Jim and Emily's Guatemala https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog Disclaimer: The information and opinions herein do not represent those of the Peace Corps Wed, 23 Sep 2020 20:05:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.25 COVID-19 https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/covid-19/ Wed, 23 Sep 2020 20:05:11 +0000 https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/?p=4309 Hello all. It has been over a decade since our return from Guatemala, and much has happened. I always suspected that once we were back in the US, the flow of our lives would change and we would return to the pace, concerns, and general flow of American life.  I also worried that I’d forget the Guatemalan people who touched us so profoundly.  It turns out the the former happened, but the latter did not.  Despite the distractions of returning to an office job, holding a mortgage, and so many other things, our hearts and minds still regularly drifted back to Guatemala. I still call Pedro every year on his birthday, and we talk for hours, even though my Spanish gets worse and worse with each passing year. Emily still exchanges brief WhatsApp messages with Reina on occasion, getting updates about her kids and the family in Temux Grande.

The last two weeks, however, have been hard. As you must be aware, the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people all over the world. Guatemala is no exception, but what’s different there is that they have much less access to medical resources than we do.  In addition, they live a very social life much different from ours- large, multigenerational households are the norm.  For those with less resources, it even includes things like a dozen people sharing two beds in the same room every night. These conditions put them at increased risk of transmission for diseases like COVID-19.

It is with a heavy heart that I report the August 20 death of Nas Palas, our dear friend and patron during our time in Guatemala. He was instrumental in bringing us to Temux, was a leader of his community, and was a kind and caring father to all of his children and grandchildren. It is a devastating blow to his family, and to ours. He was 70. Reina reports that her dad died of COVID in his home, surrounded by his family. I have so much to say about him, I owe him so much, but anything I can say would feel so incomplete. Rest well, Nas Palas. Xewan.

Upon hearing the news, Emily and I both checked in with those we still know in Santa Eulalia to learn more about what’s going on. According to Pedro, who now works part time in the health center, the Santa Eulalia community has been experiencing about a death per day for over a month. In the health center, they have no masks or face shields. People are trying to stay at home, but still need to go to the market to get food. Schools have been closed since the start of the year, and kids are sent a packet of homework once a month. His sister, the nurse Lucia who helped us so often, is still making rounds to help people, and Pedro reported that it looks like she and her son Ronald both have COVID as well.

That was about a week ago. Last night we heard more terrible news: Ronald, her son, has now died. He was a really sweet kid, always kinds to others, friendly, and inquisitive. I seem to remember he told me once (when he was 9) that he wanted to be the first Guatemalan astronaut. He fell ill with COVID about a month ago, and after a week at home, they sent him and his mother all the way to the central hospital in Huehuetenango. He was there for 20 days, on oxygen, before he died. Emily and I are crushed. He was such a lovely kid, the kind of kid who gives hope to the future of Guatemala and brings light into the lives of people who meet him. He was Lucia’s only child.

Pedro says they are all still numb from the loss of his nephew, and are just focusing on surviving day by day. Lucia is still in quarantine.

I don’t know if anyone will read this post. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve posted anything, and I suspect that many of our 400 or so readers have probably moved on, changed their contact info, or switched over to more modern forms of social media entirely. But I wanted to put it out there just in case. I feel like the readership of this blog became our extended Guatemalan family, and that you might appreciate hearing the news.

Peace and health

jaime

 

 

 

]]>
Happy 50th birthday, Peace Corps https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/happy-50th-birthday-peace-corps/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/happy-50th-birthday-peace-corps/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:23:22 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4280 As of March 1, the Peace Corps is now 50 years old. We hadn’t really planned to do anything to celebrate, but Emily got an email from a friend of a friend, announcing that the Oregon Historical Society was opening a special exhibit at their museum in Portland, showcasing artifacts and stories from a half century of Oregonians that have served in the Peace Corps. Did you know that Oregon has the highest per capita rate of Peace Corps volunteers of all 50 states?  We called the museum and found that they still had some spaces available on the RSVP list, so we signed up.

Portland is about a two hour drive away, over a big mountain range, so we don’t go that often… and when we do, we double up on other errands to make the trip more useful. After some debate, we decided that we should wear traje to the event. I mean, how often do you get to wear corte and capishay in the US? And Portland is full of enough weirdos that my Todos Santos pants only drew stares from about half the people we passed on the street.

After a full day of running around, we finally arrived at the museum at a quarter past five, just before the scheduled start of activities at 5:30. Emily grabbed my arm.

“Look!” she said, pointing to a vaguely familiar looking man, standing next to his car in front of the museum. “It’s Jim Adriance!”

No way. Jim was the assistant country director of Peace Corps Guatemala when we arrived in ’08, and finished his five-year service just a few months after we arrived. I totally forgot he was from Portland. We all had a good laugh together, then went into the museum.

“Are you Peace Corps?” the girl at the counter smiled, seeing our getups. She handed us name tags with the Peace Corps logo, took our money, and checked us off of the reservation list.

“Aren’t you glad we wore traje?” I asked Emily, as we hung our coats in the cloakroom. People were filing in past us, and there were lines starting to cue up at the bar. I made a card swiping motion at one of the bartenders, asking if they took plastic (I was totally out of cash). She smiled, and over the din of conversation told me that it was open bar tonight. Wow! We later found out that the excellent hors d’oeuvres and drinks were all donated for the event by a local prosperous restauranteur… who was also a returned Peace Corps volunteer from the 60s.

After twenty minutes of socializing, the curator gave some opening remarks, and we heard a brief speech by the wife of a former (now deceased) Peace Corps director. As we listened, we looked at the gathered crowd, several hundred people strong, ranging in age from people in their 20s, to people in their 80s. Nearly half of them were wearing some sort of fantastic dress: cloaks from Peru and Ecuador, kaftans from Morocco, gowns from Lesotho, and countless others in amazing fabrics, colors, and patterns.

“NOW I’m glad we wore traje,” Emily nodded.

Then they opened the exhibit. It was really well put together, with lots of historical information about the early days of Peace Corps. What adventurers THOSE guys were- no internet, no phone, no mail for months. Surprisingly little training. They were dropped in by helicopter, or by canoe, or by mule. They are the real heroes, the giants of the old days. And many of them were with us in person that night.

Those of us with the Peace Corps logo on our name tags became impromptu actors in a living history museum; everyone wanted to hear the stories of what we saw and did. We met volunteers who served in countries that have since “graduated” from needing Peace Corps help, like India and Korea. We met volunteers from Guatemala who served during the civil war, decades before we were there. And we even met  former Peace Corps staff people, like the very lady who worked at headquarters in Washington DC and processed our application, sending us to Guatemala… Emily recognized her name, and after a brief discussion, she remembered us. How’s that for a small world?

There were a lot of cool things in the display cases, as well. But one of them made me laugh out loud… Maximon! Hell yeah, no party is complete unless Maximon is in attendance.

With all the reminiscing and memories and conversations, the evening ended much too quickly. So, if any museums near you are having Peace Corps exhibits or activities to commemorate the occasion, I encourage you to go.  I will close this post with something I learned at the exhibit (which is the point of going to museums, right? To learn something?). It’s the original 13 guiding principles of the Peace Corps that were worked out in its first few months of existence, as reported in their first annual report to Congress in 1962. They are followed to this day.

  1. The Peace Corps is open to all qualified, single Americans above 18 and for married couples with no dependants under 18, where each has a needed skill.
  2. A college degree is not a requirement for service.
  3. The hardships of Peace Corps life will be featured in recruitment so no candidate will misjudge the terms and conditions under which he volunteered to serve.
  4. Volunteers will learn to speak the language of the host country, learn to appreciate its customs, be able to discuss adequately and intelligently the United States when questioned, refrain from political or religious proselytizing, and set as the standard of their success how well the requested job is fulfilled.
  5. The highest medical, psychological, and character standards are established and it is determined that final selection will be made at the conclusion of training.
  6. Peace Corps will go only where invited.
  7. Volunteers overseas will work for the host government or a private agency or organization within the foreign country, serving under host country supervisors and working with host country co-worers where ever possible.
  8. Volunteers will not be “advisers” but “doers”.
  9. Volunteers will serve two years without any salary or draft exemption.
  10. Volunteers will enjoy no diplomatic privileges or immunities, have no PX or commissary rights, receive no “hardship” or cost-of-living allowances and have no vehicle unless needed for their job.
  11. Volunteers will be provided a living allowance enabling them to live in a modest manner comparable to the circumstances of their co-workers.
  12. A termination allowance of $75 (approximately $275 pre-tax, currently) for each month of satisfactory service is established to help the Volunteer get started again in this country.
  13. Candidates, trainees, and Volunteers will be told they can resign from the Peace Corps at any time. The Peace Corps wants only those who serve freely, a decision now made each day by each Volunteer.
]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/happy-50th-birthday-peace-corps/feed/ 1
The next great frontier https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-next-great-frontier/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-next-great-frontier/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:53:16 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4274 Greetings all, and happy new year.

I’ve not written since last fall, but I had an interesting discussion last week that made me realize I have a loose end to tie up. While talking to my friend Missy (who has occasionally posted comments on this blog) about our next great adventure, she asked if I was going to blog it like I did our Peace Corps experience. That had been my plan, but now I realize that it’s possible that some of you who read THIS blog might be interested in the next one.

It’s going to be a bit different, but in some ways the same. We won’t be living in a foreign country, working for the US government, teaching health, or learning to get along in a rural Mayan community. Instead, we will be living in a state new to us, working for ourselves and community organizations, teaching nutrition, and learning how to get along in a rural American community.  We’re starting a farm, from scratch.

This project is the happy accident of a lot of things we learned in Guatemala, and I’ve explained it in detail here on our new website, www.PeaceCrops.net. The new blog has all the same functionality as this one, as far as comments and RSS feeds and so forth, so if you’re interested after reading the intro, please consider participating. I look forward to hearing your two cents worth.

Thanks for all your support through the hard times. It was great.

-jaime

ps: I’m still working away on the book, and I’ll send out info when it’s ready. I’m shooting for sometime before 2012, when the world will end.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-next-great-frontier/feed/ 2
Mark and Guate Living https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/mark-and-guate-living/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/mark-and-guate-living/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 01:40:58 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4271 Hey there. Remember us?

