It’s close to midnight, two weeks into a writing residency in New Hampshire, where I’ve come to finish a novel. My phone rings.
From Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, comes the voice of a woman: “I left the key to my little house on the bed. Can someone open it for me?
I’ll solve it now, I tell him. A few hours earlier, she had spent an hour on the phone with a plumber, ordering wood for a sauna.
There is rarely a day when I am not busy with at least one guest staying in the modest place I bought 23 years ago as a writing retreat.
My story in Central America began more than 50 years ago, at age 11, when my mother took my sister and me on a trip from Texas to San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. My experience of indigenous culture opened my world.
A decade later, I joined an orchid hunt in Guatemala. It didn’t matter that a civil war was raging.
Our slashed tires didn’t stop me from falling in love with the country—in particular, the turquoise Lake Atitlán and the people who lived there.
I swore I would return, although it was years before I did. By then, she had raised three children. I rented a small house on the shores of the lake, enrolled in salsa classes, wrote a novel, and experienced a greater sense of well-being than I had felt in years.
Every morning he swam in the lake. It was on one of my swims that I saw a sign: For Sale. The terrain was steep, overgrown with brush, with a small adobe house. Across the water was one of the five volcanoes that surround the lake.
I raised 85 thousand dollars to buy approximately one hectare of land. I called the place Casa Paloma. A few times a year, I traveled there to write and swim. Having recognized that this was a place that offered inspiration, I began a writing workshop, hosting a small group of women for a week each winter. They stayed in a simple hotel in town, but they met at Casa Paloma every day.
A lot changed in those years. Travelers arrived in greater numbers, along with little shops advertising healers, yoga teachers and shamans. I built a sauna and a small guest house. Back in California, I fell in love with my second husband, Jim.
The year after we got married, Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The two of us traveled to the lake together for what turned out to be his last winter. After he died, I came back alone.
I had scheduled a workshop for March 2020, the month the pandemic hit the United States. She wasn’t sure if anyone would come, but 16 women traveled there.
Two days later, the President of Guatemala announced the closure of the airport. The US State Department provided a plane to take citizens home. But I decided to stay and invited two of the women to accompany me. We ended up staying six months.
The townspeople seemed Covid-free. But without tourists, they had no way to support their families. So I embarked on the project of building a guest house. Every day, about 20 men went down the slope.
In the months that followed, I continued coming up with construction projects. Five more houses. One had stone walls with built-in hand-carved stone heads. I bought a chair made by a local craftsman.
Paying the men a good local wage pushed me over the edge. But I knew that when you give one person a job in this town, a family of 10 will eat that night.
It occurred to me that if a person empties their bank account to build a 16-guest property that requires a team of 20+ people, the place can’t stay empty. And that’s how I became the hostess of a hotel and retreat center.
Over the past year, my team, now made up almost entirely of local men and women, has hosted over 300 groups of guests.
In 2020, with the men still working, I began another novel about a woman from the US who, after a personal tragedy, lands in a small town on the shores of a lake surrounded by volcanoes, in an unnamed Central American country. She unexpectedly finds herself running a magical hotel surrounded by orchids and birds.
At the time, I believed what I was writing was a work of fiction. It was a year later that the idea occurred to me: I had built a hotel myself. Now I’d better figure out how to run one. And I did it.
“When you give one person a job in this town, a family of 10 will eat.”
By: JOYCE MAYNARD
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6790210, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-04 20:50:06
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