The Woman Who Came Back
Irma Hernandez says Our Lady of Guadalupe brought me to Guatemala. I was an unmoored 34-year-old journalist from Boston who had come to a Maya pueblo at the foot of three volcanoes to look at weaving. The village was famous for women’s huipils, thick cotton blouses adorned with birds and flowers in vibrant blues, reds, and oranges. I had missed the bus back to my guest house in the colonial city of Antigua, and Irma found me wandering aimlessly.
It was as if she had been waiting for me on the side of a dirt road. She walked toward me with the ramrod-straight posture of a woman who could move gracefully with a pitcher of water on her head. No more than 4’8”, she was beautiful, even in a village full of striking women, with waist-length black hair framing a round face with high cheekbones. Instead of an expensive huipil, she wore a worn sweater tucked into a wrap-around skirt. A somber girl — a tiny replica of her tiny mother — and a smiling boy in a straw hat, held onto her garment. In a shawl tied on one shoulder she carried a listless infant boy.
It could be a while before the next bus came, she said, speaking Spanish, not the indigenous language of Kakchiquel I had heard on the bus. I doubted there was a bus schedule in a pueblo that still depended on church bells to mark the hours.
Irma pointed to her house across the street, a one-room structure of cement block with boards where windows might have been. When she invited me inside, I readily accepted. I had stayed in expansive Spanish colonial houses in Antigua with tiled kitchens and stone fountains, but I had always wanted to see the inside of a Maya house, as if it might reveal the secrets of a hidden culture and noble past.
I’d come to Guatemala in 1993 on the urging of a nun and an ex-boyfriend. I had just finished a master’s degree program in theology at Harvard Divinity School where I’d had my own varieties of religious experience, usually accompanied by drugs and a lack of sleep. My studies had been animated not so much by devotion as by a wish to become a journalist specializing in religion and social justice. I was inspired by my recent attendance at a Quaker meeting that housed refugees, and a desire to escape my job as a reporter for Fortune magazine where I had burned out writing about billionaires and thieves.
At the Quaker meeting I met my then-boyfriend who had traveled to Guatemala to study Spanish in the colonial city of Antigua, a verdant haven in the Guatemalan highlands. The weather in Antigua averaged seventy degrees year-round, he wrote, perfect for strolling the cobblestone streets or climbing volcanoes. The central park was filled with manicured trees and exotic flowers. He had met his new girlfriend in that park, near a fountain carved with women who squirted water from their breasts.
Perhaps I could relax by that fountain, I thought, at least for a few weeks of vacation. Maybe I could find a lover who would ease my loneliness and teach me the mysteries of the Popol Vuh.
The nun, whom I had interviewed for a book I was writing about radical sisters whose faith inspired them to work for justice, had little use for romance. Sister Darlene had gone to Guatemala for the first time in the early 1980s to work with children in a pueblo 100 miles northwest of Antigua. She fled after her pastor was murdered, bringing a group of refugees with her to a camp in Chiapas, Mexico. Later, in Arizona, she would transport and house Guatemalans who had fled violence. She was a hearty woman I remember best in a plaid blazer she bought at Goodwill long after she had given up the habit, and I always suspected she disapproved of me. It was not that I was Jewish. Jesus was a Jew. It’s just that my streaked dirty-blonde hair was too girly, my clothes too fancy, and my small frame too slight for real work. But I must have had redeeming qualities because she talked to me about Guatemala. To Darlene I was still raw material, and she was sure something deep and mysterious awaited me in the Land of Eternal Spring.
My mother asked me to spend a few weeks at home after graduation instead of traveling. But we both knew it was a half-hearted invitation. I hadn’t spent the night at my parents’ house in 15 years. I celebrated holidays with friends’ families, and when I visited my own, I always brought a guest. We all behaved better in front of a witness.
At his best, my tall and lanky father struck me as elegant and witty, an agile mime and graceful dancer who charmed both men and women with stories in French. His university students in speech pathology used to tell me he was their kindest professor, and they sent him postcards from the Peace Corps and photos of their children. But inside the house he was an angry American, cursing wildly when challenged, stomping around in his underpants and putting his legs up at the dinner table while ordering my mother to serve him.
