Terremoto and other Tribulations
Just as I was settling in to my new life as a student of teaching english, strange and disturbing events began to shake the foundation of my existence, the first very literally. One night in the middle of my second week in Antigua, about eleven o’clock, I was sitting at my desk laboring not to fall asleep while reading a textbook, surrounded by a sea of papers: notes and lesson plans and rough pages of the grammar paper I was working on. I noticed that the textbook and all the papers were swelling up towards me, and then away.
I shook my head and closed my eyes- obviously I was pushing myself way too hard. When I opened them again, the desk was still rising and falling, and as I looked around, I could see that the whole room was rippling like it was on a trampoline and a large person was walking across. It took me a second to realize that I wasn’t hallucinating, and that this was an earthquake. A big one. I stood up, felt the floor flowing, thought about how many times this city has been destroyed, and decided I needed to get out of this old and cracking building.
Ran outside to find that the tiles of the courtyard were sitting on top of jello, and that the earth, which we consider to be a solid, fixed thing, can actually move and vibrate. Soon many of the other residents came out of their rooms, in their underwear and sleeping clothes, and we all stood there looking at each other, wondering when it would end, surfing the courtyard, watching the plants shake, hearing pots and pan in the kitchen fall out of their cabinets.
It went on for a long time, maybe a minute and a half, and miraculously it didn’t do any damage in town. Part of it was the type of seismic wave by the time it got to us, from 300 miles away off the coast of Oaxaca. They were big, slow, loping waves, not the hard and fast shaking kind that causes damage. I have to confess that after the initial rush of panic (the building’s gonna fall down!) I really quite enjoyed the earthquake. But it was unsettling to say the least, and there were several aftershocks that night, and for some time I would jump a little at any loud sound on the low end of things: a truck or bus rattling down the cobblestones, thunder, or the rumblings of Volcan Fuego belching up smoke in the distance.
The next day in class was our second mini-lesson to real English learners, twenty minutes with the objective of teaching vocabulary. My lesson was okay, better than the first. It was “Gabriel’s Breakfast Restaurant” and featured a menu. We were going to learn breakfast vocabulary and then by the end, the students would take turns taking orders from each other. After the fiasco which was How to Play Blackjack I was intent on cutting back my TTT, or teacher talk time in the lingo of the course, and making sure that I took the time for them to understand things before we moved forward.
I accomplished those two objectives, barely talking except to ask questions and call on students, and really took my time to go over each vocabulary word, drawing pictures, asking questions to make sure they got them. I got stuck on “toaster” which wasn’t even one of the words- apparently they are not popular in Guatemala. I was so focused on not talking that I felt fairly uncomfortable, and think I came across as unfriendly; and I got so deep into the weeds of drawing pictures of toasters and syrup bottles and so forth that we didn’t get through half of my lesson. Once again, my grade from Claudia was “Needs Improvement”.
The most memorable thing to come out of this day was from Grant, the expat in his 50’s who was really struggling to get the hang of teaching. In an attempt to socialize before his lesson, he asked the students if they’d had fun last night, and made some strange lurching body motions to simulate the shaking of the earthquake. Unfortunately this looked a lot more like a crude sex dance, and paired with the way he phrased his question, the class looked fairly horrified and didn’t understand at all. He said earthquake at some point to dig himself out of this hole, which they didn’t know, and from the back of one of us bailed him out with the spanish word, terremoto, which he repeated, wide-eyed, while still shaking and pumping his mid-section. We were absolutely losing it trying not to disrupt everything with our laughter, and “terremoto” became our catchphrase for the rest of the course.