I know I said that we were “done” with our blog, but some back story just came up that is SO AMAZING that I have to post it. As you may know, there is a large American expatriate crowd living in Antigua. Those of you that were with us in the early days of the blog might also remember Mark, who has his own blog at www.GuateLiving.com and occasionally commented on ours as well. Our relationship with him began on a bad footing when he posted some inflammatory comments on one of Emily’s posts (scroll down to the bottom of that post to read the comments; it’s a long one). We had a few rounds of emails with him, then decided it would be best to meet him in person to try to settle our differences. As it turns out, he was a very friendly and hospitable guy, and after having dinner with him and his family, we realized we’d merely had some sort of communications disconnect, and we became friends. Antigua is a small place, and during the remainder of our service we probably bumped into him a half dozen times more, including saying goodbye to him on the next-to-the-last day we were in Guatemala.

About a year after meeting Mark, we had the fun experience of spending a few days with Norm Kwalek, another of our readers, who decided to take a few days out of his vacation schedule to hang out with us. We had a fantastic time, and Norm even gave us a ride back to our village. Although I didn’t think much of it at the time, Norm mentioned that he’d met Mark a few days earlier (most blog readers follow several blogs at once) and that the guy was friendly enough, but there was something fishy about him. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my days as a union organizer,” Norm said. “A guy moves his entire family, wife and 10 kids, to Central America? On a whim? He’s running from something.”

MarkGuate.jpgSo, imagine my surprise this morning when emails started rolling in from our former blog readers, passing us links to various news sites proclaiming that Jeffrey Lynn Cassman had been arrested in Antigua and is about to be extradited to the US for mail fraud, securities fraud, skipping bail, and some other stuff. It seems that our buddy Mark was on Tennessee’s Most Wanted list, as well as having the attention of the Postal Inspection Service as well as the FBI. But a name change and dying your hair can only hide you for so long, I guess. Even in Guatemala.

Here is a link of all the newspaper articles about this guy for the last two years; it’s fascinating to follow his buildup of notoriety as a criminal. And here is one in Spanish, from the Prensa Libre.

It’s weird to think that we knew this guy, visited his house, had a pleasant dinner with his family, and carried on two years of communication with him. The police’s description of him is surprisingly accurate (devout catholic, homeschooled children, cigar and wine aficionado, businessman) and if we’d have KNOWN he was wanted and had read the police description, we could have picked him out easily. Maybe I should have thought twice when he asked that I remove the photo of him I posted on the blog after our dinner together? But I guess that is how it works: con artists get by with the holes in the information net. But interestingly, the (inter)net is getting tighter and tighter. I don’t really know what this means for society as whole, but it’s worth pondering.

To those of you that sent me emails, by the way, thanks… I never would have seen that as it passed through the news. Much like I knew the guy for almost two years, and never knew he was a fugitive.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/mark-and-guate-living/feed/ 3
Solicitud https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/solicitud/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/solicitud/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:51:14 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4259

Dear All,

It’s hard to believe we’ve been back in the US for a month now; in a lot of ways, it still feels to me like we just got here. We’ve been enjoying copious amounts of time with our friends and families and taking advantage of wonderful inventions like hot showers, flush toilets, and freezers that turn Michigan blueberries into sweet little icy treats for us to devour. I’m a little surprised we haven’t turned blue.

We returned to the states with a number of ambitious plans that began to fall apart before we even landed. Fletch had a fever starting the night before we boarded the plane, and it didn’t go away for five days. We spent those days just laying around his parents house waiting for him to recuperate, and in that time we realized how unbelievably tired we were. We’d planned so many things–family and friend visits, a two and a half week road trip to the west coast and back, a trip to Europe and then the move to Oregon scheduled for October. Forced relaxation felt good on one hand, but made me so anxious about the time I was wasting not visiting people. I would sit and try to plan the road trip only to feel irritated and upset. The truth was we weren’t ready to go anywhere. We decided to cancel the road trip, and then we canceled our attendance at a friends wedding in Utah over Labor Day weekend, and once we started canceling things, it felt so good that we completely canceled this year’s trip to Europe.
It’s funny to realize how all these plans were so instrumental in helping us get through our last few crazy months as Peace Corps volunteers. They gave us something to look forward to at the time, but once we arrived home we realized we didn’t need an escape anymore. Every day we spend with our parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and close friends is full of a million enjoyable things we spent two years living without. We don’t need to escape anywhere. It’s been good staying right here close to home.
I think the most difficult part of being back is reconciling this life with our lives in Guatemala. I haven’t really been able to do that; they’re like living on two different planets. I feel more comfortable not thinking too much about Guatemala, or it makes my heart and my head hurt. We’ve talked to our host family in Temux a few times, but the phone is such an awkward, inadequate thing between us while navigating the multiple languages and space and time. It was always so easy just to pop over and say good morning or good afternoon. For the time being, looking forward feels like the right thing to do.
Instead of running around on multiple vacations living a life in flux we’re working on ways to start a more permanent life. In the last month we did make a short trip to Oregon to set up our residency there, to visit dear friends, and to follow up on some leads of people who might be able to help us with our ultimate goal of starting a farm. The trip was more than we’d hoped for on all fronts. Time with friends was great, and the connections we’ve made with organizations working on food security in the area are very promising. With the arrival of September, though I would say we aren’t fully adjusted to being in the states yet, we’re trying to focus more on making our farm dream a reality. Job searches are underway. Piles of books are being mulled through for information and advice. We feel fortunate, hopeful, and very happy to be right where we are.
Those feelings were part of what led me to do Peace Corps in the first place, to give back in this life that has given me so much. Literally two days after I arrived home my sister said, “Emily, I’ve signed up as team captain for Pedal for Peace to raise money for girls’ education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You’re either bicycling with me or donating money!” We are a bossy bunch. It’s so comforting to know there are quite a few things that didn’t change in our absence. 🙂
Fletch and I thought our blog readers might be interested in an update on our lives, and because you’re all a very global thinking bunch, we wanted to make you aware of this little opportunity to donate to yet another good cause. All the money raised in the Pedal for Peace bike-athon will be donated to the Central Asia Institute, founded by Greg Mortenson. For more information on the Mortenson click on his name, or for more in-depth information read the New York Time’s best-seller Three Cups of Tea.

(We’re accepting donations via PayPal just like when we were in Guatemala, as well as cash/check for any of you who live in Indiana or like to use the US Postal system. We also are going to try a little PayPal donate button, for those of you who want things to be “easy” like the Office Depot commercials. You can use it, but it takes 30 cents out of the donation to give to PayPal. If you think “easy” is worth 30 cents, feel free to give it a try.  -Jaime)


Guatemala made me understand how instrumental girls education is in building productive communities throughout the world. Your donations would be greatly appreciated, not just by me, but by the girls and young women who are the beneficiaries of the project. As little as $5 goes a long way. All donations must be collected by September 25, the bike-athon will take place October 2 at the velodrome in Indianapolis, Indiana. I’ll be there racing alongside my brothers and sisters. It’s so good to be home!

Thanks for your time. We hope you’re all doing well!
Best,
Emily and Jaime/Jim/Fletch Fanjoy

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/solicitud/feed/ 7
Goodbye https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/goodbye-2/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/goodbye-2/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 18:15:17 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4199 luggageSM.jpgWe have successfully returned to American soil, a two full days ago. Look at all that luggage! Sorry it took me so long to let you know, but as luck would have it, I’ve been really sick and only just now feel up to opening the laptop. We had a really nice dinner with Nick and Katal the night before we left (they were in Antigua on unrelated business, just by luck), and I can’t think of two people with which I’d have rather spent my final hours in Guatemala. Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty ill by the end of the evening, so I wasn’t much fun by the time I got back to the hotel. This got worse during the plane flights the next day, and if you zoom in on my face in the picture, I am looking pretty unwell. Anyways, I just got back from the doctor and they have no idea what is wrong with me, but much of the tests aren’t back from the lab– except for the one that says my white blood cell count is low. Now my dad tells me I must have leukemia or AIDS or some congenital bonemarrow disorder. He’s such a drama queen sometimes.

So, anyways, we’re back home after our 27 months of Peace Corps service.

I guess this is it.

Goodbye.

But I have a few things that I want to say before I go. First, the administrative stuff: as I have promised, this blog is now done. I used to think that blogging was a vain and self-important activity, the domain of angst-ridden emo teenagers and obsessive new parents. I have since discovered (largely due to you, the reader) that it can be a powerful tool for disseminating knowledge, opening discourse, and making a difference in the world. Our blog was a fortunate confluence of the right place, the right time, and the right subject matter. Now that our Peace Corps service is over, I will be returning to a more private life– a life that would be both vain to write about, and boring to read about.

Having said that, though, I realize the how important this blog was to not only Emily and me, but also to our villagers and our regular readers, both of whom I will miss very much. It is my plan to lock the comments and user registration functions after a few weeks, then leave the blog online permanently as a resource for anyone who wants to learn about the Peace Corps and Mayan culture.

And us? We have a life to get back to. After spending a few weeks traveling around the country in our pickup, visiting friends and family, we’re going to take a long-overdue trip to the UK to pay visits to several friends. Emily showed me where she studied in Spain, so I have to return the favor and take her to where I studied in Scotland. In the fall, once we’ve reacquainted ourselves with our long-lost loved ones, we are moving to Oregon, where we are going to start a small-scale agribusiness. To keep ourselves afloat while that ramps up, Emily is going to start grad school and I will start looking for freelance architecture jobs again. Oh, and I’m going to start constructing an airplane in the evenings. Living in the mountains for two years builds up a lot of unrealized energy, so I guess we’ve got to release it somehow.

We’ve received a lot of encouragement to write a book when we return to the US, and I think that we are interested in doing that. It will be more than just proofreading and reformatting the blog then sending it to the printer: Emily has several journals filled with notes and commentary that she wants to pull from, and we have many posts that never “went live” because we couldn’t publish them. Discussions of politically-charged themes, specific locations of volunteer sites and activities, or accounts of things that happened to us that would unnecessarily worry our family members can now be included, allowing us to tell our story more completely. I want to do some more illustrations, including some maps of the places we visited. I imagine it will take a year or so for us to come to terms with our Peace Corps service, organize our thoughts, and do all the work necessary to get the book to print. If you’d like to be on the mailing list to receive notification when we finish, please send me an email and I will add you. And don’t worry, I won’t send your email address to anyone else. If you don’t know my email but want to be on the list, post a comment at the bottom of this page, saying something like “add me” and I will copy whatever (hidden) email address you typed in when you entered the comment.