My mother could be ebullient, particularly during her hypomanic episodes. When I was ten, over pancakes at the Peter Pan restaurant on Long Island, she told me about the joys of sex with such enthusiasm I couldn’t help but tell the details to all my friends. But in time she became quiet and then depressed, afraid to object when my father moved us from her beloved New York to a small southern Illinois town, where we tripled the Jewish population. She was beautiful, my father said, with her thick black hair and high cheekbones, but he lamented aloud that he hadn’t married a more intellectual woman. I was smart but bratty, countering his frequent insults with outbursts of my own.
He would apologize years later. “Only a sick man would call his daughter a sick bitch,” he said.
Still, I will never understand why his touch of paranoia became an assault against “enemies,” as he shed friends each year until he and my mother dined alone. Alcoholism would have explained his erratic behavior, but he didn’t drink. A psychologist friend suggested the reason might be PTSD from war trauma given that he was in a hospital with shrapnel wounds when his unit was wiped out, and indeed my mother said he often awakened from nightmares and flinched when someone came up from behind.
My only brother, two years older, left home at 15 to hang out with hippies in St. Louis. Angry with him for deserting me, I pretended I was an only child. Two years later, at 15, I went to a boarding school hundreds of miles and emotional light years away.
I arrived in Antigua dressed like a missionary in a white button-down blouse, short black skirt, and sandals. I was older than most of the recent college graduates who came to Guatemala to live with families, study Spanish, and hit the bars at night. The North Americans and Europeans with their heavy backpacks looked ready to cross borders and climb volcanoes, while I tripped over verb tenses and cobblestones and wished I had more meat on my bones.
I knew relatively little about the country the size of Tennessee, let alone about the Maya, who had the only fully-developed writing system in pre-Columbian America. I had no idea that nearly three-quarters of the modern indigenous men, women, and children in Guatemala – more than half the country’s population – lived in poverty. Nor had I learned anything about the more westernized non-indigenous known for disparaging Maya men as uncivilized and calling Maya women “Marias.”
Sister Darlene had informed me it was year 32 of a war that pitted U.S.-backed government soldiers against leftist rebels. The Guatemalan military had razed more than 600 Maya pueblos and killed more than 200,000 people, but I never saw any hint of violence in my colonial cocoon of Antigua. On walks past exotic flowers in the central park, I had to remind myself that in the not-too-far distance, government forces were terrorizing Maya villagers.
On weekdays I met with my teacher and studied Spanish in the park. Maya women circled the grounds with baskets filled with beaded necklaces and tapestries to sell to tourists. The Maya were pictured on brochures to entice foreigners to visit, and I was captivated by the glossy ads. On weekends I visited the villages surrounding Antigua the Maya called home.
One cool Sunday morning I decided to catch a bus to San Antonio Aguas Calientes, which my guidebook described as a tranquil village famous for its weavers, considered the best in Guatemala. They were known for their double-sided marcador technique that produced mirror images of weaving on both sides of their garments.
I walked from my hotel across town to the parking lot behind Antigua’s central market, where American school busses came to die. Some still bore the names of the towns like New Haven and Ames. But most had been painted in electric blues and reds, with silhouettes of naked girls on the windshields, and signs that let the passengers know Jesus was in the driver’s seat.
I took a seat in the front of an empty vehicle, and within minutes women filled the aisles, some carrying packages wrapped in shawls. I found myself wedged between a young girl and an old woman who wore a glorious huipil of intertwined cherubs. It was all I could do to keep from stroking an angel on her shoulder.
The teenage driver sped along the cobblestone streets in the best-preserved colonial city in Latin America, passing yellow and blue stucco houses with terracotta tile roofs and windows with ornate metal bars to heighten the beauty and keep out thieves. In the distance I could see the peaks of two volcanoes amidst the trees, a favorite destination of visitors who made day-trips up the steep trails, despite warnings of robberies and worse. The stones turned into cracked streets and then dirt roads. When I glanced down a cliff I could see a rusted school bus.
In a half-hour we reached the crescent-shaped valley of San Antonio, a town that had escaped most of the violence that occurred primarily in distant villages. The late anthropologist Sheldon Annis, the only foreigner to write at any length about the town, had noted that the quaint beauty of the pueblo had been lost in the earthquake of 1976 when most dwellings were knocked down, and adobe homes with tile and thatch roofs were replaced by depressing structures of cement block and galvanized tin that rusted during the rainy season.
But he said, rightly, the lush landscape nestled at the foot of three volcanoes remained spectacular. The magnificent Fuego volcano still erupted regularly, spewing ash miles into the air.
We arrived in the village central park, where dozens of women were showing their wares.
