Search for the Mayan Spirit

Antigua's streets are littered with brilliant paint chipped away from plaster walls by endless water and exhaust fumes. And too the once great Mayan people are reduced to beggars and street vendors, selling handcraft, squeezing pennies as tourists dig through their stack of hundreds to make change for their best haggled deal on a trinket everyone will forget about until next spring's garage sale.

A woman sitting legs entwined in faded stitch work, tattered and ragged her hands raised up cupped together. Her whimper articulates the very idea of desperation, denoting that our obligation as citizens of a wealthy country is to sustain her, a citizen of a once great empire. From her glazed over eye her stare sang out a tragic past of bowing down, begging for redemption. To have walked past, brushing her hand away and feeling detached enough to let the impression pass through me is enough to reason that the Mayan spirit was shattered and remains in a state of disrepair as their history becomes tourist attractions sanctioned by Central American governments with little concern for much beyond currency. Hers was a song of displacement and of depravity, longing for a mythical dignity. Rain drops hit my jacket, bead up and splashed on to the ground, echoing my song into the night, solely of the sadness and suggestiveness my western cultivation possesses the ability to express.

As twilight dwindled into black, the realization of my improving Spanish sets in and I felt not a sinking but a recession and tried to ease off the uncomfortable feeling in great burst of laughter through my thickening beard, hearing the echoes against concrete walls, knowing that my travels have only sparked the surface of my understanding of a longstanding social injustice, desire to find the truth of the Mayan spirit, and retain some dignity by doing small bits to see the Mayan people flourish in their communities and hope for their future representation in governments throughout Central America.