On non-market days you see ladies with stubbornly Mayan facial features in their indigenous clothes. Usually, they are followed by a couple of children, who will all look at a foreigner with amazed eyes, even though the town lives off foreigners.
On Thursdays, a carpet of color covers the center. It is market day. Everywhere you look, there are pieces of culture. And everywhere you look, a multi-lingual Guatemalan is waiting to catch your eye and sell you something. The prices are always negotiable, and morning sales are thought to be blessings. And even then, you will get ripped off.
Wait a second.
Even on the other side of the square you can smell the incense from the cathedral. An offering for good business, safety, and security. Your nose could guide you there with your eyes closed.
Oh, but do open them, for at the steps of the cathedral are hundreds of flowers: purple, white, yellow, red, orange. It really is quite a celebration on Market Day. Ladies swing cans of incense at the doors of the Cathedral.
Going in, you are conflicted between taking in the colonial structure and looking at the indigenous people prostrated in front of alters--burning candles, taking flowers--crying and pleading with genuine hearts. Then, you see them walk out, more sure in their God's judgement than we are in electricity.
A passionate guide will tell you the story of how Catholicism and Mayans collided, and how religion became a mixture of our history and La Madre Patria.
If you're lucky, you will head to Don Diego Ignacio's house for supper. A beautiful house with dirt floors and a courtyard full of flowers and laughing children. As one of the twelve Mayan Shaman's in Chichi, he will read you your Nawal and tell you stories that his ancestors have passed down, and that his grandchildren are memorizing to tell to their descendants.
Behind his house lies Pasqual Abaj, the Mayan ceremonial hill. It belongs to his family; half is his, and the other half is his brother's, who lives next door. At the top of the hill is an alter. Fire rings cover the ground where sacrifices have been made. Flower petals dance on the ground where someone came to beg for safety, health, and happiness...or came to praise for those very same things.
Curious as they are, you will have climbed the hill with an army of Don Diego's grandchildren.
And during the descent, you feel your heart break a little for the goodbyes that must come. But there is hope, because few things change in this little town. Storms come and go. Thieves are silently disposed of. People die, and new ones are born to tell their stories.
Yes, there is hope. Hope that when you return, they will remember you and serve and love you as much as is in their power--which to them, is never enough.
It has its charm, this little town. If you stay too long, it will hold on to you and break you into a life of a passionate indifference to the rest of the world.
Luckily for me, I was born with wanderlust, and there were other places calling my name.
