I’ve always loved grocery shopping. I love perusing the aisles, studying the options, dreaming, scheming, imagining. I love picking up the bags and boxes, puzzling over the ingredients, searching for something that I can’t quite find, admiring the novelty ingredients and wondering about the people who eat them. I love being surrounded by mountains of culinary potential. I love that everything in a grocery store centers around one of my very favorite activities: eating. Therefore, it only makes sense that I’d fall hard for the market with its mountains of fresh produce, sacks of dried chilis and beans and coffee, and slabs of meat hanging from hooks.

Even things that have nothing to do with food intrigue me. The men hawking large plastic bags to protect from the rain or pills for anything that might ail you.  The magician with his tricks and crowd of gawkers. The group of women squatting along the curb nursing their babies. The babies sleeping in empty crates tucked under the tables or right in the middle of the piles of melons and squashes (I am so tempted to point to a baby and inquire how much). The dog fights that never really take off thanks to some old lady with a cane calmly cracking them over the back. The men bent double with enormous sacks of food on their bags, and the women walking erect and regal with baskets of cloth-wrapped steaming tamales on their heads. The bargaining! The loudspeakers! The shouts and laughter! The tinkling of the ice cream man’s bell. The pat-pat-pat of fresh tortillas being made. The smell of fried chicken and raw meat and boiled corn and urine and fresh bread mingling together to create an olfactory sensation that will forever be imprinted on my mind.

Monday morning, the sun was shining, so I stuffed my camera into a shoulder bag and walked into town. I entered the crowded market and immediately slipped into a store where I squatted down, dug out my camera, and discreetly snapped a few pictures.

Once I got my bearings, I approached a couple women sitting on the curb outside the door. I asked them about their wares (banana leaves, squash vines, and something else I’m not familiar with) and if I might take a picture of them.

There was a space beside them, so I sat down and we commenced to talking. Turns out, one of the women was a Mennonite, and the other one had wanted to go to Bezaleel to study but wasn’t able to make it work out. We talked about food, school, and life in general, and I snapped a bunch of pictures of whatever struck my fancy.

Yesterday, we went adventuring. We’ve been here two months—long enough to develop a routine and to appreciate a break from it. It was time to go some place fun.

The night before the kids laid out their clothes and I baked cookies. In the morning, we woke early. I made a mountain of sandwiches, washed apples, and filled water bottles. We gathered sunblock and bug spray, flip flops and towels, money and camera and The Lonely Planet because hey, if you live in Guatemala, you’ve gotta let your tourist freak flag fly on occasion!

Here’s how we got to where we were going:

A summoned taxi drove us into Chamelco. There we met up with an EMM worker who would be joining us for the day and hopped on a bus to Cobán. Then we took a taxi (we fit all seven of us, plus the taxi driver, in a small, five-person car) across town to the Lanquín bus station. We had to wait an hour for the bus to leave, so we wondered around the block, bought a bag of bread, spied an open barber shop and forced my younger son get a haircut, and bought a bunch of chips (the agreed upon bribe for getting the haircut). Then the bus ride to Lanquín, part of which was on paved roads and the other part which was on gravel. The gravel part was all downhill. I did not know this before, but driving downhill on a gravel road for many minutes at a time is akin to a medieval form of torture, or it would be had there been cars in medieval times. And then in Lanquín, we bargained with a truck driver (I still think we paid too much) who agreed to drive us to and from our destination.

So to sum up: taxi, bus, taxi, bus, truck, PLAY FOR TWO-PLUS HOURS, truck, bus, taxi, bus, taxi. Or, in other words, eight hours of travel for two-and-a-half hours of play.

This, my friends, is why we call it adventuring. There are no guarantees and nothing is easy. The end.

Oh! You want to know where we went?

Well, sure!

We went to Semuc Champey, which, according to some sources, is the most beautiful place in all of Guatemala.

Now, ’tis true I haven’t seen all of Guatemala, so I can’t confirm this exactly, but it certainly was stunning.

Upstream from where we were, the river goes crashing down under the ground where it travels along for a ways before emerging again someplace downstream. We did not get downstream to see where it comes out, but we did walk upstream to see where the river gets eaten by the earth.

