This post was prompted by a question from a friend on a post I had published on Facebook, complaining about uncomfortable bus rides. The ride this morning from Nebaj, in the northern part of Quiché, to the city of Cobán in the department of Alta Verapaz, was particularly bad. I got to the gas station from which the bus departs before the bus had emerged from its parking spot, but the friend who was accompanying me held back for a moment when the bus pulled out, and two men who had arrived after me rushed onto the bus and got better seats (seats not over the wheels). Although this was what Guatemalans call a coaster -- a slightly roomier van than a mini-van, with a higher ceiling, and thus slightly higher class than what is classified as a microbus-- it quickly got very crowded, and ended up carrying twice as many people as there were original seats. Bus owners add extra fold-down seats, so that there is a solid row of seating from wall to wall with no aisle; when someone wants to get to one of the back rows, or get to the door to leave, the people sitting in the fold-down seats have to get up. Very often there are women with babies or adults of both sexes with young children. In a typical coaster row, there are two seats on the LH side of the aisle and a single seat on the RH side, but today the driver's assistant (more about them later) made us squeeze in 5 people across, with children or babies on laps making 6 people across. Forget about seat belts or baby seats; the former are of no concern to the bus drivers/owners, and the latter are beyond the means of the poor rural folks who have no choice put to crowd onto these buses.
As much as I might grumble about having to be literally squished between people, and as resentful as I am of the ayudantes (assistants) who, no matter how cramped and crowded the bus in, insist upon squeezing even more people in, assuring people who are waiting along the road that there is room, I understand why people who live in rural areas where there might only be a few buses a day will cram onto a bus where they are not going to get a seat, and will spend a couple of hours standing, trying not to lose their balance and crush their babies or other passengers as the bus swerves around treacherous hairpin turns in the mountains, or lurches along dirt roads covered with gravel as the bus moves beyond where the pavement ends.
The route I was traveling today, from Nebaj to Cobán, is traversed by precisely one bus a day, that leaves from a gas station in Nebaj supposedly at 5:00 a.m. (my most gracious host and I were alternately told that the bus was at 4:45 and at 5, so we made sure we were at the gas station before 4:45). The bus winds its way southward down steep roads to the town of Cunén, and then picks up the east-west highway (although that word is only applicable for part of the distance) that connects Quiché and Alta Verapaz. Possibly there is more frequent bus service between Cunén and Cobán, but there were a lot of people who filled up the seats that emptied as people got off at Cunén.
In addition to the overcrowding (there were about 32 people on the bus at its peak this morning, with 2 young men half-hanging out the open door), it seems to be obligatory for bus drivers to play loud music for the entire bus ride. Today's driver had his radio tuned to some station or playlist from El Salvador that promoted itself as a station for los microbuseros (microbus drivers), which played a pretty non-descript mix -- I don't remember anything much other than rancheras and duranguenses, but it was loud enough to prevent me from catching any rest.
The lack of sanitary facilities kept me from dipping into my water bottle -- I was told there would be a stop in Uspantán -- Rigoberta Menchú's home municipality, for what that's worth -- but the driver said we were behind and he stopped for precisely 4 minutes in Uspantán, not enough time to risk the effort. There was a slightly longer stop in Chicamán, but I wasn't sure how long the stop was going to last and there was no public restroom visible. I had hoped to eat an actual breakfast on the road -- there are generally comedores where the buses stop, but the one comedor I tried in Chicamán told me that they wouldn't be able to make me eggs before the bus left. Really? Scrambled eggs takes all of a few minutes to make and presumably they already have the tortillas and beans ready. But I wasn't going to argue. The woman could have made 4 plates of scrambled eggs in the time it took me to walk around the few "stalls" (they weren't really stalls) around the park where women were serving up cold cereal (corn flakes and some variant of Fruit Loops seem to be popular) and small dense tamales called chuchitos (wrapped in dried corn husks rather than fresh leaves), and find someone who was able to change a Q20 note. One of the persistent problems with street food in Guatemala is that vendors never have change. And so the first woman I spoke to, whose chuchitos actually looked better than the one I ended up buying, lost the sale because she didn't have change (and neither did I -- I end up using all my change when I have to buy something in a small store or on the street).
But I'm getting away from the reason I started this blog post. It wasn't really to tell you about my trip from Nebaj to Cobán -- which ended up taking quite a big longer than I had been told -- but to ask that we (and by that I mean folks from the U.S.) stop using the term "chicken bus".
As I was saying back up at the top, this post was prompted by a friend's question about my bus ride: "Were there any chickens?" I explained that people don't usually bring live poultry onto long-distance buses, and that I've only occasionally seen people with live poultry on local buses in rural areas -- and by "local" I don't mean intra-urban, but buses that connect the town center with the outlying hamlets.A lot of people travel from rural hamlets into the nearby towns for market day, and while there is plenty of already-slaughtered meat and poultry available at markets, there are also usually people selling live poultry. Gallinas criollas (the equivalent to "pastured" or "free range" chickens) are a delicacy for folks who don't have their own, and people often prefer to buy the poultry live and slaughter it themselves. So logically if you buy a live chicken or duck or goose, you pop it into a bag and bring it home with you.
But then I started to think about the term "chicken bus" which I mentioned in my most recent blog post, and realized that it's a problematic term. We use it in a disparaging way, even if we mean it as a joke. In much of the world, people still raise poultry and livestock in their homes or yards. I don't mean big industrial farms, but subsistence farmers throughout the world. Even in major cities like New York, in some ethnic enclaves (South Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, probably Queens, and in some of the Chinatowns) it's possible to buy live poultry and either have it slaughtered for you, or slaughter it yourself. It's unremarkable. It's not exotic, or strange, or a curiosity. It's very quotidian. But labeling the buses that are the only transportation available for people in rural areas in the so-called developing world "chicken buses" serves to exoticize and, although not always intentionally, disparage and demean the people for whom there's nothing out of the ordinary about purchasing live animals and bringing them home on the only means of transport available. I think it also dehumanizes the people who use those buses also. The subtext is, "Oh, those poor unfortunate souls who have to share their transportation with animals. Thank goodness we don't have to do that." No, because you (the person who uses the term "chicken bus") can go to an air-conditioned supermarket where the chickens are already slaughtered, cleaned, cut up and packaged in styrofoam and plastic wrap (or maybe you go to a ecologically conscious market that doesn't use styrofoam). Well, for much of human history we humans lived with animals, and people still do in some parts of the world (less so now than previously, as urbanization, migration, monocultures and biofuels undermine subsistence farming and rural lifeways). There's a famous serious of ethnographic documentaries about the Turkana in eastern African by filmmakers Judith and David MacDougall called Living with Herds. We make the people in Africa, Asia and Latin America who still have a more direct relationship with live animals somehow lesser than us by referring to their transportation in this way. And we elide the humans by labeling the buses by their occasional avian passengers.
As I noted in the previous post, Guatemalans don't use the term "chicken bus" and when I started to explain the term and what it signifies to North Americans, I was met with slightly puzzled looks. People here categorize buses by the routes they travel, and the kind of vehicle -- converted school bus, mini-van, or fancier bus. Bringing a basket or a bag of poultry onto a bus isn't the distinguishing or defining characteristic, since people can and do bring live poultry onto all of these kinds of buses except the fancy ones with reserved seats depending upon where the bus is going and what else might be available.
So enough with "chicken bus". At least in my company.
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