Happy Mayan New Year!

by Global Ministries | published on Oct 10, 2014

Greetings and Happy New Year to all! Happy Mayan New Year that is!
Not that I have completely forgotten to wish everyone a timely Happy New Year back in January, but the fact is that the Mayan New Year took place on 21st February this year.

The Mayan calendar follows an eighteen month cycle with each month being eighteen days long, plus one five-day month together adding up 365 days. The Wayeb’, or the five-day month, is the last month of the Mayan calendar year which is an important time dedicated to peacefulness, discernment, rest, retrospect, and reflection. It is a time of the year to give thanks and to reflect about one’s actions and life decisions throughout the year. It is also a time to think and ask for better family and personal relationships, a time to ask the Heart of Sky and Heart of Earth for continued prosperity and fertility and for the elements that nourish our bodies and spirit like earth, water, air, and fire.

Greetings and Happy New Year to all! Happy Mayan New Year that is! Not that I have completely forgotten to wish everyone a timely Happy New Year back in January, but the fact is that the Mayan New Year took place on 21st of February this year.

This New Year’s celebration was especially important because I began the year accompanying a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) pastor’s delegation from Indianapolis (6) and Iowa (1). The group, a story telling peer group shared their expectations and hopes to be able to listen, feel and learn stories and testimonies of faith from the different communities they would visit. As pastors who tell stories, their hope was to be able to hear and feel the pain and suffering, hope and courage, and perhaps shed tears during their trip and to take those stories to their own communities in the United States. Delegations have been an important aspect of the work for the Ecumenical Christian Council of Guatemala for two reasons. The first one helps the partnership with Global Ministries become more perceptible, more tangible. The second allows our northern community to spend a day in the life of brothers and sisters who have being victims of the internal armed conflict in Guatemala. It allows us to understand the meaning of accompaniment, by listening and understanding suffering, pain and history.

Spending a day in the life of the different communities we visited did not necessarily mean exclusively meeting people who have been damaged by the war, psychologically and/or emotionally like a widow’s collective who shared personal testimonies of the atrocities committed by the army and visiting the National Police Archive where a professional team of archivists have processed millions of documents that the Guatemalan National Police filed and secluded, and which have been directly linked to human rights violations like forced disappearances and kidnappings. The experience also meant meeting people who survived a forty year old civil war, and who have survived over 500 years of colonialism and the establishment of a feudal system that has left its traces through vast latifundium all over present day Guatemala. This allows one to understand how an old western system of domination and exploitation as the feudal system has left the majority of the population, mostly Mayan, internally displaced, marginalized, discriminated and lacking basic social services like education and health care. According to a world bank’s report for example, “The Human Development Index (2013) ranks Guatemala 133 among 187 ranked countries and in last place in Central America.” The report continues by noting that “Guatemala is the biggest economy in Central America but is among Latin American countries with the highest levels of inequality”.

Accordingly, and on a moderately optimistic note, another highlight for this year’s first delegation was having the opportunity to spend the Wayeb’ in Guatemala and being invited to participate in the celebratory activities to welcome the Mayan New Year with our brothers and sisters from the Ixil Nation, one of the Mayan nations that endured and survived the armed conflict. For the Ixil, as for other Mayan nations in the country, survival does not only mean surviving a war and colonial history, but a continued survival which is represented with what the Maya call the B’atz’ or thread in the Mayan calendar. B’atz’, symbolizing time unwound, evolution and human life, intelligence and wisdom in infinite time. Therefore, survival is represents as sustained prosperity and evolution through educational growth with cultural pertinence and dignity. Thus, the delegation learned about the Ixil University, which included hearing the methodology which is governed by ancestral practices, ways of knowing and putting to practice ancestral codes of conduct that involve nurturing interpersonal relationships between elders and youth, with the elders being the source of knowledge and orientation, the process resulting in what I call reversed cultural assimilation. With discrimination and racism being part of the social, cultural, and political problems in Guatemala, it is very easy for young Maya to assimilate the status quo and its culture. This assimilation, as the Ixil explain it, has been a cause of disparity and disrespect between new generations and the elders. This is why at the Ixil University, its methodology is designed so that students can re-assimilate and understand their own culture.

Western thought is not necessarily perceived as negative, nor is it rejected. It is, however, perceived as another way of thinking and another culture that has allowed for specialized technological tools to be incorporated during the latter part of student’s studies at the Ixil University. High tech Geographical Information Systems (GIS), for example, are used so that students can understand spatial geography from the local perspective. Understanding their local geography as a way to understand their community and their culture, as opposed to what the traditional educational system does which is to assimilate students in understanding the establishment of the Guatemalan Republic as a nation state, assist in helping children to not uncritically assimilate into the imposed culture.

I invite you to accompany me in celebrating our partnership with Guatemala and celebrating the lives of men and women who have had the courage to share what are, at times, difficult and sometimes painful experiences from the war. I also ask you to join me in celebrating the lives of great leaders who believe in the rights, identity and dignity of the Mayan people and who sacrifice their lives so that future generations can have access to a more holistic and integral education as well as access to sustained prosperity.

On that note, please accept my wishes for a hopeful, peaceful and justice seeking New Year.

Respectfully,

Gloria Vicente serves with Consejo Ecumenico Cristiano de Guatemala