I refer to vasectomy at one of Guatemala’s APROFAM clinics.

The arrival of my third son, Aaron, was unplanned, but I rejoice hourly for his presence. He and his brothers have channeled so much joy into my life, even prenatally, that I could wish the stork could continue to visit at 40-month intervals. But the wife and I are quite middle-aged, and I realized that if this keeps up, I might be in Depends before my kids are out of Pampers.

So, further pregnancies would have to be averted. Not that there was any big risk, since at my age marital congress can be as infrequent as blue moons. Even so, next time that it really is that time of the decade, morning sickness must not follow. So I volunteered to be neutered, to save the wife from being spayed. It seemed like the, uh, manly thing to do.

Most people think APROFAM is governmental, but it is in fact a foundation seeking to reduce Guatemala’s soaring natural increase, which rivals the Dominican Republic for first place in the Americas. Countrywide, APROFAM has dozens of clinics; these provide operations for folks wanting to avoid pregnancies, and pre- and post-natal care for those who do not.

We were brothers in what is apparently Central America’s second-smallest fraternity. The social worker remarked that this was the first time she had seen two men on the same day.

At the time of my own visit (2007), men were fixed for Q25—cheaper than a Mac Attack, yet better both for posterity and for one’s arteries. Women were fixed for Q75.

My arrival on the appointed day was cause for elation among the clinic employees, almost all of whom were women. The reason was not “Look girls! Mr. Expat Make-out Man, whose fame precedes him, is through sewing wild oats!” No, it was more like, “Look girls! There are two men here today!”

And so there were. In the packed waiting room, myself and one other dude, among dozens of women, held appointment cards. Other men were present, but not as patients. They were there to provide bedside support or to see for themselves that the thing would be done.

I had spoken over the previous weeks with the APROFAM file clerk, the secretary, the nurse and the social worker—all women. Each treated me as if I were the Pope granting them a private audience. Each adored me with the same fixation as did women in the old Charles Atlas ads—where the 97-pound weakling chases off the bully after undergoing body-building. Are you Rodney Dangerfields paying attention?

A one point I was surveyed, since APROFAM wants to know who their customers are. They asked about how many children I already had, about my age, about my profession—and even about my religion. That raised my eyebrows a little. But these people were on a good mission, so I had best cooperate.

The women’s operation entails not only more invasiveness, but more preparation. So, a whole room is set aside for them to recline in after the nurse administers injections on the shoulder and in the groin. The waiting women were all led off for this, leaving me alone with Pablo (the other guy) and his wife, Yoli. We chatted and became fast friends. We were brothers in what is apparently Central America’s second-smallest fraternity (the smallest being tuk-tuk operators who read Miss Manners). The social worker remarked that this was the first time she had seen two men on the same day. On most days, she added, they see none. She estimated, unofficially, that spay patients outnumber neuter patients by 45ish to one.

Pablo, the braver of us two, went first. Yoli and I talked some more. She told me how much she appreciated Pablo for insisting that he, not she, would have an operation. And she gave me the same “You are a real man!” smile that I got from the clinic workers.

After 15 minutes, however, Pablo emerged from the operating room, taking tiny steps and cupping his, uh, jewels. Oops! The real man in me began to falter. The nurse apparently noticed, for she said, “Pues, it’s not what you think. He’s not in pain. Just following doctor’s orders.” Pablo himself gave me a look that said, “If I could, you’d better.”

And so I did. It was not wholly painless, as zero-growth campaigners sometimes claim. But it was easier than many trips to the dentist. The harder part was that the operation was performed by a boy surgeon under the observation of two young female medical students. In my state of full blush, I was still fully clothed by the time I was on the table. The medical crew had seen this before, evidently. So, with some determined wrenching they dropped my drawers for me without any hint of “oh-he’s-one-of-those!”

I thought, “Wow—strange women are undressing me!” The wife thinks this happens a lot (PS: it never happens even with unstrange women). I could not look these women in the eye; maybe I was afraid to see them seeing me. But their dispassion and professionalism calmed me, unexpectedly. Weeks later I recognized one of them on a Sololá street, coming my direction, so I altered my course just in time. My inner voice exclaimed, “That chick has seen me naked!” Later I regretted this, since the manhood that such women must admire is not about anatomy but character, and it is always good to meet admirers.

And so, four years later, Aaron remains my baby. Marital congress remains rare, but the door may be opening for my greatest hope: adopting a little girl who will grow up counting her Dad a real man.

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My coffee column will be different. You see, I loathe coffee, so when I praise it (which I will presently), I have achieved my slant on that basis alone.

Maybe my hate-hate relationship with coffee started the day my grandmother (accidentally) upended a coffee pot, sizzling my foot with roiling black liquid, circa 1963. Even today, the burn scars remain, if faintly.

When I was 8 , my Dad took me to work at his car lot during the summer. My first job, “sunrise poop patrol,” had to do with guard dogs, a broom, and a dustpan. This activity would have been a distant second to going to Disneyland; but it was play compared to the inadvertent sadism of sending me to fetch coffee.

The coffee vending machine (which also sold hot chocolate and chicken “soup”) would fill the paper cup to the literal brim with finger-scalding liquid. Butterfingered shaver that I was, I could not walk all the way to Dad’s office without spilling it on myself and nearly howling in pain.

In the retail car business, one drinks vat fulls of coffee, as if each day were the eve of a congressionally mandated prohibition. Indeed, coffee is the oil of that and many other professions. I remember one sales manager telling me how to use coffee to disarm irately dissatisfied customers (without actually throwing it).

Here is how it worked. The salesman invited the customer to the vending machine room for coffee. But, uh-oh, he had no dimes (even when he really did). So the salesman asked the customer for two dimes for two coffees. By supplying these (which he usually did), the customer had “invested” in the salesman as a problem-solver, and then calmed down in order to get his money’s worth. I can remember thinking, “Wow, they found a real use for coffee!”


I confess that, personally, I have found none except as a crutch for the few times that I crammed for exams in college; but even that is a dubious utility, since cramming is stupid. And, being apparently taste-bud challenged, I do not see what the big deal is about the taste, and much less do I understand the application of adjectives like “buttery” and “gamey” to coffee “bouquets.” Nonetheless, I go through this cycle where I start imagining there is something wrong with me, since everyone else seems to love coffee. So, every two or three years, I try a cup to see if the taste has “improved.”

Each time brings not a liking for coffee, but the old suspicion that Jiffy Lube has found a way to recycle what they bleed from dirty crankcases. Then they mix it with ground wormwood, put it in bags, and sell it to the instant coffee factory. The vaunted bouquets are imparted by adding a few drops of synthetic essences, almond or vanilla or whatever, to the mix.

We, the one-half percent of the population who do not like coffee, may be the world’s last unrecognized minority. As spokesman for this oppressed group, I would point out that nonsmokers do not have to sit in smoking sections in restaurants, and in Guatemala they never have to tolerate tobacco in any public place. I am not asking for that; but we should at least have coffee-drinking and non-coffee-drinking sections. That, and maybe Coffee Hater’s Awareness Month. I mean, let’s be fair.

That all said, it would be unfair to dismiss all the myriad social and esthetic benefits of coffee to the other 99 percent. Just because I do not “do” coffee does not mean it that it has nothing to offer. In fact, it has much.

Aside from its value as a conversation prop—think of all the friendships that begin in the presence of coffee—it has recently been discovered that coffee is quite rich in antioxidants. I can think of other ways to get these, of course. No one is quite calling it a health food yet, perhaps because dark chocolate is also on this list, and calling chocolate a health food smacks of rationalization. But, considered objectively, it may qualify.

So the question of worth, when one concedes the social and health benefits of coffee (and puts aside all subjectivity on the elusive “butteriness,” etc.), then becomes one of impact on the economy and the environment. Coffee is indeed social, but is it socially responsible?

The answer may be that it depends on the source. Tuna canneries now indicate whether their product is “dolphin” friendly. So what about coffee? Demand for it goes on growing, and in places like Kenya coffee plantations are displacing elephant habitats (I personally prefer a world without coffee to one without elephants, but I have said enough on that).

