From another perspective

My house is the wooden one there with the blue shutters. You go inside and the floor is gravel, but smoothed over by years of feet passing over it.

It faces the road that goes through town. I like to look out the window and watch the passing people and trucks.

Every day, my neighbor passes by on the way to work. He labors all day in the corn fields, up the mountain. Also his wife goes by, carrying baskets of dough on her head. My mother goes out to meet her with a basket of banana leaves. They go around to restaurants and houses, selling the dough and leaves to people for making tortillas and tamales.

In the mornings, after I watch my mother and father leave, a truck comes by and my brother and I climb on back with some other boys. My brother is bigger so he goes to work in the fields. He picks lettuce now, it is the season. I go to the bilingual school. It is bilingual because we are supposed to learn Spanish there. My language is Kaq´chi. Spanish is hard for me. I like music class, though. I play the drums.

Sometimes after school I go to the town store to buy a tamal or some candy. There is one place I like to go. Next to it there is a new restaurant that just opened. I went there once with my mother when she was selling dough for tortillas. They told her they didn´t want tortillas, that the people who eat there don´t like tortillas. These people, they are not from here. They are from someplace else, afuera. They have light hair, like the color of maíz, and eyes the color of the sky when it´s not raining--I swear, they do.

When we went in, all the people there were drinking beer and eating big plates of food, and laughing. They had strange clothes with bright colors. I think maybe they do not have baths where they come from, because they all looked like they did not clean themselves usually.

They were speaking in a language I did not understand, and I realized that one of them was speaking to me. I was scared because I didn´t know how to talk to her. She was waving something black at me, and I thought it was a radio, but then she held it up to me and it made a big light in my face. She laughed and showed me the thing, and there was a photo of me on it, suddenly. I had never seen a camera like that before. I only saw a camera once, in school, when someone from the government came to take pictures of us in class one day.

Then the girl took another picture, of my feet. She was pointing at them, and saying something. I was barefoot. I only have one pair of shoes, and I keep them at school, so I don´t get them dirty when I am walking outside or playing soccer. I will wear them out too soon if I wear them all the time.

Now, I see these people every morning when I am watching out my window. They come in their own special buses, not the same ones we use to go to town. They always go to that restaurant, or sometimes to the internet café. Once, I was sitting outside the internet, just waiting for my mother, and one of them gave me a Quetzal for no reason. I was confused, because I was not selling anything, and I wanted to tell him, but he patted me on the head and smiled and walked away.

My friend at school says these people from afuera are very rich, the richest people in the world, and so we should steal from them. I don´t really want to steal. But when I see how fat they are, and how much beer they drink, and all the cameras they have, I believe they really must be the richest people in the world. They even have their own buses. And I have never seen them selling anything, like tortillas, or blankets, so maybe they don´t even have to work.

To me, it´s not important. I just go to school and play soccer in the evenings. I help my father get the firewood, and I help my mother make the dough, and when I am big I will go work in the fields with my brother. If these rich people want to come to my town, I don´t care. But, I would not mind if I could ride in my own special bus. And I would like to have some of these brightly colored clothes that look like they are so brand new, you could wear them to school and to soccer and they would never get holes in them. And maybe, just some day, I could have a camera, just to see what it´s like to press that button on the box and make my very own picture.