Now, to the final and very important task of thanks. My mom always used to tell me to be careful about listing specific people in a Thank You section, because you are going to offend anyone that you forgot, and in a large and complicated endeavor, it’s guaranteed you’re going to forget someone. If I forgot you, please forgive me. It’s been a long two years. If you feel REALLY sad or offended, please email me and I will add you… that’s the miracle of the blog! Revisionist history at the click of a mouse.

I wish to thank:

Ruby, for being a good wife and my best friend, for making me have adventures and always being there. We survived this, and have many more adventures yet to live.

Mike and Millie RIchardson, who worked tirelessly for two years as our stateside coordinators for project aid. Our boss called Mike “the best Peace Corps volunteer than never was.”

Dick and Ann Fanjoy, who sent insane amounts of care packages bringing us regular joy in down times. They also made sizeable financial contributions to our projects at the end of our service.

The Online Gaming Crew: Hammer, Yath, and Zanek. A slice of home, once a week.

Jerry Hoffman, for project assistance, technical advice, and being a good friend.

The Schneiders, for encouragement as well as financial support that was WAY beyond the call of duty.

The Youngs, for more of the same. Man, I have the coolest friends.

The Fahss (Fahses?), for sponsoring our chickens and lots of emotional support as well.

Mark at guateliving dot com, for starting this ball rolling. Four thousand hits in one month! Four thousand!

Robin Ragan & Tony Prado, for giving me two years of free college spanish classes, so I could go with Emily to Guatemala in the first place.

Everyone in Training Group 120. You are a compassionate bunch of footsoldiers, and can hug me with your crab hand any day.

And last, but not least: all of our readers. This blog would have been so much less without you.

Yujwal dyos, hemasanil. Gracias a ustedes.

Update: The blog is now closed to comments and new registrations, to reduce hacking and spamming opportunities as well as the amount of fluff email I receive in my inbox. If you only just now got to this page and still want access to the book, you can email me directly to be added to the list, or if it’s sometime in late 2011 of after, you can try searching for “Fanjoy” on Amazon.com.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/goodbye-2/feed/ 18
Gettin’ on a jetplane https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/gettin-on-a-jetplane/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/gettin-on-a-jetplane/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:33:27 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4200 Early tomorrow morning, we’re getting on the plane. Sorry about the landslide of posts in the last day or two; after more than a week of being extremely busy, we took two days of “vacation” at the lake, and we finally got caught up with the blogging. The idea was to relax a little and enjoy each other’s company before returning to what we know will be a few more weeks of busy, intense socialization in the US. Oh, and yesterday was also our anniversary. We’ve been married for four years now, more than half of it while living in Guatemala.

Besides relaxing, we spent the last few days of our Guatemalan experience buying some presents, saying goodbye to old friends, and packing our bags. Bags aren’t normally a problem with us, but after two years and a pile of going-away gifts, we’ve ballooned up to about 250 pounds of crap to bring back. That’s AFTER some ruthless discarding and regifting. Good news? You can take extra bags on international flights. Bad news? The airlines charge you $100 apiece for your third and fourth bags, and $50 for each one that’s overweight.

weighing_sm.jpgThat makes our big challenge “load distribution,” to keep costs at a minimum. While I was paying our last visit to my host family in San Luis, I made a makeshift balance scale from a broomstick, some string, a jug of water, and a tape measure. It works on basic statics: moments are equal to each other in a balance, and are the product of moment arm times mass. In this case, the moment arms can be measured with the tape, and we know the mass of the jug (1 gallon of water = 8 pounds). For my backpack, for example, the jug is at 37cm and the pack is at 10cm from the fulcrum. Do the math:

37cm x 8lbs = 10cm x ??lbs

weighingMemo_sm.jpg…which means that my backpack weighs 29.6 pounds, still within the airline tolerance. I can throw in 20 more pounds of clay idols, toy marimbas, native traje, and organic coffee before I get fined $50. Yay! The kids were pretty excited to help me weigh our stuff. Things went well until Memo asked to be weighed; two seconds after I took this picture we discovered that he exceeds the load capacity of my apparatus. BAM! But everyone laughed.

We also stopped by Froilan’s tailor shop for the final fitting of the suits we ordered. After Emily ordered hers, my mom got wind of it and suggested that I order one for myself as well, in memory of my Grandpa Wildy. He was a Great Depression survivor, always felt that you should “dress for success”, and it was his custom to buy his grandchildren a fancy suit when they graduated from college or other important occasions. What my mom didn’t know is that Froilan is cut form the same cloth: as a local craftsperson, he was in the Antigua newspaper a year back, the article entitled “Hay Que Vestir con Elegancia“– a direct quote from the interview (“One must dress with elegance”). After three visits, we slipped into our new togs, and WOW! do they look and fit great. Indeed, Froilan is a professional: we gave him several photos we’d taken from online fashion magazines, picked a fabric from his sample swatches of fine imported English wool, and he did everything else.

new_suitsSM.jpg

“Part of the reason I agreed to do these suits,” he explained as we were admiring ourselves in his mirror, “was because I wanted the challenge. How can I call myself a professional if I don’t ever aspire to doing trickier projects?’

Indeed. I apologize for the quality of this photograph; it doesn’t do the suits justice. When I get to a place that has good lighting, I will take a more flattering picture and post it– these suits are amazing. And at just under $200 apiece, they are a steal. Now our only concern is putting back on those 30 pounds we lost; my real dad tells me that during Vietnam, all of his crew had clothes tailored, but within a year or two of returning, nothing fit anymore.

I know that some of our blog readers are actually living in and around Antigua, so I want to post a shameless plug for my host dad/ master tailor, Froilan Menchú. Do yourself a favor and visit his tiny shop if you are in the market for new formalwear:

Diseño Profesional (Froilan Menchú)

2o Calle Poniente 34

Antigua Guatemala, Sacatepéquez

tel: 4074-8512

That’s about it for now; we have to finish packing for tomorrow’s big trip.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/gettin-on-a-jetplane/feed/ 4
Afterward https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/afterward/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/afterward/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:14:15 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4254 Fletch and I got married promptly, much sooner than we might have otherwise, to be able to serve together, and after a year and a half of waiting for a placement we received one only to have it taken away a week later due to a funny little conflict of interest rule…and Fletch supported and worked alongside me as we banged and shouted and beat down the door through their appeal process until Peace Corps let us back in. I didn’t believe we’d even make it to Guatemala, assuming that something else would come up to stop us from going, until we were sitting safely on the tarmac at the Aurora airport in Guate. For two years of chronic ailments, when I would find myself painfully doubled over in a latrine or with my head in a toilet (somehow I was always lucky enough to only throw up in toilets), or through ridiculous amounts of job related frustrations and thwarted projects, I would tell myself, “Hey, you asked for this. Remember, you wanted to be here!” And I think now I believe it was all worth it–I just hope my stomach goes back to a healthy normal once we’re home.

I want to thank you all for your time and comments and really just for caring. We started this blog mainly for our parents, but it turned into a project bigger than we ever could have foreseen, read not only by our families and best friends but also the ambassador and perfect strangers and former teachers and professors and fellow Peace Corps friends and RPCV’s and folks just invited to serve in Peace Corps Guatemala. Thanks, ComputerBrian, for pressuring us to do this.

I realize that I wasn’t exactly regular with my posts, not like the ever-faithful Jim/Fletch/Jaime. I also do not have a style as organized and concise as his. I had a lot of comments over these two years from numerous friends that they really try to read my posts, really, but it’s very difficult for them to get through the sheer volume sometimes. They pointed out that they have jobs and children and other things that require their attention in a day. 🙂 I understand, and I thank you for trying. The four people who were meant to read this blog, I’m fairly certain, have read every single word.

I struggled for a time trying to make my writing more Jaime-like and more singulary focused, but it’s just not me. In the end I’ve tried to relate to you all our lives as I experience them. Though we were almost as literally side-by-side through this adventure as we were figuratively, we’re two separate people. I do not believe that a marriage makes one. We experience the same things differently, sometimes very differently. And we express ourselves differently, sometimes very differently. For me this was an endurance experience with a lot going on, things blind siding you out of nowhere. That’s how I wrote about it. I hope that our different perspectives and styles made the blog more interesting, more complex, maybe even more fun for you all.

For Jim, this blog became his journal. He hasn’t written in his little leather book but two or three times in the last 27 months. I, on the other hand, am too attached to my uncensored personal opinions and filled something like 3.5 little leather books. fully detailing all aspects of the last 27 months as I lived them. 🙂 So my lengthy posts were really just a small, small sample of the volumes I write. In that sense, the blog was difficult for me, writing at length about things I’d already written at length about for myself. I found that giving you all a fair presentation without being too critical, or political, or iced over, or insincere here and there took a great deal of emotional energy and real time. For this reason I am very glad to be signing off of the blog once and for all at the end of this post. Fletch will take care of telling you about our decompression and anniversary, celebrating twelve days of vacation in and around Guatemala. To those of you who have suggested or in some cases demanded that I write a book, I’ll think about it, but I will make no promises.

While I have you all here, just one more thing. Thank you, for being part of this dream of mine, for supporting both of us through the best of times and the worst of times. Even if we’ve never met in person, your comments and well wishes buoyed our spirits on many, many occassions.

To our friends and families, we always liked you guys quite a lot. Now we’re convinced that you’re all the best, really. We love you beyond words, and we’re pretty much thrilled to be coming home!

To Fletch, after 4 years of a crazy marriage preceded by eleven years of the most unlikely friendship and noviazgo, what do I say to you? You were a great Peace Corps volunteer. Thanks for coming with me and making it your own.

El Fin.