The place scared me half out of my wits. I went with my older son, ie the kid who is fearless. He escorted me across the slippery sandstone rocks to the roped off edge which I couldn’t see over, thank goodness. And then I waited there while he walked to the other side (it was permitted, but very wet and I had my camera and didn’t feel like risking ending up on my butt) and down a bit to the edge so he could photograph the river-eating hole. There were guards over there keeping an eye on him, and other, braver (stupider?) than me tourists, but even so, I couldn’t watch. I had to turn around and focus on picking my way back across the rocks to keep at bay the images of him slipping over the edge.

(In the picture above, you can see his head in the bottom right hand corner. Eek!)

Needless to say, we did not take the other kids to visit that spot.

Anyway, while the river roils along under the ground, up above is a whole series of crystal-clear pools (fed by a different source than the underground river). You know, water falls, deep blue holes for diving into, long ledges of limestone for lounging, all that natural beauty stuff.

The kids fed the minnows and fat yellow fish.

My little one took to jumping off the edge into the blue deep and then swimming the whole way across to the edge. “I’m not going to be afraid of jumping off the diving board when we get home!” he informed me proudly.

We ate the sandwiches and apples and cookies and bananas.

I watched the tourists and pondered, once again, my belief that, when it comes to swimming attire, less does not mean more.

The whole place was idyllic, but I, however, wasn’t into it. After the long morning of travel, I was whupped. And while I would’ve loved to go swimming, the hoards of tourists made me shy and self-conscious. Plus, I was (in retrospect) stressed about the return trip. We had been forced to pay the pick-up driver in advance—would he be there to take us back like he said he would? And we were catching the last bus from Lanquín to Cobán—would we get there in time? And if the truck driver didn’t show and we missed the bus, would be have enough money to spend the night out here in the boonies? With all that on my mind, it was kind of hard to relax.

So I took pictures and pretended I was relaxed and worried about money (day outings for a family of six are expensive!) and thought about all the things we could do to make it more worth our while…and then it was time to come home. The truck driver was there waiting for us, and the last bus waited for us (the taxi driver and bus driver were in phone communication on our behalf, bless their hearts), and they even cleared out some of the seats so we’d have a place to sit.

Several hours later, we were home sweet home. It had been a hot day (and the power had been off the whole time—a scheduled event), but we didn’t realize how very hot it had been until we saw the butter dish.

The very best part of the whole day? Eating cereal for supper and drinkingdrinkingdrinking and getting showers and reading a couple chapters of Homer P. Figg before tucking the adventured-out chillen’s in their beds and then snuggling down into ours shortly after.

(Oh, and getting an email from a friend in which she recounted their outing to a maple festival and how they saw a newly born calf on the way home and, at their leisure, stopped to watch it. To drive somewhere, in a private car, with complete control over time and speed and destination—what a novelty! Can you imagine?)

Word on the street is that The Masses want to know how Our Work is going and What We Actually DO All Day.

Why, shop at the Walmart grocery store and go to the market! I thought I told you already!

(Kidding.)

Just the other day, my husband and I read over our job descriptions again. One phrase in particular caught my eye: of the ten qualifications for an MCC worker, the last one read, “Willingness to live simply.”

We both kinda snorted. “Living simply” is a nebulous and fraught phrase the world over, perhaps all the more charged when living (simply) in an impoverished culture.

“It should read “willingness to simply live,” I quipped, and only after I said it did I realize how true those words are.

Yes, we get Work done (on our better days), but much of what we do here, and much of what we did for our three years in Nicaragua, is simply live. (I can’t italicize that word enough. In developing countries, “living” takes on a weight that it doesn’t have in the States. I’m not glorifying it, and I’m not implying it’s worse—it’s just very, very different.)

