A postcard from far away

A few days ago a postcard arrived in the mail. It was addressed to our children and bore my handwriting. The picture showed a woman in traditional Mayan clothing surrounded by earthenware pots on the steps of a church in Chichicastenango. After more than a month of travel this card had breached the distance between San Pedro La Laguna in Guatemala and our farm south of Westlock, Alberta, Canada.

Immediately I was transported back to the day I sent the card. It was Friday afternoon, the last day of our stay on Lake Atitlan. By now I knew my way around town reasonably well, but hadn’t encountered the post office yet. Not sure enough of my Spanish to enquire about its whereabouts with any certainty I remembered our English speaking tour guide operator in the Bigfoot Travel Agency a short distance from our hotel. I was told to walk up the hill three blocks towards the center of town, then turn right. I’d find the post office right behind the Catholic church. I knew the way up the hill: many destinations could only reached by climbing it: the bank and the market, the panaderia,  the botilleria and the small super where we bought cheese and cookies, and, of course, the volcano we had climbed two days earlier: my calf and thigh muscles still told a painful story of hills and stairs climbed and descended.

One more climb, then –what better antidote than the very poison itself. It was midday, the sun beating straight down, and I was hot, as usual. Several benches in the neatly kept plaza in front of the church offered places to rest, but there weren’t any big trees, so shade was hard to find. Still, as in any other plaza people were sitting together in small groups, talking animatedly, some admiring the prominent feature, the statue of a saint, mothers with babies in strollers standing close to the surrounding wall to catch a bit of protection from the sun.

I crossed the plaza to get behind the church, as I had been told, but landed in a walled-in yard with basketball hoops – oh yes, here we had seen two local boys’ teams play on our first excursion into town on Sunday, undaunted by the fact that they were playing not on the hardwood floor of a gym but on asphalt. Their skins were brown, and their average size must have been about a foot less than that of a high school team back in Canada, but other than that the game looked much the same, and the spectators didn’t behave any differently either. 


The post office, however, was nowhere to be found. Back to the plaza, then, to find another way ‘behind the church’. Ah, yes, there was a gate on the west side that led to a small back street. Through that gate I left the plaza and now passed the old man with his hammer beside the pile of stones I mentioned in an earlier posting, talking to a young father with his two children, the hammer resting beside him. They nodded a ‘Buenas Tardes’ in reply to my greeting, a smile lighting up their faces like those of most other locals I encountered. If only I could have talked to them! But while there is a chance that I will be able to do that in Spanish eventually – maybe taking a course in just such a place as San Pedro which has several Spanish language schools - I’m sure I will never master their native T’zutujil.

   

A bit further up the street, by now starting to wonder if it was a good idea for me to be walking here all by myself, because I hadn’t seen any other person of my skin colour for quite some time, and it looked more and more decrepit, I finally saw the small “Correos de Guatemala” sign. A set of stairs led up to the shabby house over whose door the sign was posted. Walking up to it I noticed a suspicious looking rivulet making its way along one of the steps. The overwhelming smell of urine confirmed my suspicion, and I carefully stepped over it, wondering what else I might find here. Nothing much, it turned out, but a handwritten sign in English: “Closed. Open again from 3:30 to 5:30.” It was 2:45 now, and I felt little desire to spend 45 minutes waiting right there, so I slowly walked down the cobble-stoned hill, careful not to get in the way of one of the many tuk-tuks when I crossed the street, gazed at the displays of by now familiar little shops along the way, and went back to the hotel.

Johann, who had suffered from a bout of Montezuma’s Revenge for much of the day – blaming it on the Thai food we had eaten the night before in one of the many small open-air restaurants – felt well enough to accompany me when I made the second attempt to mail my cards. Again we exercised our aching muscles on our way up the hill, again we passed the old man with his hammer, now patiently splitting rocks for God knows which purpose,the same friendly smile crinkling his leathery face, again we carefully avoided the fourth step of the stairs leading up to the post office. This time, however, the door was unlocked. We entered a dark room, divided in two by a counter, that had little resemblance with any post office I had ever laid eyes on. A man in his thirties asked what we needed – in Spanish, of course; wherever the English sign might have come from I have no idea – and really came up with enough postage stamps. Johann, not wanting to lick the stamps, was looking for a sponge to moisten them (I, unscathed by Montezuma’s Revenge and thus much less careful, had started treating them like I treat any postage stamp right away), but the clerk brought him a “Pritt” glue stick instead. Who would have expected a German glue stick in this most unlikely place?

I handed my five or six postcards to the man, wondering if they would ever arrive at their destination. It seemed almost impossible, and yet here I am, listening to the winter wind howling around the house, holding in my hands yet another proof how wrong it is to draw conclusions based on outward appearance. 


A woman praising her wares on the steps of a church in Chichicastenango – how strange to think that I walked by those very steps only a few short weeks ago ...