Emily RR Fanjoy

Peace Corps Guatemala April 2008-July 2010

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/afterward/feed/ 7
Honduras https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/honduras/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/honduras/#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 05:22:27 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4174 guacamaya_sm.jpgWe took a little side trip to Honduras today, to see something of Central America besides Guatemala. This trip was in some ways similar to visiting Illinois from Indiana: hard to tell the difference, unless you read the patch on the policeman’s shoulder. Same language, same accent, same poverty, same natural beauty. The money is different (lempira instead of quetzales), so we had to change some so we could get a room for the night. Or so we thought; turns out that most everyone we met takes dollars. At first, we thought it was because they have heavy tourist traffic, but now I feel it might be because dollars are more stable. If you are a Honduran businessman, having some dollars hidden away could be a much more secure savings than holding onto the local coin. The exchange rate is also more favorable if one brings dollars instead of quetzales (18 lem to the dollar; 8 Q to the dollar), so our tourist dollar goes farther. Thank goodness we still had a few greenbacks left over from our last visit to the US. At the end of our trip, we brought back some leftover lempira to give to the nieces and nephews as “funny money”, much like my uncle Bill used to give to us when he came back from his various oddball assignments overseas. What WAS the currency in Botswana, anyways? I can’t remember.

copansM.jpg

Besides the novelty of seeing a new country, the real reason for our trip was to check out the Mayan ruins at Copán. We heard about them when we visited Tikal and El Mirador, and although the architecture at those two sites is larger and more grandiose, the sculpture and engravings at Copán leave the others far behind. It is generally considered the best site in the world for Mayan sculpture. Dozens of extremely elaborate carved stellae dot the site, as well as altars, capstones, and other stonework. All of the stellae are dated to the exact year they were built, since the Mayans are both obsessed with carving the date into everything, and also contrived one of the most sophisticated astrological calendars in history. Good news for the archaeologists!

grand stairsSM.jpgCopán was a major Mayan capitol in the 600s and 700s, operating later than Tikal and El Mirador, much farther to the north. To see these amazing works of engineering (highways, plazas, ball courts) backed up by such an elaborate infrastructure of culture and trade boggles my mind… especially when I think about Europe at the time, cowering in their tiny wooden palisades against the rampaging Vikings. Here is a picture of the pride of Copán: the grand staircase. The stairs climb the entire side of a pyramid, and each riser is carved with elaborate hieroglyphs depicting the history of the city in over 2,000 separate images.  

skullySM.jpg

But all good things must come to an end, and in the early 800s, the city died out. Archaeologists sampled gravesites and looked at bone development, age at death, and disease evidence. They found that like so many other places in history (Tikal, El Mirador, Mesa Verde), the culture grew too big for its britches. Overfarming and deforestation lead to extreme soil depletion, unchecked erosion, lost water resources, and eventual social collapse. By the time the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s, this former city of 30,000 was inhabited by five families.

This got Emily and I talking about how these things apply to modern life. We face many similar problems today: our freshwater resources in North America are running low, deserts in Africa are expanding, the rainforests in South America are disappearing daily, and the polar icecaps are smaller than they’ve been in millennia. Add this to a still-unchecked population explosion, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that some time soon, we’re going to run out of food/water/air to go around. You know the old saying, “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But despite all this doom and gloom, I remain optimistic, because we have something all these other ancient civilizations didn’t: communication. If one or two people in ancient Copán saw the writing on the wall, they could shout from a soapbox for a while but no one would take them seriously, if they were heard at all. In contrast, we now have internet and newsmedia and so forth, so as the situation worsens, more and more people are going to become aware of the problem, and (hopefully) we can get organized to take action before it becomes critical. Furthermore, we can draw scientists and thinkers to solve our problems from a world-wide pool of millions. I think we’ll be OK.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/honduras/feed/ 4
The Grand Finale https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-grand-finale/ Sat, 24 Jul 2010 05:17:43 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4165 The Grand Finale

by Emily Richardson Fanjoy

Guest Columnist

I was talking to a Peace Corps friend of mine not too long ago. “I just ran into a boy walking home today. His toes were sticking out of holes in the end of his shoes, and I almost started to cry. Isn’t that strange? I mean, I’ve been here so long and suddenly a boy with holes in his shoes makes me want to cry, after all the things we’ve seen?” She responded that she’s been startled to realize how infrequently these sort of things, the poor state of shoes and clothes and even homes, affect her now that she’s used to the way of life here.

“It sort of makes me worry that I’m a bad person,” she told me.

I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s more that these things are symbols of poverty that we learn from the safety of our lives in the states. In commercials asking for donations to the poor, you see children with toes sticking out of their shoes. You see children carrying water. You see dirt and flies. You learn these visual cues of poverty. I think they stop affecting us here because, first of all, we’d never make it through two years if we cried every time we saw this stuff. But it’s also because everything becomes personal.

After I caught myself from crying about the little boy’s toes sticking out of his shoes, I realized this stuff doesn’t bother me because I don’t usually see it anymore. I continued, “I know those toes. They belong to Frankie, and Frankie always greets me with a smile when I walk by. He usually tests my Q’anjob’al, and sometimes when I don’t understand what he’s trying to say, his friend Javi translates it into Spanish for me. I know Frankie and Javi are pretty excited about the carrots in my garden, since I’ve promised them each one when it’s time for picking. I don’t usually see their shoes during our conversations. Today it just got me.”

On that day, the symbols of poverty that I’d learned as a child suddenly connected to everything I’ve learned here as an adult. It’s not the poor state of Frankie’s shoes, it’s what they stand for. I saw intellectual poverty, a lack of life opportunity, restrictive gender roles, poor access to health services, and the plague of alcoholism stretching out before those exposed, dusty toes. It just broke my heart that Frankie is such a good kid who deserves so much more, and all I could promise him was a carrot.

A few weeks from now my government acronym will change from PCV, Peace Corps Volunteer, to RPCV, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. We signed up for twenty-seven months of service which has felt like both an eternity and the blink of an eye. In the case of my husband and I, we have spent more of our married days as PCVs than not. When we arrived, we were told by the outgoing volunteers that “The days are long and the months are short,” and we have found that to be absolutely true. To be sure, the process of leaving is full of mixed emotions, doubts, questions. What did we do here? Could we have done more? Did we cause unintended harm? Then there’s the thrill of going home, so searing sometimes that it’s accompanied by a real physical ache. Yet the same can be said for the thoughts of saying goodbye to the people with whom we’ve grown so close, and to leaving this stunningly beautiful place.

This time next year I might find myself in an apartment full of natural lighting and great windows, but none with the view we get from our tiny, smudged window in Guatemala: a deep green valley filled with Van Gogh-esque swirling clouds as the rain moves in. We will miss our “star status”, the fact that everywhere we go people are excited to see us, but we’re looking forward to a little anonymity. We will miss the kids that come and visit us every day, who work in the garden with us, who we read to on rainy afternoons, but we’re looking forward to spending time with the kids we’ve left in the states, our nieces and nephews. We will miss the pleasant evenings listening to rain on the tin roof of our house, but we’re looking forward to living somewhere that keeps wind, water, and pests out while enjoying modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing, climate control, and refrigeration. Although I’m sure we’ll miss the hilarity of bumping along country roads in antique American school buses, revamped and repainted for Guatemalan public transport and so lovingly dubbed “chicken buses”, we’re looking forward to the freedom of driving our little truck on the wide-open highways of America. They are so well organized and so well maintained in comparison!

From where I sit now, it’s hard to say exactly how this experience has affected me or what it will move me to do in the future. But what I will take with me, as I hope the above story illustrates, is the acute knowledge-through-experience of what poverty is, what it means, what it really affects in the hearts and minds and lives of people. And, ridiculous as it may sound, I count myself as fortunate to know these things. Before Peace Corps, I had never before experienced such a profound sense of gratitude for all the beautiful things in my life: family, friends, community, education, opportunity, convenience, justice, good government, country, home.

I have been challenged these past two years: mentally, emotionally, and physically. For one of the first times in my life, I’ve been able to see the world pragmatically, rather than just through books read in comfortable places. I’ve applied so many of my skills and latent knowledge to my every day work, and it has been immensely rewarding. It has also been a great pleasure to share my work, realizations, and experiences with my hometown of Logansport. I’d like to thank Kelly Hawes at the Pharos-Tribune for this opportunity, and to thank all of you who felt compelled to read my articles. And once more, thank you to all of you who have been a part of my life, as you’re all a little responsible for me being here today. Am I allowed to quote Ozzy Osbourne here? If so, I’d just like to shout, “Mama, I’m coming home!”

]]>
Moria? https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/moria/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/moria/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:45:47 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4126 Emily made me promise that before we left Guatemala, we’d see Semuc Champey, the only major attraction we didn’t get to in our two years of service. It’s been a while since we’ve “traveled” in the fun sense of the word, so these few extra days between our Close of Service and return to the US seemed like a good chance to tie up this loose end.

In Lanquin, the closest town to Semuc Champey, there aren’t a lot of lodging options. Two backpacker hostels cater to tourists like ourselves: El Retiro, which has a reputation for being a pretty extreme party at all hours of the day, and The Zephyr. It has really good reviews, despite being only 8 months old (El Retiro is about 15 years old), as well as hot showers, a few private rooms, and a lot of nature close by.

zephyr_sm.jpg“I dunno,” Anne said as we talked to her last week about our plan. “I stayed at the Zephyr when I went to Semuc Champey in November, and they lost my reservation. I had to sleep in the attic with the cockroaches! They’re a bunch of disorganized hippies.” She wrinkled her nose.

Not to be put off by hippies, we turned up yesterday at The Zephyr after a loooooong 9-hour ride in a microbus. “Sorry, but we seem to have lost your reservation,” the friendly guy at the desk said in a moderate British accent.

“You’d better look again,” Emily said, putting on the Battle Hat despite her fatigue, and wondering why we didn’t listen to Anne.

He did so, only to find that they DID have our reservation, but it was written on a different paper that no one ever looks at, and all the rooms were already given away. “If you want, you can have the bed in the attic,” he offered apologetically, “and we’ll knock a little off the price.”

After verifying there would be a proper room the following days, Emily sighed at the irony of the situation and accepted the attic bed. We were so beat from the last two weeks of goodbyes, running around, and paperwork, that we were too tired to look elsewhere. I hauled our stuff up the ladder into the attic as Emily went to check out the showers.

I set my pack down at the bedside, listening to the music blaring from the bar downstairs. A quick look at the structure revealed that the speaker for the sound system below us is about three feet from our bed, on the other side of a bamboo wall. A bamboo wall with poor acoustic qualities, as you might imagine. What I didn’t imagine was that that speaker would be blasting music until 5am the next morning, which it did with gusto.

“Showers are cold,” Emily said, frowning, as she poked her head up through the hatch in the floor. She climbed up in to the attic to join me, then stared over my shoulder at the bed. “What’s THAT?”

