The rain has stopped, seemingly overnight and two weeks early according to locals. Wind has replaced the rain, slowly stripping away the green from the hills but leaving the milpa almost ready for harvest.
Three thirty in the morning on Friday there was a bang on the door. Marta did not get up as usual and the petitioning continued for some minutes. Irma answered the door and then closed it again. At breakfast Marta told me that it was one of her patients that knocked, that she was beginning labor. Marta did not want to deliver the baby, knowing that she would not be able to attend the swearing-in ceremony if she did. So she had Irma tell the women she was unavailable. At seven the women knocked again. Again she was turned away. When Marta, Edwin and I left the house to meet the microbus in the park, Marta had Edwin make certain that the women was not in the street, quickly pushed through the door and took the long way to the park to avoid potential run-ins with the laboring women. Once at the park Marta went straight for the safety of the tinted glass of the micro. "There will be more babies", she told me, "but there won't be any more swearing-in for Katie. It's okay", she reassured me with a frank tone; "she'll find someone else to deliver her baby."
So on Halloween morning, twenty-nine trainees and members of their Guatemalteco families piled into microbuses headed for US Soil. We twenty-nine trainees raised our right hands on the ground and in the presence of the US Ambassador, among others. I'm official now. We celebrated that night in Antigua with dinner and a dance party, all with Halloween as a backdrop.
Saturday, Dia de Los Muertos was spent with my family in Sta. Maria Cauque. I arrived in time for breakfast with hot bread for the panaderia (first time since arrival to have hot bread) and a warm shower. Afterward, we walked to the cemetery to honor my Guatemadre's husband who died the year before and Irma's first child who died
at three months. Wreaths of cypress and marigold were made in advance and placed of the graves. More marigolds were scattered and candles were lit. A boiled guiskil was placed on the grave and we sat around each eating our own boiled guiskil, sharing with the dead (guiskil is a really popular vegetable here,
grows like a squah, looks like an alien egg and tastes like a potato). Kites are flown on this day also as a way to communicate with the dead, as their spirits keep the kites lifted.
Leaving the cemetery we joined the crowds of people headed toward the soccer field. Sta. Maria Cauque is one of three communities in Guatemala famous for Dia de Los Muertos festivities. Groups of teenagers spend up to six months creating giant kites made from bamboo and paper. One by one, the paper is unfolded on the field and the bamboo frame is placed over it. The paper is then tied and glued to the frame and the kite is hoisted onto its wooden stand by rope and manpower. Sometimes the frame is not strong enough or the kite is not hoisted fast enough and the bamboo collapses, sticks ripping through flimsy layered paper. The largest of the kits was 28 meters across. Smaller kites, still a meter or more across, filled the skies above the crowds.
Sunday, after a lunch of tongue soup I said goodbye to the Chiroy family of Sta. Maria Cauque. No tears, but my heart was sad to leave them for certain. Three hours passed crowded on a bus on a sunny Sunday Guatemalan afternoon. I traveled through hills covered with milpa, kites still floating above the corn stalks, to arrive at my new home.
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