The dwellings at Xamamatze were like tractor barns. Low wooden structures around three sides of a mud pit the size of a high school football field. Indigenous people lived there, people who had been living in the jungle for eight years. They had no privacy. They lay at night on plank shelves. They covered up with felt blankets, blankets stiff and never long enough or wide enough. The teacher in the cell they called a school said that when the people came down from the jungle to Xamamatze their children had no clothes. The children were very much afraid, she said. The walls were covered with children’s drawings on foolscap. Helicopters. Bursts of gunfire. Leaflets falling from the sky. The army leafleted the people and urged them to return, and when the people finally did return, they were placed at Xamamatze for ninety days of reeducation. We did not see a single armed soldier, though they must have been there, beyond the trees. Women ran from us, in fear or shyness, I could not tell, around the stacks of UN rice and beans in fifty-pound bags.

This is such old news, isn’t it? Picture the earth, almost eight thousand miles around at the equator, picture the pockets of refugees. Maps are available. You can purchase such information. Demographics creates such order, knowledge, pattern, security of a sort to the onlooker. While down on the ground, down in the mud, we heard a woman singing a lullaby in Ixil. She knelt at a backstrap loom, her baby nearby in a makeshift hammock made of cotton sacks. She had rigged a stick and swing to rock the baby in his rag cradle. Never missing a stroke of weaving.

Dark, it was dark in there, no windows.

The men stood around outside, talking, crocheting. Crocheting bags is the work of men, you will see them other places, men who’ve been reeducated to their patriotism, men who’ve gone back to villages and built new villages, and now they serve as civil patrol, carrying heavy World War I Mausers around the village all day long and crocheting, with the rifles in the crooks of their arms. And if they refuse to serve in the civil patrol, if they lay down their arms and prefer to grow corn, they might be disappeared. They might be found with their mouths burned from the sticks of fire, what we call cattle prods. But at Xamamatze the men had no weapons yet. They might speak to you of Gandhi. They might speak of Vietnam. And at Xamamatze what they had learned of the wide world had to be cast out like devils. They saluted the Guatemalan flag several times a day. They recited the army’s vow of friendship toward them.

We visited, delivered seven crates of mangoes and piñas, delivered bundles of yarn and thread, and I treated a woman who had been bitten by a pig that had wandered down to Xamamatze from the army base. We found her lying on a ragged tapete on the dirt floor, her gathered skirt pulled up above her bitten calf. Circles of flesh the size of two nickels had been torn away around the teeth marks. The skin was swollen and bruised. A trickle of blood had dried all the way to her ankle. There was no doctor that day, but a doctor did come around, three days at a time, every ten days, and there was a padlocked clinic. Dixie talked the man in charge into letting me in. I felt capable for the first time in a while. The woman had been given a tetanus shot upon arrival at Xamamatze. Her husband had the wrinkled vaccination card to prove that. In the one-room clinic I found what I needed, penicillin in the fridge, potassium permanganate, Neosporin, bandages. I knelt down beside the woman, and she had the brownish stains on her teeth from not eating right for a long, long time. She had pellegra, patchy, scalded-looking flesh on her legs, from lack of niacin. I knelt down and treated her and all my molecules that had been scattered with my sorrow to the winds, all my molecules caught up with me, and I felt that I was where I was supposed to be. Kneeling down before an injured woman.

We did not stay there long. Dixie bought a crocheted bag for thirty Qs from a man who had been a teacher before the violence. The man’s wife was pregnant and he made Dixie promise that he’d come back soon, very soon, to baptize the baby and Dixie said he would do his best to return. That bag’s overpriced, Dixie said, but I knew him. Antes.

What I remember of that day is this. People loved him.