GUATEMALANS believe in overtaking. It is as integral to their lives as adoration of the Virgin Mary, rice and beans three times a day and wearing astonishingly incongruous slogans on their tshirts. My third day in Guatemala was spent squashed between two Franciscan monks, Gerry from Dublin and William, a Guatemalan in a battered Toyota pick up as we travelled to the Peten, the vast expanse of jungle that makes up the north of the country.
To my horror Gerry suddenly revved up and overtook a large open slatted truck which was in turn overtaking a bus. On a bend. With a large juggernaut coming. They had years of experience if not the law of probabilities on their side and we swerved neatly back into our lane without a pause in the discussion of the bishop's new car. Everyone overtakes with staggering regularity on Guatemala's curving potholed roads and only occasional crosses on the side of the road, slightly crooked and bedecked with fading plastic flowers, suggest it might be a lethal activity.
Unlike most people on the road we were not heading for Puerto Barrios, the fiercely disreputable Caribbean port, but to an orphanage on the Rio Dulce that may or may not have been expecting me, it was hard to know. I had sent off numerous letters from Ireland looking for short term voluntary work and out of the many refusals and few replies had picked out Casa Guatemala for its location, the work (with orphaned children) and its endearingly bad grammar ("Please to come and helping us!"). Unfortunately my enthusiastic promise of help had met with a stony silence and any phonecalls were answered by 10 year old girls who claimed no knowledge of the existence of myself or indeed an orphanage.
I was not expected but I need not have worried. I was greeted by "Oh good, have you come to volunteer? The afternoon shift is about to start and would you mind catching Gustavo, he's about to fall off the dock?" During the next few months I grew accustomed to this state of amicable chaos. I had never realised just how many ways small children can find to endanger their lives, particularly when surrounded on one side by jungle and the other by a large river. Add to this a very temperamental generator, an unreliable water supply, local staff that were both temperamental and unreliable and a vegetable delivery boat that might or might not come once a week and you start to get some idea of the oddities of orphanage life.
Quite apart from this were the oddities of the children themselves. Casa Guatemala is an independent organisation answering to neither church nor state but all the children were placed there by the court for a mixed bag of reasons. Some were street children from Guatemala City, others had large families who couldn't cope with another child. Yet others were like Pelon, who was frequently found walking with glazed eyes and arms raised, into the river, having seen all his family killed in this way by the state's militia while he hid in the trees.
Guatemala is still in the process of trying to assemble a lasting treaty between the guerrillas and the military, the last of the notoriously troubled Central American countries to do so. The orphanage was just one of many of the effects of over a decade of fighting and it was not even a particularly badly affected area. Gerry, an Irish Franciscan monk now resident in Guatemala, told me hair raising tales of entire villages on the run, continually hiding from military air attacks intended to wipe out "sympathisers with the guerrillas". Meanwhile, the guerrillas had slowly disintegrated from idealistic freedom fighters to bands roaming the roads, frequently stopping buses to steal from, terrorise and often kill the bewildered passengers.
I KNEW all about this violence Gerry talked of it, the papers in their obviously censored fashion talked of it, my mother had talked of nothing but it before I left. Yet had I managed to forget it I would never have guessed. Guatemala is one of the most beautiful, mysterious and, once you get away from the madness of the roads, calm places, possessing at times an almost primeval stillness. On reaching the top of Temple Four in Tikal, one of Central America's most complex and stunning Mayan ruins, all that can be seen is mile after mile of rolling jungle with the odd white stone temple breaking through the green. The only thing that jarred the illusion that I was living in the years before time began was the whirring camera of the German tourist beside me and an inescapable echo through the trees of "on your left you will see . . . Guatemala is rapidly being discovered.
Nowhere is this perhaps more obvious than around Lake Atitlan. Described by Aldous Huxley in Beyond the Mexique Bay as "Lake Como with the additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes", Atitlan has 13 different Indian villages huddled on its shores. On a much needed break from the orphanage I drifted to San Pedro, a village on the east shore. Its residents were an odd mixture of black plaited and industrious idigenas or indians, identically dressed in the woven blues and greens that denoted their village, scattered and defensive ladinos and a fair sprinkling of hippies, new age travellers and college students on a year out, who rented basic cottages and draped themselves round the village. It was an interesting if potentially volatile experiment in multi cultural living.
When I returned to the orphanage it was Christmas, literally an explosive time in Guatemala. Any festivities are celebrated by throwing firecrackers and the director of Casa Guatemala had, in some fit of madness, issued every child with 100 bangers. Thus, everything from the bloody and hysterical killing of the enormous hogs to the arrival of Santa Claus up the river on a motorboat complete with lop sided cardboard reindeers was accompanied by a battery of bangs and screams and the smell of gunpowder.
I watched it all with bemused and slightly nostalgic detachment, knowing that I was leaving in the New Year to travel on through Central America. It had been a different type of tourism; less expensive, slightly more interactive and a lot more rewarding but I retained that slightly baffled feeling of the tourist that someone somewhere is not telling them something. Maybe I'll learn when I start to overtake properly.