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Guatemala, 1961 As Clint and I prepare to go to Guatemala to join a group of US masons building cookstove/heaters for a village of Mayans who have been relocated to a 9,000 foot mountain side, I though I would re-read my Journals from a trip I made to Gutemala forty years ago. It's frankly a little embarrassing. Please remember, I was 21 years old and sort of a boot-strap Horatio Alger right winger and not always very charitable towards others - especially those who reminded me of myself. I pick up the story as I ride my bicycle from San Cristobal, Mexico into the Guatemalan highlands. I broke my camera in Mexico so the only pictures I have are the ones I drew in my Journal.
Comitan - June 22, 1961 |
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Peten Jungle, August, 1961 By August I had made it to the Peten Jungle by train, boat, caravan, dugout canoe and finally by DC-3 to a chiclero camp called Lancandon, named after the Mayan village nearby, so let's pick up the story there. Only about 200 Lacandon people were left in 1961. They were said to be of the purest Mayan decent still around and still spoke the Mayan language. A proud and beautiful people, the Lacandon were at home in the jungle. The highland Maya are from different tribal and language groups. I saw the Lacandon - partly through the work of the Blums - as the purest and most traditional Maya people left and I understood the Maya to be primarily a jungle culture. Also, in 1961 I spent a week in the Lacandon village and drew a picture of one of the stoves they used - similar to the ones we are headed down to Guatemala to replace. I wonder, as we embark for the mountains to help some Mayan villagers learn to manage fire, if maybe they already knew a little bit about fire - and smoke - and how smoke is used to keep the malaria carrying mosquitoes and other vermin out of the thatch. Jim Buckley, 2001 |
 Lacandon stove , 1961 |
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