Chapter 10
Guatemala
Bearing Witness
GUATEMALA, OCTOBER 2001
NYC, 2002
“So what happened in Guatemala?” Akiko asks.
I'm quiet for a long time.
Guatemala is where I learned to be a witness.
After the intensity of San Cristobal, Marco's fire, the wave metaphor, the lesson about humility, Yula and I crossed into Guatemala looking for something quieter.
Lake Atitlán by chicken bus, those repurposed American school buses painted in wild colors, blasting reggaeton, driven by guys who treated mountain roads like racetracks.
We arrived in Panajachel. The lake opened before us like a vision from another world.
Massive. Blue-green. Surrounded by three volcanic peaks. San Pedro, Atitlán, Tolimán, rising straight out of the water. Eleven indigenous Mayan villages scattered around the shore, each one accessible only by boat.
The place felt ancient. Sacred. Like the volcanoes had been watching human drama unfold for ten thousand years and would keep watching long after we were gone.
We took a boat across to San Pedro La Laguna. The village was small, quiet, clinging to the volcano's slope. Narrow dirt paths wound between houses. Kids played in the streets. Women in traditional huipils, hand-woven blouses with intricate patterns, carried baskets on their heads. Men worked in the fields, cultivating coffee on the volcanic slopes.
The hostel was simple. A collection of wooden rooms around a courtyard, hammocks strung between trees, a communal kitchen where travelers cooked and told stories.
And that's where I met Diego.
Diego was in his sixties, a Tz'utujil Maya man who worked at the hostel, gardening, maintaining the property, helping with whatever needed doing. He spoke Spanish with a thick accent, mixing in words from his indigenous language that I didn't understand.
Most travelers didn't talk to him much. He was part of the background. The help.
But I was curious. And one afternoon, sitting in the courtyard while he watered plants, I asked him about the village.
He looked at me for a long moment. Deciding something.
Then he started talking.
“Do you know about the war?” he asked.
“A little,” I said. “I know there was a civil war. Recently, right?”
“Recently.” He smiled sadly. “1960 to 1996. Thirty-six years. Two hundred thousand people dead. Eighty-three percent of them indigenous. Mayan. Like me.”
I didn't know what to say.
He kept talking. Not looking at me. Looking at the plants.
“The army came to villages like this. They said we were helping the guerrillas. Sometimes we were. Sometimes we weren't. Didn't matter. They burned the villages. Killed the men. Raped the women. Took the children. Called it counterinsurgency. Called it protecting Guatemala from communism.”
His hands kept moving. Watering. Trimming. Like the story was just part of the routine.
“My village, not this one, another one, higher up the volcano, they came in 1982. I was working in the fields. I heard the helicopters. By the time I got back, the village was burning. My father, my two brothers, my uncle, all dead. My mother survived. My sister survived. But they were all different after.”
He finally raised his eyes.
“You're a traveler. You come here, you see the beauty. The lake. The volcanoes. Very nice for photos. But you don't see what's underneath. The graves. The trauma. The people who can't sleep because they remember.”
I sat there, stunned. Not knowing what to say. Feeling like an asshole for asking.
But Diego wasn't angry. He seemed tired. Like he'd told this story before and would have to keep telling it because that was the only way to make it real.
“Why are you telling me this?” I finally asked.
He shrugged. “Because you asked. And because someone should know. The world should know. So many people come here and don't ask. They take pictures. They think Guatemala is beautiful. And it is. But it's also this. And if you only see the beauty, you miss the truth.”
Over the next few days, I heard more stories.
From María, a woman who ran a small tienda in the village. Her husband had been disappeared in 1984. She never found his body. Never got an answer about why. Just gone.
From Pablo, a young guy my age who'd grown up in an orphanage because both his parents had been killed when he was two. He didn't remember them. Didn't remember the war. But it had shaped his entire life anyway.
From an old woman whose name I never learned, who sat outside the church every morning and wouldn't go inside. I asked someone why. “Because the priest collaborated with the army,” they said. “He gave them names. She can't forgive that.”
This wasn't history. This was six years ago.
The peace accords were signed in 1996. I was eighteen. Getting ready for college. Worried about stupid shit like SAT scores and which dorm I'd get.
And here, people were still burying bodies. Still looking for missing family members. Still trying to figure out how to live in villages where your neighbor might have been the one who turned your father in to the death squads.