On the home front, whatever domestic tranquility I had found at Casa Matilda was shattered one night after concluding my schoolwork. Sitting in the courtyard having a smoke, I was suddenly and violently confronted by an old one-eyed man also staying there. He had never liked me from the first, never responded to the Buenas Dias I offered, and we hadn’t spoken until he came up to me, exasperated to the point of distraction, he started in forcefully on a lengthy list of grievances. “You think you own everything- you come here and act like a prince. Play your music all the time, playing ping-pong, cooking your stinky food, smoking, talking, always it’s something. I pay to stay here, pay good money, and I can’t get a minutes peace with you around. You people have no respect! You think you own the world! I can’t-” and here, the most disturbing part, he started hitting himself in the head with his closed fist, punctuating his words, “get. a. minute. of. peace!”
I said, “please, please,” mostly to try to get him to stop hitting himself, but he took offense to this and anything else I tried to say- “don’t ‘please’ me, no please, no PLEASE!” and got inches away from my face, grabbing my shirt at my neck. This crossed a line. I pushed his arms away, and told him forcefully he had no right to touch me or attack me. This just served to further anger him. I took some steps away to de-escalate things, and as he lurched after me I told him that I was sorry I had disturbed him, and now that I knew I would try to be more considerate, but nothing I said could make peace. Eventually I just had to walk away, heart beating fast, him yelling after me. It was disturbing, having this scary old man so full of hate, who was clearly a bit unhinged, staying three doors down from me. I made extra sure my door was locked when I went to bed that night.
It was strange, what he’d said, given that I was living a quiet and rather hermetic existence. I wished I had more time and friends to play ping pong and talk with, that I could listen to more music without distracting me from reading boring textbooks. Seemed like he hated me for my American-ness, had attributed everyone’s noise and activity to me, a position which perhaps in theory was justified, given that he very likely came from a country that had been significantly harmed by our foreign policy and interventions, but still felt hurtful and disturbing. The next morning Matilda said she had heard it, that she was sorry, and that he was a little crazy. She asked if I could stay away from him, until he calmed down. I’d planned to complain to her, and offered to move out if I could get my money back, but she said that wasn’t possible.
I tried to keep a low profile, and this succeeded for a few days until one evening, studying in my room, he came up outside my door and started banging on things with a stick. I came out and livid, he accused me of using drugs in my room, and said that he was going to call the police. From the smell in the air, someone was indeed smoking marijuana, a common phenomenon in those parts, but it wasn’t me. I was tired of hiding from him, looking out of my window to see if he was there before I came out, living in fear. I challenged him to call the police, right now, and I would tell them how he was harassing me. It isn’t me, I said, I am studying in my room. I pay to stay here, too, and you have no right to attack me. Call them now, I said. Please. He didn’t like that, and Matilda had to come and get between us and lead him away.
This all just compounded my feelings of frustration. Struggling to figure out teaching English, not feeling like I fit in with the locals or the backpackers passing through, on a tight budget in an expensive town with people constantly trying to sell me tours and trinkets, not able to walk in the mountains all around me, and now deeply uncomfortable, even scared in the place I was staying. The only solution I could think of was to avoid further escalating the conflict, so I basically stayed in my room and focused on my schoolwork or hid out on the roof.
Perhaps in retrospect this was a good thing, because we had a tremendous amount of work due that third week. I had to write a six-page grammar paper- my topic was Participles- three lesson plans to go along with that, three teacher observation critiques, among other smaller things. All in all, I turned in 32 pages of typed writing in a week. Intensive, they called the class. Intensive, indeed. Felt like I barely survived the gauntlet we were running. In fact, by the middle of the next week, everyone in the class was sick with one thing or another, just worn down.
Claudia was a master of breaking up this stress and the constant flow of material we were covering with daily games and fun class traditions, at the same time constantly demonstrating how to be an engaging teacher. She has a huge repertoire of games to play, and features like Confession Wednesday (i.e. what’s the most disgusting food you enjoyed), or if a student was late to any of the daily sessions (morning, back from lunch, breaks, etc) the rest of us were treated to An Embarrassing Story, which came to be one of our favorite parts of class. She’d keep track of her own mistakes, and five of them would lead to her telling a fatefully embarrassing moment in her tragicomic life.
