The Person You Meet When You Least Expect It

I’ve always loved to laugh and considered myself to giggle more than the average person. It was a trait that I didn’t necessarily love about myself after being labelled as silly and ditsy for much of my life. That changed when I met Anat and Emily.  

We move from belly-laughing about which kitchen utensil best represents our personalities to debating the ethics of genetically modified food in a matter of minutes. Rarely does ten minutes go by without a laugh escaping from at least one of us.

After finishing our teaching year in Spain, where we had met, we spent months sending applications into the void of our respective job markets with a success rate of zero. We took it as a sign: we needed one last adventure. 

And while our friendship deserves to be written about, and one day it will be, this story belongs to Anita, an elderly Maya woman whom we met on our journey. 

We first came across Trama Textiles while scouring for volunteer opportunities in Guatemala. After reading the organisation’s description, we knew this was the place we’d volunteer at. Trama Textiles is a weaving cooperative that is 100% owned by Maya women and ensures that they are paid fairly for their artwork. 

We arrived in Quetzaltenango after a 14-hour bus ride across Guatemala, exhausted but enthusiastic. 

Anita was leaning over a woman on a backstrap loom in the courtyard when we arrived. She was somewhere in her seventies, I guessed, with a ponytail of black and grey cascading down her back. She didn’t look up immediately when we came in, too occupied with her fingers moving fluently through the threads. 

One of the first things I noticed about her were the tiny gold star gems stuck to her teeth. She welcomed us and thanked us for coming to work with Trama before introducing herself as the president of the cooperative.

Every volunteer at Trama Textiles completes a weaving project to gain a more profound understanding of the cooperative. I chose to weave a scarf of green and orange. I never thought backstrap loom weaving would come naturally to me, but it was a good deal more complicated than I imagined. 

The typical student spends a week weaving a scarf. It took me two. Each time I sat down, prepared to concentrate, knots appeared in my threads, and I would tentatively project, “Anita, can you help me?” with a slight air of desperation. She came to help me each time, occasionally letting out an exasperated “Mamita”. Sometimes strapping herself into my loom and spending long minutes pulling each knot apart. While watching her hands naturally flow between the threads and right my wrongs, I knew exactly what to say to keep her entertained. I’d ask, “So, do you want to gossip?” Without fail, she would let out a laugh that reverberated between the coloured threads and respond, “Of course.” 

One day, Anat, Emily, and I walked into the courtyard from the volunteer house next door, laughing carelessly. Anita’s eyes were twinkling with mischief as she sat weaving in the corner. She uttered, “I love how your laughs travel over the wall – it brings so much joy into the space.” We had no clue that the walls between them were that thin, or perhaps that we were that loud. 

We were working in the office when Anita came to say goodbye. She rarely came inside; her place was in the courtyard with her loom and her students. She enveloped each of us in a warm hug. Pulling back, I noticed the tears escaping down her cheeks and immediately dived in for one final squeeze. She whispered, “I’m going to miss my funny girls.” 

We left Quetzaltenango on a Friday afternoon in the same way that we came, weighed down by enormous backpacks but as enthusiastic as ever for whatever came next. I had spent years apologising for my laughter – performing seriousness to be taken seriously. Anita showed me that joy and intelligence were never in competition. In six weeks of knots and gossip and smiles with glistening gold stars, she unknowingly handed me back the confidence in my happiness that I hadn’t realised I’d been missing.

Written by, Rachel White