“Just looking,” I said as I walked up and down the aisles. But I stared too long, lingering to touch each blouse one by one, as if it were the last time I would see something so beautiful.
“Just looking,” one weaver repeated, mocking my accent.
In the presence of such vibrant color, I became like my mother at her most ecstatic. I felt the smile on my face widen and my steps lighten as if I were skimming the ground. But I knew I had overstayed my welcome as a tourist who gazed but didn’t buy.
It was a stroke of luck that Irma found me after I had missed the bus and guided me to her windowless one-room house. Inside, cardboard boxes filled with clothes were piled in the corners. On the wall across from us was a ripped calendar with a photo of a half-dressed model holding a can of antifreeze. But it was the pictures hanging on the opposite wall that dominated the room: eight framed prints of biblical scenes overlooked a free-standing metal candelabra; a large picture of a chubby blond baby Jesus peered down on her own lethargic infant, who stared into the distance with one eye crossed.
Irma offered me a small wooden chair and brushed the dust off with a cloth she had draped over her arm. She couldn’t offer me water because there was no running water, just a pump down the road shared by the neighbors.
“What is your baby’s name?” I asked in halting Spanish.
“Henry,” she said. Henry, she told me, had just had an operation. She held him up to show me a scar at the base of his skull. “The priests told us to let him die. But he is our baby.” She had borrowed 2,800 quetzals (about $400) for the operation, but now they had to pay it back, and they didn’t have any money for medicine.
I could hardly imagine what it must have taken for this family to rustle up $400, more than Flavio earned in a year. I told her I had a few quetzals, but then I remembered the Spanish teacher who told me never to give handouts.
“Do you have something I could buy?” I asked her. She handed me the faded blue and green cloth she held on her arm, it being more important at the time that I follow some arbitrary rule about not giving money than leave a cloth that she needed. Then I did what any crass tourist would do. I took a picture of Irma and Henry, a mother with her boy who might be dying.
Back home in Boston, unable to find a job as a religion writer, I took a position as an editor at Harvard Business Review, which a friend described as a rapid descent from the sacred to the profane. I could not stop thinking about Guatemala. Peace talks, I learned, had begun between the government and the rebels, though right-wing parties had won a majority in legislative elections because they had killed their opponents or forced them into exile. Most of all I thought about the family and what I could do to help Irma’s child. I looked at their photographs as if they were the needy kids in a Christian Children’s Fund brochure. But they were more than a picture, and I wanted to see them again.
The upside to my new job was a generous vacation policy that allowed me to return to Guatemala in six months. The afternoon I arrived in Antigua, I hopped on a chicken bus to San Antonio. I was carrying a small photograph of Henry in a wooden frame. If he had died, I figured, a mother should have a picture to place on her altar.
But when I entered Irma’s house I saw a baby very much alive. He wasn’t crawling. Maya babies, I learned, were not encouraged to crawl, perhaps because the roads were unpaved and the houses had dirt floors. Their mothers carried them in shawls wrapped around one shoulder until they could walk. He still couldn’t seem to focus; his crossed eye seemed more pronounced. But he had put on weight and could raise his head.
“You’re back!” Irma said, more animated than I had seen her.
And from that moment on I was known as the woman who came back.
I felt drawn to that one-room house in San Antonio, and came daily to sit outside with Irma in her small backyard lined with white roses growing in tin cans. We drank the juice I’d brought and ate warm tortillas, and I felt a calmness that had eluded me in Boston.
I envied people with a home or a piece of land or a seaside resort that represented to me all things beautiful and safe, as if a dwelling could shelter one from familial strife. Having moved from town to town during childhood as my father changed jobs, I never had much of a sense of place. But Guatemala is famous for luring sailors who, captivated by its natural beauty, friendly locals, and reasonable prices, sell their boats to remain in the Land of Eternal Spring. The magnificence of the mountains, the lushness of the greenery, and the 70-degree days helped them ignore a war on the outskirts that had already lasted three decades.
While we talked, Irma’s three-year-old son, Lusvin, kicked around a soccer ball. Her daughter, four-year-old Kendy (named after a misspelled candy store sign) wore doll-sized copies of her mother’s clothes while making bracelets for tourists, deftly braiding the threads with her tiny hands. She would teach me how to weave, she said, slowing down her movements so I could follow, and she would one day captivate me like no other child before or since.
