tripping on chickens

i got over 8 hours of sleep last night! it's been months...

so my friends are popping out the kids, left and right. seriously. several of them are on infant #3! and i'm not talking about my "grown-up" friends. i'm talking about my 22 year old friends. ok, most of them are still on pregnancy number one, but damn! so i've got a bit o' shopping to do. in general i'm not too into following rules of polite society, but i DO feel a twinge/pang of guilt for not giving wedding presents to most of my friends. true, i'm usually on the verge of broke-ass, if not the actual definition there-of, but i still feel bad. like, if i were wining and dining everyone i know, i'd want a lil something. likewise, if i were to carry a child around for 9 months straight, INSIDE OF ME, losing all stomach muscle, gaining countless stretch marks, sweating, and peeing every two minutes, finally spending 15 hours of...well, we don't need to go into those details. i'm just saying, i wouldn't mind some free stuff at a time like that. so meanwhile i've got to hold up my end of the deal and do the giving. which leads me to the story of the day.

since i've got a few presents to buy, my mom decided to take me to el mercado, the market, this morning. apparently the santa elena market is completely out of hand, so we went to the smaller, tamer (?!) san benito one. we parked our pick-up between a truck-full of watermelons for sale, and a man whose sign declared that he had "just opened bundle used american clothes". the parking lot is concrete, covered with a thick layer of fine dust, and hundreds of fuzzy mango pits of various ages and states of run-over-edness. we head "inside"; the market is covered, mostly, with corrugated sheet metal. it keeps out the majority of the rain, but, on days like this, keeps in all of the heat. the stands are run by sweating Q'eqchi, Qiche, and Castellano women. the items for sale are many, but each stand has the same basic selection of roma tomatoes, white potatoes, zapotes, jalapenos, small onions, guiskill, bruised platano bananas which fill the air with a sickly sweet smell, wilted herba mora, and carrots. there are a few stands with goodies, such as plums, avocados, and oro bananas. they are called "oros", or "golden ones" because they are tiny, little things with a yellowish or golden colored flesh, unlike the whitish/brown color of common bananas. i don't eat bananas. i hate the taste, and gag at the smell. but the 3-bite-size oros and manzanas are a different story. they are sweet and firm, and don't make me want to hoarf. that's what it comes down to, really: the hoarf factor.

the market has so many more things than food. el mercado is not to be confused with el supermercado. el mercado has everything. el supermercado has everything, but Everything is presented in a sterile, organized fashion with set prices. all of each Everything is in the same place. all of the peanut butter is by all the other peanut butter, which is right by all of the kinds of jelly, which is within easy reach of all of the bread. at el mercado, however, everyone has some of Everything, but no one has it all. this stand has 4 kinds of soap. that stand has 3 different types. the prices depend on the day, on the worker, on who you know, on how rich or how white you look, or on how long you haggle. haggling or bartering is expected. even when the initial response to the question, "Cuanto vale esta?" is reasonable, no one just opens his wallet without question. at one stand, a cute innocent-looking little girl sold underwear, towels, and cloths. one of the cloths was exactly what i had in mind for a recently married friend. "20Q for four", was the going price. my mom offered fifteen. the girl wasn't having any of it. "16Q?". Nope. "Eighteen?". my mom said, ok then, we are going somewhere else. i looked at the little girl, looked at my sister, and said, Really? that's it? but, by this time my mom was around the corner. yup, she's serious. i gave the girl a sympathetic smile and trotted after my fam. should i go back and just give her the twenty? after all, it's only about $3. i'm richer than she is... my mother has no patience for people who won't accomodate at all. it's true, most people do assume that we are rich American tourists. we are white, we wear sunglasses, we ask weird questions. they have no reason to think that we are volunteers, come to assist them at no cost to them or to guatemala. so we are stuck asking our friends how much things are actually worth, before putting ourselves at the mercy of the market vendors.

some of the stands sicken me. booth after booth sells "American clothes" as if they were gold. english music from the states plays loudly, and everywhere people wear t-shirts with english lettering. what the heck do they think is so good about our country, our lifestyle? just the wealth? (boy, are they wrong there.) the freedom? (what is freedom?) seriously. it's like being in high school, you know, if you aren't cool then you have to buy the cool brand names, or something. other stands sell plastic brooms, plastic buckets, plastic dishes/combs/toys/cups/home decor. the disposable lifestyle is bad enough in countries that have heard of garbage dumps, but all this crap is just going to be burned, or end up along the guatemalan roadside.

then there are the meat stands. oh lordy. gigantic slabs of fresh meat sit in the sun until it is dry on the outside. flies crawl everywhere; up one slab, down another, on the butcher, then i shudder as they land on me. periodically the vendor slices a pound or two for a foolish customer, then repierces the slab with the meat hook from which it will hang for countless more hours. some stands sell shrimp and frozen fish, others have vats of chicken feet and innards for sale. while simultaneously staring into one such vat and rounding a corner, i nearly stumbled over three live chickens. they clucked their way under the table...which held a dozen of their plucked, ready-to-boil relatives.

we make one more stop. my mother and younger sister are dicussing something with the man behind the counter, but i'm fading from the heat. spanish surrounds me and i start to zone out. i'm standing in the doorway, but there is plenty of room for people to come in and out. sober people, that is. but it's 11am, everyone is sober...ooo, except this guy! he trips on the step, and catches himself by grabbing the handle on the pop cooler. his train of thought is obvious, "Umm, that sounds good!" he gets the cooler open, and reaches for a Super-Cola. whoa...whoa, all those bottles of pepsi are in the way. there, not any more. oops, there goes a couple orange juices. good thing they come in plastic. too bad he can't figure out that he could use two hands. ok, we've successfully obtained a super-cola and set it to the side of the cooler. now, about all those pepsis laying on their sides, and...hmm, what was that? oh, there's still another orange juice on the floor!

i didn't stick around to see how the inebriated battle with the pop bottles ended. we headed back thru the disorderly vegetable stands, across the mango-pit parking lot, to our truck with the now butt-sizzling seats. then back to our cool, breezy home on the outskirts of town, with our refrigerator, our ceiling fans and our iced tea. and we thanked god.