{"id":397,"date":"2005-08-29T21:30:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-29T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mercurystate.wordpress.com\/2005\/08\/29\/all-saints\/"},"modified":"2008-09-09T23:02:27","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T03:02:27","slug":"all-saints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seekingsol.com\/all-saints\/","title":{"rendered":"all saints"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The bus ungracefully bumbles its way along a long unpaved road. Its full load of passengers jiggles and jostle more to the tune of the bumps on the gravel path than that of the reggaeton blasting from the stereo. We are packed four to each side\u2019s bench seat (where a decade ago two American children sat) with two or three standing on either side of where the center-sitters\u2019 hips meet. Although there are many hypotheses as to why these modes of transportation are called, \u201cchicken busses,\u201d the one that theorizes that it\u2019s because passengers are packed like poultry in a coop, at the present moment, seems most suiting.<\/p>\n

I lean forward and fold my arms across the back of the seat in front of me and as I do so, I feel the lungs of my neighbors expand as the absence of my shoulders, suddenly pulled out from the horizontally stacked backbone of wall to wall bodies, relieves some of the pressure and gives way for some well-needed wiggles.<\/p>\n

Using my folded arms as a cushion, I rest my forehead against the back of the seat in front of me and quickly fall back into a perforated sleep of exhaustion. I don\u2019t usually sleep on busses but for some reason find this case of sleepiness, which is shared by all the other tired souls that fill this space, contagious<\/p>\n

The bus breaks over a particularly large crack in the road and as the wheels clunk down, a majority of the heads all stir awake from slumber for just a single brief moment before they find their chins again bobbing towards their chests.<\/p>\n

My head too turns up. But a fleeting image of that which I saw last behind my closed eyes and on the stage of my subconscious startles me awake. It was a vision of a baby\u2019s face; eyes rolled back under closed lids, black charred skin flaking black and grey, facial features bloated out of grotesque proportion.<\/p>\n

I look around the bus. It\u2019s a flood of reds, greens, pinks, yellows and blues; the striking and beautiful colors of the traditional \u201ctraje\u201d (suit\/costume) of the indigenous Mayans that people these highlands.<\/p>\n

I close my eyes again and find that the child\u2019s face has branded the blackness with its image. The vision, scarred into my memory, silently stares back at me.<\/p>\n

My mind suddenly races. Where would I ever get such an image? Have I seen it before? On the television while lunching at a local comedor? In a movie? Or book? I search my memory, but can find no source for the vision so three-dimensional that it couldn\u2019t possibly fit into any picture I\u2019ve seen in a movie or magazine.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust a dream,\u201d I tell myself. And I fall asleep again.<\/p>\n

The bus bumbles on. Passengers with swaddled children or sacks of corn get on and off. It\u2019s market day and delicately wrapped baskets are carefully heaved on and off the roof of the bus, which both above and inside packs tighter and tighter as we arrive closer to our destination.<\/p>\n

A pig squeals from somewhere up front and I am rustled awake from a sleep I never realized I\u2019d entered. I don\u2019t lift my head but I turn my face and look into the isle; and there I see a masked man; his features heavy and so defined it seems to me they must be hollow, as if only bones give shape to the black hood that hides his face. He\u2019s holding a rifle. And although his eyes are hidden by the mask, I know he\u2019s starring at me.<\/p>\n

I close my eyes as fast as they blinked open and calm my racing heart with a intuitive meditation that I drop into out of both instinct and routine. It\u2019s a prayer that I make regularly, not for my health and not for my safety, but that, \u201cif this be the day I die, may I do so with grace, compassion and consciousness.\u201d I don\u2019t want to, but I open my eyes again.<\/p>\n

And the man is gone.<\/p>\n

The bus comes to a final jolting halt, the doors open and people begin to flood out of both ends of the bus. One of my travel mates, previously lost in the sea of seated people, climbs her way to my seat and wakes me from my startled state; \u201cWe\u2019re here!\u201d<\/p>\n