Irma sat on the rocky ground stringing yarn on her loom. Henry, wrapped in a blanket, slept peacefully by her side.
I followed her as she moved the stick of wood in her small right hand through the warp, raising and lowering the threads in a steady rhythm, her body becoming one with the loom. She had been weaving since she was seven, she told me, memorizing the basic patterns the village women taught her until she was skilled enough to add her own designs.
I watched the way I had in math class when the logic eluded me. She followed a pattern that I could not fathom. So I sat, quietly lulled by the rhythm and the smack of the stick, as she pushed back the threads.
She brought her hands to her head and parted the silky black hair that had fallen from her ponytail to rub her temples. “The colors,” she said. “I get a headache thinking about the colors.”
I had read that weavers see the cloth as having a soul whose colors give off poder, power or heat.
“Tell me about the soul of the cloth,” I urged Irma gently. “Tell me about the poder.”
“Poder?” she said. “What is that?”
“The strength of the colors.”
Perhaps I had picked the wrong word, I thought. I would question her about the goddess Ixchel, who wove mountains in the sky and gave Maya women the gift of weaving. I would ask about the symbolism of the birds, the grapes, the shrimp that floated on the fabric.
But Irma, I would learn, did not know the stories of the ancient Maya. Local priests had told her the Maya deity Maximon, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking trickster, was the devil, and she believed them.
Irma did not know the indigenous language of her mothers, Kakchiquel. Raised culturally Jewish in an atheistic home, I had never learned the language of my ancestors: Hebrew. We were two women from the richest of cultures, dancing to the music without knowing the words.
It would take some time before I got to know the sprawling community of several thousand, which seemed much smaller given many people lived on the mountains on the outskirts of town. There were no restaurants, supermarkets, or community centers, let alone paved roads. Social life, at least for women, revolved around the well-preserved colonial Catholic church, which hosted religious processions that seemed to attract half the town. Irma and Kendy dragged me to these marches, where San Antonians in their finest clothes carried heavy statues of Jesus and Mary to the accompaniment of ragtag brass bands.
Day by day I became less of a stranger. Women who initially ignored me on the street began smiling because I was Irma’s friend, and she continued to tell whoever would listen that Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, had sent me.
“You weren’t thinking of Guadalupe,” I said.
“Well, not at first,” she admitted.
I suppose the easiest explanation for their acceptance of me was that I came bearing gifts, even if it was a bottle of juice or a bag of oranges. The Maya had the tradition of the good stranger, and it was common for poorer Guatemalan Catholic families to choose godmothers for their children from a higher social stratum who could help in crises, all too frequent given that no public healthcare existed in the pueblo, and villagers drank dirty water from pumps. It wasn’t long before Irma and Flavio asked me to be the madrina, the godmother, to all three of their children.
I happily consented. Here was a ready-made family with aunts, uncles, and cousins by the dozen. Now I would no longer have to be the last-minute guest at someone’s holiday dinner. I was the madrina. There was even a name that does not exist in English for my relationship with Irma. We were comadres, co-mothers, and I was grateful to a mother willing to share her children with a stranger.
I was an illegal godmother. Madrinas were supported to be Catholic, not Jewish, so they could teach the fine points of religion to the children. The family had heard it said that the Jews were responsible for the volcano Fuego’s eruptions. Anthropologist Sheldon Annis, who was Jewish, had written that villagers believed Jews entrapped in the volcano writhed and spat fire as they tried to escape eternal damnation, a story I imagine was spread by the same Catholic priests who told parishioners Jews killed Jesus. But the family didn’t think that I was up to no good. The truth was that neither Irma nor her husband, Flavio, cared much whether the children were taught the catechism or if the local priest accepted me.
In time, Irma really did believe that Guadalupe (or Lupita, as she is affectionately known) had sent me. The family needed help, and Lupita knew I could help. “She loves everyone, and she brings families together,” Irma said, clasping her hands. And whether or not I believed in her mystical powers, Guadalupe loved me too.
When I was back in Boston, I called Irma once a week. She shared a telephone with a dozen neighbors and was delighted to get an international call. We asked one another about our day.
“Tejiendo. Tejiendo. Tejiendo.” she said. Weaving, weaving, weaving.
“Escribiendo. Escribiendo. Escribiendo.” I said. Writing, writing, writing.
Mostly we talked about Henry. I thought if he had more stimulation he might become more lively, mobile, and learn a few words. I had begun sending money via Western Union so Henry could see a doctor at a Catholic hospital in Antigua, and to pay private therapists for physical and speech therapy.