I turned around. “Oh, it’s a two-inch long cockroach crawling across the bedsheet. Wonderful.”

At that point, we gave up and settled in for a fitful night of screaming guitar riffs, beer-and-cigarette smells, and sex noises from the dorm bunks next door.


Luckily, the next day our room became available (complete with hot shower) and after a long nap to make up for lost sleep, we got back onto the right foot. That evening, a local Q’eqchi guide was offering tours of the caves in Lanquin. The departure time? 5pm, so you could hang out and see the bats leave for their night’s business.

cave entrance_sm.jpgWe took a tuk-tuk to the cave a few kilometers away, paid our fee to the man in the little shack at the trailhead, and hiked a few hundred meters in. The cave entrance itself was a crack above a stream that gushed forth from the mountainside, sortof like Faramir’s hideout in The Lord of the Rings. This analogy turned out to be slightly off, though, once we were inside and realized we were actually in Moria. Perhaps I am too obsessed with Tolkein’s masterwork, but there are a lot of cool Tolkein-esque natural wonders in Guatemala that would make it a good runner-up for filming the trilogy…if only they had the technology and social infrastructure to match New Zealand.

As we hiked into the caves, it soon became apparent that the cavern complex was elaborate: a half-dozen main chambers, some of which were fifty or sixty feet high. “This is a lot like the caverns at Cave Junction in Oregon, or Luray Caverns in Virginia,” I said to myself as we explored. This is when I found out that Emily had never been in a cave before. What? How can that be possible? Caves are incredibly cool. But I guess there aren’t many in northern Indiana.

moria_sm.jpg

We passed stalactites, stalagmites, curtains, pools, and all sorts of cool geologic wonders. The caves were remarkably free of graffiti and abuse, a rarity in the third world. We saw a name and “1966” painted high up on one wall, apparently left by one of the first professional explorers, and then came to a flat area atop a high shelf. The entire area was black with soot. “This is where the Mayan priests come to burn offerings of incense and copál,” our guide explained. “For hundreds of years, up until a few years ago, they were the only ones that ever came into the cave.” A few years back, the locals realized the tourism potential for the cave, strung up some electrical lights, built a little guard shack, and are doing a respectable job at keeping it vandalism free. Most of the tour companies around here are owned and operated by Guatemalan Mayans, something they’re proud of and working to continue, fighting off foreign megabusinesses that threaten to commercialize the industry and monopolize the market.

rubybats_sm.jpgWhen our tour ended, we returned to the entrance of the cave. “It’s almost dark, the bats should be starting soon,” he said as he looked at his watch. “Turn out your lights, and we will wait.”

A dozen or so of us waited, lights out, as the last rays of the evening sun casting a dim light into the first chamber. I was pondering how bats could know it’s time to do their thing, since it’s eternally night in the caves, when I noticed that the roof was swimming. OK, not really “swimming”, but it looked like a river was running along the ceiling in all the nooks and crannies, like gravity was reversed.

“Ok, turn on the flash of your cameras, and shoot at the roof,” the guide advised us. Poof! Flashes went off, and we realized there were THOUSANDS of bats zoming everywhere. Within minutes, they were zipping around us, streaming out the entryway. It was like the Dan Ryan Expressway at 5:30 pm on a Friday night. Bats everywhere! But unlike on Scooby Doo, the swarm of bats howling out the cave entryway did it in total silence. “They are just getting started,” the guide advised us. “There are millions in here.”

crazybats2SM.jpg


The next day, we made it to Semuc Champey proper. The entire region is filled with limestone, moving water, caverns, and karsts. The morning’s event? Checking out another cave. This one, however, was filled with water.

About a decade ago, I visited New Zealand for a few months, and tried Blackwarer Rafting while I was there. The Kiwis have tourism down to a science, and really make use of their cool natural wonders: in “blackwater rafting”, the idea is that you float the rapids in a water-filled cave complex. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s pretty cool. To prepare, the guides equip you with a wetsuit, water shoes, life preserver, helmet, headlamp, rock climbing harness, and (of course) an inner tube. Hey, I said they made it a science, right?

candleheadSM.jpg

In Guatemala, for the exact same trip, you get: a candle.

Yep. We all stripped off our clothes down to a bathing suit, were each given a candle, and plunged into the mysterious world of undeground waterways. The guide was a little better equipped: he had a headband made from a strip of old innertube, into which he stuck a half dozen extra candles.

It was truly amazing seeing the mysteries of the deep by candle light, and it made me feel even more like Gimli, Gloin’s son as I held up my lone flickering flame to check out deep crevasses, towering spires, and dripping stalactites. As we dogpaddled our way along, gripping candles between our teeth, I though about what it means to “adventure” in the third world. Most of humanity doesn’t know about liability insurance, tort law, and negligence lawsuits. People are expected to act reasonably to safeguard their own wellbeing. In the US, coffee cups say “Caution: Hot Coffee” so McDonalds doesn’t get sued again when some moron burns themselves on the hot beverage they specifically ordered that way. Geysers have guardrails. Scenic overlooks have fences. I’m not saying that leaving the handrail off of a stairway with a 100-foot dropoff is a good idea (seen it), but sometimes the lack of over-protectiveness here is charming in a way, and shows us things that would never be possible back home. It’s life in the raw, it’s being responsible for yourself… it’s seeing millenium-old natural wonders by candlelight, and it can be beautiful.

The final part of the tour was the star of the show: the pools of Semuc Champey. This photo is the one I think of as “the money shot,” one of the most famous in all of Guatemala. Semuc Champey translates into “where the water goes underground” in the local Mayan dialect, and that is exactly what you’re seeing here. A giant raging river drops through an enormous hole in the ground at the top left of the photo, due to a strange geologic condition, and flows under massive plates of limestone. The plates, in turn, are covered with a small percentage of water that doesn’t fit thorugh the hole, forming beautiful green pools of slow-moving water that are arranged like giant stairs down the hillside. At the bottom, the river comes raging back out of the exit hole, about 50 feet wide and a reported 25 feet deep. THAT is a lot of water.

semuc_champeySM.jpg

We hiked all over the site in the steamy jungle heat, climbing the limestone cliffs to get the money shot, then back down to swim and wade in the scenic pools. The cool water of the caves and then the pools, alternated with the oppressive humidity of the jungle, made for a really enjoyable day.


Back at the hostel, we had a beer to celebrate a good day. I’m not much of a beer person, but we’ve discovered something new in Guatemala: Russian beer. It’s all the rage in the more touristy areas, and feels strangely at home in this weird country of Korean-made cars, Chinese-made electronics, Indonesia-made condoms, and yarn from the Ivory Coast. This particular company, Baltika, has four different beers that are regularly available here: 5, 6, 7, and 9. Hah, yeah, the different varieties just have a number, not frivolous names like “Special Draft Amberbock.” Russians are very cool that way, all business, just like their airplanes. Here’s our take on the beers:

5: A lighter beer, tastes like a heffeweisen. Probably our second favorite, and it’s really good with a lime in it.

6: Stout, like Bass or Guinness if it didn’t have the burnt taste. Strong molasses flavor makes it not so good with food. But if you’re hungry? Yumm, like the monks of old who drank doppelbock to sustain themselves whilst fasting.

7: We like this one the best. It’s a medium lager, sortof like Heineken, and comes in a green glass bottle. It’s the only one with a pull tab to open it. What?

9: DANGER. RED ALERT. This one tasts like beer, but is actually a mechanism to cause inebriation in the incautious. It’s a crazy 8% alcohol, very high for a beer and challenging some wines. We first tried it at the tasty falafel place in Antigua after a full day’s camioneta ride. We were starving and the restaurant owner (who is a friend of ours) recommended it, so we tried it. Unfortunately, we’d not eaten all day and the food was slow in coming, allowing us to finish the entire beer before the food arrived. Despite the fact that we’d SPLIT the bottle between the two of us, we had trouble finding our hotel room that evening.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/moria/feed/ 2
By the Numbers https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/by-the-numbers/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/by-the-numbers/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:16:15 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4202 For all you left-brain people, we collected some objective, quantatative data to summarize what was actually a very subjective, qualatative experience. During our time in the Peace Corps, there were…

6,506 pictures taken (Jaime)

4,735 hits on the blog in our busiest month (June 2010)

3,706 pictures taken (Emily)

3,476 dollars of Uncle Sam’s money spent on infrastructure

417 blog entries posted

400 trees planted

300+ chickens vaccinated

295 square meters of concrete floor installed

271 pounds of baggage brought back on the flight home

209 women trained in preventive health

92 morrales produced by Temux Mayan Artisans

91 formal health lectures given

46 posters drawn

31 pounds lost (Jaime)

30 pounds lost (Emily)

29 gringoes who visited our home *

27 months spent living in Guatemala

18 computers delivered

16 stoves built

13 articles published in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune

12 other volunteer sites visited **

9 water tanks built

4 latrines built

3 confirmed types of parasites contracted (Emily)

3 nights spent hospitalized (Jaime)

2 lives changed forever

0 times victimized by crime


* visitors we had: the 4 witches, karen, elke, devin, robin, elena, mike, millie, alta, anne, dan, zack, joe, katy, matt, sarah, norm, steve, donaldo, alice, charlotte, 3 trainees, katal, nick. Wow, that’s a lot!

** PCV sites we visited: alta, charlotte, S&M, K&J (both sites), sara furman, N&K, anne, kristin, dan, cat, kaying

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/by-the-numbers/feed/ 2
Where did we go? https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/where-did-we-go/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/where-did-we-go/#comments Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:44:17 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4096 Wow, it’s been about ten days since we’ve posted! I hope no one was worried. We’re still alive, we’ve just been extremely busy. So busy, in fact, that we have a half-dozen or so posts to make to chatch up with everything that just happened. So as not to overload you, we’re going to be sending out a retroactive post every day or two this week until we get caught back up.

In short, today is the first day of us no longer being Peace Corps volunteers. We are going to be in Guatemala for another week and a half or so, finishing up a few social obligations, traveling a bit, and taking a few days of VACATION to celebrate our 4-year wedding anniversary in relative peace before we head back to whatever insanity awaits us in our homeland. We expect to be back in the US by the first of August.

