A Road Leads to Xela
When I’m in a plane that’s on its final approach, I try to look out the window and watch the entire descent—not because it’s sublime (though it often is) but because it helps me brace mentally for the initial shock of a figment of my imagination becoming a real, palpable place. A little over three years I lived in Alabama, and in a little over three hours, I spanned the chasm between that world and the one I spent months willing into existence, not soon to return through the looking glass.
As we passed low beneath the clouds descending into Ciudad de Guatemala, a child next to me and I marveled at the lush greenery and beautiful vistas that overlooked the surrounding lakes and valleys. The city itself grew from a speck to a toy to a life-size metropolis. Textures like farm fields from on high resolved into suburbs and slums. The plane alit, its air brakes engaged, and it halted on the tarmac; I inherited its momentum, catapulting through the airport into a car that bobbed and weaved across the vertiginous, sylvan ridges of Los Altos as we climbed the highland roads to Xela (i.e. Quetzaltenango) seventy miles northwest.
The driver, Daniel, was a kind man from Xela and we did our best to converse despite our broad language gap. The first thing he managed to convey to me was that I apparently looked to him exactly like Henry Cavill. I took it as a good indication there weren’t many white people in Xela these days. He answered a dozen phone calls over the four hour drive, and I picked out the words “Henry Cavill” at least once in every single one. At least as much as our broken conversation, the chaos of driving through Guatemala bonded us. I watched his six like a squadmate in a foxhole as he dodged buses, motorcycles, and road debris. If it had not been for the excitement of the drive and the incredible views as we ascended, the one hour of sleep I had the night before would have subdued me. Even still, I was bobbing and weaving more than the car. I watched half a dozen sunsets as mountains obscured the horizon, then revealed the red gloaming like a matador’s cape.
Daniel pointed out a dozen locations to me as we hurtled into Xela, though only the most obvious, like a massive graveyard in the city center, did I comprehend. Off a side street, we turned into a dark, serpentine alleyway that fizzled out in a clatter of small apartments piled atop each other like Christmas presents. We sat in the idling car, and I listened to him on the phone as the tenor of his voice shifted higher, all his inflections became questions, and his body language denoted growing uncertainty. Just then, a car that looked like it had been purchased from a crash dummy pulled into the alleyway behind us, its blinding headlights obscuring whoever was inside. Moments like this as a lone backpacker can feel pretty tense, like turbulence on an airplane. And like turbulence on an airplane, it’s usually fine. The driver cut the headlights and stepped out of the car. It was a confused-looking, rotund old man holding groceries. So it goes.
As the old man backed up the crash dummy car to let Daniel through, my homestay mother ambled up to me out of the darkness, smiling, also rotund. She told me her name was “Loodly” (spelled phonetically—I still have no idea how to write it) and bid me follow her upstairs. There I met a very adorable seven year old boy named Rodrigo and a very chubby little dog four years his senior named Luna. If I had not stayed with friends in New York multiple times, the apartment might have felt cramped. But I’d come to enjoy shoebox living, so it felt just right, and I appreciated the cozy atmosphere.
In the bedroom I was led to—which must normally have been Rodrigo’s unless Loodly invested in dinosaur toys for her tenants—there was a classically drawn self-portrait of Rodrigo with Luna. I know a lot of mothers have coffee mugs with the word “hope” on them and a lot of children have dinosaur toys, but pound for pound, I would put Loodly and Rodrigo up against any other mother-son duo on Earth. Moreover, Rodrigo knew in English all the words to Imagine Dragons’ “Believer” just because, unbeknownst to me, it was apparently the theme song of “Jurassic World.” (Don’t fact-check me on this: the video has Chris Pratt and dinosaurs, and I refuse to dig deeper.)
For months prior to arriving in Guatemala, I had strained to muster the gumption to poke the language-learning app icon on my phone and spend at least fifteen minutes poking subsequent buttons that would turn either green or red, then sparkle and shower me with points and praise like a slot machine. Despite the app-developers best efforts, I felt absolutely nothing, and I learned almost as little. But fumbling frantically through my mind’s junk drawer of Spanish vocabulary trying to communicate to Loodly I would indeed like to have dinner with them and to answer Rodrigo’s questions and ask some of my own as I played legos with him, I could feel the gravity of every success and failure in a way that even app-developers’ greenest green and reddest red couldn’t convey. If for no other reason than to coexist more amicably and considerately with this lovely little family, I was going to jump into my Spanish lessons the next day feet first. That’s the power of a homestay; or rather the power of not staying home.