A friend in Boston, a political activist who rarely crossed borders, chastised me, saying it was wrong to send money to an individual family. I was promoting dependency. I would incite jealousy.
“Fuck that,” I replied under my breath. You tell me how to help a disabled child.
I continued to return to Guatemala, resuming my daily ritual of spending time with Irma and returning to my guesthouse each night. Instead of selling her wares in San Antonio, she had begun bringing her textiles to Antigua. She spread a blanket in the entryway of one of the dozens of Spanish schools and began to weave. I sat down beside her and watched her finesse the threads.
Sometimes in those moments I wondered, given her need for money, whether Irma would have attached herself to any tourist wandering aimlessly in the street. I had gathered from our conversations that there had been others before me, women drawn to her beauty and the perfect picture of a weaver at her loom. But in time I realized the meaninglessness of my question because Irma knew with such certainty that I was her twist of fate.
“You are the godmother,” she would say, “to Kendy, Lusvin, and Henry, all three.”
“All three,” she’d say again, and while the terms of the agreement had not been spelled out, it was clear I had signed on some dotted line.
“All three,” I’d repeat dutifully.
I liked watching Irma in action. If she had been serene on her home turf, when she was in selling mode she was a force to be reckoned with. A tourist who made a passing glance at her blanket was met with a stream of “Buen precio,” (Good prices) and unwelcome tugs on the arms, and for the first time I heard the desperation in Irma’s voice. When I ventured to say she was coming on a little strong, she looked at me quizzically. She was a vendor with a family to feed, she seemed to say. And she couldn’t let a customer slip away.
She held onto me with the same ferocity, making sure that when I left I would soon return. “Are you coming tomorrow?” she would ask. “What time?” though she didn’t own a watch. I soon got the feeling she needed me to show up, as if I were insurance against impending disaster.
Sometimes, her sister-in-law, Odelia, a slight woman who wore elaborate huipils she wove herself, would join us, and I’d be the subject of teasing about their favorite topic: men.
“Do you have a novio (boyfriend)?” Odelia would ask me.
“No,” I would say, feeling the sting of having broken off not one, but two engagements, terrified of making the wrong choice.
“You are lucky. All they do is drink.”
“Why don’t you have children?” Odelia would ask almost every time we sat on the blanket. Husbands were a pain in the ass. Children were a blessing, and I was too old not to have children. What was I thinking?
I weathered these questions with a shrug of my shoulders, but Odelia’s insistence struck a nerve.
When Irma and I were alone I turned the tables and peppered her with questions. She did not resist answering. In fact, she spoke about her life with surprising ease, as if she had been thinking about the beginning, middle, and end, just waiting for someone to ask.
“It is a mala vida,” she said, a very tough life.
She was born on July 21st, 1965, in the house of her father, who worked in the campo, the fields. He was an alcoholic who often hit her mother and three older brothers.
“Crazy from alcohol,” she said and began to cry, as she would frequently and without embarrassment.
Her mother died of gallbladder disease when Irma was two. Her aunts told her later about how her mother had suffered.
Her father married another woman in the village, who moved into the house until another tragedy struck. The new wife was sitting in the street one day and a car careening around a curve crushed her legs. She moved back to her parents’ home to recover, and Irma’s father joined her there. When Irma’s brothers began working outside the house, she was left alone with little food. An aunt taught her to make tortillas and to boil some beans, but she spent most of her days hungry, aching for a mother she had barely known.
“I needed a mother,” she repeated, as if to make sure I was listening. “I didn’t have a mother and I needed a mother.”
At age seven, Irma began working for a vendor of textiles in a small store near the house, fetching water from the pump and performing small errands. The store owner taught her to weave, usually the mother’s role, and by age nine she was making simple tapetes, all-purpose cloths, to sell to San Antonians.
For three years she went to school in the mornings, but her father stopped paying before she learned to read a whole book. She had few friends in those days, and her father discouraged her from associating with boys. “No boyfriends,” he would shout. During her teenage years she talked with boys on the sly in the street. But no one caught her eye until Flavio.
He had graduated from the fifth grade and had a good job working at a carpet factory in Antigua. They met on the street for the better part of the year. He was handsome and charming, she said, and he seemed to care about her. Together, he told her, they could have a better life in his parents’ home. So she did what many girls in the village did: She left one day to move into a little room in her boyfriend’s house containing an altar adorned with a painting of The Last Supper.