So expect more posts through the end of the month, to find out how it all turned out. And don’t worry, we’ll let everyone know when we’ve returned safe and sound to American soil.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/where-did-we-go/feed/ 6
Scavenger hunt https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/scavenger-hunt/ Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:12:55 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4197 Our last day as Peace Corps volunteers was spent in an elaborate scavenger hunt. Being employees of the US Government, we have a lot of papers to fill out to officially terminate our service, especially if we want to have access to the benefits that we receive for successfully completing our two years. By an executive order signed by John F. Kennedy, returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) get one year of noncompetitive hiring preference for certain government jobs, much like a watered-down version of the benefits extended to honorably discharged veterans. In addition, we get a few thousand dollars of “readjustment allowance” to help us secure an apartment, make a down payment on a car, and so forth to get us back into normal American life once again. Although our fantastic socialized healthcare finishes when we leave the Peace Corps, we get a month of free health insurance on the way out the door and can pay for up to 18 additional months through a special group coverage offered to RPCVs.

But to get these things, we have to collect a dozen or so signatures from various officials and administrators at Peace Corps headquarters. Some are easy, like the facilities manger who affirms that we’ve returned our handbook and toolkit, or the bursar who checks our bank paperwork to be sure we have no outstanding debts.

Others are more time consuming. At the medical office, for example, we turn in our Peace Corps medical kit, but we also have an exit interview with the nurse, who goes over our medical records with us, returns our W.H.O. vaccination cards, and explains the forms we would need if we were to claim any workman’s comp medical coverage in the next year. She also gave us our terminal malaria prophylaxis: you know, a hefty set of pills to take for four weeks once we’re back in the US, to kill any malaria parasites that might be camping out in our livers (gross!). Even though our village is not in a malaria-endemic area, we spent time working and traveling through areas that are. Better safe than sorry. A few years back, a volunteer had a malaria relapse almost a year after returning to the US, and had to go to three different doctors before anyone even thought to test him for it.

Collecting all the signatures is a weird experience. We visited many people we’ve known and worked with for two years, doing this routine administrative task, but at the same time knowing that it is also saying goodbye. There are some people on staff that have treated us like adopted parents, people like Basilio and Ana Isabel, who we will miss a lot. Besides farewell, we wanted to say thanks to everyone for looking out for us for two whole years. But to our surprise, most of them actually thanked us: “Thank you for giving up two years of your lives to help my country. Thank you.”

On the way to get the signature from the director of the language department, we passed by the office of Craig Badger, the head of training and a long-time ally of ours. We stopped in.

“I can tell by the looks on your faces that you’ve come to say goodbye,” he said in a serious but friendly way. At that point, it all became very real, and a few tears came unbidden to both Emily and me. Craig’s always gone the extra mile for us, even after we were done with training and his official responsibility to us was over. He helped us get extra funding for our Q’anjob’al lessons, gave us advice when we were fighting for more volunteers in Santa Eulalia, and gave me his copy of A Mayan Life to read. He’s always been very positive, encouraging, and levelheaded. He’s one of the good guys.

A bit after noon, we were all called into the central courtyard of the training center to have a farewell lunch. Several of the administrators were there, and we had a chance to get up and “dar palabras“, or say a few words. Standing there, we all gasped at how few of us were actually left from the initial 30 or so in our training group: six in Healthy Homes, seven in Youth Development. We’d lost some due to health issues, emotional issues, administrative issues, and a bunch went home early to start grad school. But here we are, the survivors from the original picture with George Bush:

HH-final_sm.jpg YD-final_sm.jpg

As I should have anticipated, the scavenger hunt couldn’t be completed in one day. Farewell hugs, people gone to meetings, lost paperwork, and other coincidental events forced us to return the next morning for the last few signatures. Perhaps it was meant to be this way; the next day was the swearing-in ceremony for our replacements, people we hardly know who will carry on the work after we are gone. We got there early, to avoid the rush and catch the administrators before they were embroiled in the ceremonies of the day. Within minutes, we had what we came for and were ready to leave.

“I want a picture with us with the Peace Corps flag,” Anne whispered to Ashley as we were standing by the front door. But the flag was gone! A quick search revealed that it had been moved to the pavilion, in anticipation of the swearing-in ceremony that would be starting shortly. We casually meandered out to the pavilion and discovered Wendy, the acting Director, waiting patiently by the podium.

She’s a very friendly lady, and the five of us started talking. “You know, if you’d like, you can come with me to meet the Ambassador when he arrives,” she invited. “Just keep an eye out, and if you see me leave suddenly, meet me at the front gate.”

About that time my phone rang. It was Froilan, my host dad from training. “Jaime, We’re here!” he said.

I turned around and looked into the pavilion, which was mostly empty chairs when we arrived, but had since filled with over a hundred people, American and Guatemalan. An arm waved from the back.

san luis women_sm.jpg

Of course! All of the host families from San Luis would be here; they had trainees this cycle, and were here to celebrate with them at their swearing-in. I ran back to visit with Jovita, Froilan, Doña Suzanna, and Doña Lydia; all long-time friends of mine from the very beginning, more than two years ago. The circle was closing before my vary eyes.

Just then, Emily caught my attention. Wendy had disappeared. The ambassador was coming.

We found Wendy outside the front door of Peace Corps headquarters, within the secure outer wall that enclosed the grounds. We chatted for a while, discussing the last time we saw the Ambassador a few weeks ago at the Fourth of July party. We’re fortunate in that he’s interested in the Peace Corps and actively supports the mission.

Suddenly, the guards started bustling and the front gates opened up, allowing two sleek Suburbans to enter the compound. The first one had strange-looking windows, obviously heavily modified with bulletproof glass to protect the Ambassador. The doors of the second Suburban opened while it was still moving, and imposing-looking Men in Black with sunglasses and earbuds stood on the running boards. When it slowed enough, they hopped off and secured the area.

“The veterans are here!” the Ambassador said, recognizing us and smiling as he walked up. In the past two years, we’ve each had a few opportunities to speak with him, and he seems to have a good memory for that sort of thing. “Sorry I missed the farewell lunch. I really wanted to come, but I had a meeting I couldn’t get out of.”

We chatted for a few minutes in the front yard of the Peace Corps office. Like I said, he’s a very personable guy. He mentioned that he hoped to get a chance to visit Santa Eulalia some time in the next year or two, and I suggested that if he were to go to the trouble to travel all the way out there, it would be worthwhile to go a bit further to enjoy the view in Nick and Katal’s site. “If you go to Santa Eulalia, I am sure that the people there will talk about if for years afterwards,” I smiled. I wish I could be there to see it!

By this point we’d already stolen too much of Mr. McFarland’s time from those waiting in the pavilion, so we thanked him for his time and support. He smiled, shook everyone’s hands again, and started inside.

“Can I get a picture with you, Mr. Ambassador?” Anne blurted out, shoving her camera into my hands.

last_day_sm.jpg

“Actually, why don’t you all get into the picture?” Wendy offered. So we all posed with the Ambassador.

“Oops, I think I cut off your feet,” Wendy said, looking at the camera. Everyone laughed; it’s a gag we never get tired of. Guatemalans have this obsession with making sure every inch of a person is in the photo, leaving all their snapshots oddly-composed.

Mr. McFarland chuckled as we posed for another. “That’s OK, my feet aren’t that good looking anyways.”

“The Ambassador made a joke!” Ashley squeaked, mostly to herself.

“The funny part is that you laughed,” he replied, smiling into the camera for the next shot.

After the brief photo shoot, we parted ways for the last time. The Ambassador went inside with his entourage to start a brand new group of volunteers on their two years of service. And the four of us? We walked out the front gate of the Peace Corps compound, terminal papers in hand, to start the rest of our lives as ordinary citizens.

]]>
The Trail of Tears Part 2 https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-trail-of-tears-part-2/ Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:09:28 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4238 To leave our site, we planned on renting a van just for ourselves, but then we put the word out to our friends that they were welcome to ride along if they thought they wanted to, and we could split the cost. Most of them thought it was a great idea. From our house to Huehue, it was just the two of us with the driver Mario and his wife, who he brought along for company and so she could enjoy the scenery. The ride through the mountains was beautiful, watching the sun come up and turn the sky red, watching the deep shadows of that first light slowly recede as the hill turned greenish gold. We watched Kab’ tzin, the two stone monoliths, grow larger until they were right up next to us and then behind us. The smell of hot coffee was enough to perk up Mario when I popped that thermos open. The red sword flowers and little gold blossoms were brilliant against the dark green rocky fields. I just tried to soak in every minute of it until we started the descent into Huehue where things are still nice looking, but definitely not as lovely as the top.

Funny side note, we still had a vaccination cooler from the ministry of agriculture, and though I’d called our contact there to try and get it back to him, I had no luck until the day before we left. He said he’d be climbing up to a village in the cumbre, and since there’s only one road I just had to keep an eye out for his white truck. Sure enough, we passed him, and since I had my phone out, I made Mario pull over and called Nelson to turn around. We handed off the cooler with a list inside of how many chickens we’d vaccinated in various communities, then took off in opposite directions. One more final task finished.

First we picked up Maggie from Aguacatan just outside of Huehue, where I started crying all over again just watching her have to say goodbye to her host family. Then we picked up the much-less-sad and much-less-weighed down Ana and Dan in Huehue. Those two weren’t moving out just yet, but they wanted to come to our final lunch the following day. The last stop was to pick up Ashley and Anne and all their luggage at the Pollo Campero in Cuatro Caminos, one of the few intersections outside of Guatemala City where there are stop lights. They were both driven to the Campero by friends and community members, dressed in full traje and bawling. I started crying all over again. But once we were all squished into the van amongst our luggage and on our way to Antigua, it felt good to be surrounded by people who knew just what it was we were was going through. Somehow I’ve turned into my mother’s daughter with this PackSnacks mentality (because buying them elsewhere is more expensive and less healthy!), so I had found time the last day in site to bake cranberry scones for breakfast and to turn our leftover garbanzo beans into hummus dip. Ashley brought a bag of donut holes from the famous Bake Shop in Xela to help drown our sorrows. It was never a problem that someone would randomly start crying, and no one ever had to explain why. As tired as we all were, I don’t think any of us slept on this last journey down the InterAmerican highway.

IMG_2602_sm.jpg IMG_2605_sm.jpg

The following day, Wednesday July 14, we had to run around the Peace Corps center to collect all the necessary signatures to leave: to receive health insurace, to get our cash in lieu of a plane ticket, to say that we had indeed (FINALLY) finished our SPA project, and to turn in any and all things that belonged to Peace Corps…so much to do! But once the entire page and a half of signatures was full, then and only then would we really no longer be volunteers after midnight on July 17.

