Making Peace

‘ By the end of my week in Guatemala, I felt like I was just beginning to grasp the rural… ‘ By the end of my week in Guatemala, I felt like I was just beginning to grasp the rural lifestyle. The day began when the roosters crowed — which was often before 4 a.m. — and ended with just enough time to make the trek back home before dark.

But one thing I hadn’t absorbed was the actual work that these farmers did, the machine-less farming that many would do until the day they died. A group leader and translator, AJWS’s Lom Friedman, arranged for Julian, one of Paraxaj’s leading figures, to take us to his fields on our last morning in Guatemala.

Only two students were up at 5:30 a.m., and Robin Scheimer, Lom and I met Julian outside the schoolhouse as the sun came up. He was a small man with a soft, forgiving face, round cheeks and large eyes.

We walked along the main dirt road that outlined Paraxaj’s upper border until our schoolhouse was out of sight. We walked and saw 13-year-old boys similarly headed to the fields, old women with baskets balanced on their heads. Morning rush hour in Paraxaj comes early.

After a mile, Julian turned onto a tiny trail, and we followed him up a brief hill and then down, down an entire mountainside sometimes so steep we had to hold on to tree roots to keep from falling, down so far that when we finally reached his fields, the spot where we’d begun our descent was the horizon.

Julian smiled and led us toward the wide, expansive opening in the woods — his fields, his livelihood. His daughters were already at work watering the crops.

The main exports of Paraxaj are zucchini and snow peas, an interesting combination considering that neither is remotely a part of the Guatemalan diet. Rather, the two crops are almost solely grown in the area because they are major exports, vegetables that can’t be grown just about anywhere else. Paraxaj, which means ‘humid’ in the indigenous Kaqchikel language, is called so because under the dry topsoil is fertile, moist ground, ready to grow.

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ We asked Julian what type of zucchini he grew.

‘ ‘Green Commander,’ he said, pronouncing the English with a heavy accent. ‘Is that a translation?’ asked Lom.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Green Commander en espanol.’

The seeds, we learned, were imported from the United States — on each pack, Julian had sounded out, the seeds were labeled Green General. Julian, like nearly every farmer in Paraxaj, was so encompassed by the U.S. market that he didn’t even know the name of his product — only that it allowed him to feed his 11 children.

Though I’d come to farm, to kneel in the dirt and learn the craft, the four of us stood in the middle of Julian’s field and spoke, through Lom, about the United States, about the recession.

Here, our recession might mean that we don’t buy a new pair of jeans, that we skip the family vacation or that we pass on picking up some snow peas for dinner. But to poor farmers like Julian or Pedro, our recession could mean missing a day’s pay because the peas aren’t selling, it could mean that there’s no money to buy Willy or Byron medicine in the next town. It could mean death.

We asked Julian what responsibility the United States had toward a poorer country like Guatemala.

‘Compre mis verduras.’ Not sending money, not donating clothing. Buy my vegetables.

‘ A drop in the pond of my country, which felt so far away, rippled to the mountains of Guatemala, rippled through the entire world. At once the United States felt like a giant shadow.

On the hike back,’ Julian gave us a guided tour of his country’s secret holocaust. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because we don’t learn about the estimated 2 million indigenous Guatemalans slaughtered by the Spanish-descendent-run Guatemalan army in the 1980s — the Guatemalans decapitated and thrown into mass graves, rooted out of hiding in the mountains, rounded up in villages like Paraxaj to be raped and murdered. The Guatemalans were massacred for their different culture and heritage by an army receiving arms and funds from the United States. Thank you, history class.

As we hiked up the mountain, Julian would pause and point to a patch of land.

‘There,’ he would say. ‘A family used to live. My neighbors. The army came in and threw a grenade into their house.’

For us, these sites were plots of earth, imagined violence. For Julian, we were walking through a graveyard of friends.

‘How does it make you feel,’ he said, ‘to know that your parents’ tax dollars paid for my friends to die?’

But there was no accusation, no anger. He really wanted to know how we felt. He wanted to see that we were human too, that we, the white man, the man that funded the army that beheaded his brother, were not machines but people.

‘And now,’ he continued, ‘you pay money to come and rebuild our lives. For a long time, we thought everyone in the United States wanted us to die.’

We continued to climb up the mountain, but I clung to his words. Maybe the work we’d done on the reservoir or on the library floor was negligible. Maybe it was putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. But for many of the people in Paraxaj, the fact that we were there helping at all had changed their entire conception of Americans, of an entire people.

The specter of the United States, of the global impact and impression of the United States, billowed greater than ever. Our actions, it seemed to me at once, are not our own. And whether we choose to believe it or not, by merit of being born into a wealthy nation, our lives reverberate around the globe.