Post 9 - The Mayan Mystery Story
This
is Post 9. To start at the beginning, go
to Post 1.
The story begins in the lunch room of a hospital. Kelli, a nurse, sees her friend, Ta-Ta,
eating at a table across the room, joins her and says she made a medication
error that could have killed a patient, except the lady noticed the pill was
different than the kind she had been taking.
This was the third medication error she had made this week and the
doctor told her to take some time off, go somewhere far away and totally
different, and not come back until she can do her job without endangering his
patients.
Ta-Ta
tells Kelli about a volunteer team going to a medical clinic in an impoverished
Mayan village in Belize, says they need two nurses. Ta-Ta says it would be a nice vacation during
a cold and dreary February, she offers to sign up for it if Kelli does, then
they both rush back to their assignments.
The next scene is at an airport, they are in a yellow van with
the air conditioner running and the driver standing outside, sweating under the
tropical sun. He is staring back toward
the line of people coming from the door of the terminal building, he is looking
for two other tourists he is supposed to pick up.
“There they are,” he says, and he points toward two elderly
people, followed by a porter with several suitcases stacked on a handcart.
“They can barely walk,” Kelli says. “Are we going to spend a week touring Belize
with them?”
The driver helps the newcomers into the van, then tells all
of them he will be their guide this week and asks each to tell their purpose
for this tour. He says that every tour
needs a purpose, just as every life needs a purpose.
This is the theme statement for the book. The title of the book may cause people to
believe the main theme is the ‘Mayan Mystery,’ but it is actually ‘finding
purpose.’ That is the first problem
stated in the book, and it is the last problem solved.
Kelli says that she and Ta-Ta volunteered to work at a
medical clinic in a village, and they came a week early to see the natural
wonders of Belize and the Mayan pyramids.
The teachers say they have a contract with a travel magazine to write a
series of articles about the Mayans and their pyramids, and they want to
explain the mystery in the final article.
The driver says, “You do that and you will have a best
seller. Nobody knows.”
Since
they all want to visit the pyramids, the guide plans several tours of Mayan ruins,
and he says their purpose will be to search for the reason the ancients
abandoned these cities so suddenly.
Kelli agrees to that purpose.
That evening, Ta-Ta begins to question Kelli, looking for
the reason she is having so much trouble concentrating on her work and is
making serious errors. Kelli normally
does not make mistakes. Ta-Ta finds that
Kelli had just discovered her husband is being unfaithful and her marriage
could fail. If that happens, Kelli would
be unable to achieve her planned purpose of building her dream house, and that
is causing her anxiety.
The next day, the guide takes the four of them far up a
river to an abandoned city. They walk
trails through the rainforest between pyramids and the ruins of a palace, and
the guide explains that the rulers built the pyramids as displays of their
success and as monuments to their pride.
That evening, Ta-Ta points out that Kelli is imitating the faults of the
ancient Mayan rulers, but on a smaller scale.
The second day, the guide plans a trip to another abandoned
city and its pyramid, but the elderly couple need to rest and cannot go, so he
carries Kelli and Ta-Ta to a cavern where ancient priests had conducted sacred
ceremonies. Deep inside, the guide drops
his flashlight and it breaks, leaving them in total darkness. He leads them out by the trickling sound of
the stream that had been cutting the cavern through the mountain for thousands
of years, and still flows along its channel to emerge in the rainforest outside.
This becomes the pattern of their tour. They all explore an ancient city and its
pyramid one day, and the next day the elderly couple rest and the guide takes
Kelli and Ta-Ta for a more strenuous adventure.
They
tour an abandoned city, then visit a nearby village of thatched homes. They meet descendants of the Mayans who had
inhabited that city a thousand years ago.
Here, they are told a folklore tale about ‘evil spirits’ that had been
passed down for an unknown number of generations. They hear the exact same words a Mayan guide
told the author and his wife when they visited Belize the first time. The retired teachers, who were familiar with
folklore, suspect this tale originated at the time the city was abandoned, and
they become determined to find the meaning of it.
Kelli and the retired teachers follow the same path of
experiences as the author did during his search for the answer to the ‘evil
spirits’ tale, so the reader can envision the actual exploration like being there
when it happened.
As Kelli
learns about the life of the ancient Mayans, she compares her purpose to those
of the ancient rulers. She sees that her
success at her career had caused her to take her eyes off her original purpose,
as happened to those rulers a thousand years ago, and she is now traveling the
same path toward a disaster as the ancients.
The search for the meaning of the ‘evil spirits’ tale leads
the four of them and their guide on an adventure that ends with a reenactment
of the day the courageous Mayan farmers decided they would live free from the
tyranny of the king and his aristocrats, or they would die trying. Like many other oppressed people throughout
history, they rise up in revolt. They overcome
the king’s warriors, then flee the city to escape the spirit gods they believed
were protecting the evil king. They fear
the vindictive gods so much that they never return.
The retired teachers have found the answer they were
seeking, and Kelli recognizes the signs that show her current path leading her
away from happiness. Her purpose has
become to increase the abundance she and her husband are accumulating, and to
build her dream home as a monument to her pride.
She
rediscovers her original purpose, and she abruptly changes direction. She returns to her path of helping people who
are sick and need medical care.
Scroll
down to continue, or go to Post 10.
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