“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

Here is the Great Khali, i.e. my fraternal twin, if anyone is interested: http://www.wwe.com/superstars/smackdown/thegreatkhali/photos1/ 

Thank God Chiapas looks so much like the Guatemalan highlands, because otherwise 14 hours of transit split between a bus, two taxis, a microbus and a rickshaw plus two immigration checkpoints, 3 security car screenings and 4 on-board document checks by federal police to collect bribes from people trying to cross illegally into mexico, might have been a little harder to stomach.  The solo border cross wasn´t as scary as the shocked look on the faces of all my friends and family when I said I would be doing it, though when the federal police emptied out an entire tightly-packed microbus only to go through MY bag and nothing else ( we are talking shoulder deep into the backpack, full cavity search, including removal of the plastic bag containing my under garments in front of all the passengers on the bus who already didnt want to sit next to me because I am tall, foreign, white and weird, sort of scenario) definitely tried my patience.  I spent about 40 minutes looking for a hotel that wasn´t on the list of those that aren´t supported by the federal police or right wing inteligencia this afternoon which only included one good slip, leaving me with an only a little bit bloody shin from the bottom of the knee to about halfway down the leg.  I miss Guatemala more than I ever thought I would, and if Katie wasn´t only a day away, I would sprint back into the arms of my almost overly hospitable aunt who was sure to warn me before I left about those people…those people that have…that army…with that man marcos…ay no he is no good..¨. “The Zapatistas?” I ask. “Oh I don´t know, I suppose so,” she says.  Ha…if only she knew.

My time in Tecpán was straight-up incredible.  So what if I had fleas in my bed, and a thirteen year-old girl sharing a room with me whose favorite nighttime, post-sleep activity is to experiment with different ringtones, and fall asleep with the light on.  I learned so much.  My new skills include finding the position of a baby in the womb, checking blood pressure, INJECTING PEOPLE, checking dilation of the cervix, finding a fetal heartbeat both manually, with a doppler device, and using a toilet paper tube, and convincing mayan ladies to let someone with virtually no skills or cualifications (me) poke and prod the crap out of them while still charging them 15 quetzales for the favor.  I really have learned how to do a lot, and I think it might be just enough to make me realize that this is a profession that I could really do, and hopefully even love doing.  Odilia is an incredible teacher.  She operates on the watch it once, maybe twice and then do it philosophy, so by the end I was doing the prenatal exams more/less by myself.  I unfortunately only got to go with her to one birth.  Slow month.  Though as luck would have it, two ladies went into labor the same day that I was being whisked off to Guatemala City to collect my new passport.  So I did get to be with them for parts of their labor despite ducking out before the grand finale.  Seeing the first birth was amazing, but a little anti-climactic because birth and pregnancy there, from what I could tell, is just not the major motion picture/tear fest that it is in the U.S.  I had to choke back some tears after adorably-purple baby Daniel was born because I would most certainly have been the only one showing any kind of obvious emotion (other than Rosita, the mom, who was screaming and stuff…which I believe indicates pain.)

Leaving Odilia and the kids was probably the hardest part.  You would think it would be impossible for one woman to raise 15 well-rounded kids all at once, but these kids are literally ALL good.  Every single one of them was so kind, and helpful, and loving and funny.  They share everything, and love to teach me things, and are just so freaking cute.  Except Luis Eduardo, aka Guicho, who has a bit of an anger problem and as one of his favorite activities while in fits of rage was threatening to throw my roll of toilett paper or some other delicate item over the balcony.  Still, leaving them was rough.  Although, Odilia´s mother in law, Doña Lya took it a little harder than even I, given that after handing me a meat-filled tamale, she said that this would probably be the last time we would ever see each other and started to cry.  I didn´t realize why she thought that until Odilia told me that she didn´t think she would live long enough to see me the next time I come to visit.   Here I was thinking she was being just a little bit dramatic.  Ughhhh.  God did I feel bad.  Man, I get chills just thinking about it.  I will especially miss my two angels, Meme (Manuel Orlando) and Coco (Sonia Carmelita), the 11 and 12 year-olds.  They were some of the most intelligent, kind people I have ever met.  The favorite pasttime of all the kids is to go look for wild mushrooms and rasberries in the woods, and down by the river.  Some of my best moments were walking around with them, and 8 to 9 other kids, usually with at least one or more little hands holding each of mine, with Meme and Coco, teaching me about all the different plants and mushrooms and yelling at me to whack branches of rasberries and cherries with a stick that they couldn´t reach.  I´m kindof convinced that my height is the only reason they actually like me, but I enjoy myself so I deal with it.  We would steal pears and peaches from the neighbors farms, all the kids either whispering or screaming, as if volume would prevent the neighbors from noticing three kids climbing around in their trees with six others face-planting into their best produce.

God there is so much to say.  The food was wonderful.  Beans, eggs, TONS of hand made (poorly-made if I was doing it) tortillas, greens, veggies etc.  They loved that I would eat pretty much anything they gave me, although I was seriously pissed the ONE time I tried to cook for them, all I did was cook some spinach Odilia gave me in a skillet with oil and garlic, and they wouldnt not TOUCH it.  I figured, they love green herbs, they cook the beans with garlic and they scortch the crap out of all sorts of things with oil so how could this be a miss???  Might as well have been the anti-christ.  One girl actually spit it out.  I mean I really didn´t love some of the food sometimes, and even would pick a stray piece of chicken out of my food sometimes (read: compromising personal convictions so not to offend) and they were by no means willing to excericize such politeness.  Sometimes I think I have conditioned myself to be so comfortable, and so culturally relative that it comes at the expense of expressing myself honestly about 90% of the time.  No exaggeration.  That was probably the only moment I was really straight up pissed but didn´t say anything.

Ok we gotta wrap this up.  My birthday passed like most other days.  Market.  Prenatal exams.  Trip with the kids to find flowers in the milpa.  The highlight was definitely when the older girls covered the ceiling over my bed with balloons that said¨”Happy Birthday Endie!”  Birthday occasionally misspelled, and Andie, always misspelled in the same adorable fashion.  Morenito, the three year-old, continued to wish me happy birthday every single day for the rest of my stay, which compensated for almost every single one of them forgetting the morning of, despite having asked me when my birthday was every single day since I had arrived.  It took them about 5 days to remember my name so I´m really not surprised.  I remembered 17 names and by 17 I mean 51 because they all have second names and nicknames in 48 hours and they couldn´t get mine to save their lives.  Once they did get it, the younger ones still cant pronounce their R´s so my name always came out And-lea.  And then despite the lack of R, in Andie, they perverted it to Andlay or otherwise just went Lea, depending on levels of linguistic development.  Precious.  In any case, I miss all of them dearly, and hope to god you all will let me tell you more stories when I see each one of you next.

I have no idea what this next month will be like but I think I am going to allow myself to be glad to be hear.  Thank you all for the birthday wishes. 

With love, (more for the people who actually had the patience to read all of this)

And-Lea