There was also a lunch that day, in honor of all of us who were completing our service and all the Peace Corps staff. In Guatemala you get diplomas for everything, and they mean a lot to the people who receive them. Peace Corps gave each of us our very own diploma for making it through two years in Guatemala. We were invited to say a few words, and I felt compelled to thank all of the staff and my fellow volunteers and my husband, for helping me realize a long standing dream of mine, to serve in the Peace Corps. It’s an organization full of hardworking, dedicated men and women, and it was truly an honor to serve here. I connected early on in our service with Anne, my best friend in our training group, because this had been something we’d both wanted to do for so long. It was great to sit beside her at the very end and hold our diplomas, saying that we’d “successfully completed service with the United States Peace Corps.” Again, many tears. Feeling absolutely worn out that afternoon we went to quit our crying over giant dessert crepes at our favorite little French place in Antigua, the Luna de Miel. Anne and I always share the peach crepe with ice cream instead of whipped cream.

Thursday was spent saying goodbyes to our host families from training. We went to San Luis, where Fletch had lived, along with Anne, to say goodbye to families there, and in the afternoon we went to my host family’s house for dinner. I was feeling so emotionally drained that I didn’t think I’d survive the dinner, and I started crying on the bus to Pastores. But again we heard the same thing: “Thank you.” My host father Hilario started off by saying, “Two things. First, thank you for coming to help my country. You’ve done wonderful and necessary work. Two, thank you for remembering us and coming to say goodbye.” Then I was glad I’d made the effort. We had the usual dinner of eggs, beans, tortillas, cream, and tea, as we shared a summary conversation about our two years and answered their questions. It was good to have gone, and good to return to the hotel in Antigua for some well-earnerd sleep.

]]>
The Trail of Tears Part 1 https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-trail-of-tears-part-1/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-trail-of-tears-part-1/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:34:58 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4233 Our last week in site passed so quickly it’s difficult now to sort out the details. It felt like that week was actually almost two weeks of constant activity packed into the space of about two days. Saying good bye started on our way home from the fourth of July party, though I think the reality of the situation hit me with the absence of good byes to our friends who’d left in June, who we didn’t really even get to say, “See you later”, and subsequently what felt like a sudden void at the actual party. There was the Last Supper in Huehue with our friends who are not yet done with their service. Then we rushed home to start the tedious task of packing in the twenty four hours we had before the three trainees showed up. We sorted piles: things that go back to the training center, things that stay in our house, things that go back to the US, and finally the fire pile. I refused to take anything off the walls until the trainees had come and gone. I wanted our house to feel like a home. So they arrived and our good byes really got a jump start as we combined welcome and going away parties into one.

First, there was a party in the house of Lucia and Pedro. She was the nurse in our village and her brother Pedro was our Q’anjob’al teacher. They were perhaps the two most helpful people in our two years of service, always going above and beyond what common courtesy requires, to help us out and make our lives easier. Because it was a welcome party for the three girls and because Lucia and Pedro invited our good friends Nico and Katal (who also study Q’anjob’al with Pedro) as well as our boss Basilio (who was in town for the project inauguration in Yulais the following morning), it was quite a mix of emotions. I realized how strange it was that here sat these three women that were going to be spending the next 3 days in our home, and yet I’d never really get to know them, at least not here. And then it hit me that I was supposed to be saying good bye to Pedro and Lucia and their adorable elderly parents and their wonderful children and Pedro’s very shy but kind wife, Carmen. Pedro’s daughter was about two weeks old the first time we came over to talk about whether or not Pedro was interested in being our teacher. She now calls me Amali and chatters and smiles constantly. She even had a conversation with me over the phone entirely in Q’anjob’al a week or so before the party. I guess we’ve both learned a lot in two years.

Everyone gave small speeches and presents. Lucia’s son Ronald sang a song in Spanish where the chorus translates to, “Don’t cry, blue eyes. Blue eyes, don’t cry,” and he read us some of his poetry. They gave us gifts, a wooden marimba, a crucifix of the Black Jesus of Esquipulas which is a popular pilgrimage site for Guatemalan Catholics, and a set of small carved wooden cups. I’d knit them fingerless handmits, Lucia a matching scarf and Pedro a matching hat. I apologized for not being able to knit something for everyone in the family, but Ronal tried his mother’s handmits on and promptly declared, “They’re unisex!” Hah. We all did cry a little, but at that point, it was all still a little unbelievable. We got home late from our dinner in town, which necesitated the rental of a private van to take us home in the dark. Being out after dark is such a rare thing here. It’s always indicative of something out of the ordinary. At this point, we’d really given up on the idea of feeling rested at all until we were no longer in the village. The next morning we had to make and eat breakfast, clean up, dress up, and head to Yulais for the long awaited party.

The inauguration in Yulais was really beautiful. Basilio drove us down the dirt road… what service after two years of walking! And the community leaders all greeted us at the car to lead us to the festivities. I’d assumed we’d celebrate in someone’s house, but that wasn’t the case. We made our way to the tiny red dirt basketball court on an outcropping the looks over the valley in the direction of Santa Eulalia. The court was covered in pine needles, the sign of a party, and the place was packed. I almost burst into tears as I passed all the women lining the hill on the way to take our seats. I knew pretty much everyone there. I’d been in their homes. I’d shared meals and work and a lot of health talks and whole lot of laughter with this community. From the moment I stepped out of the car, men and women and children would shake my hand or hold it and smile and say, “Watxili, watxili.” telling me I was beautiful in my traje. The weather too had started out rather watxili that morning, but clouds were approaching. I just hoped the rain would hold off long enough for us to get through the ceremony.

We sang the (world’s LONGEST) national anthem one more time, listened to speeches all around, handed out diplomas, posed for pictures, watched children’s presentations, received presents from the community–red handkerchiefs tied around our necks and traditional straw hats– and of course, no party is complete until we’ve danced a few rounds of marimba; there were raindrops here and there, but no downpour. After the ceremony came the food. We piled into Deigo’s house, full of tables and chairs no doubt brought from all the surrounding neighbor’s houses for the day. The food was served and the rain let loose, but we were all safely inside.

Piles of tamales and bowls of chicken soup were depleted, the conversation slowed. It was time to go. Basilio was in a hurry to leave and he was giving Nico and Katal a ride–they promised to come back and say a proper good bye to us when our house was less full of guests. I looked around at the half empty room, made small talk for a time, and then Diego’s wife appeared. She just wanted to tell me thank you, again, but then she grabbed my elbow and her whole body heaved with a sob. She held on and cried for a few minutes. I felt paralyzed and trapped all at once, but somehow we managed to walk to the kitchen together. I looked around the room full of women who’d served us all, finally sitting down to eat laughing and joking amidst dirty pots and dishes, discarded tamale leaves and glass bottles of soda some empty some half full. “Thank you. Thank you all, and goodbye,” I managed to get out before I started to cry too and all the women dropped their utensils and tamales and smiles disappeared as they lined up to hung me one by one, all of them crying.

nylon_sm.jpgIt was pouring still when I emerged from the kitchen. One of the women saw me crying and said, “You don’t have a raincoat. You need a nylon.” I told her it was ok, we’d just walk fast. She didn’t need to get me a plastic sheet to cover myself on the walk home. She walked off to busy herself with a mission. The women outside lined up and hugged me then too, and as I started to walk away, the first woman appeared with a plastic sheet for me and one for Jaime. “Thankyou,” I said, waved, and started my walk home, sobbing on my own and leaving the rest, Jaime and the three trainees, to negotiate their own exits. I dipped down into the soggy cornfield, and when I emerged on top of a hill across the field from the houses the school kids were chanting, “Naq Jaime, Xal Emily, Naq Jaime, Xal Emily!” and waving goodbye. I couldn’t believe this was it, for a good long time. “Take a picture, Jaime,” I said and I turned away crying even harder. I had to go home now. The five of us walked down the gravel road to our house, where I found at least a little respite.

The next morning Lucia called us and asked if we could come to the health post for a little bit, so we tied on our boots and slogged through the ever present mud to the health post. We were called into one of the examining rooms where a small delegation of about six women waited for us. The women of our community wanted to tell us thank you and goodbye. Apparently they’d planned to present gifts to us at a meeting the week before, but since no one had managed to inform us that our presence was requested at a meeting on Monday morning, we inadvertently missed our community farewell. While on the bus leaving Huehue on our way home from the fourth of July, Lucia called to ask us if we were home or not. We told her we were on the bus and she sounded incredibly disappointed. The women had gathered at the school to give us presents and send us off.

Because we’d missed the party 4 day earlier, this group of women had come on behalf of the community to present us with recuerdos , which literally means a remembrance but is also means souvenir, of our time in Guatemala (like we are at all in danger of forgetting). Lucia translated to Spanish for us as the women thanked us for our time, for our health talks, and for sharing in their lives and their community for two years. Some said they were sorry we weren’t able to do more, and I told them, “That’s why Catalina is coming, to help you do more the second time.” 🙂 They gave me a traditional Santa Eulalia corte, a simple design with bright red as the main color and thin, vertical stripes of blue and green and black and white. They gave Jaime a small hand woven bag, and then apologized that “women are easier to shop for” and gave me another present, a huipil, a traditional top to wear with my corte.

It was a heartfelt presentation. They didn’t want to let us leave without letting us know that they appreciated us, which was very kind. The purchase of a corte is no small thing, which means many many women must have contributed a few quetzalitos each. It did make me a little sad, that even our good bye was indicative of our struggles against a total lack of organization and communication in and with our village. I’m just glad that they really did seem to get something from all of the work. I honestly believe, in spite of all challenges and difficulties there, that the women benefited from the health education talks, if in no other way except that they’ve heard new ideas, even if they don’t entirely understand or believe them. The idea is now out there, and there’s a new volunteer coming to reinforce and expand on the small things we were able to accomplish. It was hard to say goodbye here too.

