The birthday starts at about 5:00am, with a round or two of fireworks. If you’ve never been woken up by explosions, there is no comparable experience. Nothing is less pleasant or more likely to send your recently-relaxed body into adrenaline-pumping terror-response mode. I’ve experienced this on three separate mornings, and each time I instinctively jammed my head under my pillow, not yet awake enough to register anything but fear. It’s a hell of a way to start your day.
After that, things get better. They have a family party in the evening, with their entire family. In a culture where 10 kids is not uncommon, families are large. Marta bakes cakes, (along with selling cheese, dispensing free medical advice, cooking, running a hotel, remodeling said hotel, to keep herself busy since she retired from the hospital, selling cosmetics, and selling gold), and the day before the kitchen is full of huge golden rectangles of delicious-smelling cake – enough to feed the army of relatives. The traditional birthday dinner is tamales. Marta also explained how they’re very easy to make for hordes of people. Incidentally, they’re also delicious. Combined with the Monterey Jack cheese some blessed soul in Wisconsin decided to export down here, they are perfect. This was the first real cheese I’ve found in this country, the first real cheese I’ve eaten in the past two months. Glorious.
In accordance with their song, the cake comes out with dinner, not after, and then it’s piñata time. Christian’s birthday (he turned two) this weekend had three piñatas, Buzz Lightyear, Woody and Jesse. By the end, the three looked like victims of a zombie attack – newspaper entrails falling out of candy-less guts, limbs torn off… the scramble for candy was pretty intense – I myself was caught up, reaching for sweets and lollipops in a competitive atmosphere that resulted in a 60-year-old aunt snatching a lollipop from my grasp, something we both laughed about afterwards, but in the moment – woah, was she playing to win.
It’s been nice, being involved with the family that lives in and around this hotel (I realized at the parties just how many of the neighbors are family). Getting to know Marta and Oscar has been an experience. They’re both Puro Maya, pure Maya. Not Q’eqchí either (one of Guatemala’s largest indigenous population, and the one that’s migrating from the south up into Petén), they’re Maya Itzá, descendents of the original inhabitants of Flores, and Lake Petén Itzá, and they’re obviously proud of that. Oscar is very laid back. He runs his boat to Flores a few times a day, bringing passengers if there are any, he fishes, and he directs the work crews remodeling the left side of the hotel. He worked for ten years bringing archeological teams to Mayan sites deep in the jungle, and know lots of stories and myths.
Marta runs the hotel and deals with all of her relatives, and tells me just what is wrong with everything in the world. She’s serious, but good natured enough that it’s not annoying. Once she realized I was actually interested in how she cooked things, and why she did things a certain way, she started explaining everything. The fish she made for dinner is good because of all the vitamins she knows it has, and she makes sure not to add any of the processed seasoning – only onions and tomatoes go into her broth, and so forth. She’ll explain why she does something, why it’s better, and why the gente (the people) don’t do it the way she does. The gente are her constant foil, and they seem to include just about anyone who isn’t Puro Maya. The Ladinos living in Petén, the Q’eqchí immigrants, the people in the towns, the people in the country… really anyone. The gente generally don’t do things the way they should be done because they’re uneducated, or they’re lazy and don’t like to work, or they just don’t know how things should be done. To say she’s prejudiced is only fair, but it’s also fair to say that she’s at least half right. A lot of the things she does – avoiding unhealthy expensive processed foods, preferring the home-made and natural, making use of natural resources and her own medical training to take care of those around her, and her sense of the sort of work it takes to get by in this world are admirable, and the situation in Petén would be better if more people were like here. The gente, though, she could give them a rest.
Marta runs the hotel and deals with all of her relatives, and tells me just what is wrong with everything in the world. She’s serious, but good natured enough that it’s not annoying. Once she realized I was actually interested in how she cooked things, and why she did things a certain way, she started explaining everything. The fish she made for dinner is good because of all the vitamins she knows it has, and she makes sure not to add any of the processed seasoning – only onions and tomatoes go into her broth, and so forth. She’ll explain why she does something, why it’s better, and why the gente (the people) don’t do it the way she does. The gente are her constant foil, and they seem to include just about anyone who isn’t Puro Maya. The Ladinos living in Petén, the Q’eqchí immigrants, the people in the towns, the people in the country… really anyone. The gente generally don’t do things the way they should be done because they’re uneducated, or they’re lazy and don’t like to work, or they just don’t know how things should be done. To say she’s prejudiced is only fair, but it’s also fair to say that she’s at least half right. A lot of the things she does – avoiding unhealthy expensive processed foods, preferring the home-made and natural, making use of natural resources and her own medical training to take care of those around her, and her sense of the sort of work it takes to get by in this world are admirable, and the situation in Petén would be better if more people were like here. The gente, though, she could give them a rest.
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