Guest entry by my mom about her visit, part 1 of 14

[Post #1 in a series of guest posts from my mom after she and my brother visited in July]

Hi. Marcia here, mom of Elizabeth, aka Seño Leez or sometimes just Seño. A month ago I didn't know that this title (roughly "Ms.") existed. I had never even wondered how the people who live and work with my daughter address her. It's one of the many things that my son and I discovered during our two-week visit.

I can hardly stand to think that this trip almost didn't happen. Neither Brian nor I had been inclined to go. We had no hankering to see Central America or to travel at all. But Elizabeth wanted us to come down. And other parents of Peace Corps volunteers who had visited their children all came home saying the same thing: Vaya.

So we did it. Brian and I got the passports and the shots and the airplane tickets and the raincoats and the translation apps. I braced myself for the worst. Earthquakes, violence, drug running: here we come.

We never did feel an earthquake, although one reportedly happened while we were there. As for violence, the worst we experienced was getting accosted by vendors who forced armfuls of beautiful weavings on us while we were eating at restaurants or mailing packages at the post office. The closest we got to drug activity was Brian's pursuit of Pepto-Bismol a few days after we arrived.

The worst thing for me was the dirt. Many roads were made of it: hard, corrugated earth. Cars and trucks and buses belched out exhaust the color of coal dust. (On our first day Elizabeth warned us that our boogers might turn black. I'd call it grey.) Some of the "better" hotel rooms — no bed bugs, no cucarachas — sported furry cobwebs and grimy ledges, and they smelled of ancient mildew. Our running water didn't always run: dishes didn't get washed, showers didn't get taken, toilets didn't get flushed. Used toilet paper was universally directed into waste baskets to avoid overwhelming the plumbing systems. Litter decorated the roadsides. What garbage did make it to the dump (including the unflushed TP) got burned, dispersing invisible nasties into the air. You could taste the acridness as much as smell it. The taste attached itself to the back of my throat, where I could almost feel a sooty spot developing. No wonder respiratory problems were common in this country.

But considering the devastating scenarios that I'd been prepared for — in part from reading about the hundreds of thousands who'd been killed in Guatemala in the recent decades of political violence, in part from seeing the movie "Sin Nombre," which conveys the desperation of young people sucked into gangs in a region of Mexico that's close to Elizabeth's town — I didn't mind putting up with dirt and inconvenience. It helped me to think of our two weeks as a camping trip.

In fact, the backdrop of grunge served as an aesthetic booster. It highlighted the brilliant, grime-fighting colors that shouted to us from building exteriors, paintings, tablecloths, hammocks, and the traditional Mayan clothing that many of the women wore every day: shocking greens and oranges, scalding pinks and scarlets, electrifying blues and purples, screaming yellows, piercing whites. A walk through a typical market was blinding, as if a huge box of neon crayons had exploded. The color combinations zinged up my optic nerve to that pleasure spot just this side of pain. The more I saw, the more I wanted to see. I couldn't get my eyes full enough.

Like a weaver of one of those unrelentingly dazzling wall hangings, Seño Leez created an experience for us of one mind-blowing day after another. I plan to describe each day in a series of blog posts so that some of the richness of that visit will be available to all of you who have an interest in Elizabeth's life in Guatemala.

The vendor next to our first hotel (in Antigua).

Sabe Rico, our first restaurant (yes, restaurant). The green fruits growing on the tree to the left are oranges; the fruit hanging from the tree on the right is a pomegranate.