Camotan, Guatemala, short fiction

Camotan, Guatemala, southern Guatemala. 10.5 miles from the Honduran border.

Jeff Morrison had never really “clicked” with Bobby Miller back in Oklahoma but Jeff had written that off to the fact that they had not spent much time together.

Jeff got along with everybody, a skill he had honed as he worked his way up from volunteering at small-town fire-departments until he landed a full-time job with benefits in a large city’s fire-department. That path taught him the virtues of reading the personalities and political currents. It also taught him the value of keeping his mouth shut. 

Still, there are some people that just have bad chemistry and there were ways to avoid friction even if it just meant not talking and staying out of each other’s way.

Unfortunately, Bobby seemed intent on causing friction and there was no way to avoid him. They were on a two-week church mission trip in Guatemala with three other adult chaperones and 15 kids between the ages of 14 (Jeff’s youngest daughter) and 19 (Bobby’s son).

In fact, friction between Vicki (Jeff’s daughter) and Spike (Bobby’s son) had been the first flashpoint.

Spike loved to play pranks on the other kids and he was unable or unwilling to modulate the pranks. They were all pedal-to-the-metal. Spike seemed to take special delight in tormenting Vicki since she was the youngest “camper”. Spike also seemed to delight in pulling the pranks right in front of Jeff, figuring that as a chaperone Jeff would feel constrained to not chastise his most “senior” camper in public.

Spike's pranks had driven Vicki to the point of tears before the end of the first day in-country.

Spike did not reckon on Jeff having a Ph.D. in pulling pranks. Pulling elaborate pranks is a long and hallowed tradition in fire-departments where personnel use them to pass the time and maintained their sanity.

On the second day in-country, the missionaries were working in a nameless, mountain village erecting an awning across the front of a small chapel

It was not difficult for Jeff to be spudding a post-hole when Spike came around the building after smoking a cigarette. They were setting posts for the awning that they were erecting over the main entrance to a chapel and the ground was full of rocks. Every post-hole was a fight.

“Hey there, Tiger. Whaddya say you pull the loose rocks out of the hole so I can keep spudding?” Jeff said to Spike. Since Spike had been afraid that Jeff was going to tell him to use the spud, heavy work that quickly caused blisters, Spike was OK with the request.

Spike didn’t think it the least bit unusual that nearly all of the campers he had been tormenting were around Jeff. There was far more stand-around time than actual work-time on these projects. The campers didn’t have a lot of skills with the old-fashioned, manual tools and they quickly wore-out.

As Spike knelt down and started to reach into the hole, Jeff jerked the dark shoe-lace he had been holding in his left hand. The other end of the shoe-lace was tied behind the neck of a small, dead snake that Jeff had stolen from one of the village chickens. The dead snake “bit” Spike on the hand as he was reaching into the hole.

Spike over-reacted and launched himself up and backwards from the hole...overbalanced and toppled backwards and struck the back of his head on the sun-baked clay.

Bobby had been on the fringes and seen what happened with his peripheral vision. Watching his son launch backwards like a missile whipped him around and he aggressively approached Jeff. Bobby’s rage magnified as he absorbed the fact that all of the campers were laughing.

“Take a chill-pill, man” Jeff told Bobby. “Spike has been dishing it out. Grown men know that if they are going to dish it out they better be ready to have somebody return the favor.”

Bobby did not “...take a chill-pill.” Rather, he and Spike started to under-cut Jeff’s authority at every turn. Thus, Jeff came to realize that he was chained-to-the-oar with not one, but two dedicated pricks-of-misery. And it wasn’t as if he could bail. There were a bunch of kids counting on him to shepherd them through what would be a once-in-a-lifetime event for most of them.

***

Melody, Jeff’s wife, was one of the other chaperones and she could read her husband like a book.

They had met through work. Jeff was supporting the EMTs and Melody was a night-shift nurse in the Emergency Room at the city’s major trauma hospital. Fire-fighters and nurses share a special affinity. Both are results-oriented profession who operate under extreme time-urgency for very high stakes. They also fight “process-oriented” administrations who watch pennies and manage from computer screens.

In spite of admonitions from his Captain to “not fish off the company dock” Jeff asked Melody out for a date and it was as if they had known each other for twenty years. They were married 366 days after that first date.

When Melody became pregnant with their first child, Jeff insisted that they move away from the big city. Melody did not argue. Jeff and Melody had spent the last 18 years in Eucha, Oklahoma in the state’s extreme northeastern corner where run-off from the Ozarks fed streams choked with fish and farm fields were small and human-scaled.