In the evening I crawl into bed and my thoughts are finally granted the freedom to wander and wonder about the visions of the burnt child and masked man I\u2019d seen on the bus. One voice inside dismisses them as dreams. Another smiles and says, \u201cyou\u2019re crazy\u201d (which I\u2019m perfectly fine with being). Another voice is silent, but wants desperately to cry for a reason I\u2019m not yet allowed to know. And then there is another voice. One that claims she is of Reason. And she says this:<\/p>\n

\u201cGuatemala\u2019s 36-year civil war officially \u201cstopped\u201d nine years ago. The Peace Accords were perhaps signed, but the war continues for little has changed and nothing<\/strong> has been erased from the memories and hearts of the people who surround you and the land which grounds you. The terror, brutality, torture and rampant murdering and massacres (of which many would call genocide) that left over 200,000 people dead, over 1,000,000 displaced and countless others \u201cdisappeared\u201d touched the lives (with a knife) of every single person in this town and on that bus. You are furious. You are furious because of the fact that the Guatemalan military has been recognized as responsible for the majority of these murders. You are enraged that in 1954, your very own country, The United States, started this civil war when the CIA orchestrated, trained and equipped an invasion from Honduras led by two exiled Guatemalan military officers who ousted the democratically nominated President Juan Jose Arevalo, who (how dare he!) tried to re-distribute unused lands \u201cowned\u201d by the American United Fruit company that had wrongfully and violently been seized from the indigenous Mayans in the first place. In the hills that your bus climbed through today lie mass graves, some without a single cross to mark the sites of massacres where the military, with American-made and paid arms, buried entire villages of civilians into a brutal history that went without mention in the American press aside from a few headlines to the sound of the, \u201cPeaceful Liberation of Guatemala\u201d (from communism!), which rings *deafeningly* in your ear at the same tone of China\u2019s \u201cPeaceful Liberation of Tibet\u201d (1.2 million murdered) and America\u2019s current, \u201cPeaceful Liberation of Iraq\u201d (25,000 *and counting<\/a>* civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq). You are disgusted. You are furious. You are devastated. You are horrified. You are raw. And you didn\u2019t even see it. Your mother was not raped in it. Your brother was not tortured by it. Your sister did not flee to Mexico from it. Your father was not \u201cdisappeared\u201d in it. Your child was not orphaned by it. But every person in this town was cut and numbed by it. And did you really think you could travel untouched by it? When the scars of the war have not even yet scabbed, but still actively bleed from the souls of those (living and dead) that surround you?\u201d<\/p>\n

My travel mate drops into the room and I confess to her my visions, frustrations, furiousity and fears. She confesses her own, shares with me a heavy sigh, and notes how suiting the name of the town we\u2019re in is; “Todos Santos”…<\/p>\n

“All Saints.”<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

(The US\u2019s malicious involvement in Guatemala is by no means conspiracy theory. It\u2019s all a quite well documented hisory that even ex-President Clinton finally eventually admitted was a “mistake”<\/a> (but this “apology” of sorts saw so little press, I can’t find a direct quote online). For more information, an excellent movie documentary is, When The Mountains Tremble<\/a><\/em> or pick up a copy of Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy<\/a><\/em> by Victor Perera or, I Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala<\/a><\/em> which finally brought international attention to the plight of Guaemala\u2019s indigenous population and won Menchu the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. Although the “mistake” is never mentioned in any of our history books, it’s considered enough as common-known-fact to be documented even in the Lonely Planet Guatemala guidebook.)<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The bus ungracefully bumbles its way along a long unpaved road. Its full load of passengers jiggles and jostle more to the tune of the bumps on the gravel path than that of the reggaeton… <\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,63,71,59],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nall saints - Christina Rivera<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/seekingsol.com\/all-saints\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"all saints - Christina Rivera\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The bus ungracefully bumbles its way along a long unpaved road. Its full load of passengers jiggles and jostle more to the tune of the bumps on the gravel path than that of the reggaeton... 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