A Language of Compassion

I don’t know when it first occurred to me to take my 7-year-old daughter, Sydney, to Guatemala for a month. It might have been after the holidays, when she informed me that her friend Brittany had “a radio and a CD player and a VCR and a TV and a telephone in her room, and she’s only 6. When can I get my own telephone, Mommy?”

Maybe it was the cumulative effect of a year spent listening to Sydney and her fellow first-graders measure their worth in Powerpuff Girls and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and all things Barbie. Or perhaps it was after taking a good look at the overindulged children of my middle-class friends and thinking, “Look at these fragile children, with their underdeveloped sense of self-reliance and overdeveloped sense of entitlement.”

I had come here for a three-week Spanish immersion program in 1999. It was the first time I had spent a significant amount of time abroad, and the trip seared my mind with harsh, beautiful contrasts, scenes of panoramic beauty and grinding squalor.

A trip to a well-traveled locale in Central America would be a great way to teach Spanish to Sydney and to expand her frame of reference gently, I thought. A way, I hoped, to dematerialize my material girl.

We touched down in Guatemala City on an early June evening, and city lights colored the night sky. Sydney looked out the airplane window and exclaimed loudly, “Look at all the buildings, Mommy!” Then she looked at me accusingly and added, “You said there weren’t any buildings in Guatemala.”

I refused to make eye contact with any of the other passengers. I had not said that, but in trying to prepare her, perhaps I had overemphasized the whole developing-country thing. Tact was to be a frequent casualty of our trip.

The head of the English department at the bilingual school Sydney would attend had taken care of the logistics. We would stay with a family in Antigua, the destination of nearly 70% of all visitors to Guatemala. It is an evocatively beautiful, ancient city, a place where Spanish colonial architecture and cobblestone streets are set against a backdrop of great, looming volcanoes. In a country scarred by 36 years of civil war--it ended in 1996--Antigua has held fiercely to its Old World soul while catering to a robust tourist industry.

Syd had not been looking forward to the trip, complaining that she would be forced to live without TV and English. Our first night, she was tired and close to meltdown about the “clubhouse on the roof,” a small, spare one-room roof addition that was our living quarters. But early the next morning she rushed out to play with the roosters, which had begun crowing, impossibly, at 3 in the morning.

“Mommy, I fed the chickens,” she exclaimed. “I love it here!” She hated-loved just about every day we spent in Guatemala.

For $65 a week we received our room and three meals every day except Sunday. The house was about a five-block walk from the main gathering place, Parque Central, and its nearby banks, restaurants and shops. Our typical colonial abode featured an uncovered indoor patio and eight rooms of varying sizes, with the front room used as a small tienda, a store selling toiletries, snacks and liquor. The spare room was reserved for foreign visitors.

I spoke limited Spanish; Senora Lorena and her husband, their two children and the more than half-dozen extended family members who lived with them spoke no English. But nothing focuses the mind like having to negotiate food and bathroom issues. Everyone in the house made concessions for our limited vocabulary except the matriarch and family cook, Dona Olivia. At 71, the tiny, wizened woman could not be bothered to interrupt her flow just so her foreign visitors could translate. While Senora Lorena and her father ran the family store, and her husband worked in the city as a security guard, Dona Oli ran the house and cared for the foreign guests.

She clucked, fretted and worried, grandmother-like, over Sydney’s eating, bathroom and outerwear habits.

“Te gusta la sopa, mi amor?” she asked one day after serving a steaming bowl of black bean soup. “Do you like the soup, my love?”

Sydney just stared at the old woman, while I smiled and apologized and assured the senora that the soup was fine. “Sydney, you’re being rude,” I told her.

Within a few days, Syd got with the program. Her attempts to count in Spanish improved, and “uno, dose, crayes, tacos” turned into a well-accented count to 10.

“Tienes que comer, nina,” the senora admonished my daughter one day at lunch, frowning at her half-eaten plate. “You have to eat, child.”

“Si,” Sydney replied, smiling at the senora before turning to me. “Mommy, do you like how I just say ‘si’? That way the senora thinks I know what she’s talking about.”

Our days fell into a routine. We were up by 5:30 to avoid the bathroom rush and the prospect of being mostly nude in the courtyard, which was just off the bathroom. At breakfast, Syd and I would run through a checklist of our day.

