Gabriola
Island volunteer finds poverty, poetry in Guatemala
Kit Pepper has written about the events
and impressions she gained while volunteering in the northwestern
highlands of Guatemala. There she was aligned with Alianza, a
project which responded to grassroots requests for education and
health care from the local Mam-speaking women and men of Comitancillo
and surrounding rural aldeas, altitude 7000 feet.
Unequivocal beauty and blunt terror,
abiding forces in these Guatemalan highlands, stand together in
her poems in unsparing and exacting intimacy. This is a landscape
where, by day, a machete manifests as a broadside percussive instrument
tamping and leveling damp adobe bricks, while at night, becomes
a weapon of domestic malice, slashing to the bone the arms and
skull of a young mother.
Her writing started out as fragments
and sketches in a tiny, torn notebook in a vest pocket as she
took a daily run that drew her from the highland plateau down
an impossibly steep mountain fissure to a gravel road that meanders
parallel to the Rio Chixal.
The poems recount how this morning run,
which started as an arduous almost impossible task, surprisingly
became an integral part of the her day; how predawn persistence
gradually took up residency in legs and lungs. As the run and
especially La Gruta, the temple-steep crevasse of descent and
ascent, wedged their way into her inner landscape, she became
familiar to the children and to the men and women who daily walked
the route.
Perhaps most profoundly, and despite efforts
to diminish the suffering of one particular street dog, she witnessed
the permanent lasso of suffering. "Suffering changed shape
before my eyes and bounded along beside me as yet one more wound-festering
feral dog."
As her work with Alianza
deepened, she began to understand the switchback nature
of time and that birth and death are only examples "of the
capacity of spirit to rest a moment on earth, in this mist-laden
plateau."
Kit Pepper will read from
Let Beauty Be: a Season in
the Highlands, Guatemala
Event hosted by Thora Howell
at Hill's Native Art
76 Bastion Street in Nanaimo 3:00 p.m. December 6, 2009
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