The mountain school

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The two weeks in the mountain school probably gave me more insight into Guatemalan life than anything else. Everyday we were shown an example of how life in Guatemala really is for the millions that live on little more than a dollar a day.

The school is about a fifteen minute drive from a town called Columba, about an hour and a half west of Xela on the "Xela-ju" chicken bus route. I arrived early on Monday morning and was introduced to the other eleven students. All girls, except for poor old Thompson. He later became affectionately known as ´big bro´or ´dad. There was a nice mixture of people, most of us were between 22 and 30 with a sweet 18-year-old from Sweden, and then an organic gardener from New Zealand in her mid-30s and a human rights lawyer from Boston. Everyone had a pretty interesting background - a Virginian girl who was learning Spanish to visit the family of her Guatemalan boyfriend who´s living illegally in the States, a film maker from California, etc etc. There was one English girl and everyone else was American which meant another two weeks of repeating everything I say! I now automaticall refer to my "pants" and "sweater" to save time.

The mountain school is an old finca owner´s house located on the edge of the villages of Fatima and Nuevo San Jose. Both these villages are essentially two streets which come off the same path, there´s a third and older village - Santa Domingo - at the end of the road. All the students slept in the school which was surrounded by this amazing garden of banana trees, huge flowers with chickens, a local pig and even humming birds. The first week I shared a room with Eleven Greenstones, the organic gardener. We had our classes (four hours in the afternoon or morning) in these huts in the garden and then the rest of the day we hung out in the hammocks out front, studied at the kitchen table or we squeezed into the back of a pick up truck with about 20 to 30 other locals to head down to the nearest town of Columba. Compared to our little village where none of the shops sold anything other than crisps or mini biscuits, Columba was a paradise where you could use the internet, buy some fruit (but best of all - yoghurt!) and get some ice-cream from Sarita.

The story of how the villages came into being is also quite important. This particular region of the country has many coffee fincas, with campesinos working the land. Traditionally campesinos live on the finca and they earn less than four dollars a day for the coffee they pick. In the past the campesinos have tried to organise and campaign for better conditions and pay but this resulted in them losing their jobs and being blacklisted so that they couldnt work anywhere else. In some cases, organisers were even killed.

Nuevo San Jose, up the road from the school is a community of campesinos who lived and worked in a finca for years. After years of struggle against an owner who refused to pay the salaries owed to his workers, the community won their back wages and benefits. Twenty seven families pooled their resources and with assistance from the Catholic parish in Colomba, purchased land to start a new community in 1993. The people in the village speak one of Guatemala´s 23 indigineous languages, Mam, as a first language and then Spanish. Many of the women still wear all or part of the traditional dress. Fatima, the other village, was founded in June 2001 when 18 families moved there. They had been working 18 hour days for less than 2 dollars and so they organised, were thrown out of the finca and blacklisted. After failing to break the union during 5 years of retaliations and unemployment through blacklists, the owners finally agreed to a settlement providing back wages and benefits to the workers. Some of the families in the union decided to settle in a community together and bought the land where they now live from the Catholic Church. That same year, they built houses with help from a housing program linked to the Church in Quetzaltenango. However, Fátima continues to face challenges in developing their community as their houses still lack electricity and indoor plumbing.

Both the families I stayed with had members who spoke Mam, which is one of 22 indigineous languages in Guatemala. Of course they all speak Spanish now and to avoid discrimination most have Spanish surnames and their kids only speak Spanish.

The first week we were pre-occupied with food and talked about nothing else between classes. Part of the experience is earing with these families. But adjusting to a carb-heavy diet complimented by tortillas really takes its toll on you. Breakfast was usually eggs and tortillas, lunch pasta served in the water its cooked in and then dinner rice and beans. One day I was served pasta for breakfast, rice for lunch and pasta for dinner and I´ve never felt worse in my life. I had no energy, was in a terrible mood and went to bed early. After the first week, we understood. There are people who can´t choose what they eat. There are people who eat what they eat, not because of how it tastes but because of how long it keeps them full at the best price. By the time it was time to leave we were craving dairy products and other treats but we stopped to think a little before eating them. In particular I thought about Maria Esperanza, the daughter of the second family I stayed with. She was a birght and chatty 11-year-old who kept me company at the dinner table. Once she asked me if I had ever been to a restaurant and wanted to know all about it because she had never been.

There are 36 families who host students and so they get a student once every three or four weeks. For most of the families this income is crucial and means that they can put food on the table for a week. Most live in two roomed houses with a wood stove out the back (sometimes, but not always, covered by a tin roof). The villages are permanently smokey because of this and the fact that they burn their rubbish.

The first week I ate with the school accountant, Abelino, who has one of the bigger houses in the village. He has a little girl with cerebral palsy. Shes six but they only had the money to bring her to a doctor last year and so didnt know what was wrong with her until recently. Similarly, in Cecilia´s family the next week, her husband suffered from epilepsy for ten years before he was diagnosed last year. I enjoyed eating with Cecilia´s family most. They were always joking with me, asking questions and insisting that I was always welcome there. Their attitude is even more impressive when you think that she has spent the last ten years working for two (her husband Jose couldnt work because of his condition) and looking after her bedridden mother. Despite this, both her son and Maria Esperanza study hard at school and are not expected to work (which most of the other families in the village have their children do from about 11 or 12). Their clothes are always clean and they are the politest children I´ve met yet. Domestic violence is also a major problem in Guatemala (as is teen pregnancy, many of the girls aged above 14 were already pregnant) but Cecilia was one of the only woman who had the full respect of her husband and they were always on the same level. Similarly she was one of the only women in the village who could read and write.

While I was there I went on a hike in the rain through thick rainforest and across rivers to go see this amazing waterfall. We also hiked up to lake Chicobal - which is a spirtual place for the Mayans. Its a volcano with a lake in the middle. I went with Hayley and Tuve from the school and it was amazing. There was a thick fog all the way as we hiked up and when we reached the lake we couldn´t see a foot in front of us. There wasnt a single sound. Suddenly the fog lifted and there was this beautiful tranquil lake, the sky was clear and we could see all the way across. But, within minutes the fog had returned again.

A visit to La Florida on the first Saturday also had a big impact on us. La Florida is a coffee finca which was occupied by landless campesinos for two years before the government agreed to give them a loan to buy it. Until that point they ran the finca themselves, struggling to find enough to eat. Like the people of Fatima and Neuvo San Jose they had been underpaid and overworked and finally decided to change their situation. La Florida is a co-operative but in recent years there have been problems - kidnappings, sabotage - between some of the communities that came together on the finca. Now they are still working hard and dividing the profits, but soon they will have to start repaying the loan and are currently in negotiations to settle the differences.

The second week´s group was even more diverse with photographers, union organisers, medical assistants, linguists, etc. Almost all of them worked in the States with hispanic communities. By the time we left the mountain school we were definitely seeing things differently. I left for the market town of Chichicastenango with Hayley and Thompson and when we went to a restaurant that night there was definitely a moment where we were aware of the self-indulgence. We ate what felt like the best hamburgers ever and were aware that back in Neuvo San Jose and Fatima there were families who would never experience any of this.

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