“How bad can it be?” Melody asked rhetorically about the remaining days of the mission-trip. “In twelve more days we will be on a plane flying back to Dallas and we can pick a different church service after we get back.”

Melody also knew that Jeff would not back away from a fight if it became physical. She became Jeff’s shadow, hoping that she could dampen down tensions if things started to escalate.

***

The days settled down into a routine. Breakfast in the cool of the morning. A bus-ride up to an isolated village. Physical work rebuilding infrastructure that would be wiped out with the next hurricane.

Jeff felt compelled to share that the mountainous landscape and ruinous agriculture practices had made flooding a yearly occurrence. The mountains were mostly igneous rock that did not allow rain to percolate downward. Erosion had washed away much of the topsoil so there was little there to absorb the falling rain.

He heard Bobby being dismissive of the slap-dash construction techniques the villagers used and Jeff explained that there is no point in building structures with a twenty-year life expectancy when history showed that it would surely be washed away within the next three-to-five years.

One thing Jeff had not anticipated was the dearth of manpower in the country-side. Jeff had always had a prepper mentality. He was a pessimist, an occupational hazard of cops and firefighters. They were the ones who came in when fantasies were unexpectedly impacted by reality and the house-of-cards toppled.

He saw fertile, if small, fields being planted to Spanish Cedar trees or converted to pasture for cattle. He saw poor nutrition and he asked “Why?”

The answer was that trees are not labor intensive while corn-and-beans were. Most of the young and middle-aged men were in the US or had gone to the large cities. They sent money back home. It was far easier to plant fields to trees, plant coffee or convert it to cow-pasture and to buy food.

Lunch. Bible lessons after lunch which the community was invited to. A little bit more work and then a ride back to the Christian Center in Camotan that was their base-of-operation. Supper, which was always some kind of Guatemalan dish was served shortly before dark. The campers were not aware that the meals they were being served were more like wedding or fiesta foods than the daily fare of the typical Guatemalan.

After eating, the “campers” socialized, played on their smart-phones and then hit the rack in two bare-bones “dormitories”.

Sunday was the day of rest. Wednesday was a recovery day when the group went on “tourist” expeditions with a longer Bible study in the evening.

Things had settled down into a routine...until Tuesday of the last week. Jeff noticed in the middle of the day that his smart-phone was not able to tell him the time but he thought nothing of it. He had been told that the signal in the mountains was “shaky” at best.

After the work-day, nobody was able to get a signal and the bus did not show up to take them back to Camotan. It was a Chinese Firedrill finding places for the entire group to sleep but everybody was under a roof and behind screened-in windows before 10:30 PM.

Breakfast was much less than any of the Norte-Americanos were used to. Corn-tortillas, a bit of scrambled eggs with greens and a few green-onions mixed in. The ravenous kids and adults gobbled them down, unaware that what they took to be their portions had been intended to feed their entire host families.

The locals marveled at the huge size of the Norte-Americanos and their equally enormous apetites. No matter. There were many days when all they had for breakfast was a cup of coffee with sugar. This would be one of those days.

Unable to get through on their phones, Jeff made the executive decision to have the group walk back to Camotan, a distance of six miles, primarily downhill. It was not a popular decision, especially with Bobby, Spike and Bobby’s wife Doreen. None of the three had any fondness for walking.

Jeff had the group drink their fill of water before leaving and fill their Yetis and water-bottles. He was certain that the girls had not had very much to drink because it would be a two hour walk and there were no “rest-rooms” on the way. Jeff begged a couple of empty 2.5 liter pop bottles from his host and he put them in his day-pack after filling them. Jeff was equally certain that most of the kids did not want to carry water because it was heavy. He would have bet money that several of the kids had “cheated” on filling their water bottles, having no concept of how much water they would perspire walking six miles in the heat.

Jeff stopped the walk after an hour and had them drink. He stopped it again after another hour and this time several of the group actually drank some of the water.

Jeff was stressing at their slow progress and because the group was breaking up. Most of the group kept looking at their phones and they stopped walking when that happened. When one person in the mob stopped walking all of the others did too. They all wanted to be the first to detect “a signal” and they were sure that they would find one as they neared the town. They were sure that they could call a bus and they had no desire to walk a single step farther than absolutely necessary.

The other thing stressing Jeff was that the group had broken up. Three of the boys were on the school track-team and they had gone bounding off toward town. Bobby Miller and his wife Doreen were traveling even slower than the main group while Spike and his shadow “not-Bevis” stayed with Spike’s parents.

