By Fiorella
Arriving in a foreign city with no bags is never ideal. Arriving in a foreign city with no bags, no Spanish and apparently no awareness that Central America could get cold: well, that’s another beast entirely.
After an hour watching the baggage carousel it became pretty clear that my luggage was missing. I kept on telling myself: ‘its great, i get to start afresh’ ‘endless shopping totally guilt free’ but as much as that sounds great, when you’re backpacking it is the last thing on your mind. I had to accept the obvious: it was just a bit crap.
What I didn’t realise though was that being estranged from all the important things I’d packed, like my endless wacky socks, and my speaker, was surprisingly good preparation for what was to come.
I met up with one of my close school friends and we spent some time discovering some of Guatemala’s famous natural wonders, meeting as many people as we could – trying every activity on offer: from cliff jumping into pristine lakes, to discovering ancient pyramids, to meeting surgeons in aerial yoga classes who then let us scrub in on complex knee operations taking place in a restored monastery!
But finally, we made it to Xela (or Quetzaltenango) our home for the next month and Guatemala’s second largest city. Nestled in the highlands of the country, the altitude meant that the balmy tropical weather I’d been naively expecting morphed into nights close to freezing and jackets needed for the first half of the day. After a week of chattering teeth and nights bundled up like a babushka, I had finally thrifted the correct clothes to manage the situation.
Mandatory British weather complaints aside, what a city! Endless streets of colourful houses, sidewalks taller than my hip, and one of the best coffee cultures I’ve ever encountered. The hot chocolate alone was enough to sustain me. We learnt to weave scarves using traditional techniques, stumbled through salsa lessons and somehow ended up getting even more humbled in yoga. We lived in a homestay with a wonderful old woman who cooked us traditional meals every day with a massive heart and seemingly infinite capacity. She had six cats and more dogs than we could count (all rescued off the streets in their old age), two sons, five students and five volunteers, all of whom she welcomed into her home. It was chaos (especially given we all – apart from the pets – shared a bathroom) but it was a wonderful melting pot of people from such different walks of life. Hearing their stories – bonding over tea and even the occasional club night that our host herself would take us to (such a diva) meant we never felt alone in the city.
But what were we doing in Xela?
I was volunteering at an organisation called ‘Primeros Pasos’ a female-run clinic offering primary care, dentistry and nutrition support to the rural, indigenous populations from communities surrounding the city. A great window into what some of the healthcare barriers actually look like in practice.
There was, however, one petite problem. The clinic, naturally, operated exclusively in Spanish. I, however, since this trip had come late to fruition, had only 1 month of Duolingo to my name.
My role, amongst other things, was manning the reception desk leading me to carry a piece of paper around everywhere, writing down every word and phrase I didn’t know – garnering enough vocabulary to get someone from the waiting room, to myself and then back into the waiting room. I quickly learned decent medical vocabulary, but unless you exclusively want to talk about gangrene and stomach ulcers, slightly less useful for everyday life. One of the hardest parts ironically, were the names. Enough of the medical terms are close enough to the English or Latin to be comprehensible, ‘estomago’ or ‘dientes’ are just intelligible but with people’s names, there seemed to be endless variety and some were totally incomprehensible. As most of the patients we were helping were indigenous and often illiterate, the names were mostly alien to me, and they could not be spelt out. Occasionally there was a familiar biblical name that I brazenly would think i could spell but was humbled one too many times by a very different Guatemalan rendition! It was incredibly frustrating at first, but after learning the vocabulary for “would you let me record your name (showing my phone) so I can write it later?” a highly sophisticated system arose from the ashes and I let my supervisor fill them in later.
Apart from this, I was shadowing the doctor, making posters and games, and freezing off countless warts which somehow was one of my favourite activities!
Another part of our role was visiting peripheral communities to run health workshops. Given my measly Spanish, I could not deliver the sessions, but I found other ways to be useful. I measured children’s heights and weights to keep track of their development, played with them so their mothers could listen to the information being shared, and carefully cooked falafels for healthy meal demonstrations. There are things that entirely transcend language: the impatience of children being asked to stand still on a weighing scale; the chase of duck, duck goose; and good food are some examples. On reflection, it would have been worryingly easy to disengage from the start–“well I can’t communicate with anyone so what can I realistically do?”–but I’m so glad I didn’t. Would I have gained anything? Maybe some brain function – it’s only so many times you can play ‘ring a ring a roses’ before the dizziness starts to do permanent damage, but other than that, no!
What nobody tells you about building a life somewhere new is that community doesn’t just happen – you have to go and make it. Growing up in boarding school environments since I was 9 made me slightly complacent about this as it meant community was always pre-built and handed to me – I had forgotten how much proximity and forced bonding makes a difference. We all want to slot into a pre-established community but if everyone thinks like this, who is actually going to build it? Every activity we did in the city, we invited people to join us. Pseudo ‘mandatory’ group lunches, cards nights, football games and slightly hyperbolic recommendations of a taco stand.
“Trust me it will change your life”
Whether this would be because of their taste, or the food poisoning that potentially ensued, is still up for debate, but it was something to bond over nonetheless. The haggling and nudging people to join us was a bit tiresome at first, but my gosh did it pay off and we left Guatemala with two new surrogate families – the homestay family, and the volunteers and staff at the clinic.
This all reminds me of a moment that encapsulates this experience. Early in the trip, we had the opportunity to climb Acatenango – a brutal hike and a very active volcano. However, for the entire first day of uphill hiking, the weather did not permit a glimpse of the mountain! It was harsh – 8 hours of rain, clouds, exhaustion AND no view. When we reached base camp, we had nothing to show besides our very soggy gear. Our guide gave us the option to push for another few hours to hike ONTO the active volcano to see if we might catch sight of it. We didn’t even have the energy to laugh, but managed to scoff at such a preposterous idea. Nobody wanted to, then this crazy English student stood up and pleaded with us to go, the idea percolated, spreading its roots across us, and one by one we all scrambled up and joined him,committing. Looking back, it all felt a bit ‘oh captain my captain’ of us, but that level of drama is inevitable at 4000m altitude.
The hike was hell, but we dragged each other up, the clouds magically cleared, and we watched volcanic eruption after eruption in complete awe and silence. It was terrifyingly beautiful and an almost out-of-body experience seeing the molten lava, to feeling the ground shake and to think we would have missed it entirely if someone hadn’t just decided to rally us together.
Arriving totally unprepared might on the outside seem terrible: no bags, no language, no warm clothes and no network. But somewhere between a baggage carousel, treating warts and an erupting volcano, I learned that none of it is what you actually need. What you need, it turns out, is just the willingness to stand up when someone asks you to – and hopefully to learn, in the process, how to be the one to raise others next time.