One evening, sitting by the lake watching the sunset, I thought about my grandmother, Yaya.
We are all here because of a thousand random moments.
She stood in a line to be executed in the crying square in Athens during the Civil War.
Diego's father died in flames on a Guatemalan volcano in 1982.
Different decades. Different continents. Different ideologies pulling the triggers.
But the same ancient pattern. The same horror wearing new masks. The same trauma echoing forward through bloodlines and borders, waiting for witnesses to carry it into light.
Helena was another story I heard. An elderly woman, maybe 70, with eyes that had seen too much.
“They came at dawn,” she said quietly. “Soldiers. Looking for communists. We had nothing to do with politics. We were farmers. But that didn't matter.”
She described hiding seven children in the river reeds while soldiers burned the village. Holding them underwater, their small bodies trembling, as boots passed inches away. The smell of smoke. The screaming.
“I saved those children,” she said. “But I lost my husband, my brothers, two of my own sons.”
Another story came from Carlos, a young man maybe 25. He'd been a child during the worst of it.
“My father rebuilt,” he said. “After everything, after losing family, after the village was destroyed, he came back and rebuilt. Not just houses. The community.”
He showed me the cooperative they'd formed. The school they'd built. The way they'd taken their trauma and transformed it into collective healing.
“Remembering isn't enough,” Carlos said. “We have to use the memory to build something new.”
Yula left. She was heading back to Mexico City.
“Be careful,” she said at the bus station in Panajachel.
“I will.”
“No, you won't.” She smiled. “But maybe that's okay. You're learning something here. I can see it.”
“What am I learning?”
“How to listen,” she said. “Really listen.”
She hugged me goodbye and got on the bus.
I stayed in San Pedro. Not doing much. Just being there.
Helping Diego in the garden. Talking with María at her tienda. Listening to Helena. Sitting with Pablo while he practiced English.
I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't changing anything. I wasn't solving anything.
I was just there. Listening. Bearing witness.
On my last day, Diego gave me a small woven bracelet. Red and black threads, traditional Tz'utujil patterns.
“For remembering,” he said.
“I won't forget,” I told him.
“I know. That's why I'm giving it to you. You're the kind of person who remembers. Who connects things. Who tells stories. The world needs that.”
I still have that bracelet. It's in a box in my apartment, along with all the other objects I collected on the journey. Small pieces of the path.
I carry my grandmother's story too. The line in the crying square. The guard who looked their way.
Antigua next. Colonial beauty frozen in time. Cobblestone streets, pastel-colored buildings, volcanoes looming on every horizon. I stayed at a hostel near the central plaza. For a few days I just existed. Walking. Eating. Reading in cafes.
From Antigua I wrote to everyone at once, the whole road from Chiapas in one email. It reads the way that month felt. Fast.
Off to Oaxaca and then the pacific coast, suffers and well the pacific, great Porto Escondido .... guapo!, all day bus ride over the boarder to Guatemala, that means traveling back 50 years or so in time, the busses are there as a reminder to anyone who has doubts. Chicken buses oh yes the name says it all, some goats but mainly chickens and no air condition like Mexico. Obviously just joking, arrive in small village after sunset drive through spectacular mountains and volcanoes, cliffs and big rocks in the middle of the road. Yula is still with me, so are 2 gay Frenchmen from Marseille, and a Dutch couple.
9:00 pm in bus station in small Guatemalan village, with all our gear strapped to our backs, we were like sitting ducks or maybe better said sitting chickens. TAXI!! Lake Atitlan..... Here we come. Me with the Dutch couple, Yula with the solely French speaking French. hohohoho! Lake Atitlan gorgeous, in between 3 volcanoes, did some shopping and shipped it home, nice fabrics. Yula doesn’t speak to me after-snaring a bed with the French couple, it was getting a little weird anyway.
Got a motorcycle, went up a volcano on a horse, lived on 5$a day! Now Antigua Spanish lessons, colonial city, BEAUTIFUL, volcanoes all around. Nightlife and plenty of nice young people, I also found the first speaking Greek. Petros, a Greek Canadian had been traveling 1.5 years now great guy!! Crashed a Guatemalan party outside the city, ended up spending the night because no buses left after!2. Now ready for my week of Spanish classes. to all those traveling good luck and keep me posted, to all those at home hope you are well and hope you get on the road for some adventures soon. lots of hugs nikos
That one went to everyone. This one went to Cassie.
