Chapter Two: Westward, Ho!
I'M not going to spend much time talking about Guatemala City. We didn't see it again for two solid years. All I can say is that it's the biggest Central American capital: a veritable concrete jungle, plastered with glaring handpainted signs and strung up with people's laundry. You'll find that large cities in developing nations all follow the same pattern: there is a large bus terminal in the middle of the city, a large open-air market nearby, and then sprawling alleys and narrow streets in every direction until, eventually, city blends into jungle or desert or fields.
We spent that first night at the Centro de Capacitacion Misional, the Central American equivalent of the MTC. There were latino missionaries there, of course, and they quickly mobbed us and asked us all sorts of questions about America and American culture. Except for the two sister missionaries, who were accelerated Spanish speakers, most of us couldn't understand a word they said; so eventually the latinos who could speak English became the translators for the whole group. Elder Grant and his companion - the Assistants to the President (AP's) - had instructed us to speak to the CCM missionaries only in Spanish in order to improve our language abilities, but we gave up on that rather quickly.
When you can't speak a foreign language but persist in speaking it (despite the fact that the foreigner can speak English), it becomes very awkward and very annoying very fast. In fact, even once we learned Spanish fluently, the natural tendency is to switch back to English if your listener speaks it (such as a fellow American missionary). It's a natural tendancy. This was a major issue the whole time I was in Guatemala, since we sometimes alienated our latino companions when we did this. Most foreign missions have a rule that missionaries always speak the local language. My sister Shauna, who served in Argentina, says that missionaries in her mission were very compliant to this rule. In my mission absolutely no one followed it: It was the least of our problems.
All of us were very tired that night, so most of us excused ourselves from our conversations and turned in.
The next day was spent driving all over "Guate," taking care of our visas and residence paperwork. This isn't that hard to do since Guatemala is all too happy to have us spending dollars in their country ... it's just time consuming. Guatemala is an extremely poor country. In fact, 75% of its population lives below the poverty line.
I can't remember much about that day except that it was hot and we spent a lot of time in dusty bureaucratic offices. Also, we were solicited all day by beggars ... which was a new experience for me. The APs shrugged them off like old pros, something that kind of bothered me but would eventually become natural.
Driving in a Third World country is an experience so harrowingly dangerous and gut-wrenchingly exciting that anyone who hasn't had the opportunity should make every effort to do so. During my two years there, I never lost my affinity for Third World driving; I loved the complete freedom of it, the stuntman ease with which drivers would go racing through traffic lights, up on sidewalks, or into on-coming traffic. When you ride as a passenger in Guatemala it's with suicidal giddiness -- you think, "We're going to die, but this sure is fun!"
The APs had obviously picked up the nuances of Guatemalan driving, and would go barreling through intersections with lights flashing and horn blaring. We quickly finished all our errands.
It is a six hour drive from Guate to Quetzaltenango. In the United States, with a well-paved Interstate, you could drive the distance in a couple of hours; in Guatemala, however, there is only one east-west highway, and it takes a circuitous route -- rising up and down and snaking around hillsides and farmsides, all the while with the same scenery on all sides: corn fields, corn fields, corn fields.
Corn, maiz, is the major staple of the Guatemalan diet, and it is grown wherever there is room for it. I even saw corn fields growing on terraced mountains ... or even on unterraced, 45° slopes.
The only thing to break up the monotonous blur of cornfields was reddish-brown cliff faces. Each cliff face was graffitied with either soda ads or political party emblems. I saw Pepsi logos and Coke logos and acronyms for every kind of political party imaginable: FRG, PAN, ANN, PLP, etc. Guatemala had undergone a few recent military coups, but democracy was getting popular again, or so it seemed. In addition to cliff faces, we also passed numerous houses and villages. These followed no real system of spacing, but were scattered in groups and clumps all the way from Guatemala to Quetzaltenango. There's no such thing as urban sprawl in the Third World.
We were still trying to get over our travel fatigue, so we all pretty much fell asleep at some point or other during the drive. Only waking up occasionally to get a drink or use the bathroom in some grimy restroom. We got to Quetzaltenango late that night, pulling up to a fortress-like house with a rust-colored metal gate and high concrete walls topped with cemented broken bottle shards -- "Mexican barbed wire," I once heard it called.
