Transportation on the Chicken Bus

Defying all rules of safety or even basic ideas of personal space, transportation in Guatemala requires a person to deflate their personal bubble and become intimately aquainted through proximity with one´s neighbor. The ancient Blue Bird school buses from the United States are here painted gaudy reds, oranges, yellows, and revamped for maximum capacity, well over that of a normal school bus ride. The buses in Guatemala City have had the cheerful blue synthetic seats replaced with chairs that one would see in a middle school auditorium (like McKinley) - old, rickity, wooden. While the chicken buses maintain the school look, they manage to fit more people than a normal school bus ever could. I look up and read the signs painted in gothic writing on the insides of the bus: Jesus, mi fiel amigo (Jesus, my faithful friend), Dios bendiga este bus (God bless this bus). I certainly hope Jesus is the bus driver´s faithful friend and that God is indeed watching over this overcrowded machine.

Like sardines, three people to a seat and aisles full to bursting, the bus from Xanacoj kept stopping to let more people on the bus. In the front, the bus attendant hollers that there´s more space in the back of the bus. ¨Adelante señores!¨ is his call as he squeezes through bundles, past women in woven skirts, shoves by men in suits to collect the bus fare. To let the people squashed in the back off, they open the rear escape door and the passangers leap out onto the pavement below.

I found myself directed to sit in an already full seat, half of my butt on the seat, the rest of my body tense and bracing myself so I wouldn´t fall off the seat onto the floor as the bus screeched around tight corners. My face started to sweat and I had to carefully time when I would move my hands from their deathgrip on the bar to wipe off my sweating face. I felt it trickle down my back and wondered why on earth the people by the windows didn´t open them to relieve the heat.

Finally, Mirta signaled that it was time to get off the bus. Slowly, like slow moving lava, we oozed our way to the front of the bus past the multitudes of people squashed together in the aisle, clambering over the women in their woven skirts and huipiles and squeezing, much like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, between the men in their dark suits. Finally, we reached the door and, like a Christmas cracker that pops when it´s pulled, or a pressurized can that explodes, we burst free from the overcrowded bus. The acrid, sweet smell of low grade diesel filled the air as the bus huffed and growled and grumbled away with is precarious and precious human cargo.