Soon Flavio spent nights and weekends building a little house made of wooden planks on the property. She loved having a home of her own, and for three years she spent her days in her garden weaving while Flavio worked at the factory. Her first daughter, Kendy, was born two years later.
That was a tranquil time before Flavio started drinking. She wasn’t sure why, maybe it was the friends he hung out with after work. Drinking was such a problem in the village that evangelical pastors courted women in the predominantly Catholic pueblo by preaching sermons about the evils of drink. She didn’t know a single family that wasn’t touched by alcohol. Odelia’s husband couldn’t even hold a job.
Flavio spent so much money on grain alcohol fermented with chemical fertilizer there was little left for tortillas and beans, so Irma began weaving by candlelight late into the night. She wasn't sure when he began hitting her, just that it went from being sporadic to constant, and the baby in her arms was of little deterrence.
Then one day he came home with a pistol and threatened to kill her. She smacked the pistol out of his hands, grabbed the baby, and went back to live in her late mother’s house.
Flavio was remorseful. He promised to stop drinking. He moved with Irma back to her father’s home, determined to start a new life. Lusvin was born a year later, and Henry followed, delivered by the midwife in their home.
The midwife told Irma about the opening at the base of Henry’s spine. The midwife had seen it before, and the situation was grave. She told Irma and Flavio that they had to bring the baby to the public hospital in Guatemala City. The next day they wrapped him in a shawl and set out for the capital.
They sat on plastic chairs in a waiting room with paint peeling off the walls, leaving only to take the children out to urinate in the street -- to avoid the stench of the hospital restrooms -- and to buy tortillas and beans from vendors. A woman with a notepad scribbled their names on a list, but at the end of the day they were no closer to seeing a doctor, so they went home and came back the following morning, and the morning after. On day seven they were ushered to an examination room where a doctor gave them the bad news. The baby had been born with spina bifida, and had an open spine that would require surgery to close. As soon as a surgeon was available, they would schedule an operation.
On day 11, the doctor called the family into a small examination room, Irma told me, offering more details than he had before. If the family could come up with the 2,000 quetzals for the doctor, it was likely he could make time for the operation. It was a tremendous amount of money, more than they had ever seen. But Flavio returned home to find his Aunt Josefina, the only one who could raise that kind of cash in a short time. She lent him the money with the promise that he would pay her back little by little as soon as he could. He asked a local priest to say a benediction for the baby. The priest said that it might be the will of God for the baby to die. Flavio never forgave the priest.
The operation was a great success, Irma told me, though she did not know any details about the procedure. The baby had survived the surgery — that was proof enough for her that a miracle had occurred.
When they returned to San Antonio they had nothing. She sold whatever textiles she had in the house and kept up her regimen of weaving late at night, this time for tourists who had recently discovered the village. Flavio sold his bicycle. But there was no money for medicine. And when she looked into Henry’s eyes she saw little sign of life.
Irma cried for a while and then wiped her eyes with a woven cloth. She had told me her story. Now it was time to tell mine. She wanted to hear about children, but I had no children. She wanted to know about cooking, but I did not cook. She could remedy that situation, she told me. She would teach me how to make tortillas.
I spoke a little about my own relatives and how I had spent my life courting happier families. But faith, that was a tough one. It was hard enough to explain being Jewish. How could I tell her that when my life got tough I often chose pills over prayer, and my religiosity was fueled by more than a touch of mania?
How could I confess that I drank too much, a sin she associated only with men who were prone to violence?
To her I was the good madrina sent to her by a Virgin, not another damaged soul looking for home on a distant shore.
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The excerpt above is the first chapter of Lieblich’s memoir in progress.
Julia Lieblich is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in human rights. A former religion writer for the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, her news and feature stories and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Time, Life, Ms, and AGNI. Lieblich's first book, Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance, is about how obedient nuns evolved into radical sisters, stemmed from a cover story she wrote for The New York Times Magazine. Her most recent book, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror, co-authored with Esad Boskailo, tells the story of a Bosnian concentration camp survivor who becomes a psychiatrist in the United States helping survivors heal from the trauma of war. Her upcoming book is a memoir about a restless journalist who finds new meaning in an enduring relationship with a Maya family of weavers in a Guatemalan village. She is a Fellow at University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library and an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Dart Center for journalists who cover trauma.