Our third mini-lesson was the last day that week, and I was ready to fully submit to the program, let go of trying to make it up myself and come up with these really creative lessons. I met with Claudia several times to pick a topic and develop the lesson plan, and ended up with a really small part of grammar, teaching the use of “be + going to + verb” in the past tense. For instance, “I was going to write more blog posts, but I never seemed to find a quiet place to write.” I took a lot of time to make my lesson plan super air-tight, and pretty much just did exactly what Claudia suggested. Surprise! It worked. I was so prepared that I was much more relaxed and focused, taught a simple lesson, the students learned the grammar, and were able to use it in an exercise that we actually completed. By the end the students were reading excuses in full sentences using “be going to”. I felt a little bit like an English teacher.
That afternoon my Mom arrived to visit for the weekend. She has lived the past six years in San Salvador, where she is a teacher at an international high school. It’s about a six hour bus ride from there, depending on traffic at the border. Antigua is her favorite place she found in Central America, and she’ll usually make the trip a few times a year. It turned out that her visit was a turning point in my time there. It was lovely to see her, the first person that I knew in over a month. She always stays at the same place, a charming hotel called the Aurora which is set around a fantastic old courtyard brimming with tropical flowers. That afternoon after lunch with Monica and Angie, I walked over to her hotel to meet her.
I’d debated whether I even wanted to show her my place, given that it was haunted by a scary old man who hated me, and thought that he might try to make a scene and attack me in front of my Mom. But in the end, I decided to risk it, not to live in fear, and as we walked down that way I told her the story and warned her about what might happen. But at the Casa Matilda things were all quiet on the western front, and I was able to introduce her to Matilda and a few of my friends there, show her around without incident. Feeling a rare sense of freedom, we even played some ping-pong. When we were leaving Matilda asked me if I felt better now that he was gone. Who? I asked. The viejo loco, she said, se fue. He left? Not coming back? I couldn’t believe it.
What an incredible weight off my shoulders. My Mom and I went for a good walk that afternoon, and I was happy to show her some new places in her favorite town; as usual, she marveled at all the old doors and arches. She had me take a picture of one set of doors she especially liked, which I never did send her. We went to a bookstore, browsed for a long time and bought a few books, had an excellent dinner at an upscale Mexican restaurant, and I went home without fear. Suddenly I was living in a different world, a kinder, more leisurely one.
We spent the whole next day together, went for a walk outside of town to an organic farm and its Saturday market, a nice lunch on a rooftop terrace, and the afternoon we were side by side lesson-planning in the courtyard of the Aurora. It was good to get her perspective as a veteran teacher and to feel like we were in something of the same boat. The next week was Practical Teaching Week, when we were to teach one-hour lessons to a class for the next five days. This prospect was somewhat overwhelming, given that I had just got the hang of a twenty minute lesson, and had spent several days planning for it. Now I had to prepare for three times the length of a lesson, and do it once a day. I was taking over for a real teacher, and responsible for covering as much material in a week as he would have.
On Sunday morning we climbed up to the Cerro de la Cruz, a popular hike just outside of town that is the only safe place nearby to walk on a trail without a guide. I realized as we were walking up that I was starting to see Antigua through my Mom’s eyes, and was much more present to its romance and mystery. This is the beauty of relationships sometimes, that we can subtly transform reality for each other. My Mom is in love with this city- it might as well be Paris to her- and after two days of walking around with her commenting on all the architecture and vibrant flora and the great food, I started to see it in a different light. We sat up by the cross and admired a beautiful view of Antigua and it seemed like not such a bad place at all. I’d been so caught up in the struggles of day to day existence that I’d stopped seeing the world around me.
