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I don't think anybody can go to a third world country and have it not challenge one's definition of everything, of happiness, of wealth, of the contours of what we consider to be real.

How is it that the Comalapan people seem more genuinely happy then the average American Joe or Jane despite of the poverty and mud and trash and work from grade school age until your back is the same shape as a crescent moon?  It's not poverty in their minds, it's poverty in my mind, relative to what I consider to be the definition of poverty and wealth, a horribly anthropocentric tendency I have to hurl these concepts onto everything I see.  And what are these things, poverty and wealth?  Is it only in relation to finance?

The Comalapan people, from my experience don't attach the latter to the former.  Their concepts are simple, un-muddied and elegant and their happiness is not connected to any of the parts that make up the whole of the definition of any word resembling wealth.

Every aspect to their lives is at the core of experience.  Experience itself, the thing done and ingested.  It happens and is taken in and that's it, no analysis paralysis, no preconceived notions or expectations to skew the outcome of the experience.  A kid falls flat on his or her face and gets up to shake it off, no over-comforting from the parents, the experience is done and over with, no need to add extraneous baggage and dependency to it afterwords.

Conversations are at a genuine and real as rain level because there aren't any abstract or over thought players in the conversation.  The conversation turns into a conversation akin to talking to a peacock without getting lost in the iridescence of it's wings and finding out it's inner most basic all sharing and simple qualities by looking at it in the eyes.  Kind of a stretch but it works.

With our technologic development, like out of a movie about the future made ten years ago, with our university and medical systems, with all these glittering perks of a first world country, with all our delicious drugs and some mind altering athletics, there is something inside and universally muddied to the point where it, the most instinctual of Homo sapian shared qualities, is lost.  Gone.

And at what cost.  Everything is relative to what you know and understand.  The curse of knowledge.  The curse of the tortured genius, with the opening of avenues of thought comes vulnerability to their destructive capabilities of hurting something that was not there before the avenues were opened in the first place.  The more you know, the more you know you don't know anything.

Another core gut like need share by everyone under air is companionship and community, with it's microcosm found in the family.  Rugged individualism has dynamited this emphasis on family, the building blocks to any notion of community, into a pile of shrapnel.  Think for yourself is as necessary as a good beer, but to much can make you look like you swallow pumpkins for breakfast, lost jobs, and body dented couches, and just enough - not only tastes great but can lead to a productive buzz.

But, I have to use these sort of opaquing abstract concepts to write and say everything I just said.  To make order of the cultural differences I have to diffuse and deconstruct and add more floating and possibly irrelevant concepts to create a definition that I can not only write, but chew and swallow and actually enjoy the taste.

So much for that.

From here to there back to here

            I went to one of the local schools this morning in Cuhol, a ten minute walk up and through meandering mud and trash paraded roads, cows standing in filth, tied to posts with six foot ropes, kids in doorways who smile or look at us with complete aw, past a pila (a three foot walled bath like sink fed by rainwater) where women and young children wash their clothes and hair.  I say “Buenos dias” in the sing-songy Comalapan way and they sing it back.  Sometimes they say it with emphasis on the last syllable of “buenas” and “dias” like a church bell.  Sometimes it comes out only “bue-dias,” sometimes only “dias” and sometimes all muffled and melted together in a gurggly duck call.

            We helped an English class today.  I started by going through the class and saying “good morning, how are you,” and they would reply, “good morning, I am well” or “I am sleepy” in a slow concentrated way, where you could see they were trying so hard with an eagerness to learn not familiar to my experience in teaching American kids.  They’re faces would light up like roller-coaster’s when they knew that they got a word or a phrase right.

            “My name is Kyle” I would say, “O en Espanol, Carlos”, “or in Spanish, Carlos”.  “Cow” they would reply.  Almost.  I would then ask them their names and how old they were in English, “My names is Antony.  I am twelf,” “my name is Fedlia, I am fourteen.”

            I was working with sixth graders, ranging from ages 11-14, some dressed in traditional colorful traje, some dressed in American Eagle, some dressed in whatever clothed coverage they had.  The sixth grad is the last grade of the school and this will be the end of 95% of their academic careers and the beginning of their lives carrying corn and digging trenches and pounding tortillas.  It breaks my heart.  They all want to learn and this is all made more painful in contrast to American kid’s mirrored philosophy towards education.

            These kids are tough as sledge hammers.  Recess began and the teachers gathered for a meeting and it was on.  They went bezerk.  The courtyard/basketball court turned into a running pulsating cackling smile torn war-zone.  Kids colliding into each other, running in every direction at once, about 15 basketballs flying around in all sorts of unpredictable trajectories, boys fighting for money, girls pummeling and tackling each other for possession of one of the many basketballs.  They were having the time of their lives, smiling and laughing uncontrollably.

            I played basketball and soccer and tag with them.  “Me amos es Carlos” and I would spin the ball on my finger and I’d quickly have a group of 20 of them surrounding me, hypnotized by the way the multi-colored ball transformed into one undulating color as it spun suspended on the tip of my finger.

            In the 7^th grade we had two lesbians visit class to talk to  us about alternative sexuality and to these kids I was probably just as exotic, not in the sexual referent way, but different to anything they’ve seen so far in their lives.

            I saw at least five kids just get completely taken out, hit in the face or head by these cannonball projected basketballs that flew in every direction, sometimes knocking them of their feet, and they would just get up like was nothing and start marauding in gleeful spasms again.

            They would call “Colocho” and want me to flex my muscles for some reason.  I felt cool.  Some little girls would take my hand by the finger and bring me no place in particular, but just walk with me.  Some boys would throw balls or shoot tiny pebbles out of straws at me like snipers from rooftops, I’d feel one hit me in the back and turn to locate the assailant and there’d be nobody there.  Sneaky.

            And they’re going to carry corn for the rest of their lives.

            All these kids happy like nothing else, running in extacy with ragged boots and scandals, eating simple tortilla or fruit snacks, smiling smiles that will melt your face, free-wheeling around, intoxicated by this brief moment of unsupervised mayhem.

            There is a missing demographic in Comalapa.  It is nearly impossible to identify young adults or the entire decade of 20-30 for that matter.  You’ll se a mother with a couple of kids on her lap and another older kid carrying the third youngen’, and the mother’s glazed eyes which resemble stoicism betray her youth and you realize you’re not looking at an older women but you’re looking at an underclassmen, younger than I am, surviving in the way only humans slowly survive.

            The people are beautiful here, but of course I notice the women first.  There are a lot of beautiful young women but the locals talk about something that happens to this beauty in the twenties, it just somehow goes away.  But then something more profound and undetectable and really, to my brooding, un-analyzable grows within to replace the exterior aesthetics.  Something that is beyond words like music.  Something that you can catch it’s presence, like a dim star, but disappears when you try to look at it.  The slow survival, the memories of boundaryless playground mayhem, the wick of a child’s smile seem to be the waters to the growth of this ethereal something.  It is smoke.  It has images.  It imagines what it can define as it’s boundaries.  It imagines it’s childhood and muddy toes and just projects, that’s it.

            And the kids will carry corn for the rest of their lives.