In Guatemala, and particularly the Atitlán Basin, there is responsibility on every level I have witnessed. The large coffee finqueros in the region are increasingly raising the lot of their workers, via noblesse or under the compulsion of old laws with new teeth. The machinery of fair trade is in place, enabling small growers to get a fair wage for their toil. And the coffee bushes that were planted with the help of Rotarian money following Hurricane Stan yielded their first harvest in 2009. Finally, the coffee of our region is prize-winning Arabaica.


So come on out. Enjoy our rich coffee with a clear conscience. And when they find a way to make it taste good, I will join you—for what little that may be worth.

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But if non-lawyers disdain lawyers, whom do lawyers pick on? Tax collectors, perhaps. Maybe I will write a book of tax-collector jokes for the lawyer market. Then again, no.

There is historic support for the contempt of lawyers for tax collectors. The New Testament, for instance, records multiple instances of lawyers dissing tax collectors. In that day, the line may have been, “I may be a scumbag lawyer, but I’m no tax collector, thank God.” In fact, there is a parable to this effect.

Levi, the apostle who recorded that parable, was himself said to be a tax collector. His plight is explainable by the ancient practice of tax farming, which in some parts of the world endured as an official institution even into the 20th century. The short definition of this is that a ruler or governor would grant a franchise to a taxation agent, or “farmer,” whose job was to collect whatever was assessed against a town, city or province. Anything above this, he could keep.

The tax farmer collected his quota however he liked, justly or unjustly, so woe to you if you crossed him. Given this circumstance, even honest tax collectors fell under suspicion and contempt. And if the town, city or province you lived in was a conquered entity, then it was all the worse. So it was that Judean tax collectors, employed by Imperial Rome, were reckoned lower than the scum at the bottom of the septic pool.

Even today, this perception takes a toll, on both despiser and despised. I recall a visit I made 25 years ago to a Nevadan IRS office (the IRS, for my non-paisanos, is the tax collection apparatus of the United States). I had some questions, but the people inside were too hardboiled to address them. They had chafed, I concluded, under a modern version of the daily opprobrium suffered by their first-century counterparts. The waiting room was in fact full of people cocked with head-exploding anger. Someone later told me that, since I saw no outbursts, I had gone on a good day. Even so, I never got to talk to a live IRS employee.

I casually befriended a vacationing IRS employee I met one day, circa 2000, in La Antigua. He was looking for a marzipan store, and since I do not know the street names in that town, I had to actually lead him to the place. En route, I discovered his line of work, and found that he was willing to be candid about it.

Now, as historically, tax collectors have relatively few friends, and some have none at all—aside from other tax collectors. Paul of Tarsus instructed his co-religionist to treat your offender or enemy like you would a tax collector if he failed to respond to a prescribed series of rebukes for wronging you. But this same teacher was himself under the imperative to love one’s enemies, including, presumably, those as bad as the tax collectors. How do these two commands square with each other?

Perhaps in the following way. Tax collectors may be someone on a wicked trajectory through life; but even if they are, they retain their human identity, they have needs, and they can be reconstructed, and they might even have integrity to begin with. Paul may have personally known a tax collector, one Zaccheus, who did turn over the leaf.

In my 21 years in Central America—mostly in Guatemala—I have had many dealings with tax officials. Sometimes, I see them on my own matters. At other times, I am accompanying (as a consular volunteer) a compatriot who has received a scary-looking summons from the SAT, Guatemala’s answer to the IRS.

In all that time, I admit to encountering occasional corruption or apathy. But there is less of this now, since SAT is much more transparent than the machinery it replaced some years ago. Increasingly, I have found people who were not only honest, but genuinely nice. I have even experienced that rarest of bureaucratic events, the returned phone call.

Doña Tatiana, the former tax commissioner of Sololá Department, was my friend, and remains so even after her trans- fer. I recently met her replacement, Don Pedro, while answering a scary-looking summons of my own. The guard directed me to a row of chairs but, before I could sit, Don Pedro came out of his glass-walled office. He all but grabbed me and my son by the collar, and asked how he could serve me. I quickly thanked him for the apparent special treatment.

During our opening small talk, he remarked (with the candor I have become used to from disarmed officials), that his experience with “foreigners” had, to date, been largely positive. They accepted in principle, he explained, the need for taxation. In this, I imagined, we foreigners tacitly appreciated the contribution to society of tax collectors. Just the kind of person my new friend, Don Pedro, therefore likes to see.

The care and feeding of lonely tax collectors, then, is a delicate art, but one that may yield quick dividends. A little acceptance may melt them de una vez. It is said that watchdogs can smell fear. Similarly, tax officials may be able to smell the dirt of disdain. So, wash up before you go. Dismiss any negative experiences from the past. Pay your taxes, and do so with a smile. Guatemala gives us “foreigners” a good value for our taxes.

In 2005, a bike accident put me in the public hospital for a few days. It was not Club Med, but the care was adequate, and it was free of charge. In the old country, a stay like that would have wiped me out. So I was grateful.

Wonderful thing—those quetzales at work. And if I ever land in the hospital again, perhaps I will be visited by the person who helped make it possible—my friendly local tax collector.

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When I was a child, the holiday season’s shortest half-hour passed during the broadcast of Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown. That, and the other seasonal Peanuts specials, were always over too quickly. These cartoons enraptured everyone—even grownups who otherwise despised cartoons, like those vapid Flintstones.

I might have been 6 when my mother explained to me Linus VanPelt’s remark (to Charlie Brown) that “Christmas was controlled by a big eastern syndicate” (which might today be identified with Wal-Mart). The theme of Merry Christmas was the search for meaning among the crass consumerism that bred Linus’ complaint. The Peanuts gang goes on to discover meaning in the rescue of an anemic Christmas tree found, allegorically, among a lot of garish tinsel trees flocked with fake snow.

If Linus grew up to become an expat in Guatemala, he would find the consumerism more tolerable here, especially if he limited his TV and radio time. Certain broadcasters begin the countdown in September by announcing, several times hourly, that Sólo faltan 106 días para la navidad! If you listen to the radio with some regularity, then you hear this reminder thousands of times between Labor Day and Christmas. Like they don’t want you to forget, or something. I could wish this “reminding” system were operative for lost keys.

Although Charlie Brown does find meaning, he remains resigned to the pervasion of Linus’ big eastern syndicate. But Linus may have been right in ways he could not have known, since another big eastern syndicate began spreading Christmas in Guatemala for centuries prior to its “introduction” in the early 1500s. For while the big eastern syndicate of medieval Catholicism deserves partial credit for promoting the holiday in the New World, there is evidence that a still older big eastern syndicate, first-century Christianity, was the original herald.

Fortunately, it is rare these days to hear Columbus called the discoverer of the New World. I have to wonder how my Apache ancestors felt when, newly confined to the reservation, their white schoolteachers described him thus. Columbus was only the latest in a series of rediscoverers, and even then only eurocentrically speaking. His landfall was Western Civilization emerging from a fugue and “discovering” a hemisphere it had long influenced, but had not known, since the exchanges and diasporas had been one-way propositions. Migrants had crossed the Bering Strait, sailed the Atlantic or ridden the Pacific trade winds. They traveled light, so their cargo could include creation stories such as the accounts of universal flooding (found in cultures worldwide) and the First Noel.

Ancient astronomers, regardless of their venues, had to account for the appearance of a phenomenon, two millennia ago, that is still commemorated on Christmas cards. It is typically abstracted as a four-pointed star acting, among other things, as a beacon for wise men bearing gifts to the Messiah. Modern thinkers who corroborate the reports think it may have been a supernova. The ancient Maya saw it, and also pondered it.

But whatever the phenomenon was, within a century millions of people in the Roman Empire believed the Christmas story, with its virgin birth of a deity called Immanuel (Manuel in Spanish). Since we know that this belief soon became a persecutable offense, many believers fled the Roman world and carried the story, along with even earlier canonical stories, to the “ends of the Earth” (as was also prophesied in the Testaments).

The pre-Columbian Mayan version of Christmas, described by American anthropologist Vincent Stanzione in Rituals of Sacrifice, features a virtuous maiden named Marya who discovers a wounded hummingbird, which she tucks into her bosom. The bird disappears but is replaced by a deep warmth and the realization that conception has occurred. Eventually, MaNawal is born. The first Catholic missionaries quickly identified the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit and Immanuel (Manuel) among the cast of this story. Even today the account lives on in the Custom religion of the Tzutujil Maya, centered on Santiago Atitlán.

