Mexico's 800,000 Mayas are not the sinister, secretive, apocalypse-obsessed race they've been made out to be.
In their heartland on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Mayas continue their daily lives, industriously pedaling three-wheeled bikes laden with family members and animal fodder down table-flat roads. They tell rhyming off-color jokes at dances, and pull chairs out onto the sidewalk in the evening to chat and enjoy the relative cool after a hot day.
Many still live simply in thatched, oval, mud-and-stick houses designed mostly for natural air conditioning against the oppressive heat of the Yucatan, where they plant corn, harvest oranges and raise pigs.
When asked about the end next week of a major cycle in the 5,125-year Mayan Long Count calendar, a period known as the 13th Baktun, many respond with a healthy dose of homespun Maya philosophy.
"We don't know if the world is going to end," said Liborio Yeh Kinil, a 62-year-old who can usually be found sitting on a chair outside his small grocery store at the corner of the grassy central square of the town of Uh-May in Quintana Roo state. "Remember 2006, and the '6-6-6' (June 6, 2006): A lot of people thought something was going to happen, and nothing happened after all.
Reflecting a world view with roots as old as the nearby Ceiba tree, or Yax-che, the tree of life for the ancient Maya, Yeh Kinil added: "Why get panicky? If something is going to happen, it's going to happen."
A chorus of books and movies has sought to link the Mayan calendar to rumors of impending disasters ranging from rogue black holes and solar storms to the idea that the Earth's magnetic field could 'flip' on that date.
Archaeologists say there is no evidence the Maya ever made any such prophesy. Indeed, average Mayas probably never used the Long Count calendar, neither today nor at the culture's peak between A.D. 300 and 600. The long count was reserved for priests and astronomers, while average Mayas measure time as farmers tend to do -- by planting seasons and monthly lunar cycles.
Mayan priest and farmer Petronilo Acevedo Pena says God may punish humanity someday, because people have stopped going to church.
"The world is going to end, but we don't know when it will end, nobody ever gave a date," hesaid. "They said it would be in 2000, but nothing happened."