We traipse through town and say Buenos dias to every Diego, Roberto, and Javier we pass. We squish into buses. We get ripped off in the market because we don’t know any better. We buy the wrong kind of ajax (“ah-hax”) for the house help because we can’t find it in the fancy grocery store. We experiment cooking with the fat purple beans that we find for sale along the road, the vendor squatted down by the basket, her snotty-nosed, ebullient little boy sifting through them like it’s his own private sandbox. We travel to other towns to make bank deposits. We wake our children at 5:45 every school-day morning and then deal with the fallout. We make connections and phone calls and purchases. We read maps and ask questions. We order (and finally get!) the kids’ long lists of school books. We get a call from our children’s school explaining that our little boy got into a pretend scuffle with another little boy, but then the other little boy, who just happens to know karate (at which point I interrupted the soft-spoken school director and with loud guffaws) got mad and punched our little boy in the face. Twice. (Our little boy didn’t even mention his purple face when he came home—I had to approach him to get the story.) Almost daily, we wash uniform shirts by hand (yes, even though we have a machine now) and hang them up to dry. We spend hours at the kids’ school enduring blasting loud music and watching a slew of talent shows that mostly involved dances based on this song. We pack lunches and make beds and clean and oversee (kinda) the pack of firecracker-loving boys. We read books and buy jugs of purified water and try to keep the dogs from attacking the taxi drivers that drop us off at our door. We argue and cry and tell jokes and problem solve and dole out consequences and laugh. We live.

But this still doesn’t answer the question: what about work? Because really, that’s why we’re here, right? Right?

Our job descriptions were clear and succinct. Our actual jobs are not.

We fully expected this. Most MCC assignments are complex and complicated and a wee bit ornery. But so are we. It’s a good match.

At present, we’re taking it a week at a time. I mean this literally. Every Sunday, my husband and I look at the kids’ school calendars and our own calendar. We assess what needs to happen and how to go about getting it done. We divide up our hours at the school—who will be there when and for how long. And then every night we review the next day’s schedule—what needs to happen at school, what needs to happen at home, who will have time to buy the eggs on their mad dash from work to home in an attempt to get there before the kids do.

Currently, I’m teaching two English classes—4th  and 5th grades (US 10th and 11th). (When I start two paragraphs in a row with words like “at present” and “currently,” it’s an indicator of how temporal our work really is!)

I love teaching, and I love the students. Some of them struggle with the basics, and some of them are whipsnap smart. I have zero discipline problems.

My default work involves hanging out in the library and in the teachers’ room, visiting, asking questions, and observing how the school is run.

Some days it’s excruciatingly boring, and other days it’s lots of fun.

The teachers are friendly, generous, and welcoming. One morning I took in a bag of hot biscuits and jam. In return (or maybe, just because), they tell me the best un-touristy vacation spots, how to cook the new-to-me vegetables, and laugh at all the dumb stuff I say.

I’ve been interviewing students, finding out their experiences at Bezaleel, and, in particular, in relation to MCC’s Saturday Vocational Arts program. The students love the final step of the interview process: getting their pictures taken.

I’m hoping to find ways to tutor some of the students who have a faulty educational background. Also, I’d like to start a mid-week baking class for the 4th grade girls.

My husband spends his days helping out the maintenance guys.

For a couple weeks, some masons were redoing the concrete court, so he helped with that.

He’s been making cake pans out of tin and wire for the baking class, and he wants to teach the students to make them themselves. These days, he’s been working at organizing and sorting the storage shed.

He’s hoping to teach carpentry to the 4th grade boys (for some undetermined reason, the entire 4th grade class is not participating in the vocational arts program), and to help build a carpentry workshop for the school while including the students in the process.

While we were originally sent to provide support to the Saturday Vocational Arts Program, we have not been able to find our niche in that particular area. They already have teachers and classes lined up, and it seems to be running smoothly, so my husband goes for part of the day while I usually stay home with the children who, by the end of the week, are in desperate need of an unstructured day.

There’s lots of work to be done at the school, but the way to accomplishing it isn’t very straightforward. Therefore, it’s kind of hard to talk about our work in terms that people back home will be able to relate to, and so I keep quiet. However, don’t equate my silence with lack of trying! We are constantly wrestling with the issues at Bezaleel, looking for ways to fit in and be helpful without taking over or bulldozing the local culture.

There. Are The Masses sufficiently placated?