Her shuttle to Guatemala City to catch her bus back to El Salvador was in early afternoon, and we walked back down to Dona Luisa’s for a good brunch. Then it was time for her to go, and I bid her goodbye and told her I’d come see her in San Salvador in a few weeks and she left with tears in her eyes as she always does when we say goodbye. Walked home to Casa Matilda ten blocks of cobblestones and narrow, uneven sidewalks feeling heartfull, amazed at how different things looked after one weekend. I worked all the rest of that day on the first two lesson plans of the week, and sat out in the courtyard under the bougainvilleas, without fear or shame.
The afternoon before my first one-hour class, I got a haircut and showered and put on the nicest clothes I had. I was nervous but thought I was prepared. Turns out thinking through an hour of class and anticipating and preparing for all the inevitable confusions is more difficult than I thought. Also, feeling more confident, I’d gone back to not taking Claudia’s advice exactly, and for our very first activity I planned an overly ambitious icebreaker game called “Two Truths One Lie.”
Walked into a room of adults who were kind of awkward, wondering where their regular teacher was, and I introduced myself and then I was in charge, for a week. I was keeping my head above water, but just barely- it’s working- it’s not working- it’s working- no, definitely not working, where did we go wrong? They didn’t get the game, it was off to a wrong start, and I cut it short. Some of the students answered all the questions, most of the rest seemed confused by the material. By the end we hadn’t completed the lesson plan, and I was skeptical about how much if any they’d learned. Humbling. Claudia and I met afterward and I was back in the “Needs Improvement” category.
But I survived it, an hour of teaching a class in a language they don’t understand, and I went home and prepared for hours, and more the next afternoon. Saw one of my students a little while before class and he told me the day before had been his first day of studying English. I was impressed, and told him that I never would have guessed that. He said he’d worked for a long time at a hotel. I asked if I could tell him a secret, and told him that that had been my first day of teaching. He seemed surprised, but either way it felt like a relief to confess that. The second day went a little bit better, still rough, but I felt more comfortable and even had some fun with it. I knew I could survive the hour, so it wasn’t quite so fraught, though there was still moments where ambiguity in the questions I was asking created holes of confusion for the class to fall into. I could see clearly by this point from experience that the less I talked the better. It was a zen puzzle: how to teach language without talking. Claudia mostly saw the rough spots, being of the tough-love variety of teacher, and I remained needing improvement.
The third day I wasn’t really nervous anymore, and I knew I had a good lesson plan. I had a trick up my sleeve from Claudia- part of the material to cover that day was the difference between not enough, enough, and too much. She wasn’t sure if I should go through with all of it, but I loved the spectacle of the idea, and was excited to have some fun in the classroom. I wrote some words on the board that are cognates (meaning very similar, recognizable words) with Spanish: insufficient, sufficient, excessive. Asked if anyone wanted some water. A few students said they would, and I produced some clear plastic cups and a bottle of water. I gave a cup to a young woman, poured about three drops in it, then went back to the board and asked “insufficient, sufficient, or excessive?” Generally it was agreed that it had been insufficient, and next to that word, I wrote “not enough”. Next I went to another woman, and poured her a perfectly normal cup of water. The class said it was sufficient, and I wrote “enough”.
Last, for the piece de resistance, I went up to the guy in class who was just a bit of a class clown. Slowly poured him a cup of water, a full cup, made sure everyone was watching and then calmly just kept pouring as water flowed onto the floor. Students gasping and hushed, nervous laughter. I couldn’t help but laughing as I placed the cup in front of him. Everyone was very grave as they said “Excessive” before I even asked. I wrote “Too much” on the board and knew that I not only had them in my pocket, but they would not soon forget that phrase. Carried on with the rest of my lesson plan, knocking out sections right and left, and afterwards Claudia was simply glowing.