Every morning, a van picked up Sydney for the trip to Colonial Bi- lingue in old Antigua. Two afternoons a week, Sydney also had a Spanish tutor, Senorita Brenda. But it was playing with Senora Lorena’s 7-year-old son, Andreas, that provided Sydney with most of her substantive Spanish interaction. After lunch they would take turns riding a bike around the courtyard and even through the dining room. They would hit each other or play teacher or hide-and-seek or a Latin version of tag. This went on for hours.

At other times they would clash--not culture clash, just clash like two willful kids who wanted the same toy. “You need to show some home training,” I would tell her when she and Andreas screamed too loudly. “We are guests in this country.” But no one else seemed to mind the noise.

Dinner typically was a light, meatless meal, always with corn tortillas and beans or some kind of pepper or tomato soup. We always cleared the table, but Dona Oli, who waited on us at each meal, consistently waved away any further effort to help with dinner or household chores outside our room. After dinner was a time to unwind.

I would often sit on the bench in the courtyard, enjoying the night breeze or reading the paper while the children played. Sometimes someone would play the guitar, and often Syd and I would sing, a children’s song or an R&B; bubble-gum classic. My daughter and I bonded over missed timing and off-key notes, but the family seemed to appreciate our musical stylings.

Then we would head upstairs to our room on the roof. After we changed into our pajamas, we would each spend 20 minutes or so writing in our journals. This was nonnegotiable, although Sydney often complained about additional “homework.” She was defiant, I was insistent, and these were among our most trying times. I was still waiting for some great teachable moment.

Besides taking classes and hanging out at the house, several times a week Syd and I walked the city, scouting places to eat and send e-mail or taking our laundry to be washed. Most everything was a 20-minute walk from the house.

The first time I went to the bank, I met Angela, a disheveled indigenous girl. We were both waiting to exchange U.S. dollars for quetzals, and I was struck by the little girl’s patience as we stood in the long line. She seemed to be Sydney’s age and was alone at a bank trying to change money. I gave her a few quetzals for reminding me of my daughter, and she smiled before blending into the crowd.

Here, Sydney and I were brown people in a country filled with brown people. With my light complexion and wavy hair, I was Everywoman--a person of color but race nonspecific. Perhaps Puerto Rican or Panamanian or from the Dominican Republic, but most people assumed I was Latina. That made me plural.

But Sydney was singular, the only little negrita girl walking the cobblestone avenues. Often when they saw her, Guatemaltecos would call out to us. “Que linda, tu nina”--How pretty, your daughter. They were enchanted by her eyelashes, long curly things that reach for her brows, and by her soft, kinky, shoulder-length hair, kept in two or three neat pigtails.

While I was delighted at the affectionate attention she received, Sydney acted like a movie star barely indulging her adoring public. “Mommy, I’m tired of all those people staring because they’ve never seen a brown girl like me,” she would say, sticking out her lip. She wasn’t one to celebrate diversity with the locals.

Enjoy it now, nina, I thought to myself, because little brown girls are not always so celebrated.

I had told Sydney that Guatemala is a poor country, much different from the United States. But even given the general level of poverty, there were many people living hand to mouth. Sydney began peppering me with questions, trying to understand who they were and why.

“Is he poor, Momma?” Sydney asked once, as we passed an indigenous man asleep on the street. “Look at his feet,” I told her. “If you see someone who doesn’t have any shoes, that usually means that he’s not doing so hot.”

Sydney looked up at me. “Are we doing so hot, Momma?” she asked, and I felt my eyes well up with unexpected tears.

I held Sydney’s hand and we walked past stray dogs and street people and children who would never see the inside of a school.

“Yes, sweetheart, we’re doing just fine,” I told her.

As we took touristy shots of ruins in this colonial capital, our trip also became part history lesson, and I talked to Sydney about racism and slavery, about Columbus and the history of colonialism in Latin America. Besides the ruins, I took her to the ancient village of Chichicastenango, home of the largest indigenous market in Guatemala. It would be a leisurely way to get my souvenir shopping done, I thought.

I was wrong.

There are lots of cliches about the dignity in poverty. I find them untrue. Desperate poverty is just that--desperate. Cynical. In search of its next meal. And every Sunday and Thursday, when thousands of Mayan artisans display their wares in Chichicastenango, tourists are the meal ticket.

From the moment we stepped off the bus, we were surrounded by women and children urging us, “Compre algo”--buy something--making it difficult to walk. Haggling is part of the buying process in Guatemala, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I ended up paying close to full price for most things. Little children followed Sydney, and she began doling out her allowance and instructing me to give money to her “friends.” The volume of people and the level of need was exhausting, overwhelming.

