Tactic

Tactic, Alta Verapaz

It was my real first visit to the Pocomchí project in central Guatemala. I knew I had to go to the Monja Blanca bus terminal in Guatemala City and --after nearly five hours’ ride north-- be certain to get before the bus veered off northwest toward Cobán. The only way to be sure to get off at the right place was to tell the driver where you were going and ask him to let you know when you got there. This I did, and I sat near the front on the left side of the bus so he would see me in his review mirror and not forget.

He let me off a short distance from the town, and I knew that I had to walk about two and a half kilometers (a mile and a quarter) to get to the only place in town where I could rent a room: La Pensión Central. And I would have to lug my suitcase and laptop computer with me!

I don’t know a really good English word for pensión except perhaps “flophouse”. But this translation seems more than adequate in this case. The manager appeared from the back of this one-story hotel, took one look at my Nordic features, assumed I had money and offered me the deluxe room. “Deluxe” meant that it had a toilet (en suite, as the Europeans say), a miniscule sink and a pipe sticking straight out from the wall which served as a shower. The room was quite narrow, perhaps six by twelve feet, and along one side was an even narrower cot with a straw mattress. I shook the proprietor’s hand and said, “I’ll take it!” How could you go wrong at $1.75 per night?

Now I had to get organized. I had to unpack the things I would need for working with the project, try to find where the project was located, etc. But I quickly perceived a problem. My room could be locked from the inside by barring it, but there was no way to lock it from the outside. Clearly the assumption was that roomers would rent the room, spend the night and leave the next morning. But I intended to stay for seven days and had to find a way to secure the room while I was at the project.

In traditional colonial style, there were actually two doors that met in the middle. It seemed to me that I could get two eye screws and a padlock, close the doors from the outside, insert one screw into the center edge of each door and then thread the padlock through both eyes and lock the two doors together. Ingenious!

First I needed to go out in search of a store where I could buy two eye screws and a padlock, taking my suitcase and laptop with me. I quickly discovered that –while there is no shortage of tiny stores in Tactic—there is indeed a very different system of classifying them on the basis of their merchandise. In one store they sold nylon stockings, votive candles and deodorant. In another, scissors, tuna and light bulbs. And in yet another, ballpoint pens, yarn, little bowls and machetes.

This led me to believe that there was no good basis for assuming that I would find the screws and lock in the same store, which indeed turned out to be true. I did eventually find both the screws and the lock, but I have yet to unravel the system of store classification used in Tactic. However, having read George Lakoff’s book Fire, Women and Dangerous Things. I don’t doubt for one minute that they have one!