Attractions were ahead and we were to keep walking- walk until we understood all he attempted to teach us. Thankfully, I learned much of what my mind yearned for the moment I saw this woman. She was bent as if she had a medical condition, yet her gait was more powerful than I ever practiced during this youth. They said if you had a healthy life and strength, clothing style was inferior and irrelevant. Still, she wrapped herself in a decorative scarf similar to my mother’s taste, similar to my own taste. Her dangling earrings portrayed her femininity and perhaps, importance towards beauty. She may have worn this dress for the past several days, but unwashed clothing did not taint her majestic beauty. I lived within a society demanding a freshly dressed appearance on the daily, but this woman oxygenated my system through simplistic clothing and gathered hair.
I heard a man compliment 108 years of age and I turned around, desperately searching for this person he spoke of. I felt rising goose bumps on recently shaved skin as I caught her walking at a pace faster than my athletic little sister; a pace I struggled to keep up with. Finally, reaching her level (not even close), I gestured towards the camera hoping to photographically capture this moment. Privileged to kneel beside her, I looked up into her eyes, blacker than ever seen:
P: “Espagnol?”
W: … “Maya”
I felt my eyes widening and consciously hoped to not appear discriminative. I felt my heart dropping, as if an elevator was making several stops before reaching the bottom floor. I wondered if she was okay. I thought about anything she may need and how to help her, understanding her culture was fading and her people may not exist. On the other hand, I vocalized nothing but stared at her in amazement.
How was she able to keep on going when her kind was fading? Amongst a community so self-centered and ethnocentric, she strived to keep her Mayan culture alive. How could she live knowing her home had become a tourist site? How could she selflessly become an object of photography to satisfy foreign curiosity? I wondered if she understood what was happening around her; how they pointed towards her as one of the left overs. To live in a world with scarce mention of your cultural existence, to think of all the children reading about your history and extinction- how could she live with so much kindness and love rather than anger and resentment? I thought of all those hoping to die, preparing suicidal plans or signing papers of Euthanasia. She was alone, thin as bones, mutely living beyond the average, and persistently engraving her culture into all that remained.
The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica. Originating in the Yucatán around 2600 B.C., they rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras. Building on the inherited inventions and ideas of earlier civilizations such as the Olmec, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing. The Maya were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples:
http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/maya/mmc01eng.shtml