“Little Now”

One of the first things that I noticed while trying to transition my broken Cuban Spanish into ‘chapin’ is Guatemala’s apparent obsession with the –ita suffix. Maybe it stems from the stereotypical stature of the Guatemalan people or from their affinity for the endearing. Either way, it has a tendency to turn things on their head. The three letters have the ability to transform a pulga, a despised parasite, into a pulgita, a Pixar-cute flea. When I’m offered another helping after an enormous meal, my go-to response, “no gracias, estoy bien llenita,” magically puts a cute spin on my grossly engorged belly. But my favorite example of the –ita’s enchanting spell is with the word ahorita: “little now”. As many of my close friends and family members will enthusiastically attest, time has always been a very abstract and difficult-to-grasp concept for me. So when I learned that Guatemalans had completely erased the notion of a now and replaced it with a little now, I thought that they had cracked the code.  See to me there’s really no such thing as a now; there’s just a past and a future. If land is the past and the sky the future, then the horizon is the present. A constant line between two real things. But the horizon itself is not a definite entity; it is a construct of our own, manufactured by our brains to help us grasp the difference between earth and air.

I know that to many people, especially the “live in the now” crowd, this sounds senseless or even depressing. But to me, it reminds me that my sense of now is really just a little part of a much bigger picture. It reminds me to never forget where I’ve come from and to always look forward to where I can go. I am constantly building off my past and simultaneously laying the foundation for my future. Every moment of my little now is part of two much grander things: who I was and who I will be. This has been super relevant for me as I go through PC training. I’m constantly learning new things, and with each new thing I think back on a past experience and a future one. How have I successfully or unsuccessfully done this before? And how can I improve in the future? Sometimes this mindset can be exhausting and overwhelming, and I can admittedly get too caught up in obsessing over the past or crazily planning for the future. But working in health and development, I think that keeping the past and the future constantly on the forefront of our minds is crucial. How else can we build off past experiences and mistakes while beginning to devise a healthier and more equitable future?

Guatemalan time is a very fluid thing. On-time can mean an hour late, and a five-minute walk can turn into a 20 minute tour of “buenos días.” So really here there is no exact now. Guatemalans don’t define themselves like we do back in America (“What do you do?” or “Where do you work?”).Instead they describe themselves by two things: who and where they come from (the past) and their children (the future). Guatemala is a lively mix of the old, represented by the Mayan ruins, the cobblestone streets of Antigua, or the guipils of the indigenous women, and the new of bustling Guatemala City, dynamic political discussions, and exciting development projects. Lost in this confusing swirl of past and future is where I feel most at home. Ahorita is just little now; really I’m part of so much more.