Los Autobuses

Guatemalan buses are the craziest thing you’ll ever see here. Except for four people and a baby on a motorbike, speeding down the main highway. But buses are the more prevalent. There are a whole bunch of numbered buses (retired Blue Birds for the most part) that run up and down the main highways and circle all of the zones. I take one bus to and from school, #203, a trip that lasts about 20 minutes if there’s no traffic, but several of the CASAS students take two buses, with a trip totaling over an hour.

On every bus, there’s a driver and the man who shouts. The driver squeezes into impossible spaces and drives erratically with jolts and sudden stops. The man who shouts does just that – shouts. At the top of his voice. At each stop, he shouts about the next stop, or the main stops on the line. As people get on, its “Al fondo, al fondo, vamos por atras, por fav, por fav!” “To the back, let’s fill the middle, please, get going!” The man who shouts also collects our money and shoves people onto the bus if necessary. Nearly every morning, the buses are packed. Jam packed. People are packed in like the overused sardine cliché. There are usually people hanging out both exits, sometimes with only one foot and one hand actually attached to the bus. Picture an ordinary school bus with two people in each seat, and three people wide in the aisle. In the aisle, that’s right. In that 2.5’ wide aisle. Three people across. If one is sitting, there’s usually a man’s crotch pinned to one’s shoulder. If one is standing, there’s usually a tiny indigenous woman that comes up to one’s armpit clinging desperately to the seat back, and/or one’s backpack is precariously close to giving another passenger a nosebleed or black eye. Woe betides if one needs to get off at the next stop and one is in the middle of the bus. That requires extensive maneuvering, rude shoving, cursory “permiso, permiso”s, and finally, nearly falling off the bus as everyone shoves everyone else to get off. As a result of riding the buses every day, twice a day, I have a highly altered sense of personal space. It’s at about zero. There are a lot of legitimately good-looking guys on the buses, though, and that’s a plus.

This weekend, our group is taking a much-anticipated (and very tardy) trip to Lake Atitlán, a famously beautiful place south of the city. The following week will be our last with our host families before we move on to the service component of our time here. We haven’t been assigned yet, but my two choices are a medical clinic in Santiago, Atitlán and a medical clinic in San Salvador, El Salvador. Medicine in Spanish. It doesn’t get any better.