Santiago is famous, of course, for its open-throttle celebrations, but of Easter. Christmas is a comparatively minor holiday, but all three local professions—Custom, Catholic and Protestant (evangélico) —mark it. The costumbreros have never allowed themselves to be co-opted by the consumerist pandemonium of the big cities, where the influence of what expat Linus might today call the big northern syndicate (again, being Wal-Mart or whatever) is most felt. The católicos in Santiago still hold a Christmas procession, but it is solemn and dignified. The burgeoning evangélico sector, out of either deference or simple inertia, has also, to its credit, shunned the tinseled commercialism. The faithful of all three stripes acknowledge MaNawal (albeit with varying Christology) but they are less enthusiastic about Santa Claus, and less so still about the god of seasonal commerce.

“Hi, Chuck,” Linus VanPelt says when Charlie Brown answers the phone one day early in December. “Sally and I want to have you down to the lake this Christmas.” The lake in question, naturally, would be Atitlán. The Sally in question would by now be Mrs. VanPelt, Chuck’s sister. Linus and Sally are grant writers living in Panajachel. (Linus also does musical gigs and Sally midwifes).

Chuck, now in his 50s, must think about this. His job as bookkeeper at a lumber yard will wait for him, but Guatemala may be a bit exotic for a guy who has never been more than 50 miles from Cleveland. Can he even carry a suitcase through customs? After decades, his back still ails from innumerable crash landings, owing to the devilry of his football-snatching future sister-in-law, Lucy (by now an under-medicated, five-time divorcée who manages a boiler room for a telemarketing agency).

After some talk, Chuck relents.

“Good grief,” he says to Snoopy IV after hanging up. “What have I agreed to?” But then he sighs and smiles tentatively. Linus promised to take him to a place called Santiago, where some true meaning awaits rediscovery. Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

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This meant that if you were lovestruck and wanted to ask Olguita (to choose a common name for girls here) on a date, then there was no good reason to not just drop by her house. Thus, it would be harder for her to give you the local equivalent of “I’d love to, but I’m washing my hair tonight.” Her parents, or elder sister, or whoever was in charge, would expect this anyway.

The early stages of teenage romance in these parts are traditionally played out not over rare telephone lines, but on doorsteps. Even today you see this, although everybody, from 9-year-old kids selling gum, and up, now has cell phones. This commonness of cell phones, which literally outnumber people in Guatemala, could change this, but hardly overnight; at the core of the willingness to entertain unexpected visitors is a passion for hospitality.

It may just be me (since I rise at 3 each morning) but Central Americans strike me as night people. There have been times that I have needed to phone someone at 9 p.m. (at which hour I am brain-dead if not already asleep, so the person I am calling must endure a mix of urgency and incoherence). Whoever I am with always assures me that calling at such a miserable hour is acceptable, even though in the Old Country you could almost be arrested for harassment.

As late as 9 p.m., Olguita may still be in the doorjamb flapping her gob with gossipy abandon at whatever guy is targeting her (provided, of course, that she does lives in an OK neighborhood). Being now married, I do not do such things. But I can call on Olguita’s parents if they are friends of mine, without telling them beforehand. It will be enough to pry past Olguita in the doorway to get in, since in her state of enamor she will “not even know that I exist.”

Personally, I like this informality. Rarely do my Guatemalan friends drop in at my office when I cannot make some time for them. One, a lad named César, often visits after a day of filling bags with sand in the river channel. He is mute, and can make only grunts, so we barely converse even when we try to. But I am as used to him as anyone else.

Once inside someone’s house, you are subjected to layers of hospitality. There is economy of scale, since not all Guatemalans can afford to break out a can of salmon. But if they have one that they won at a raffle, then your name might be on it when you visit. If it is understood that you are spending the night, you will invariably be told, “Mi casa es su casa.”

Another friend of mine, Aleyda, the chief parcel manager at the big post office in downtown Guatemala City, scolds me each time I leave her house after her family puts me up for the night. I am “in trouble” for not spending another night, even though her son refuses to give me the couch, insisting I take his bed instead.

Benjamin Franklin compared guests to fish: by day three, both stink. But here, it seems, the “stinky” thing is leaving before you have put in your three days. Later, your eyeballs will need to be re-greased from watching all that finger wagging.

You might think from all this that I am a great houseguest. But no, this is a Guatemalan thing. In fact, as guests go, I am a bust, since Guatemalan hospitality extends to food, and there is little you can feed to a lactose-intolerant vegetarian with multiple allergies (some of which I fake for everybody’s good). The tactful way to avoid eating something is to bring something yourself and fill up on it because of “doctor’s orders” so that you can plead too much fullness to eat everything put before you.

The longer we are here, the deeper the contagious Guatemalan hospitality bug bores into our personal ethos. Two of my friends in the city, both paisanas, have developed, over the decades, an incurable symbiosis with this bug. Both came here with hospitality on their virtue profiles, so they had a head start.

Phyllis, the headmistress at a colegio in Guatemala always leaves the light on for visiting Quakers or whomever. She even puts up friends of friends, and once picked up someone at the airport for me, then brought him home and showered him with Guatemalan hospitality. Then there is Rita, an elderess at the church. Whereas Phyllis’ hospitality is merely extreme, Rita’s is positively aberrational. If you need to leave at 10 a.m., you must announce at 8 that you are leaving. But at 10 you are only halfway through the obligatory eight-course breakfast. You cannot get to your car without Rita stuffing cookies in your pocket or detouring you to her raspberry bush. How did Phyllis and Rita get this way? Probably from being told, a googleplex times, mi casa es su casa.

Is this a function of Guatemala’s Arab heritage? In the deserts of the Maghreb, hospitality was not so much a virtue as a necessity. You might own an oasis, but you never refused water to a traveler. The Arabized Moors ruled southern Spain for centuries, and the Spaniards in turn brought the mi-casa-es-su-casa catechism to Americas. And now Phyllis, Rita and the rest of us are doing it.

Reader, someone is knocking on the door. Mi casa es su casa.

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Maybe, among the group of Nutmeggers who set out from post-colonial Connecticut to settle what is now the state of Ohio, there was someone who revered Colón. This fellow—let’s call him Fred—thought that this territory should have a capital named after a great navigator. And who was to say that this city wouldn’t also someday have, say, a National Hockey League franchise? No one was willing to take the chance that it wouldn’t. So it needed a respectable handle.

However, Fred’s brother Jed noted that Colón, although an elegant-sounding name in Spanish, was in English depressingly similar to the name of an organ at the south end of the human alimentary canal. It was a place where what we can in mixed company refer to as “coliform” (after the Escherischia coli that make up 70 percent of it) heads for removal from the body. The purpose of the colon is to remove excess moisture from the, uh, coliform.

The other colonists (no pun intended) quickly agreed that this name was therefore unsuitable, since someday a wag journalist might declare that the future capital of Ohio was, uh, a coliformy place. So Fred, Jed and the other settlers on the Scioto river brainstormed for an alternative.

Fred and Jed’s niece, the group’s schoolmarm—let’s call her Louisa—was good at making mnemonic devices. She was the first pedagogue to ever teach in a one-room schoolhouse that “in 1492, Colón sailed the Ocean Blue.” Even so, her uncles sensed there was room for improvement. Both were men of letters, relatively speaking. After finishing fourth grade back in Groton, they got interested in poetry and the classics, and self-educated themselves from some old books.

Louisa’s rhyme, Fred and Jed decided, was off-meter. It needed another syllable. They decided to add -bus to the name, because it was the first part of the Latin word for to look for, and if there was one thing Admiral Colón did better than anything else, it was looking for stuff (if not necessarily finding, as in the case of India). So now it was “Colónbus” who sailed in 1492, and who also had a future state capital chartered in his honor.

Fred and Jed, however, were not in agreement over the admiral’s nationality. If he were indeed Spanish, as Fred thought, then his name was, indeed, Colón. But if he were Italian, as Jed rather felt, then his name would be something more like Colombo. And, according to the admiral’s recently discovered memoirs, there was aboard the Santa María a shipmate named Lieutenant Colombo, who was absent-minded and who incessantly badgered the admiral by objecting, “There’s just one more thing …” This nearly kept the Americas from being discovered. Meanwhile, the debate continued over whether to change Colónbus to Colombo.

