The Clinic and Antigua Reevaluated

We´ve been in Antigua for a good three weeks now and have two more to go. I never thought that Antigua would be the place that we ended up spending most of our time in Guatemala. When we first arrived we came here because it was safe and beautiful, that colonial city that every country in Central America seems to contain and boast of. It had bagels and good coffee and easy places to eat. It was comfortable and truthfully, it turned us off. Not that we aim to be Sir Edmund Hillary going boldly into the darkness or even hippies on the trail, camping and cavorting their way down into the banks of Lago Atitlan, living on tortillas and herb. But in some way we were looking for something that was more of a challenge. Everyone had on flip flops and board shorts and the locals talked to you in English and then Spanish. The shops were expensive and a beer cost three bucks. We left and enjoyed ourselves in the other parts of Guatemala and I think that is where we would rather still be, but something about Antigua this time around has grown on me.

Partly it is that Kath has this amazing opportunity to work at Manos Abiertos. Every day she is getting to experience midwifery on a level she couldn´t in the States. She is observing and learning and becoming a midwife. Partially it is the life of living at the clinic. Now the clinic isn´t in Antigua, so that is a bonus, but there is something to be said for shitting on your own pot for a minute (all credit to a Miss Renee Robinson who once told me she had to go home for that very reason). We have a kitchen to cook in and matching twin beds to sleep in. The bus is 15 minutes to Antigua and the creature comforts offered there are just that, creature comforts. I don´t mind a good grocery store and the ready availability of internet in comfortable chairs, though I still do resent three dollar beers.

The weekends are when we usually have time to spend in Antigua, and it is also the time everyone else has to spend in Antigua. It is smothered in tourists from all over, including people from Guatemala, and that is what has struck me about the place this time. Despite the fact that it is full of students studying abroad, people doing volunteer work, expats working bars and hostels and running NGOS, and of course, the ubiqutious language students (of which I was one, though not here), it is at heart a very Guatemalan city. The people here aren´t much different than in other cities, though more of them speak English, and the market is nearly the same, though there are more of the trinkets in the brightly colored motifs of Guatemala. The stores sell more expensive things but outside the city center it´s all the same homemade tortillas and coke in a bag that you get everywhere else. The houses are old and crumbling and on the deforested hills shacks cling precariously while alleys zig zag moreosely towards dirt roads where chicken buses burp and belch black exhaust. People sit 4 to a seat in old school buses meant to hold to two children and the ayudantes yell just as loud.

It is in the last couple of days I´ve spent in Antigua, while Kath works, that by walking its streets and getting to know it past just appearances, it has taken on a different mein. Antigua has its charms and its beauty. The hotels are there that cost a fortune and the meals that would rival New York (although nothing compared to this little spot on Utila called the Wooden Spon...best meal I´ve had in ages). There are weavings costing hundreds of dollars and masks and bags proclaiming Guatemala. But also there, in plain sight if you look, is Guatemala. The women are in huiplies and the men in trajes, the mountains are covered in maize and coffee, the chicken buses run nonstop, the volcanoes are as high and as beautiful, the people are friendly and warm, the tortillas delicious, there is fried chicken on every street corner and the stores close for lunch just like everywhere else. There is something to be said for watching it all passby with a good bagel and coffee in hand.

I leave you with two pictures from New Years. While New Years involved lots and lots of wine, it also involved cashew green beans, cucumbers and star fruit with salt (spectacular, you gotta try it), homemade tomato soup which then served to poach eggs, make baguette pizza and great pasta sauce, and also cheesy garlicky toasts.