Art of Storytelling Thrives in Guatemala
It’s mostly Peace Corp volunteers who are brave enough to take the chicken bus in Guatemala. While the pimped out buses are often packed like sardines with Guatemala’s lower-class, if you brave a ride, you’re in for a treat. The ancient art of selling everything from magic elixirs to glue sticks through artful and elaborate narration thrives on these recycled school buses. One blogger shares his experience while traveling to Chichicastenango. For those wanting to experience the tales of a modern day snake doctor first hand, wander to the “bus station” behind the market in La Antigua and board a bus. You shouldn’t have to wait to long before a soliloquy starts.
I’m talking about the real thing–the carnival barker, the frontier snake oil salesman, the witch hunter. I didn’t think that was something you could see anymore in a public setting: a silver-tongued philanthropic capitalist addressing a preferably credulous public in order to convince them at length and in grand style to buy whatever it is. In Guatemala I was astonished and really very happy to find that tradition thriving. These people are serious storytellers, doing it to survive.
I took a series of chickenbuses to Chichcastenango, a highland maya town on a hilly plateau at about 6,000 feet where they have a big market on Thursdays and Sundays. It was windy and cold and the thin air made it hard to walk uphill. At one end of town, there’s a pastel-colored graveyard on a cliff, at the other, a stark white church built in 1600 on whose steps the local adherents of the maya religion make their offerings of flowers, tobacco and copal.
Five steps into the market I met a lady selling packets of medicine to kill stomach parasites, ringworm and the like. Four pills for four days. She had a collection of specimens–actual stomach parasites preserved in alcohol in baby food jars. She picked them up one at a time as she lectured. “Look at the size of this one,” she’d say. “This demon came out of the belly of a twelve year old girl.”
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