After four years, the town had grown big enough to have a stop sign, the better to regulate equine traffic. By this time the colonists, who all wore blue jackets (because they had gone to a blue-jacket clearance at the Hartford Goodwill before migrating westward) decided that they could use neither Colónbus nor Colombo, since neither had the right ring when placed before “Blue Jackets.” This name, it was universally agreed, would be the name of the NHL franchise, in case it ever came into existence (and there was still nobody willing to take the chance that it wouldn’t). And so, Fred and Jed suggested a Latinized compromise: Columbus.

Another problem arose, however, after they erected a statue of Columbus in the town square. Louisa thought that his first name sounded too much like “Crystal Ball.” Since she was a campaigner against divination, she argued that Cristóbal could not be engraved on the pedestal plaque. It suggested that the admiral had consulted familiar spirits in order to make his landfall.

Louisa knew that the Spaniards had introduced uncool stuff like the Inquisition to the Americas. And that they had ethnocentrically abolished certain cool stuff (like human sacrifice) that had existed there previously. But she also recalled that the Spaniards had brought Christ, through the agency of selfless men like Bartolomeo de las Casas. So Louisa suggested changing Cristóbal to Christopher, which means “Christ bearer.”

This caught on, since by the mid 1980s, more baby boys in North America were named Christopher than any other name, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (Yeah—really!)

Now, someone may write me to say that the foregoing is fanciful. And there is indeed another explanation of how we got from Colón to Columbus. It is that, in 1492, all educated Europeans, from Lisbon to Warsaw, still communicated with each other through the lingua franca of Latin. In the spirit of unity, many great thinkers adopted Latinized names or pseudonyms, a practice lasting nearly to the present. The father of modern taxonomy, for instance, was from Sweden yet he called himself Carolus Linnaeus. And that is how Admiral Colón, as a pledge to this big Latin club, became (according this prosaic explanation) Columbus.

Since my three sons are Guatemalan as well as U.S. nationals, they must learn both names, even though Hallmark has still not figured out a way (as they did for St. Patrick’s Day) to create a frivolous demand for greeting cards on “Columbus Day.”

Readers (and you, too, Matt), there’s little chance of going back. They won’t rename Columbus Day “Colón Day” since people might conclude that enemas are what is being celebrated, and behavior at college frat parties is bad enough as it is. So Fred, Jed and Louisa—or whatever your real names were—we salute you.

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It helped to have a Guatemala expert (so reputed) in the family. Had I the means, I could have flown north to give a talk to her class on things Guatemalan. As it turned out, Holly needed little help. And the answer to the one question she did put to me has gotten me in trouble before.

The innocent question was: What is the national dish? My offending answer is— ready? “chau mein.” Years ago, I made the gaffe of telling someone this in the presence of the wife, who is Guatemalan. Slow learner that I am, this was not the last time I did so in her presence, provoking sighs, rebukes and that you’ve-been-here-long-enough-to-know-better look.

OK, so then what is the national dish? Típico possibilities, like jocón, come to mind. The candidacy of the tamal has also been put forth, but it is about as uniquely Guatemalan as tuk tuk operators in tropical latitudes without drivers’ licenses. There is nothing that is explicitly national, as say, pupusas in El Salvador or kidney pie in Ireland. So, for Holly’s sake, I championed my old standby, chau mein, as the answer.

The full answer might be, “chow mein with Russian salad on the side and horchata as a chaser.” Horchata is a sugar-saturated drink made with rice. Ensalada rusa is basically carrots, potatoes and green beans diced and mixed with mayonnaise. How it got that name taxes my imagination, so I will limit my chatter to my candidate for the national entrée, the thing that, back in Nevada, we spell “chow main.”

I have encountered this trio of vittles with astonishing frequency at social events, including nearly every wedding, wake and quinceaños I have attended

I have encountered this trio of vittles with astonishing frequency at social events, including nearly every wedding, wake and quinceaños I have attended, including my own (my own wedding, that is; I’m not ready to attend my own wake, and I passed on having a quinceaños).
And herein lies my first argument. Either there is some vain conspiracy to make me think that chau mein/ensalada rusa/horchata is the de facto national dish, or, more likely, it really is. .

It breaches class lines, age lines, regional lines and even cultural lines, since it is big with both Mayas and Ladinos. For all I know, even Garífunas dig chau mein.

Chau mein may be the only phrase of Chinese origin to have entered all 23 of Guatemala’s constitutionally recognized languages. Go to any mercado, even in isolated, distant spots, and you find Doña Pepa selling little bags of prepped vegetables—carrots, güisquil, celery and aubergines. And Doña Marta, the dry-foods vendor in the next stall, sells mats of stringy dried pasta. This product, though dressed in faux Asian packaging, comes from a Guatemalan factory. Now if Pepa and Marta call both of these dissimilar wares chau mein, then we may assume that the two not only go together, but that every Pepa and Marta in Guatemala has her own recipe. Sounds like a national dish to me!

The objection to this idea, from the wife and other doubters, seems to be that chau mein is “Chinese” and not, therefore, essentially Guatemalan (by the same logic, pizza is only Italian). This overlooks the contribution of Chinese immigrants to the social pedigree of Central America and their presence as citizens. Many descend from railroad coolies brought in by Cornelius Vanderbilt over a century ago.

In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, everywhere you look, you see people with full or partial Chinese phenotypes. They are not as common in Guatemala City, but comedores chinos in zone 1 seem to outnumber the combined total of those in Shanghai, Hong Kong and San Francisco, with Brixton thrown in. These establishments have proprietors whose ancestors spoke Chinese, but to whom such utterance would now be as intelligible as Martian or Aramaic. All such places also have, according to unwritten convention, an aquarium.

The mystery is how chau mein broke out of zone 1 and became—dare I say it? The National Dish. My serious theory (since I often put forth unserious theories), is that it happened through the channel of town ferias. In a 2003 Revue article, I mentioned el chino que anda con la feria. The roadshow operations that arrive at fair time to unpack Ferris wheels, confectionary stands, chingolingos like ring-toss and other annual novelties also include makeshift comedores chinos. Between the walls of nylon sheeting are plastic tables set with Tabasco, A-1 and “El Chino” soy sauce. No aquarium, though.

The operator looks chino enough to augment the experience. And if there is just one item on the menu, it is, of course, chau mein—in beef, chicken, pork and maybe shrimp varieties (I could wish for tofu chau mein or “nothing” chau mein, but that’s just me). And so, via culinary missionaries, chau mein went wherever the moving fair apparatus went. Campesinos in the remotest aldeas could sample something exotic, something special, and so chau mein caught on for special events. Now it unites cooks nationwide.

I say we make chau mein official—the “main chow,” if you will!

Any day now, I expect Álvaro Colóm to ring me up and tell me it is so: Chau mein, thanks to my lobbying, is now the National Dish. The National Assembly, he will add, has finally found something that its members can all agree on. When can I come to the capital to be decorated with the Order of Quetzal? And by the way, Russian salad and horchata—what else?—are also on the menu for the awards ceremony.

Holly Myrick will be proud of me. I just hope my wife doesn’t find out.

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Before coming to Central America, I assumed that there were four seasons here. After a few years, I had come to understand that, according to local opinion, there are but two. Furthermore, winter was summer, and vice-versa (more on this later). But the more I think of it, I count six.
With apologies to Dr. Seuss, it all reminds me of a passage in “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” about a parade of whimsical creatures that kindled wonderment in the eyes of each of my sons at they passed through early childhood. “Some have two feet, some have four, some have six feet, and some have more.”

Depending on whom you ask, Central America experiences two, four, six or more seasons. I will outline the case for the first three possibilities. The folks who think there are more than six are probably manic-depressives who forgot to take their pills, so I will ignore the “more” possibility.

Year in and year out, the Earth pivots on her axis, first 23.3 vertical degrees one way, then 23.3 degrees to the other. As most schoolchildren know, this is what causes seasons. For every lateral degree (each 360th of a complete circle), there is a calibrated vertical angle for the Earth. This has been the case for millennia. There is a smidgeon of decay in this orbit, as we would expect given the First Law of Thermodynamics, but it is so negligible that planetary physicists cannot explain its virtual perfection.

