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DAY 6
This is crazy: I am actually going to bed at 9 or something and wake up just before dawn at 5:30. Then come the struggle down the caracol stairs from my apartment to the outdoor communal kitchen and my special coffee preparation: boil water, put ground coffee into the water, raise to a big boil, turn off, let it settle, add a little milk and drink. Now sometimes there are coffee grounds, a little, not much. It’s just that there are no coffee makers and no equipment to buy as far as I can tell. It’s strange that the so-called coffee culture is so much not a thing in the coffee growing countries. Mostly you get fairly good, but very week percolated coffee.
Today is going to be subjunctive day! It’s the great monster issue of Spanish, in my opinion, and I have never really been able to deal with it except very superficially and very occasionally. But Javier has prepared for me this amazing table of stuff, chart, etc., etc. and sends it to my computer through his telephone. And he demonstrates the ‘inner meaning and necessity’ of this part of Spanish, running from one place to another, making examples, making me make examples and I think I am getting it..at least the first page of this amazing chart. And then he pulls out his telephone again and downloads onto my computer a great song by Silvio Rodriguéz called ‘Ojalá’…and here’s the deal: the whole song is in subjunctive! And we transcribe it. I write a whole paraphrase of it using subjunctive and then, because the song is so heartbreaking, I play psychologist and give Silvio advice about overcoming this lost love described in the song and all of that is in subjunctive! And I can do it. So excited.
Here is my not so exciting schedule: 8am to 12am class. 12am to 1pm check email. Then home to do my homework and maybe a little siesta. Then at 5:15 back for conversation. And tonight I am staying after conversation for the film. It’s something about the civil war in Guatemala. We have been warned that it is tough, but I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
There is sort of a big room on a part of the school property and that is where the film will be shown. There are 25 to 30 students sitting in this dimly lit sort of outbuilding by the time I get there. The film is, of course, in Spanish but captioned in English. And it is stunning. The photography, the people, the settings. And it is horrifying and frightening. I mean it. Whole villages are massacred, women, men and children. They are all campesinos wearing these clothes that I see on the streets here all the time. Tens of thousands flee across the mountains to refugee camps in Mexico. People disappear and are never seen again, except in dreams. I feel so stupid not knowing this story. This took place in my adult life, not a century ago. Oh, of course, I knew that there was a civil war in Guatemala….well, I think in the United States we were told it was a communist rebellion that had to be squelched. I am watching the film and thinking that there should be some kind of entry law at the border that no one can enter the country without having seen this. About half way through people begin leaving. I am stunned. How can you do that? How can you not want to know what happened here in your life time? So, by the end there are only about half of us left. I walk away from this experience hurting and not really willing to talk to anyone. It’s not a film where you can say to yourself when you get too involved: “it’s just a film”. No. Because it wasn’t just a film. I begin wondering what part the USA played in this civil war. I don’t know, but I want to know. And I am determined to ask Javier tomorrow and then after I ask Javier I will ask Aricelly, the leader of my conversation group.
It poured during the film, but it has stopped by the time we leave the school. It seems really dark in these tiny little streets, about as dark as my mood. I am not at all tempted to take the paths along the lake back to the apartment, which are bound to be pitch black if the regular streets are this dark. I reach the turn off to my apartment, and this is where, whether you like it or not, you are on a tiny path that crosses a couple of fields, through a tight bamboo grove and then across a couple of ditches and through a coffee field. And it is dark. It is really dark. I can see nothing. The best I can do is more or less to intuit that there exists a path because the texture of the darkness is a little different from everything else. I am glad that I have done this lots of times by day and if I hadn’t I would probably be wondering lost through rain-soaked corn fields well off the path. And I am more than a little spooked by the darkness. It would be so easy for someone to be just behind a bush waiting for some foreigner fool coming through there carrying his computer and money and everything he owns, sort of stumbling on stuff in the dark and half falling over a little ditch. Heart beating hard, I push ahead. I am not being courageous, I just want to get home. Finally I reach the main door of our little complex. There is no light here, either and for my life I cannot find the lock on the door it is so dark. Now I really feel like a stting duck, messing with keys and feeling around, locked out, exposed. I really can’t find it. And then I do and I am in and I realize I am sweating and it is actually very chilly.
I guess that’s the way this is going to be at night. Rain hits the tin roof of my place like a machine gun and then like a firehose full blast. And I don’t think it stops all night. And I am freezing despite the heavy blanket
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