GUATEMALA CITY – I greeted the sunrise at the Livingston boat dock with a heavy heart, clambered aboard the lightweight skiff that passes as a ferry and braced myself for the sea-spray-slamming commute to Puerto Barrios, where I would catch the bus to the capital, spend the night in a hostel and grab the first flight home to Missouri.
There in the harsh and sterile environment of a hospital lies my grandfather, the farmer, a man who can’t stand to lie still or be indoors for too long. Weakened to the point of surrender by a string of virulent infections, he asked the doctor yesterday to give him a pill to end it all. Hardy as an old oak tree, he’s weathered many a storm, and this isn’t like him. He’s going home with my parents tonight on hospice care. Two days might be too long, but there’s no help for it. I’m praying to be able to see him once again, but more importantly, for the pain to end.
My first week in Guatemala, seen from the lively Caribbean port town of Livingston, was upbeat, filled with noise and movement from the Holy Week celebrations, meetings with bright and engaged community leaders and time well spent in the jungle and on the beach. I took a Garifuna cultural ecotour with Mega and Amanda at Rasta Mesa, a community center in the heart of the local Garifuna community that strives to reinforce cultural pride and ecological sensibilities among local youth while providing hands-on classes and adventures for tourists and volunteers.
I also met with leaders of Ak Tenamit, an autonomous Maya school that is changing the lives of villagers and creating a dynamic new leadership for the years ahead. I made plans to visit the school this week.
I knew the sadness would come – I’ve read too much of the history and politics of Guatemala to expect that it will be easy, riven as the country was by nearly four decades of brutal civil war, and ravaged as it has been by the exploitation of multinational corporations.
Yesterday I read in La Cuerda, an ecofeminist publication produced here in the capital, that more than two thirds of Guatemala’s richly biodiverse forests have already been lost in the last half-century. Every year, more than 70,000 hectares of forest is lost – at the rate of 200 football fields a day.
My first glimpse into the dark side came early in the week as I prepared to meet with the regional coordinators of FUNDA-ECO, the country’s largest environmental group. As I reviewed their website, I saw to my surprise that one of their forest rangers had recently been assassinated, and that others, including the director, had received death threats.
Cleopatra and Justo, who work with communities throughout the Izabal province in the east, reassured me that they were being careful and they didn’t anticipate any further problems. I sensed an uneasiness and resolved to delve further in the week ahead.
Today, in fact, I was scheduled to head to the preserve at San Gil, where Don Samuel had worked protecting the forest for decades before he was shot to death as he worked in his office in January. His job was to report timber poachers, illicit ranching operations and other threats to the area, and his colleagues believe he angered the wrong person.
Until today, however, I managed to hold the sadness at bay. My self-appointed task is to focus on the success stories – to show where personal and collective commitment and initiative are making a difference. There would be no wallowing in negativity. I couldn’t afford it.
Nonetheless, there it was. I felt it spread as I stared out the window at the misty purple mountains heading inland from the coast. I’d longed to see those verdant hills for years, reading about the resplendent quetzal and the toucan and the macaw and heroic efforts to preserve their rare habitat, and the heroic struggles of the native peoples to protect their lands and their way of life.
Now, however, as we approached those misty mountains, I was dismayed to see them brown and barren. A few were hacked by machetes and burned to make way for milpas in the traditional way of slash-and-burn agriculture. More of them were denuded to provide pasture for cattle. On still others, reason eluded me – like an impossibly steep hillside where I watched as a man braced himself and his chainsaw to cut the last remaining tree in a terrace of stumps. At the foot of the hill, as if in silent resistance, a limbless, disembodied trunk sprouted stubborn leaves from what remained of a cleft.
I rode along in silence. Surely it would end, and we’d come to the lush forest soon, I thought. Ah, there was a skein of mist hanging over some purple mountains in the distance. But as we approached, more brown, stripped hillsides. Fields striped with plastic, awaiting planting – strawberries? – whole faces of hillsides slumped to the ground below where no trees remained to shield them from the fierce tropical rains.
The good Guatemalan grandmother seated next to me, with her rhinestone-studded sandals and her matching bag, eyes me curiously as I lift my camera to shoot the environmental disaster unfolding around me. I can’t explain. I can’t help it that I see the things I see. I’ve always been this way.
We crossed over a river, cloudy with runoff and an unwholesome greenish growth. Downstream, the women were scrubbing their laundry on the rocks.
Did these men with their chainsaws not see what I saw? Those rains had begun yesterday as I still lay in my bed, hammering the roof with a violent intensity, hour after hour.
We passed a dusty, barren pasture, crisscrossed with bleached patches of grey grass. What were those cattle eating – dirt?
I thought again of my grandfather, a hardscrabble dirt farmer in the early years, nourishing the earth with his own sweat. Year after year he labored to restore the soils of the degraded and eroded farm he had worked along with the factory jobs that kept the bills paid, the same farm his father had ruined in the Great Depression.
I thought of the care he took to preserve the trees on his land, where I can still see in my mind’s eye his small herd of cattle grazing sustainably in the shade. I thought of his love for the land, of his deep knowledge of every plant, every animal, every season and its vagaries, knowledge that would leave this earth with him. I thought of the time he put his gun away to hunt no more.
“I looked at that squirrel, and I saw him looking at me. And I just didn’t have the heart to do it.” He laughed at himself. Growing up the son of a trapper, supplementing his family’s diet with the occasional rabbit, squirrel or deer, there was a time it was needed. This was not that time.
I knew he would be saddened, too, by what I saw.
We’re at the end of the dry season, I reminded myself. Next time I come this way, the plants will have grown up and everything will be green again.
That was when the limestone mine loomed ahead of me. The whole side of a mountain had been removed to grind into gravel for cement. Then another, and another. The white powder covered everything.
“Cementos San Antonio” was proudly painted in white on the barren hillside.
“Sal si puede,” read a sign – the name of a river? A town? Literally, “Leave if you can.”
It was no use. Some days you just have to swallow the sadness and move on. Guatemala City, the long flight home and my grandfather await.
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