A certain sage and eunuch in Babylon, sixth century B.C.E., believed that Earth was divinely held in place; almost all modern Central Americans agree with him. “He changes the times and the seasons,” the sage wrote, “and He removes kings and raises up kings.” Personally, I think that changing the seasons is a bigger deal than changing kings, since the latter is something in which mere human hands often take part with tools ranging from hanging nooses to hanging chads.

According to the two-season theory, Central America has only winter and summer, with winter being the warmer of the two. That’s what I said—winter is warmer. By local definition, winter is the season of precipitation; since the rain falls mostly in warmer months, these months (roughly May to October) are el invierno (winter). The dryer months (November to April) are colder, but, being dry, they are el verano (summer). I explained this apparent oddity in my articles “Vivaldi Was Not Born in Belize” and “Canicula, Caniculi” (see www.revuemag.com to find past articles).

No need to say much about the four-season model, since la primavera (spring) is only a word brochure writers use to lure tourist to Guatemala with phrases like “Land of Eternal Spring.” And el otoño (fall/autumn) is an esoteric abstraction, especially since Guatemalan tourists often go to Orlando to see Mickey, but rarely to Vermont to see the leaves turn.

OK, so what about my six-season model? It is undeniable that the dry and wet seasons have a mini-season of three to six weeks straddling their midpoints. There is February, or el mes loco, in which any kind of weather is possible, although it is in the middle of the dry season. Then there is the canícula that starts in early or mid-July and usually takes in a week or so of August. This period brings positively Mediterranean weather to the rarefied heights of Central America.

So the six seasons are the two mini-seasons, and the before and after phases of the dry and wet seasons. Since winter and summer make little sense as universal terms, I would discard them. But I would use spring and autumn.

People often ask me about the best month to visit. I say that November is beautiful, but to avoid October. There are years when the torrential rains last literally to Halloween but vanish by Day of the Dead (Nov. 1)—almost like they were spooked away overnight. But the rest of the time, this changing of seasons is very close to, if not coincidental with, this changing of months. Good thing, too, since on Nov. 1 cemeteries are clogged with folks leaving marmalade and rum at the graves of loved ones.

The season that starts here, and runs through January, I call primavera, because —the cold notwithstanding—it resembles spring. Wildflowers are profuse in November and some remain well into bone-dry January. But then the angiosperms get a slight boost in February, the mini-season I call Morphin, since the weather can easily and suddenly morph. Then comes the second dry season, which I call Vernal, after the associated equinox, and because it is the season of corn harvest.

The rains then return in force in what I call Neolluvial. Then comes Canícula, and after that the second rainy season, Otoño, which begins with the sowing of the corn. Rounded very crudely to the nearest whole month, these seasons are: November, December and January-Primavera; February, Morphin; March and April, Vernal; May and June, Neolluvial; July, Canícula; August, September and October, Otoño I do not expect these labels to enter any lexicon; that presumes much. But the case for naming the four longer seasons rests on the utility of naming anything that exists, even abstractly, like the value for x in algebra. Or things that exist more substantively; in 325 C.E., the Council of Nicea inferred the existence of the Trinity, so they coined this term (not present in the Scriptures) in order to understand each other. Likewise, terms for the six seasons would aid agronomists, travelers and even wedding planners.

If my Stepmom, Doris Burke-Coop, visits me in June and it rains, I’ll remark, “Well, what can I say? We’re in Neolluvial.” Maybe she will take me for a brain and write home about it.

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Goatsuckers are not something you see every day. In fact, they are not something that most of us will ever see on any day. Nevertheless, so many Central Americans believe in their existence that, for their sakes, we need to give a fair hearing to the possibility. Whether goatsuckers exist or not, they are the stuff of local ghost stories. By most accounts, they are bipedal, have tails and claws, and have mostly reptilian traits.

Let me say right off that I believe that goatsuckers exist, or at least that they did exist until so recently that they remain a fresh presence in the collective imagination.

Like UFOs, we need to separate, first of all, probable reality from competing explanations, such as folk tales and sightings that are illusionary (erroneous perceptions of something real) or hallucinatory (perceptions with no objective basis).

If goatsuckers, or chupacabras, were a folk tale, they would be a pre-scientific explanation of natural phenomena, like volcanoes or will o’ the wisp. I don’t think this is the case, because people have actually seen goatsuckers and found them terrifying. They are not inventing the sighting for the sake of explaining something else.

As for illusions, these are likely enough, since goatsuckers are nocturnal, and we have all misperceived things in the dark. But they are not hallucinations; there is much agreement—if limited substance—about goatsucker anatomy and behavior.

People have actually seen goatsuckers and found them terrifying. They are not inventing the sighting for the sake of explaining something else

Some readers will complain, but I believe that UFOs are strictly terrestrial phenomena. Whatever UFOs are, I say they are not crafts piloted by beings that have mastered sidereal travel. All arguments I have ever heard in favor of the plausibility of interstellar passage sound forced and metaphysical, so I dismiss them. UFOs are from within our solar system, and almost certainly from Earth herself. So it must be with the goatsuckers.

Erich von Daniken might disagree with me. According to his Chariots of the Gods, intelligent beings visited Earth from the stars and engineered their apotheosis (promotion to godhood) in the minds of the Earthlings. He, uh, reasoned that the famed giant spiders, etc, etched into the Peruvian landscape (with the precision of a modern surveyor) were the work of extraterrestrials. Maybe it was their way of writing “Kilroy Was Here,” or of doing what dogs do to fire hydrants, lest aliens from elsewhere showed up with delusions of godhood.

Maybe Kilroy left the goatsuckers here during his trip to see if they would thrive. Or perhaps they crawled down the rocket’s mooring lines, much like rats first immigrated to the New World by jumping ship before Columbus’ flotilla weighed anchor. If all this sounds as preposterous to you as it does to me, then we can safely rule out the goatsuckers as space aliens.

Von Daniken’s idea, then, was racist and condescending. But it would sell more books than the competing probability (or certainty, as I see it) that ancient Peruvians were, gosh, smart enough to have etched the images without any help from space beings. If ancient Peruvians were that smart, then surely modern Guatemalans and Chiapanecos are smart enough to know that they have seen something unusual. People from many other countries in the Americas also insist that chupacabras exist.

Now very rare, if not fully extinct, they are credited with more mischief than they deserve. Believers in goatsuckers have in them an additional explanation for certain things that go wrong. When put to the test, goatsuckers remain elusive, and solutions emerge that would sell no books for von Daniken. An outbreak of goatsuckers was blamed for the deaths and/or disappearance of sheep from ranches in Sinaloa State, Mexico. The authorities put out traps and discovered that, in this case at least, goatsuckers were feral dogs. We need not doubt that ordinary predators are behind almost all attacks credited to goatsuckers.

But what of the goats and sheep that are found dead with their blood drained through a single puncture wound? Surely this is not the work of dogs, coyotes or minks. The kia, the world’s only predatory parrot, preys on sheep and could leave such a wound, but they live only in New Zealand. To be in Central America, the kias would need either to escape from a zoo or be beamed here via Kilroy’s transporter room. Nor can we rule out humans using arrows to slay their neighbor’s livestock. But these encounters normally leave shoe prints and other clues.

There are large vertebrates that we know of with extreme, asymmetric development of a single tooth (gross heterodonty). Any kid with a book on whales knows about the narwhal, which experiences the growth of one of his upper eyeteeth into a magnificent tusk more than half its body length. Perhaps the chupacabras have such an irregular dentition as well.

With their habitats threatened by logging, slash-and-burn agriculture and the expansion of villages into towns, any chupacabras that remain alive could soon be flushed out and placed in the taxonomy and also, we hope, in captivity rather than in a natural history museum. My guess is that they would be a species of dragon that survived into an era when humans lament, rather than pursue, the extinction of dragons and other creatures. And by dragons I mean any large and potentially dangerous, or dinosaur-like, creature that our ancestors considered a nuisance. They are the origin of hundreds of dragon legends in cultures throughout the world. But only the dragons of Komodo have escaped extermination by humans.