Mon, 08 Oct 2001
So where are we right now, what is installed for our troubled hearts and our fucking inconvenient placement on this planet? I don’t know. I don’t know if I can remember what you look like naked anymore, I don’t remember how you kiss, things have faded and yet that pain, the love is still there and doesn’t allow me to touch another soul, I am still blocked and that is why I am going to the shaman. Things are going great and crazy; I am on the verge of something really big. I have met 2 cool cats and we are going to do something special I know it. We got this idea and we all have the means to contribute to it in the right way. Anyway I don’t know when I will see you again. I hope you get off your butt sooner or later and come and finish a dream we had dreamt together, once again maybe not... who knows only you. Love Nikos
I keep checking my email and looking for a message from you, in almost a pathetic way. I am deciding that you are on a mountain somewhere meditating, or you simply don't have anything to write right now. I am thinking of you, and honestly I am dreaming about you a lot, which I haven't done for a few months, but now I find you almost every night in my sleep. You look and seem well, you aren't fat or bald or anything. I miss you. It’s weird, I see you here sometimes. Hope you are well. Love Cassie
And to Cassie again, from San Salvador, on the fifteenth of October, with Tikal behind me.
Mon, 15 Oct 2001
Dear Cassie, What can I say but.... why aren’t you here with me. Every moment I wonder around some back street alley and play football with some Guatemalan children, every time I see a couple kiss on the top of a jungle pyramid, every time I walk into a bar and see some tourist-hungry Latin woman giving me the eye, I freeze I think of you and me, wondering like two innocent children using the world as a play ground. What can I say? I don’t know, yo ablo espanol pocito, aora yo penso a tu todo la dia et le solo thing yo se esto que te quere mucho even today. Antigua was nice you would probably like to live there for a little, you would enjoy the gringos from time to time but you would love the locals and immerse yourself into their vivid lives. Lago Atitlan is a special place where you can really chill out and meditate, do yoga and all the relevant shit, san Pedro is a little village on this collapsed volcano with some very groovy people from all over. Climbed another volcano, rode through the jungle for 2 days on a horse, woke up at 4am to see the sun rise in the Mayan ruins of Tikal, then I spent the night on the top of a pyramid after hiding from the security guard, but couldn’t sleep from the jungle noises and the howling monkeys, they make a scary sound. I travel alone, meet great people find myself saying many hellos and goodbyes all the time. Some unbelievable characters are on the road.... I think that is what I like to experience the most. So many unbelievable hotels with no windows or doors, sleeping in hammocks, under the stars, drinking Chilean wine. Talking about the Internet, globalization, filming my quest, keeping a digital diary, feeling very alive, very happy..... But I am alone... which is fine ... great... but I wish I could share those moments of ecstasy when looking at the perfect reflection of the sky in the mirroring lake. I am now in San Salvador on my way to Costa Rica, everyone here has a gun you think you are in Texas or something, it quite weird and I would probably say unsafe. I leave tomorrow for Nicaragua and the day after I should be getting to Monte Zuma, Costa Rica where I think I will continue to pick up the surfing I left dangling in Porto Escondido Mexico. I miss you I dream of you, I wish you were here, I love you Nikos
Oh Nicky.... I want desperately to come to you right now. I do, isn't it weird, nothing about you has faded in my mind, not even the way your flat square feet look! I just can't right this minute. Maybe in some months, but right now I like what I am doing, it is important to me. I know I know we will see each other soon. I am looking into doing this art program in Mexico in the spring. I also am looking into a few other things. I secretly looked for some classes on Greek islands for next summer, hoping maybe we would run into each other. Just give me a couple of months. I think you should like to have them. You sound wonderful and full of life. I am somewhat excited and overwhelmed by how much you are going to talk next time I see you (joke, but you know you talk a lot.)…. So I am happy. I want to see you though. I think of you. Love Cassie PS. Your Spanish is interesting but definitely improving
“That's heavy,” Akiko says, her fingers paused over the keyboard.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know that's what Guatemala would be when you went?”
“No. I thought I was just going to a beautiful lake to decompress after Marco's accident.”
“But it became something else.”
“It always does. Every place I went thinking I was there for one reason turned out to be preparing me for something deeper.”
She nods. “So after Guatemala, where did you go?”