We stopped for lunch and were approached even while eating. One especially determined woman wouldn’t take “No, gracias” for an answer. She hovered around our table, saying she was thirsty and asking me to buy her a Coke. I emptied Sydney’s bottle of Coke--I was drinking tea--into a cup. She drank it up eagerly. Sydney was near tears.

“Oh, honey, your mommy can buy you another Coke,” some of the other tourists told her, but Sydney would not be consoled.

I didn’t even try. Some things cannot be translated. I’m not sure I had the words to let a 7-year-old know how bad off you must be to beg for soda from tourists. Some things, I decided, my child would have to process on her own.

As we left the cafe, a small girl followed us and stood next to our bus, staring as we took our seats. She was just a little older than Sydney and had a toddler strapped to her back. We had already bought something from her, but she seemed to be trying to process something of her own. She seemed to be trying to process Sydney.

In Chichicastenango, rich Americans were nothing new. But a rich brown girl from the States was something else entirely. It was as if the universe had betrayed her by the fact that such a person existed, and I read the questions in that little girl’s eyes. Why does she get to eat? Why does she get to ride on the bus? Why doesn’t she have to sell cheap trinkets with a baby strapped to her back?

As we drove away, I had no answers.That night Sydney wrote in her journal:

“When me and my mom ... were at a resterron, we saw some poor people. They were worring my mom to deth but my mom can understand that they really wanted money to buy some food . . . I was givving away money to some people who did not have a lot of money and I felt proud of my self. One girl was begging me because she wand my purple sweater. I felt bad for that girl because she had to carry her baby sister on her back.”

A week later, at her desk in our clubhouse, Sydney stopped in the middle of doing homework. “Momma, I should have given that lady my Coke,” she said, nodding over and over. I just nodded back.

My maestro, Julio Morales, has been teaching Spanish to tourists in Antigua for 12 years. He says he’s seen the number of students double in that time. He credits this to the affordable prices and Antigua’s blend of old and new cultures. Guatemala, he says, is a vacation for people to play but also to learn, to think.

It was nearing the end of our trip, and Sydney and I were ready to leave. There is a certain amount of letting go you do in Guatemala. There is no OSHA, you can’t drink the water, and it is an armed society. Still, you feel safe, as long as you take precautions. Common sense and strict family oversight are often substitutes for government programs and regulations.

I had been stoic about not having a lid on our toilet and warring every day with flies, but I was also becoming worried. More than 70 maximum security inmates had escaped from a nearby prison, and a countrywide state of emergency had been declared. There were corruption scandals and a growing sense of political unrest, as well as a daring daytime bank robbery not far from our house. I never felt personally threatened, but I was homesick and skinny. Sydney was flea-bitten. We were ready to go.

We spent our last few days picking up gifts and giving away small amounts of money, mostly to the women we passed every day. Sydney handed it over. A few dollars went to the young woman who slept in the doorway of the church in Calle 3. A few more to the old indigenous woman who sat next to Cafe Condesa, who met my eye and started to pray in some ancient Mayan dialect.

These were gratuities, I explained to Sydney, small thanks for allowing us to share their country. On our final day in Guatemala, Sydney and I found Angela, the little girl I’d met in the bank. We took her to lunch at Campero’s, a McDonald’s-style chicken place with an indoor playground. I bought food for Angela’s brother and gave her some money. She seemed pleased but restrained.

Angela and Sydney walked down the street with their arms around each other, as all the good girlfriends in Antigua do. Angela gently guided Sydney closer to the sidewalk, away from passing cars. I was struck by how street-smart and aware she was. How much older she was, at 8, than my child.

I took a final perfect Polaroid of Sydney and Angela--my daughter and her new friend, arm in arm. Angela, who begs money from tourists in the streets and always saves half of her French fries for her brother, had never had a picture of herself. Her face lit up when she saw this one.

“Is this for me?” she asked, and I hesitated.

“She can have the picture, Momma,” Sydney said. I smiled, fighting back tears, for the first time seeing Angela in three dimensions and not as some kind of prop in Sydney’s big adventure.

I did not dematerialize my material girl overnight, but I know she will be processing the images from our trip for years to come. And so, unexpectedly, will I.

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Lonnae O’Neal Parker is a feature writer for the Post’s Style section.