Mosaic mirrors and giant fruit

I am appreciating the inevitable changes that one has to accommodate when living in such a different place. The arrival of the rainy season is having a huge impact on daily life here. I can no longer gloat about living in perpetual summer, and how ironic now that it is beautiful summer weather in Europe. Rather, I am acclimatising myself to getting sodden wet and muddy with increasing frequency. Rather than reaching for the sun lotion, I am now donning my raincoat daily and beginning to eye up wellington boots in shop windows with more than a passing interest! An infestation of fleas in my house has attributed to an unprecedented hatred and paranoia of all things that bite. I am even now expert in detecting the differing sensations between, for example, the chomping jaws of a flea and a mosquito. Sad but true and a nightmare, I can vouch. So I abandoned my house, leaving it full of poison to kill the wee beasties once and for all and have been gone for a good two weeks.

Where have I been? I have been touring Guatemala, running mosaic workshops with women in all the libraries, which has been exhausting, but wonderful. We have been making mosaic mirrors, an activity which is appropriately simple, very effective and gives the participants something beautiful to take away and adorn their homes with. It is wonderful to work with women and very interesting to see how they differ from region to region. In Western Guatemala the population is predominantly indigenous and some of the workshops have been attended 100% by indigenous women, whereas in the east is almost wholly ladino. In Izabal, which is close to the black Garifuña region, we spent a fair amount of our time there dancing punta (local Garifuña dance), or attempting to! Buena gente.

Recently I ran a workshop with librarians from all the Riecken libraries in Guatemala. The idea was to teach them an activity they can do with groups in the future. Ever since showing an initial presentation of my work to the team when I arrived, the member tasked with coordinating the training session had remained fixated with my giant fruit, a theme which crops up pretty regularly in my festival work; in fact food in general and always on a giant scale! So she asked if it was possible to do this activity with the librarians. What I thought was going to be a challenge actually turned out to be a huge success; everyone worked together excellently in teams and turned out some very convincing and wonderful pieces, not to mention the laughs!

So successful was the result, that when the head teacher of a local school approached Alba (librarian and top lady of Chiché) with a request to fit out the newly elected queen of the school in a suitably regal float for the school parade, what better than a giant basket crammed with another array of huge fruity delicacies and said queen ensconced within! I must add that I was not even there to help in this decision; it was made by the head teacher the minute he laid eyes on the photos of the training session! Great folk here in Chiché. Better than that, the students were a joy to work with. Twenty two of the most enthusiastic 16 year olds I have ever come across. When we came to an end on the first day, I had to practically beg them to leave, and when we finished for good, after two days of hilarity and fanastic fun, they sang me a chant to thank me for the project. Why is it that this kind of reaction is so much rarer in British schools? Running workshops with communities here really is gratifying. It makes it all worth while when the kids can hardly organise themselves in position with their fruit for a photo shoot because they are laughing so much, or when an indigenous mother tells me that this has been the first time in her and all her companions’ lives that they have had the opportunity to take 3 hours out of their incessant work schedules (usually at home, cooking, cleaning, feeding many mouths or down at the river or the lake scrubbing their hands raw washing clothes), to do something creative and more importantly something for themselves.

As for the hidden fantasy world in Quiché (i.e. sculpture garden in Chiché); my baby and something I have wanted to realise since arriving here, the go ahead is just about coming to fruition! Great but…, of course there is always a hitch. It has taken the town council 5 months to decide they want it and will pay for it (it is turning out to be a fairly expensive project, what with the increased scale, the preparative ground works, structure building and sculpture fabrication), so now that they have agreed, I have a mere four months left! What to do! Anyone knows that agreements from builders to be finished by a certain (already improbable) date is nonsense, but they really want their garden now. So I believe it must be commenced and then ¡vamos a ver que pasa!