The next day was the day before Guatemala’s Independence Day, and only three out of thirteen students showed up for class. It was a slight letdown from the victory of the day before, not that I was less prepared, but that there was no audience for my show. In response to this, class was cancelled for the next day, and my final day of Practical Teaching put off for Monday. Which meant I had the day off, and could walk around town all day through packed streets following parades and marching bands. The chaos of several marching bands meeting at an intersection, and all just senselessly cram in together, all still playing and marching in place, made me realize how impressively efficient Carnival in New Orleans is amidst the chaos. It’s not fun to have three marching bands playing at the same time, people shooting off fireworks, no one on the street or sidewalk able to get anywhere. It was an impressive scene of madness and disorder, and I didn’t last long.
On Saturday we took a class outing, and four of us and Claudia, along with several friends of my classmates, went up to Hobbitenango in the mountains high above Antigua. We got picked up in front of our school half an hour late, in a deeply aged old van that we packed into. As we rattled over the cobblestones, the maimed shocks threatening to break at every pothole, the engine coughing and sputtering, I remarked to several people close by that I really didn’t know if this van was going to make it up the mountain. Tayannah expressed great faith that it would, assured me that she’d been in much worse, and that this van still had a long way to go. I told her that she didn’t know the road we were about to climb. We continued to disagree about this as we drove out of town.
Sure enough, about halfway up the forty-minute ascent, after somehow coaxing this dying animal up the nearly vertical mountain road thus far, the old van just couldn’t make it up around a hairpin steep curve with all of us passengers. So they asked if we could get out and walk for a bit, and we all got out and started puffing our way up the mountain. Without us, the van was just able to climb, and rattled its way out of sight. It was a struggle just to walk it, even for those of us used to hiking, and I observed that Angie was looking like she might not be able to make it. I put my arm around her and more or less dragged her up the mountain as she fought back tears and fought bravely on. A few curves ahead, we found our van again, and all got back in, but after a few hundred feet of crawling speed, it was clear that it just wasn’t going to happen. The driver apologized and said we should wait, and he’d send another vehicle down for us. So we all stood on the side of the road for three quarters of an hour, and I gloated a little to Tayannah over my vehicular intuitions.
Finally a pickup came, and we all piled in the back, and it was good fun to ride out in the mountain air and look back at the vistas opening up before us. As a country boy from Virginia, riding in the back of trucks has always been a preferred mode of travel for me, and the wind in our face seemed to lift our moods, happy now to have gotten off the side of the road. Sometimes a little adversity will just serve to make a journey more memorable and fun.
In the open air, looking out over some stunning mountainside view, Claudia asked if one of the small towns we could see in the distance was Guatemala City (which has three million people). Monica and I just started right in on the sarcasm and took the chance to mess with our teacher a little bit, and when the next town came into view someone asked if that was Mexico City. No, I think it’s Buenos Aires, came the response. And we went on from there, on and on in the way that people do when they think they’ve found something very funny.
We made it up to the mythical Hobbitenango a couple hours after leaving town, and afternoon fog and the threat of rain was rolling in. There were handsome rounded Hobbit houses built into the hillside, a restaurant serving standard Guatemalan fare at high prices, a Guatemalan reggae band playing on the lawn, and a number of amusements, such as an archery course, axe-throwing, and a big swing over the mountainside. Most people went for the overpriced buffet, except for Monica, who hung around and scavenged people’s leftovers, and me who drank beers and scoffed at the tourist rates.
We wandered around the grounds and many of us tried our hands at archery and axe-throwing. Angie and I split a dozen arrows. After watching most of the people ahead of us flub their shots or have their fingers stop the feathers of the arrow, we calmly stepped up and showered the dragon target with arrow after arrow. At dusk they made a bonfire in front of the restaurant, and we huddled around and told stories about broken hearts and little towns in Iowa and drunken roommates and the things that come to mind at a fire. The pickup ride down in the dark was crisp and cold and the only match for the stars above were the lights of Antigua and the surrounding villages below us. At the sight of these, someone would inevitably point and ask in a totally serious voice if it was this faraway major Latin American City or that, until Claudia started intimating that our class results might be in jeopardy.
