At Lake Atitlan, I spent a lot of time thinking about my project. We went to the textile cooperative in San Juan La Laguna, and there were many women wearing traje that were very different from what I had seen in Antigua. Even the difference in traje from San Juan La Laguna to Santiago Atitlan was drastic. During the semester in Austin, I felt like I struggled to conceptualize how traje varied. There was not a lot I could find on the associations between the styles and their specific locations. I also could not, for the life of me, understand how weavers assembled the sticks into a functioning loom, but after speaking to Delfina at the coop and seeing how they were put together in person, I could. She showed us the entire process from start to finish, from a ball of cotton to a woven table runner. Being able to see firsthand the different styles of traje and the weaving process made what I had gathered from my read research so much clearer.
Lake Atitlan was crucial for my project, but it was also the place where I learned the most about my classmates. After dinner, most of us went and got ice cream. We had a gathering in our rooms to play cards and talk. It was the last place we were before a lot of us started getting sick, so in retrospect, it feels like the lake was a haven.
It felt surreal to return to the US after spending a month with some of the coolest people I have ever met. Without our group, I don’t think the experience would have been anywhere near the same. This experience was completely different from traveling with my family or friends for leisure. I was always actively interacting with my environment and reflecting on the information I was learning. I always had something I wanted to write down. Balancing my time between my new friends, a new explorable environment, class, and my research in another country also, ultimately, turned out to be just as difficult as I imagined it, maybe more, but after a while, I got the hang of it.
I value everything that I learned or gained from this experience from my research to the friends I made on the way.
-Michelle Brun