Unless, of course, the goatsuckers are also dragons, and there are any left. Perhaps only a single family or band remains, as many believe to be the fate of the “bigfoot” or sasquatch. In such a case, inbreeding may finish them off before angry ranchers do.
Maybe there is just one left. I hope my sons see it alive someday—from a safe distance.

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Marrying into a large family brings unannounced house guests and some new vocabulary.

Since my Guatemalan wife had 10 siblings, I have enough in-laws to populate a middle-sized Dallas suburb. I am forever meeting “new” members of the González-Boch clan for the first time. And I was not that good at recalling names even before ADD and premature senility made this task even more difficult.

My Dad, who had some troublesome in-laws, often declared that we cannot choose our relatives. This is certainly true with blood relatives, since we have no control over whom our ancestors were and whom else they procreated. Most of my ancestors were Saxons, who were hunting heads at the time the Mayas were erecting high civilization in Mesoamerica. But thanks to the mixed pedigree of both my grandmothers, I am 9.375 percent Apache. Say what you will about them, they didn’t hunt heads.

With in-laws, however, a theoretical choice exists, and in Central America these carry greater implications than they might in the home country. Family ties here tend to be non-nuclear in nature, unpredictable in intensity and stellar in number. So if you marry a local, you get a heftier package, for better or worse, than you would get by being endogamous. This term does not mean “marrying oneself into the doghouse” (which happens enough to merit its own term) but, rather, marrying within one’s own herd, however defined.

You can wind up in the doghouse if you have too many troublesome (or troubled) in-laws, whether you are endogamous or, like me, exogamous. Given all this, it may be a good idea to check out your prospective mate’s family.

In my case, though, I would have needed a battery of screeners (perhaps personnel managers resting from their Stateside jobs) to do this. My wife once did the addition and found that she has 57 first cousins on her mother’s side alone (yes, really). She was unsure about her paternal first cousins, but they number well over 40. In other words, she has 100 or more first cousins. The only way she can recognize some of them, even if they grew up in the same village, is to compare recent genealogies.

On the other hand, I have only nine first cousins. I know all their names and where they live, and I know a lot about each one. In my case familiarity seems inverse to proximity. In my wife’s case, even close proximity does not guarantee familiarity. She would need a database just to log them, and just knowing them all would be a full-time career. Perhaps because families are larger, and blood ties stronger, a nomenclature exists that is alien to outsiders.

My wife once did the addition and found that she has 57 first cousins on her mother’s side alone. She was unsure about her paternal first cousins, but they number well over 40.

I thought, for instance, that I was acquiring a plethora of nieces (sobrinas) and nephews (sobrinos) by marrying into the González-Boch clan. What I actually got was a wealth of sobrinos políticos. I discovered this one day when I introduced one of my visiting “nieces” to another Panajachel gringo, who since that time has had a jones for the girl that has gone unreciprocated. Later, she tactfully explained that she was only my “political niece.” My first reaction was to wonder if she attended rallies, ran voter registration drives or painted acronyms on rocks. But the prosaic truth was soon obvious: only by blood are you a real or “nonpolitical” uncle.

There is also a special name for that person who in the United States becomes your partner when two couples play Monopoly. I refer here to what we must call the “husband of my sister-in-law” or the “wife of my brother-in-law.” Hispanophones say concuño and concuña, respectively. I really like these words; with as many relatives as I have in this category, it’s nice to have a single word for what are inelegant circumlocutions in English. If I took a friend to a González-Boch family reunion, I would grow hoarse from all the introductions without these words.

I also like the way that great-grandparents are bisabuelos and great-grandchildren, bisnietos. These, too, are single words replacing phrases. The English phrases are not that long, but they are ambiguous. What if your great-grandparents were not, well, so great after all? On the other hand, if you say you have great-grandparents, does this mean that your grandparents’ parents live under the same roof with you, or that your grandparents were great (i.e., they cheered you at Little League and bought you Lego sets for Christmas instead of clothes)? In all, there are many reasons why we should be bully for bisabuelo and bisnieto.

The same problem exists in English-speaking countries with great-uncles and great-aunts. Are they truly great folks, or do they just happen to be your parents’ uncles and aunts? Down here, these are called tíos abuelos and tías abuelas. Not elegant terms, maybe, but never ambiguous. If you think about it, they can only mean one thing.

So, in the end, am I better off having a gazillion in-laws or worse off? After 16 years, I’m still not sure. Most of them are pretty good houseguests and do not, like fish, stink by day three. Yet very many of them come to Pana (especially during Semana Santa) where they get free lodging from me. Conversely, whenever I go to Guatemala City, where many of them live, I can pop in unannounced, as can the blood relations. On the downside, I never know who, among the in-laws, will pop up unannounced at our place. One was a young salesman who had never met my wife but who found in her someone who could be even lower than he on the Amway pyramid.

The muchacho in question was one of my 101 or so “first-cousins in-law.” With so many of these, I hope someone will coin a one-word term for them. Reader, can you think of one?

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Tomato paste is mentioned in Guatemala’s Constitution. I have yet to find the paragraph, section, and clause, but I’m certain it is there.

The law in question requires all cans of tomato paste sold here to be the 6-ounce variety. You may occasionally find tomato paste in larger cans, such as at Jim’s Pana Meats in Panajachel, but these were smuggled in.

When I moved to Guatemala as a single person, this was no big deal. But now, with a family of five, these Lilliputian cans make cooking a chore: endless spooning that yields a pile of trash big enough to cover Staten Island. Once, in the desperate search for expedience, I tried to vacuum the paste from the cans with a turkey baster inherited from my grandmother. You can imagine how well that worked.

The law applies to every retailer, from the mammoth Hiper Paiz all the way down to Doña Pepa’s phonebooth-sized tienda in the remotest hamlet. It applies to all three suppliers; none departs from the rule.

It may be rooted in centuries of hand-to-mouth culture, which conditions folks of sparse means to buy everything in the smallest available quantity. This is why Doña Pepa sells many items sueltecito (one-by-one) instead of in bulk. Instead of boxes of matchbooks, she sells individual books, to say nothing of sueltecito cigarettes and gumballs. She also sells Fab (detergent) in packets whose contents wouldn’t fill a salt shaker, and tiny toothpaste tubes that Mr. Bean wouldn’t have to squeeze half-empty when packing light for a trip.

All this is much costlier for the end-user, but it keeps Doña Pepa afloat. Yet surely Hiper Paiz, which buys and sells candy and Fab by the containerload, could sell bigger cans of tomato paste.

The absence of such a commodity, i.e., reasonably sized cans of a major food staple (for which there is no doubt a latent demand) reminds me of the Chicken War between Germany and the United States in the 1960s. This war was less spectacular than the war these powers fought in the 1940s. For this reason alone, you will never see the Chicken War on the History Channel.

Up to 1963, U.S. automakers monopolized the domestic pickup market. But then Volkswagen introduced a pickup that shared the chassis of the venerable VW bus. The VW pickups were almost bulletproof, had hearse-sized beds and ran on fumes. Consequently, Detroit lobbied Congress, which imposed protectionist duties against VW pickups; overnight, their price shot up 70%. Germany retaliated with crushing duties on frozen chickens, of which the United States was the main supplier. Hence, the Chicken War.

All producers of tomato paste sold here are multinationals, so perhaps a “Tomato-paste War” has been going on without our knowledge, with big cans excluded through protectionism.

Some other foodstuffs of the liquid-or-sauce persuasion are subject to another bizarrity which I call “questionable quantification quirkiness” or “3Q.” This is the practice of labeling, say, a small cup of yogurt as containing 200 grams, but labeling a bigger one as containing a liter. One quantity is given by weight, and the other by volume, even though we are not only talking about the same item, but the same brand.

Think about this. When some quantities are given by volume and some by weight (3Q), then you need another conversion factor to determine which package, big or small, is the better deal. Before you can do the math, you must know the density of yogurt. Who is going to know that?

3Q may be a response to the increasing awareness that frugality lies not in buying the smallest quantity, but in buying larger quantities that are (usually) cheaper per unit of measure. That big bag of Fab may wipe out your daily tortilla budget, but you’ll not have to buy more until the rains stop. In the black-and-white commercials from my childhood, they called such packages “economy size.” Central Americans are now on to this; more and more you see them in stores savvily dividing prices of bottles of oil by their quantity.

