An invitation from the Global Fund for Children:

Join The Global Fund for Children for an exclusive trip to Guatemala. Experience the work of our grantee partners and become immersed in the everyday life of the local people while touring community-based organizations that serve vulnerable children and youth. You will also visit some of the most treasured destinations that Central America has to offer, such as colonial Antigua and the Mayan ruins of Tikal.

The learning tour will take place either January 15—22 or February 19—27 (the date chosen depends on the response received). Please contact Haida McGovern by September 15 for more information.

Amelia Lau Carling’s picture-book, Mama and Papa Have a Store (Dial, 1998)/ La Tienda de Mamá y Papá (Groundwood, 2003)) is all about a day in her parents’ Chinese shop in Guatemala City. In a wonderfully evocative Personal View for our current issue of PaperTigers, Amelia shares some more memories from her childhood, as she recalls the celebrations “On Our Street” around this time of year:

We sat in the rooftop terrace around a small card table. We were the three kids my mother could rope into a chore that would pay us a quarter each. My feet dangled without touching the floor. Mama had cooked a pot of glue with cornstarch, water and lemon juice. The pot sat cooling in the middle of the table and a couple of old paintbrushes lay next to it. There was a stack of “Cohete El Aguila” labels and a case of firecrackers, each one a four-inch square of red paper and gunpowder. Our job was to glue a label on each packet. In the sky, a kite or two danced among the clouds. The air was crisp and the sun shone strongly. We whiled away the afternoon around the little table in silly banter, slapping on labels.

It was December in Guatemala, and we were happy to be in the middle of our summer vacation. School was out from October to January. Christmas and New Year’s Eve were coming, and pasting firecracker labels was only part of the excitement. We helped in the store, our Chinese store where a little of everything was sold. I stood on a stool to punch the numbers in quetzales and centavos on the old cash register and turned the crank on the side to make its drawer fly open with a cheerful brrring…”

Read the rest of Amelia’s article here - and while you’re at it, check out our gallery feature and interview with her…

In Amelia Lau Carling’s Sawdust Carpets, a Chinese-Latino family drives to visit their (also Chinese) relatives in Antigua, Guatemala, where a little cousin will be baptized during Holy Week, and where Quan Yin and the Virgin share space on the family altar, “like friends.” Carling illustrates her own texts, bringing this Chinese family’s life as Guatemalans vividly to the reader in softer pastels than we usually see in stories set in tropical countries. The reference in the title is to a tradition shared by cultures around the world: making art that is destroyed in the process of an annual celebration. Carling’s young characters learn a deep lesson in observing their carpets trampled upon. And Chinese tamales? That’s how this multicultural family refers to the rice dumplings, wrapped in bamboo or lotus leaves, that they made back in China. The comparison is an imaginative stretch, unless you grew up, as Carling did, “learning about Chinese, Mayan and Spanish cultures.”

PaperTigers is all about such imaginative stretches. The blog stretches the website’s field of interest to include all multicultural children’s books in English. Our topics will evolve as we explore. For today, Chinese tamales are our motif for reflection.