President Lunt pressed a bell and a few seconds later the gate was opened by the gardener, who had been expecting us. The Montero pulled in and parked, while the rest of us unloaded our luggage from the back of the van. The APs helped us unload, then climbed into the silver mini-van and drove off to their apartment. We had reached our mission headquarters.
We spent that first night at the Centro de Capacitacion Misional, the Central American equivalent of the MTC. There were latino missionaries there, of course, and they quickly mobbed us and asked us all sorts of questions about America and American culture. Except for the two sister missionaries, who were accelerated Spanish speakers, most of us couldn't understand a word they said; so eventually the latinos who could speak English became the translators for the whole group. Elder Grant and his companion - the Assistants to the President (AP's) - had instructed us to speak to the CCM missionaries only in Spanish in order to improve our language abilities, but we gave up on that rather quickly.
When you can't speak a foreign language but persist in speaking it (despite the fact that the foreigner can speak English), it becomes very awkward and very annoying very fast. In fact, even once we learned Spanish fluently, the natural tendency is to switch back to English if your listener speaks it (such as a fellow American missionary). It's a natural tendancy. This was a major issue the whole time I was in Guatemala, since we sometimes alienated our latino companions when we did this. Most foreign missions have a rule that missionaries always speak the local language. My sister Shauna, who served in Argentina, says that missionaries in her mission were very compliant to this rule. In my mission absolutely no one followed it: It was the least of our problems.
All of us were very tired that night, so most of us excused ourselves from our conversations and turned in.
The next day was spent driving all over "Guate," taking care of our visas and residence paperwork. This isn't that hard to do since Guatemala is all too happy to have us spending dollars in their country ... it's just time consuming. Guatemala is an extremely poor country. In fact, 75% of its population lives below the poverty line.
I can't remember much about that day except that it was hot and we spent a lot of time in dusty bureaucratic offices. Also, we were solicited all day by beggars ... which was a new experience for me. The APs shrugged them off like old pros, something that kind of bothered me but would eventually become natural.
Driving in a Third World country is an experience so harrowingly dangerous and gut-wrenchingly exciting that anyone who hasn't had the opportunity should make every effort to do so. During my two years there, I never lost my affinity for Third World driving; I loved the complete freedom of it, the stuntman ease with which drivers would go racing through traffic lights, up on sidewalks, or into on-coming traffic. When you ride as a passenger in Guatemala it's with suicidal giddiness -- you think, "We're going to die, but this sure is fun!"
The APs had obviously picked up the nuances of Guatemalan driving, and would go barreling through intersections with lights flashing and horn blaring. We quickly finished all our errands.
It is a six hour drive from Guate to Quetzaltenango. In the United States, with a well-paved Interstate, you could drive the distance in a couple of hours; in Guatemala, however, there is only one east-west highway, and it takes a circuitous route -- rising up and down and snaking around hillsides and farmsides, all the while with the same scenery on all sides: corn fields, corn fields, corn fields.
Corn, maiz, is the major staple of the Guatemalan diet, and it is grown wherever there is room for it. I even saw corn fields growing on terraced mountains ... or even on unterraced, 45° slopes.
The only thing to break up the monotonous blur of cornfields was reddish-brown cliff faces. Each cliff face was graffitied with either soda ads or political party emblems. I saw Pepsi logos and Coke logos and acronyms for every kind of political party imaginable: FRG, PAN, ANN, PLP, etc. Guatemala had undergone a few recent military coups, but democracy was getting popular again, or so it seemed. In addition to cliff faces, we also passed numerous houses and villages. These followed no real system of spacing, but were scattered in groups and clumps all the way from Guatemala to Quetzaltenango. There's no such thing as urban sprawl in the Third World.
We were still trying to get over our travel fatigue, so we all pretty much fell asleep at some point or other during the drive. Only waking up occasionally to get a drink or use the bathroom in some grimy restroom. We got to Quetzaltenango late that night, pulling up to a fortress-like house with a rust-colored metal gate and high concrete walls topped with cemented broken bottle shards -- "Mexican barbed wire," I once heard it called.
President Lunt pressed a bell and a few seconds later the gate was opened by the gardener, who had been expecting us. The Montero pulled in and parked, while the rest of us unloaded our luggage from the back of the van. The APs helped us unload, then climbed into the silver mini-van and drove off to their apartment. We had reached our mission headquarters.
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