Unlike the phenomenon of chintzy tomato paste cans, 3Q is relatively new. You can’t blame suppliers for the same reason that you can’t blame the airlines for introducing frequent-flyer programs. They have to compete with the airline that invented frequent-flyer programs in the first place; not boarding the bandwagon is marketplace suicide. So I’m not accusing yogurt and oil producers of collusion, even though 3Q has yet to be codified in Guatemala’s Constitution, so to speak.

Another expression of 3Q is found in farmacias. When you buy a bottle of pills, for instance, you buy a pill count. But when you buy four or six pills sueltecitos (according to the prescription), you are buying pill strengths. Are there 250 microgams of Widgetol in those pills? Or 400? Or 750? With this form of 3Q, at least, the “density” (the pill strength) is indicated. So you can do the math.

But I have noticed that wherever you can buy pills either by bulk or sueltecitos, the latter is far costlier, even up to a factor of eight. For this reason, I always just buy a whole bottle. The second time I need that particular medicine for someone, the savings are realized. On every subsequent occasion, the medicine is free.

As for tomato paste, my wife and I just bought what might be our solution: a 38-gallon cooking pot. Next time that fresh tomatoes are cheap, we will fill the pot and simmer a gob of tomatoes into paste (it takes four hours at low heat) and freeze the result. We will save money and not dishonor Guatemala’s Constitution. And besides, homemade always tastes better.

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If you are a foreigner in Central America, some people in the home country think that you spend Christmas in sweltering heat and humidity.

“Oh, yeah,” they say. “Down there, the seasons are reversed and all that.”
The charitable response, the one I usually give, is to commend them for what they recall of fifth-grade geography. The sarcastic response might be to ask if the Equator has moved.

True, that the seasons are reversed—as my Australian and South African readers know. Reversed in the sense that when Santa flies to the Southern Hemisphere, he has to don Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. When it is snowy in Buffalo, it is steamy in Buenos Aires.

But Central America is in fact north of the Equator. Not only that, but five countries of South America—Panama, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad—are entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. Colombia is now the second most populous country in South America, yet 99% of Colombians live north of the Equator. And Ecuador, the quintessentially South American country, is split by the Equator and even named after it.

Learn the names of any rivers and lakes on the map. You might save yourself the heartbreak of confusing Lake Atitlán with Lake Amatitlán and boarding the wrong bus.

When I tactfully point out such things to the people confused over the equatorial division, I often get blank stares. But it is not my fault that, as the waters receded, South America failed to move far enough south to prevent the misunderstanding. I call this condition “Hemispherical Discognizant Disorder,” or HDD (not to be confused with ADD, which doesn’t preclude hemispherical knowledge, but it does preclude finding a map when you need one to shed light on the subject).

My own grandmother was stricken with HDD after I moved to Guatemala in 1988. She sighed with relief to discover that Guatemala was not only in her hemisphere, but closer to Las Vegas (where she lived) than, say, Leisure World in Fort Lauderdale. Fortunately, the condition can be “managed” (to use the parlance of psychiatry) without drugs. Maps are often enough.

People from my own country do not have the monopoly on HDD that you might suspect. I have friends from other countries who, speaking on condition of their country’s anonymity, have told me candidly that HDD and other forms of geographic misconception are also present where they hail from.

To a degree, but no further, we can blame schools. Once, while I was a primary teacher in 1985, my principal (whom I will call F.) gave a sample reading lesson to the school’s neophyte teachers during an after-school “staff-development” (similar to “detention” for kids, but less fun). The lesson was from a basal reader story and was called “The Bremen Traveling Musicians.” It was about a group of talking animals that traveled in Germany, giving concerts (dumb concept, I know).

Anyway, F. kept saying “Berman” instead of Bremen, which drew snickers (but no spitballs) from some of the teachers attending the sample lesson in, uh, reading. The matter came up during lunch the next day in the teachers’ lounge. I recall the mentor teacher remarking with deadpan seriousness that F. “would not be able to locate Germany on an unlabelled map of Europe, much less correctly pronounce the name of a city within Germany.”

Now if some of our educational stewards have this problem, is it any wonder that some of our relatives back home think that Guatemala is the second biggest city in Mexico, and that Guadalajara is a brand of tequila or a type of hallucinogenic mushroom?

Maybe not. But, again, we can only blame the schools to a degree. Those of us who live and/or travel in Central America owe it to our hosts to know something about their country. Insurance sellers try to find out all they can about a prospect or “lead” before making the sales call. Diplomats are briefed on the authorities they will be dealing with. And so on. More often than we might expect, knowledge of the host country can avail us much.

If you can name the capital of the province where the person next to you on the bus comes from, or the name of someone important who came from there, you win points and open doors. This is especially true if your potential friend comes from a place that outsiders rarely visit, and if you have not been there yourself.

Guatemala is divided into only 22 departments; Honduras, 18; and El Salvador, 14. Belize is made up of just six districts. Fully half of these provinces have a capital, or cabecera, with the same name, making memorization easier still. If someone says he or she is from Jalapa, for example, you look knowledgeable if you then ask, “the cabecera or the department?”

After replying, your friend may ask, with a smile both hopeful and curious, “Have you been to Jalapa?”

“No,” you answer. “But I’ve seen it on maps, and wondered what it must be like.”
Don’t be surprised if you then get an invitation to stay with your friend if you’re ever out that way. And if you go, you might get a guided tour and discover some cool thing never mentioned in the guidebooks.

Simple scholastic maps can be bought in any librería for a few centavos. They outline the country’s provinces and pinpoint the cabeceras with dots. Start labeling, and carry the map folded in your wallet or purse until you know them all. As an icebreaker, ask someone to show you the location of the country’s tallest mountain, Volcán Tajumulco, then mark its location.

Also, learn the names of any rivers and lakes on the map, and label them. You might save yourself the heartbreak of confusing Lake Atitlán with Lake Amatitlán and boarding the wrong bus. And finally, you won’t look like a foreigner with HDD.

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Ranferí Aguilar and Hacedor

It’s that time of year again for the Lake Atitlán International Music and Arts Festival

March is coming, time for Festival Atitlán. On March 14, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Santiago Atitlán will once again host this annual alternative cultural event featuring live music and arts. Since 2001, there have been six festivals, each one more interesting than the last. Proceeds from the past four festivals have been donated to help rebuild Hospitalito Atitlán, which was destroyed by mudslides from Hurricane Stan in 2005.

In 2008, the eclectic show kept the crowd dancing for 12 hours straight. The new location and the quality of the new professional stage and sound system (run by Lenin Fernández and crew) inspired the bands to play harder, and the result was remarkable. The crowd is always very pleased with the relaxed ambiance that is a hallmark of Festival Atitlán, and everyone had a great time. The event also raised a nice amount of cash for the Hospitalito Atitlán.

This year an even better show is planned, and bands that have already agreed to play include the entire Brian Howe Electric Band (Ex-Bad Company), Lost Coast Marimbas, Crater, The LeRoy Mack Bluegrass Band, Otis Brown and the Blu Dawgs, Percush, and the Marco Trio Electric. In all, there will be 12 bands.

Additional performers will include La Cambalacha, The Marionettes of Chumbala Cachumbala, and a couple of clowns, who will keep the children entertained. Once again, a gourmet food court will have great food and drinks for all tastes. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

This year has an added bonus: The Kendida Foundation has agreed to match any funds that are raised for the Hospitalito, so the ticket price will go twice as far to help this important cause.

For more information about Festival Atitlán visit www.festivalatitlan.com
For more information about the Hospitalito Atitlán project visit www.puebloapueblo.org/ha.html

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On February 12, 1993, I returned to Guatemala after three months Stateside, for what Latin Americans call el pedido, “the asking.” The thing I was going to ask for was the hand of my fiancee, Mely González, from her parents. I thought doing so on Valentine’s Day would show some class—all I had, probably.

I’d never met her parents, since nobody in her family and only one of her friends expected me to come back. I made liars of them by popping up at the airport where I was greeted by Mely, her eldest sister, Miriam, and Miriam’s crusty Mexican semi-hubby, Arturo. As we left the airport, Arturo offered to give me a trial pedido on the eve of the real one. Could I say no?

