A Meal Among Friends

by Nathaniel Brown (United States of America)

Making a local connection USA

We sat at a table you would find on a film set for The Road, eating salad crackers and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. The pressures of home all but disappeared. All that mattered were the thankful eyes that surrounded the extravagant meal. This was my first time out of the US, and I was a quick study, but geographical overviews of “the place of many trees” and biographies centered on the Guatemalan civil war will not prepare you to share the sufferings and joys and hopes of families that have been subsistence farmers for generations. We were visiting friends who lived their lives here in Guatemala, committed to serving and sharing life through their nonprofit organization in San Cristóbal that established a community youth center and delivered cooking and heating home for families that lived in surrounding villages, that otherwise could not afford them, normally building fires on the dirt floors of their homes, leading health issues later in life. I had raised donations to buy ten stoves and was here to help install them. We spent several afternoons at La Zona Exrema getting to know the organization staff and playing with the kids who came to play billiards, lift weights, and skate a halfpipe built in the building’s courtyard. As one of the few tall, awkward white Americans, who could help but laugh? But the jesting was in good fun, making friends out of the staff members who would spare a moment to converse in poorly cadenced, broken Spanish. The kids had the most fun quizzing me their English vocab words from school and asking for a hard American accent. The Zona was an investment into this backwater city — a way to share embodied lives with the people of San Cristóbal. Later in the week, as we drove up to the villages, our new local friends graciously chose to ride in the bed with climbing pads to cushion the rocky drive so we could ride in the cab with the organization leaders. Riding in the bed was no easy task as we passed thick jungle over rugged road to get to the high elevation communities where the stoves would be installed. After a two hour ride and a short backpacking trek through covered trails and wide vistas, we assembled stoves at several different communities across the ridge. The recipient families were responsible for transporting the stoves from the city up to their mountain village. It was clear by that task alone, this was no handout. This was us extending a hand, these families extending theirs, saying, “as friends and partners, we will work together.” The last family gave us a short tour of their neatly organized farm. As we approached their small one-room home, we passed a border of fruit trees that our friends had no English name for. They led us over a ridge to a valley of coffee plants the family had carefully nurtured from seeds in their hillside greenhouse, down cleanly terraced trails, to their carefully trellised crop. Like so many other Guatemalans, the family had seen hard times in past years, and was risking needed income and yearly food yields to try a cash crop besides the local varieties of beans and corn. So this home stove had come at an exciting time — a time of joy and risk and hope for the future. We sat at a table, eating salad crackers and drinking a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. This was a gift even wealthy Americans visitors would enjoy. For a moment, it didn’t seem like there was a job to be done or a bar to achieve. This was their communion prepared for us, bread and wine presented before now deeply humbled guests. Later, I could be far away, forgetting the terraced rows of coffee cherries and fruits I had never heard of. But right now, it was a joy to be part of the family, even just for a moment. We were invited into the fight to make a way for their future. Just for a moment, we shared a meal in the flesh, eyes penetrating to reciprocally thankful hearts.