As I mentioned in Week 30, I have been having some trouble with my teeth. Namely, little pieces keep committing sedition. I’ve now had 4 or 5 dental appointments in the last two months, with varying levels of success. They keep fixing the cracks and chips, but a few days later it reoccurs. I now am the proud owner of prescription tooth paste (extra fluoride), prescription tooth spray (extra potassium nitrate), a second night guard (extra grinding protection), and prescription muscle relaxants (extra…relaxing?). My nightly routine has ballooned to about 45 minutes.
However, there is a reason for this recapitulation of an earlier post. When I went to the dentist most recently, last Friday morning, it required me to arrive in Antigua Thursday evening, a pretty typical scenario.
Shortly before embarking upon my 6 hour bus ride from Huehue to Antigua, I received a call from the volunteer a year ahead of me, a friend who also lived with La Familia Loca (The Crazy Family), the name we fondly bestow upon the host family we both lived with during our respective training periods.
She was calling to check up on me, partly at the request of La Familia. They had written me a text message a few days ago and I was slow in responding. After a short conversation, we both realized that we were headed towards Antigua, and she suggested I stay with her at La Familia’s house in San Lorenzo. The family, for their part, always loves surprise guests.
“Why not,” I reasoned. “After all, it’s been some time since I’d seen them, and it’s free room and board.” It would mean that I wouldn’t get to meet any other travelers at the hostels in Antigua, something I greatly enjoy, but the pros outweighed the cons.
It’s a very good thing they did.
I only know myself. I cannot speak with certainty about hypothetical events, but in knowing myself, I feel pretty confident in how my night would have gone:
In San Lorenzo, with La Familia, I ate a meal of fried chicken, spaghetti, tortillas, and a single pickled jalapeno.
In Antigua I expect I would have ingratiated myself with a group of single-serving friends—tourists—and brought them to my favorite, dirt-cheap, hole-in-the-wall felafel joint.
In San Lorenzo, I washed my meal down with a wineglass full of Pepsi.
In Antigua I would have been convinced by the starry-eyed novices to help the food settle with a few beers, some dancing, and a late walk home.
Meanwhile, not far from Kafka, the hostel I most typically frequent, someone was getting mugged, and then. as an exclamation point to this traumatic crime, they were stabbed. This someone was not Guatemalan, but a gringo that was targeted for that reason. This someone who was probably just like me.
And then it happened 6 more times around the city over the next few hours.
The crime rate in Guatemala is perpetually high, but the truth is, security incidents against Peace Corps Volunteers in Guatemala are grossly under-reported. We are—imprudently I might add—more concerned about potential judgment or administrative separation (getting fired) from Peace Corps than the actual crime or safety issue that has taken place. On several occasions I have heard of volunteers unwilling to report being robbed at knife- or gun-point in a place frequented by other PCVs because they had not called out of site. It is more important to know where the dangerous places are than to punish people for administrative transgressions.
When I think about this, it makes me pause. Antigua is the beautiful city, the safe city. Antigua is the oasis in Guatemala where violent crime does not occur. I’m not saying that it wildly reforms my notion of the country—I know that the country in which I live is dangerous—but it forces me to be more reflective on what I do to be safe and, more importantly, the wanton randomness of street crime. Simply put, I could be doing everything right and it still might not matter. My sense of immortality, which I’ve carried with me since I was old enough to know what “hubris” meant, is dead.
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