Accordingly, we went to their suburban farm the next day. I picked fruit with Mely and her nephew, including granadillas, or passion fruit (logically in season during February). We hiked and played with the dogs. I was thinking that their dogs had a good life, especially when I noticed Miriam stewing fishheads in an outside cauldron. I thought, “This family cares enough about their dogs to feed them delicacies!”

I need to mention that since high school I’d been a vegetarian. I still am, thanks to seeing a televised bullfight, circa 1973. I also avoid alcohol, but I’m not dogmatic about boozing or meat-eating. Most of my friends do both, and I don’t care.

The trial pedido—to return to what this is all about—began with Arturo and I sitting down to a cola in his kitchen. To my great chagrin, he added rum to his drink and then to mine, and ordered me to down it. I complied.

Soon afterward, Miriam brought out two steaming bowls of something that looked like it had been dredged from the bottom of Lake Erie, before the cleanup. And stuff was bobbing in it. Arturo started spooning it down and directed me to do the same. Willy-nilly, I did. Right away I knew that it was not Lake Erie vintage. It wasn’t good enough.

Arturo found a snail in his, whacked it with a hammer, and sucked out the contents. I followed suit but without chewing. The biggest floating object was, you guessed it—a stewed fishhead. Arturo retrieved his and vacuumed it clean with his mouth. I kind of picked at mine, hoping this would suffice (and hoping, too, that a dog was under the table). Clearly, I was getting the bootcamp version of the trial pedido. All for my own good, I supposed. But my stomach was not agreeing.

The next day, Arturo, Miriam, Mely and I rode out to the parents’ farm for the real pedido. I was still mildly sick from yesterday’s cola, rum, snail soup and fishhead. It didn’t help that Arturo was saying that Don Zenón, my presumable father-in-law, was bad-tempered, carried a revolver and disliked gringos. But I imagined that I would be spared another alimentary assault. Hope springing eternal, and all that.

Mely’s relations seemed nice enough. And, as before, we hiked and picked fruit. Mely was making me a green salad, and when we were seated for the feasting that would lead up to the pedido, this was the first course. It was followed by a pasta course and then— uh-oh —chicken soup. In Guatemala, chicken broth lacks the reputed medicinal powers that it has when consumed in my country. This is especially true when your system has forgotten how to digest it.

Still, I spooned it down. At the bottom was a pile of giblet, something that even your typical omnivore wouldn’t eat. I avoided doing so by covering it with tortilla crumbs and patting my churning gut. Eventually Mely’s sister, Elisabet, carried it off. But then Mely’s brother, Iginio, started passing out fried chicken. He dropped a drumstick on my plate and sat down next to me. Oh boy!

When you are the guest of honor at a banquet for a dozen people, someone is almost always looking your way. A moment came, though, when no one was; so with some fast sleight-of-hand, I schlepped the drumstick into my briefcase.

(Once inside, it soiled my passport. The grease stain remains to this day, overlapping the autograph Telly Savalas gave me when, one night at home in Las Vegas, I discovered him strolling through the Riviera Casino).

Iginio was the first to notice something “amiss.” I never asked him what he was thinking as he observed my plate with the fascination of a paleontologist discovering a missing link. Was it, “Wow! This dude was hungry!” Or was it, “Do gringos eat even the bones?” I’ll never know.

So to slake his curiosity, Iginio took the chicken wing from his plate and put it on mine. I had to feign fullness for 45 minutes, until Iginio excused himself; then the wing, too, magically vanished. Meanwhile, we finished the pedido, with the parents assenting.

Back in the city that night, I gave the chicken to my roommate, Franco, an elderly artist from Maine. He told me it was lousy. I told him it was my mother-in-law’s cooking.

The next day, February 15, I found overstocked Valentine chocolates on sale at a downtown confectioner. I bought a box with walnut nougat centers, thinking I deserved a “chaser” for what I had eaten over the previous 48 hours.

But maybe it was worth it. I got the girl, and she has yet to make me eat fishheads.

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Back then, E.T. would never have tried calling home from here. But since I was only calling the United States, instead of the Mother Ship, I began looking for channels after I arrived here.

Calling the U.S. from my landlady’s landline was a theoretical possibility, but, in fact, you actually had to go somewhere and stand in line. That would be your neighborhood GuaTel office.

You went to the window, gave your datos, then sat in a waiting area. I preferred to stand and watch the operators peg their ancient switchboards and turn hand-cranks on museum-piece machines dating from the 1920s. Finally, the clerk gave you a manic wave and shouted cabina tres (“booth 3”). Then you went in, drew the hinged wooden door shut, and found that your party was already on line, saying, “Hello? Hello?”

You were not always alone. Sometimes, while conversing with my father, he would ask, “So who’s that woman yackety-yackin’ at us at 90 miles an hour in [Spanish]?” I neither knew about nor heard what he referred to. Neither did the woman know, judging from the insouciance of her chatter, which was about real or scripted soap operas. The problem was what they called líneas cruzadas.

The lines no longer cross, because they no longer exist. The location of my neighborhood GuaTel office has hosted a muffler shop since the first Gulf War, and GuaTel is now TelGua. In 1988, the penurious town of Independencia in Huehuetenango Department had 12,000 people and one —yes, one—telephone. It was likely not used for soap-opera updates, and the line of usuarios (users) was probably longer than the queue of extras waiting for Charlton Heston to part the Red Sea.

Nowadays, of course, every 9-year-old kid selling gum sports his own cell phone. Soap-opera talk is still affordable, but now it travels through atmospheric ethers rather than through copper wiring.

To be sure, there were mobile phones back then in Guatemala—maybe 10. In developed countries, where mobiles were more common, they were a mark of prestige and importance. They used another technology: local radio broadcasters set aside what we would now call dedicated bandwidth. Communications satellites existed, but using them required beaucoup hoops and gobs of money. A landline, on the other hand, was something almost anyone in the U.S. had. If you did not, you were a flake, a beggar, a credit risk, or all three.

In Guatemala, landlines were not something almost everyone had. They were still a mark of basic affluence in 1988. One curiosity that I recall from the time is that six-digit phone numbers and five-digit numbers somehow existed side by side. It was as if half the utility’s directors were thinking, “Oh, we’ll never have to convert the whole system to six digits.” My landlady had a five-digit number. No wonder that I still remember it.

At the turn of the current century, cell phones (to say nothing of touch-tone) had arrived, but they were still associated with the very well to do. If you had one before 2000, you were a good credit risk. If you had one before 1994, you also had a private chauffeur.

This prestige had an echo that has only recently petered out. A few years ago I learned, by accident, that I had made the day for a poor joven working in forest reclamation. At a meeting, his cell phone rang, and everyone stopped talking so he could talk to me. Pepe had been called on his cell phone! He may have had his chin up for the rest of the day.

Nowadays these interruptions are so common that dentists, even dentists with poor patients, hang a “turn off your cell phone” sign in their lobbies. Such interruptions no longer arouse awe, but annoyance and even contempt.

The great irony is that people who have only cell phones, and no landlines, have become suspect as flaky or insolvent. If you have a landline, then you are a homeowner or you rent in a neighborhood that has sewers, electricity and playgrounds. But any squatter can have a cell phone.

And what about credit? Well, if you ask your carpenter if you can borrow his cell phone and he replies, “I can’t. It’s low on card time,” then you might worry that your down payment will be spent on beer instead of wood for your project.

Outside of human settlement, the only place where cell phones are absent, you still see their microwave towers spangling the landscape. This means that time travelers from two millennia ago, as well as those from two decades ago, would have a new set of landmarks to deal with. The towers are not overly ugly, but they are by necessity in the wrong places: on mountaintops, where they cannot be missed.

None of this would have happened without the privatization starting in 1998 with Mexican capital and Italian technology. Italy won the contract to replace those hand-cranked machines, in part because Italian patents on new technology enabled them to underbid other countries. They used Guatemala as a lab for their newest gizmos, and, briefly, Guatemala had one of the most advanced systems on Earth. Italy overtook us, of course, after applying at home what was learned (sometimes painfully) in Guatemala. But here we are in the 21st century, after a conversion that brought eight decades of progress in eight years.

Now my father, who visits this month, can call me without the intrusion of soap-opera yackety-yack. That is progress!

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