Email: Callie Vandewiele

Friends:

Samac is a coffee cooperative about eight kilometers outside of Coban. Originally a traditional café finca owned from the 1880s until the1970s by a German family, the plot of land stretches through a long green valley between Coban and San Cristobal. It is currently home to just over 800 people who own the land collectively and farm coffee, cardamom, and foodstuffs. Along the banks of a mid-size stream that meanders its way down into and through the flat valley from a series of mountain springs sit what's left of the original German farmhouse, slowly rotting from within, a personal family church that has seen some restoration, and the ruins of what is believed to be the rest of the original structures which were burned in the early 1980s by the Guatemalan military shortly after the valley was abandoned. A massacre and a series of disappearances in late 1982 or early 1983 pushed the cooperative members and all the surrounding village people into hiding in the mountains for several years during the height of Guatemala's civil war. Not everyone returned, and many of today’s residents are the children of refugees from other areas who ended up as part of the cooperative by chance as they wandered down from the mountains, hoping to rebuild the lives that they had lost to violence and persecution.

Today the green hillsides are dotted with thatched roofs, corn stalks, and coffee bushes. The coffee processing plant has been rebuilt and a Peace Corps project is helping community leaders develop an ecotourism office within the cooperative in order to bring tourists, awareness, and money up the one-lane dirt road that winds between grey boulders and verdant hillsides to reach the community. Samac has a lot of potential. Barely populated (comparatively), the valley is home to dozens of bird species, perhaps even Guatemala’s rare national bird, the blue-and-red quetzal. There are five major caves within walking distance of the cooperative’s main office. From the peaks of the surrounding hills it is said that you can see half of Verapaz, and coffee tours have been popular with tourists in Guatemala for years. But that wasn't what led me to wait an hour for the old green bus that runs four to five times a day from Coban out to Samac and a handful of other outlying communities. I went looking for a gauze-like white fabric called “picbi'l” that has been woven by the women of the Alta Verapaz for at least a thousand years, maybe longer.

In addition to working two days a week at the library and going into the CEDEPCA office to be an intern/office slave for a few days each month, I am also working with an organization called “Endangered Threads Documentaries,” which is working with the Ixchel Museum in Guatemala City to create a documentary about picbi´l and the women who weave it before this ancient art form disappears completely. Endangered Threads Documentaries has done work across Guatemala and throughout Central America, recording different forms of weaving in a world where these traditional arts are fast disappearing.

A white-on-white cotton fabric used to make the women’s traditional blouses, or huipiles, picbi'l is as thin as gauze and the patterns, woven into the weft using slightly thicker threads, are often ancient. Women such as Amalia, the president of a women’s weaving cooperative that has existed in Samac for the last four years, learn from their mothers and aunts. Most of the handful of women who continue to weave picbi'l cannot afford to wear it themselves. A month’s worth of work goes into a single huipil, which then sells for the equivalent of 30 to 40 dollars, if the women are lucky.

Amalia has a wide face with a smile to match. Q'eqchi is her mother tongue, although she can speak Spanish—but so shyly that I have to rely on a translator for help. She is 31 and has five children. She was born in a mountain village above Coban but settled in Samac after the war, having spent some time, I think, as a refugee. I can't really tell. Like all Guatemalans, she skirts the painful periods of her country’s history and its intersection with her life. She was introduced to me by Andrew, the local Peace Corps volunteer, who met me and my travel buddy (Anna, a fellow volunteer at the library) at the bus stop and led us up a narrow rough road, then a steep dirt path literally straight up the side of a hill to her family's home.

Carved into a natural indentation in the face of the hillside is a small clearing of hard packed dirt. An outhouse with a torn curtain stands about ten yards down the trail, and the hillsides surrounding the house are planted with a mix of corn, coffee, and sugarcane. Two houses share the space; both have thatched roofs and hard packed dirt for floors. The walls are wooden, but there are spaces between the boards. They keep out the rain, not much else. Amalia invites us in to one of these houses. There are three beds, wooden frames with wooden slates covered by blankets, and not much else. We sit on one of the beds. She brings us coffee—instant coffee made by Nestles that most Guatemalans drink. It's all they can afford despite the fact that many of them grow coffee beans that are considered some of the best in the world. We talk for two and a half hours. She shows me patterns, projects she's working on, and projects she's finished. We agree that I can come back in two weeks with a camera and she'll introduce me to more women and let me photograph her working.

The weaving is done on a simple back-strap loom. The women, or sometimes their husbands, build the looms; all you need is a little wood and the cotton for weaving. It's deceptively simple. Holding the final product, fine as gauze and light as unspun flax, you wouldn't think that it started life on a loom so small and simple that it could be rolled up and stored almost anywhere. Nilsa, Amalia's 9-year-old daughter, proudly showed off a project of her own, her second or third I think—by this point the Q’eqchi translator was chatting with another woman and I was making do with hand signals. Amalia admits that it is hard to make money weaving, but every extra cent the family earns can mean the difference between two meals of beans and tortillas a day, or three, the ability to visit a nurse if needed, or send a child to school. Despite the fact that there are electric lines running into Samac, Amalia's house has none. Her days begin just before dawn and end shortly after dusk. She talks excitedly about the future plans of the cooperative, and the ecotourism project. She sees an influx of outside visitors with money as the possible salvation of her craft, picbi'l. With each generation fewer women are learning to weave, a fact only compounded by the small but steady trickle of people from Guatemala's traditional countryside to the slums of Guatemala City, or north—towards the United States and (in either case) the hope of work that pays enough to live on, but often at the cost of people's original cultures.

Before I go Amalia gives me a scarf she has woven—a token of thanks for taking the time and interest to care about what she and the other 30 women in her cooperative are trying to do, and (I think) a hope that in the future the project I am working with (the documentary) will help keep picbi'l alive and maybe, just maybe, help her and other women get a price closer to what is fair when they sell their work.

I made it back to Chamelco around 5:00 p.m., just in time to catch an exceedingly crowded bus. I was convinced that I have been allowed a peek into a world so different from my own that I can barely imagine its realities. I can hardly wait to go back, to meet more of the women, to take their photos, and to start learning their stories. For once (and believe me, this was a surprise) I am looking forward to a volunteer retreat and wishing it were another two or three weeks into the future instead of tomorrow.

Callie Vandewiele