Once they hit the main highway, there was almost no traffic, only a few motorcycles. None of the bikers slowed down as the group tried to hail them.

Entering Camotan, they saw that it was buzzing with groups of people in animated discussion. It looked like many people had flowed in from the nearby farms.

Very few of the mission-group were conversant in Spanish. Those that were conversant deduced that the entire communication system except, maybe, the land-line phones were down. Speculation was white-hot. Was it a military coup? Was it Russian hacking? Was it a sun-flare….

Most worrisome to the local populace, is that remittances from the States were locked up as were bank accounts. That was the first thing that many of the women had checked.

Jeff found that his credit card was worthless. None of the machines in Camotan would hook up. His group, at least for the time being, were foreigners stranded in a town fifteen-hundred miles from home. In a town where very few spoke English. And they were essentially broke.

***

Bobby and his group came stumbling into Camotan five hours after they started. He was livid with rage. He confronted Jeff and demanded to know why he had not sent a cab up the highway to save them the last two miles of walking. They had waited beside the road for two hours and the cab never showed up.

The youth-pastor inserted himself between the two angry men.

“Nothing is moving in this town except for some motorbikes. Nobody wants to move their vehicles until they know where they are going to be able to get gas.

It isn’t that we didn’t try (which was a little-white lie) but that we could not find anybody willing to do it.”

Barely mollified, Bobby went stomping off.

***

One week after “the event” and three days after they had been scheduled to fly out of Guatemala, the situation was still very, very murky and no relief was in sight.

Jeff and Melody had quietly been preparing the group for a “walk-out” based on a conversation they had with an ex-pat who was making his way to Belize. It was his belief that passenger jets were grounded for the duration but surface vessels were evacuating Americans from port cities.

“Why Belize?” Jeff asked. 

Relative distance between Camotan and Texas vs to Belize City (dots).

“Mostly because they are close and they speak English in Belize” the old, sun-darkened retiree said. "The way I figure it, it is 140 miles or so to the border from here and another 150 to Belize City. I can get there in a month at 10 miles a day or in three weeks at fifteen miles a day."

Jeff, Melody and the old man talked a long, long time.

Based on the old man’s recommendations, Melody encouraged the young women in the group to trade some of their trendy, fashionable clothing and footwear for local “costumes”. She insisted that they not be conspicuously new and that they had skirts. It is much easier for a woman to “do her business” in the bushes beside the road while wearing a skirt than while wearing men’s trousers.

Jeff took his wedding ring to a jeweler and had it cut into chunks eights. He traded two chunks for a cheap, battered Brazilian revolver and 12 rounds of .38 Special ammo. He traded another chunk for silver which he then used to purchase suitable backpacks and some basic provisions for the three-hundred mile walkout.

The night before they departed Jeff called a meeting. He laid out the plan. Melody, his two daughters and he were going to start walking toward Belize City based on their best current information. They would check their phones every morning and evening to see if the situation changed and they might be able to get mechanical transportation.

Jeff shared that the old man told him that there were churches, chapels and aid-groups every nine-to-fifteen miles. Those places were like stations in the old Underground Railroad in pre-Civil War America.

Jeff had already talked to the youth pastor. During the meeting, he stood up and announced “If the majority of you decide to stay in Camotan” he said, pointing to the youth “then I will stay in Camotan. “If most of you decide to follow the Morrisons then I will walk-out with you.”

“The only other thing I want to add is that this is a chance for us to relive Exodus. Camotan is like the flesh-pots of Egypt but it could rapidly degrade into an intolerable situation. Leaving is to place our faith in God. I ask you to pray about this tonight.”

Jeff Morrison announced “We will be leaving an hour after sun-up. I would love to have you join us but you need to understand that I cannot offer an easy journey.”

The only people who decided to stay in Camotan were the Bobby, Doreen and Spike Miller and Spike’s side-kick not-Bevis. The women had all put their hair in buns and were wearing hats to cover it. The men stacked up at the front and the back of the line. The day's goal was a Mennonite mission ten miles away.

Note from the author: I undoubtedly got a lot of details wrong. I invite readers to comment rather than let inaccuracies stand. 

The question "Stay or Go" is huge and there are a lot of dynamics that need to be considered. Sometimes there are no good choices and you have to pick your pony and ride it. I tried to write this story in a way that included many of the critical variables in making the Stay-or-Go decision. I hope you found it entertaining and helped you think.

A tip of the hat to Billybob out-West for the story idea.

Two short-stories down, fifty more to go.