Doña Chona seems tired but she isn’t frightened. And by frightened I mean the frightened you see deep in the eyes of most human beings. A frightened that hides itself well. A frightened that quietly shouts its assumption of isolation, and of loneliness.

I shot this film in Guatemala, and subsequently worked out the meaning of this extraordinary encounter whilst spinning in the depths of a dream and drinking strong coffee.

Film Transcript

Doña Chona seems tired but she isn’t frightened. And by frightened I mean the frightened you see deep in the eyes of most human beings. A frightened that hides itself well. A frightened that quietly shouts its assumption of isolation, and of loneliness.

Doña Chona’s eyes aren’t frightened.

We weren’t actually meant to be here. But we didn’t realise that until long after we’d left. We’d arranged to meet a different character altogether but somehow found ourselves in the spartan dimly lit backroom of a woman who at 83 had been working as a midwife for 68 years.

Her beautifully lived in face told a tale but it wasn’t until many months after the encounter that I worked out what that tale was and what the contours of that extraordinary face had been whispering with all its might.

It seems to me that the tale of any soul has an ability to reveal itself when it chooses. And not when the observer expects too forcefully. Perhaps it reveals itself only when the observer is able to hear such a tale.

There are many of us in the room, unusually, and the discussion ripples up and down the line. From English to Spanish to Tz’utujil and back again. She doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Tz’utujil. And neither of us speaks Spanish. But soon we drop the translation into English and I’m forced to listen beyond the words. It helps. Later a written translation paints the detail.

She talks to us about her job and the point at which she knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was her life’s work. Work for which she has seldom been paid. Work to which she’s devoted. She is here to serve. That is obvious. She says it’s her destiny. She has been certain for many many years.

And alongside her words it seems that there’s a whisper. It’s quiet but it’s there.

 She talks of a happiness that fills her heart. A joy. That exists night and day. Perhaps it’s because she’s there when a soul chooses to emerge. Or might that be re-emerge?

She tells us of how her father prayed that she would ‘carry entire towns’. She had been just 7 years old. And now it seems that she has carried entire towns with the wisdom that is so close to her surface.

6 of her 10 children died as children and she remains abjectly poor by the material expectations of most who’ll read or hear this. But she’s wealthy in a way few have yet realised is possible. It’s something I’ve encountered everywhere in this nation of old souls.

But Doña Chona also talks of social obedience and of the many decisions that she’s had to force herself to follow against her immense yet humble sense of self. It’s probably this that contributes to a very human tiredness.

All her childhood friends have left this world and as she continues through her story the words begin to show signs of this tiredness. But the whisper that exists alongside these words seem to me to intensify.

Somehow she found a way to exist within a system. A way to live a magnificent life within a paradox of social obedience and freedom. It appears that it is possible. For anyone that might care to choose. For you and me.

I sit there and listen to the words I don’t understand but somehow know that I do.

I can’t immediately express what’s being encountered. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. This much I do know.