¡Hacen usar de pollos!

Get ready for a long post with lots of pics. First things first, the calendar is FINISHED and the files are at the printer!  What a great project to work on and what great people to work with.  I am really going to miss Proyecto Payaso and my new clown friends!!  I am un poco triste that it is over. And I can’t believe that I am going home next Friday.  And even though I really am sad to leave, I guess it will be kinda nice to go to sleep without trying to catch something biting me.

So now I have a few days before I go home to maybe take another little trip. Which brings me to the little trip I took last weekend. Todos Santos Cuchumatán for Día de Los Muertos!! The Cuchumatanes are beautifully scenic mountains in Northwestern Guatemala. 

So Tony, my other payaso boss, who had just returned to his home in the lake from Europe last week, hopped in the clown car with his gorgeous dog Burbuja last Sunday to drive us to Todos Santos, which is about 3 hours más o menos from Xela. He drove a few hours from the lake to pick me up at a gas station at Cuatro Caminos, a junction with roads in four directions, and surprisingly I didn’t get lost getting to it. Okay, Stef dropped me off at Minerva, but I got on the right bus and off at the right stop and thankfully there was only one big ol’ Shell station, so the odds were definitely in my favor that I was in the right place.  The drive was absolutely spectacular. We passed through Huehuetenango, (a.k.a. way-way) and ascended pretty quickly through the most stunning landscape of mountains and valleys and distant volcanoes.   

There was lots of talk in Xela from students about heading to Todos Santos and I had it in the back of my mind that it would be difficult to find a room so we brought sleeping bags just in case.  Good thing, because when we arrived, there was not one available hotel room in the already sparse hotel scene.  Even though we didn’t have to sleep in the street, I like to think my sleeping bag protects me from things that can crawl on me and bite me. 

One of the hotel proprietors sent us to Doña Juana’s casa grande de cuartos para alquiler and after about a half hour of negotiating in Spanish and Mam about where we were going to sleep and how much we were going to pay, we were set. There weren’t actually beds for us in this room and apparently there was another traveler staying in the big bed we thought was ours’, but Doña Juana and Rosa insisted they would bring in another big bed for us. And that Burbuja was welcome también which was definitely a relief.  What a beautiful family. Mom and dad, adorable little boys and Rosa with her baby, Emily. I somehow successfully communicated my surprise at her baby’s name so she showed me a book of 10,000 baby names in English from 2006, and that is where she chose Emily, which was #1 or 2 in popularity that year.  She told me she was close to naming her Betsy but was worried about the cruelty of other children. Phonetic “Betsy” must mean something vicious in Mam. I couldn’t have been in a more foreign place, culturally, socially and linguistically, yet this young mother expressed a concern that seems to transcend place, culture, society, language. I love when that happens…and it happens A LOT.  I also really love Mam…what an interesting sounding language.  I was convinced I understood what they were saying, sort of like how I convince myself that I understand Spanish.

So we left our bags and headed into town for a churrasco and a wander, we had to be back by 7pm for our chuj.  I had a temascal in Oaxaca and this type of bathing is similar—a sort of sauna/sweat bath. On the top of their roof terrace they have a small room with a hearth and chimney where they bathe.  My temascal in Mexico included a small woman who came in to beat me with branches while blessing me in Spanish.  This time, I was on my own.

So after our chujs and a few hot rum chocolates with the Swiss guys down the road, we headed back to our room to get a good night’s sleep before the races.  It looked like our neighbor left because his bag was gone,  so I got into the empty bed with my sleeping bag. Of course, he wasn’t gone and came home wasted in the middle of the night, swaying drunkenly and slurring that I was in his bed.  Duh.  I was honestly thankful that he didn’t just strip down and climb into bed with me which is what he proceeded to do after I scurried back, still in my sleeping bag, to the bed made of a pile o’ clothes.

THE RACE

Okay, this is one of the things that intrigued me most about Todos Santos. Apparently on November 1st, All Saint’s Day (Todos Santos means All Saints) after a week of booze, marimba and scary carnival rides, the men get on their horses all dressed up and all liquored up and race each other back and forth between swigs of aguadiente on a short, straight course made of loose earth and sand. We heard that the town of Todos Santos has been dry since 2008 during this festival because of the drunken disorder, but if this is what a dry town looks like in the Cuchumatanes, I am staying far away from any “wet” ones. 

Oh my god, it was so crazy.  And so wildly entertaining.  There is nothing like watching hours of what seems to be an elaborate pantomime of drunken balancing on horseback. I went to both sessions because I was obsessed with a few of the riders. My favorite was one guy I called “swollen eye” because, well, he had a swollen eye and I needed to distinguish him from “Drunk Hat” and “Head Gash” and “Chicken Guy”. 

I watched the spectacle from several different viewing points—in front the of the action, above the action and on the sidelines. It didn’t matter where I stood, these men were drunk.  And I mean close to unconscious drunk. Some were even at the hallucination stage of prolonged intoxication. Swollen Eye thought he had a lasso at one point and would twirl this imaginary rope over and over while rocking back and forth and side to side on his saddle, trying to move his horse in the direction of the race, but going absolutely nowhere.  I never got tired of watching him struggle with his imaginary lasso before whipping into starting position and almost losing his seating.  I am not sure if he ever fell or not, but I never saw him go down and I watched him for a loooonnnnngggg time.  If I had to choose a winner of this race it would hands down be Swollen Eye, with Head Gash a close second.  And when it came close to the end of the race, some of men who were racing all day, including Chicken Guy, rode with live chickens.  I couldn’t tell if they were alive or not, one or two seemed to be, but I did watch Chicken Guy wring his chicken’s neck before swinging it wildly and screaming something as he raced down the track.  I was horrified by the barbarism, but I still couldn’t stop watching.

I stood on the sidelines for hours and hours and became friendly with my Mayan neighbors.  One Mayan mama wrapped her arm around my waist as if I were some sort of prize she won, this tall, dark extrañera fixated on the race. It was comforting to feel so welcome and protected. There was one point during the afternoon where I was the only norteamericano in a crowd of todosantonians and at that moment I wished there were two of me, the first me to stand exactly where I was standing, the temporary hija of a Mam woman, towering doofily over a sea of white straw hats and colorful huipiles and the other me to take a picture of it.