by Dwight Wayne Coop
Hanne Lunder will never understand Guatemala, and admits she does not want to. In its mysteries, she says, abide all the magic and fascination. This comes from someone with more ties to Guatemala than exist in the typical outsider’s universe. Lunder herself has added to the fascination by forging clay into elegant objets d’art (photo), which have won her as much renown in Guatemala as she enjoys in her native Norway.
Part of her story is familiar, since it is
either our own story or one we have heard
from others smitten with Guatemala. It is
also a story of adoption, not one kind, but
many. While touring Mexico, she came too
close to Guatemala not to take a look. She
only planned to spend a week there, but the
Fates had other plans.
It was like falling in love for the first
time, she recalls of this 1988 introduction
to the Land of Eternal Spring. In spite of
everything, the bad experiences among the
good, I knew I’d come back. Like so many
others, she went back to her first country to
fi nd the wherewithal to return. In her case,
it was a 1989 traveling artist’s grant.
I started with a week of Spanish study in
La Antigua Guatemala. Then,
for two months, I toured Guatemala by myself and got deeper
into an eternal love with it. She
later fell for Rune, a Norwegian
who, like her, wanted to adopt
children. After they married,
Hanne brought him to Guatemala
on the third of 15 trips. It took
three years to adopt Sandra, now
10. Recent legal reforms enabled them to
adopt Aracely, now 7, in a year.
They are precious girls with Mayan
blood, coffee-with-cream skin, and good
temperaments, Lunder says. They also have
Norwegian citizenship, a personal tie paralleling the relations between Guatemala and
Norway. While the Lunders were navigating the adoption process, few nations contributed as much as Norway (diplomatically
and materially) to the 1996 negotiated end
of Guatemala’s 35-year civil conflict.
Today the family lives in Son, near Oslo, in an old wooden Norse house. Rune, a carpenter, keeps the cold out while he schools and otherwise raises the girls, who are learning Norwegian and English. Hanne, plying her craft, is the breadwinner most of the time.
During a year-long stay with friends in
Aguacatán (which enjoys sister-cityhood with a Norwegian town) near Huehuetenango,
the Lunders accomplished another adoption. Not another child, but a cause that
would better a community and bring light into the life of a young boy.
Rune went to work on a fixer-upper house while Hanne began
volunteering at Aguacatán’s colegio (private school). The pair organized lessons
on litter control and hygiene, and remodeled the school office (Hanne, with her
eye for color harmony, selected the paints). Most important, they solicited
their Norwegian friends for the means to fund scholarships for poor families.
Today, nearly a third of the enrollees benefit from this informal