The next day we said goodbye to the trainees who would be back in short order to take over this whole operation. And with their departure we knew that we had but a few days left in the village. Jaime accompanied them into town to show them around and introduce them to helpful store owners before making sure they found their bus back south. I fixed a cup of coffee and stared out the window for a time, knowing there wouldn’t be many more moments like this. Then I set to work taking down and packing up. First, the wall of drawings. I should have taken a picture of how full the wall was at the end, drawings from nieces and nephews and the children of friends in the states, photos of our families and friends and drawings upon drawings done bye Chalio, Alberto, and plenty of neighborhood kids. All alone for the first time in quite a while, I started crying, pulling out tacks and thinking about how the picture of the twins on the wall was ridiculously outdated and how each of my sisters’ kids have grown, and that next to the richness of the friendships we cultivated with all the kids here. That one wall really said a lot about how big our world is. Since lots of drawings were placed above the stove they were spattered from cooking and crinkled by the heat that escaped the oven. We couldn’t consider taking all of them home, but we did scan our favorites. The we hid them and quietly put them in the wood stove the following evening so the kids thought that they all went into our a luggage. It was only a tiny deception with the best of intentions.

New ClothesSM.jpgThankfully our boss took most of the books, tools, and clothes for the freebox at the center when he left. Even so, we had a mountain of stuff to figure out how to pack. And, as though time weren’t already an issue, our house turned into the most popular stop in an endless parade of folks from all over. Yulais sent their resident tailor to take our measurements. A day later the tailor came back with a pair of pants that fit Jaime to a T, and a skirt that did not fit me at all. He said sorry, he’d forgotten to write down one of the measurements that I took. Then he said, also you told me to measure higher up and now you want it to fit lower down. And then he continued to repeat that last sentence so much that it was hard for my overly-stressed and under-rested self not to flip out and ask him to leave the house. We were, after all, trying to pack. I tried to just keep smiling and be gracious. He came back the next day with a skirt that did fit me, mostly. This was an additional gift from a small group of families in Yulais.

On Saturday, Katal and Nico came to say goodbye. One last time, they got to enjoy our electricity and internet access. We left them at home to really soak it up as we went to Don Ximon’s house for a last dinner with his family. We had pictures my dad sent from their visit to drop off with the family, and a few days before we’d agreed to come at 6pm. I think we arrived at 6:10 and were greeted with smiles and hellos and then, “We thought you weren’t coming…” I never get over how ready everyone is to be let down. It has nothing to do with us; it’s just the way of things here. We proceeded to eat the most delicious chicken we’d ever had. Don Ximon talked to us in his usual quiet, deliberate voice, which was challenging to hear as rain pummeled the tin roof through most of dinner. He talked to us about how he was grateful we’d come, that our parents had come to visit his community, that we’d done so much work with the women in the community. Then he talked extensively about the Manuel problem. He reassured us that there has never before been a community leader this bad in the community. Over the last few months, leaders from various committees have started talking and realized that Manuel fleeced everyone. He made up stories and demanded money with a voice of authority that compelled everyone to hand it over to him, and it all disappeared, hundreds and hundreds of quetzales. Everyone is pretty unhappy with him, but we don’t see it or hear it. It’s this quiet vibration that runs through gatherings and official meetings, but in their reserved and overly polite way, it’s rarely talked about. Don Ximon assured us that people didn’t think we were lazy. Now every one knows where the problem lies. Still, I don’t think they know exactly what to do about it, but they have their new committee and a new volunteer on the way. They’re working on it, slowly, quietly, steadily.

The rain stopped just in time for us to say our good byes and walk home dry. There, Nico and Katal were waiting with freshly baked ambassador brownies. We pulled boxes out from under the bed and filled them with fancy cooking supplies left over in our stash, a few kitchen utensils they lacked. It was a little like Christmas, sending them home with yoga mats and for a time we thought they were going to take the Christmas tree itself. Funny how that first year when we were out in Santa Eulalia all alone seems like such a distant memory. It was fun to have friends so near by the whole last year. We like those two a lot, and wish them well in their last year of service. We will probably have to send them a care package in a month or two.

blancaSM.jpgfinal_modelSM.jpg On Sunday we rode into market together. One last time to the market, and to say goodbye to friends in town, our favorite shop owners, the cheese vendor Blanca, who comes from out of town only on Sunday to sell the best queso fresco, and folks from the teachers’ school. The latter actually invited us out to lunch, and Jaime presented them with the finished model of the new building for their school, to help with fundraising. We had a great conversation about cultural preservation and the importance of bilingual education. Volunteers to the very last minute.

Nico had alerted us that our favorite storekeeper, Antonio, was planning on coming out to visit us on Wednesday or Thursday. Unfortunately, we were moving on Tuesday morning. We went to let him know. He’d always promised to come out to our house and visit; one time he even tried, but that day they were pouring cement on our road and it was closed to traffic. With no way through, he turned around and went home. He’d always wanted to try my homemade bread, and I told him we always have some at the house. On Sunday I brought him a loaf, figuring he’d never make it out.

Monday morning we were making muffins before Jaime went to plant trees. We woke up at six since we really wanted to see and feel and experience our last morning at home. We won’t have a home of our own now for the next few months, so this was important. Antonio called; he was on his way out to visit us. We like this guy because he seems to have a much broader perspective on life than most Guatemalans we know. He’s my age, yet he’s unmarried and has no children. Very surprising in these parts. He lives in town, but he loves being out in the countryside, so twice a week he hikes out to take care of the family’s cows where they own land on the outskirts of the municipality. He invites us into his family’s home (attached to the store) and always fixes us coffee and tea. Although his mother and grandmother are usually there, he serves us himself. On Sunday when he invited us in for coffee, I saw wine bottles on the table. “You drink wine? I thought we were the only people in these parts who hauled that back from the city,” I said. He said he liked to have a glass in the evenings.

IMG_5520.jpg

So at a little after 7 Antonio showed up. He’d brought us wine as a parting gift. It was going to be a long day, and rough, so we had a glass of wine with our muffins and tea and coffee at 7:30 to show him we appreciated the gesture. I called it my quitapena, which doesn’t translate well, but means that it made me feel a little less stressed and emotionally strung out. Antonio is really great, and although we didn’t have a lot of long talks with him, he was always so kind and helpful that we made a point to drop into his store often just to say hi when we were in town. I didn’t like having to say goodbye.

Jaime planted trees that morning while I took some last minute photos. I went up the mountain to check on the planting and help them out, but it was all men. They didn’t not want me there, but their inability to interact normally around women and their obvious awkwardness led me to head back home before I’d even planted a tree. I was very, very glad it was happening though. I’d told Jaime from the very beginning that we couldn’t burn wood to keep us warm without replanting before we left, especially since we’d given community talks on the importance of planting trees. Jaime helped make it happen.

I spent much of the day doing last minute packing and cleaning and reading the last few books to the kids. I had a packing audience most of the day. Chalio at one point said with a half smile, “I want to go with you.” I think he only meant to Antigua, and not all the way to the states. This kid loves long adventurous drives. He’s been on four in the span of his short life, two family trips to Panajachel and two family trips to pick his father up at the airport. I love that kid. The whole day felt like a buildup to dinner, but we had to move slowly through every minute until then. In the afternoon I baked a chocolate cake, and shortly thereafter we were called into a meeting at Nas’ house with the members of the new Peace Corps comittee that in reality looks almost exactly like the last leaders group, minus Manuel and plus another Juana and Bernabe. The committee had a few questions about the arrival of their new volunteer, but after that everyone started to make speeches. They thanked us for our work and the time we gave to their community. They apologized for all the problems with Manuel. Each one of them spoke, saying mostly the same things, and Nas translated for the few who were more comfortable speaking in Q’anjob’al.

The leaders apologized for not having a real send off party for us. While I think they were speaking the truth, it also felt like they were ushering an embarrassing epoch for their community discreetly out the door. I though about our gloriously hailed arrival, the firecrackers and bombas, roses, the formal dinner. Honestly, they were celebrating what they believed to be the faces of money coming into their community, a promise from the North. I wondered if I was just being naive thinking that this quieter goodbye was a sign that they understood, at least in some small way, that we aren’t the faces of money; we’re just Emily and Jaime. We expected a lot of the community before we gave them anything they could touch or hold. They messed up, and they are embarrased, but not entirely ungrateful. Tears were shed, yet again. But it was a strange hour or so, and we were relieved when it came to an end.

Our last night, just like our first, was spent around the fire in our host family’s kitchen. That first evening, Delmi was not even a year old and I had to learn the Q’anjob’al phrase tz’ebatx nena before she sat stoically on my lap staring straight ahead. On our last night, she was stuck to my side until moments before she fell asleep with her grandmother. I think she knew. Reyna told me the week before she’d been trying to explain our departure to her, but wasn’t really sure how much she understood.

We had soup and tortillas and chocolate cake at the end. But then there were words. Everyone shared their words. It took over an hour, and I never could look at Nas, but there were no dry eyes anywhere else. We gave a children’s book with a little inscription inside to each of the kids; I tried to pick out their favorites (which were quite conveniently all different). We gave our book on the history of Santa Eulalia to Nas to keep (I ordered myself one of the two English copies we could find on Amazon a few weeks earlier). We also left the family with 400 trees and a written statement that our wood burning stove and our gas stove/oven would go to the family after volunteers were done using them.

This evening was the first time we ever talked with the entire family about Galindo’s suicide attempt. Lina thanked us for helping them through that time. Galindo thanked us personally, and told us we’d helped him to grow, to be more mature, and to be more open with people. His sister Lina said we’d helped her talk more to people and share more. Chalio and Alberto’s father thanked us for the short time we’d shared with him since he returned from the US, but broke down into tears telling us thank you for all we’d shared with his sons. Their mother, Gela, cried throughout the whole thing. For two years she’s always apologized and said, through her mother’s translating, how much she would like to talk to us but is so embarrassed about her lack of Spanish. It makes me feel bad that I never got better at Q’anjob’al. Maybe the next volunteers will do better. Reyna, who refused to cry through Galindo’s ordeal, who told me she wouldn’t shed a tear unless he died, god forbid, could hardly speak she was crying so hard. I think she liked that she had the freedom to just be friends with Jaime, in a way that is not possible with any man here. Obviously she and I were also good friends, and the fact that we showered her children with love and adoration and stories and games was something she thanked us for. But really, I feel like we owe them more than we ever gave.

This family has been so amazing. I mean, my family at home has always had an inclusive philosophy. Really, when you start at base 10, what’s one more person? But it moved me further to see that attitude in complete strangers who, on the surface, appear to be have so many more differences than similarities to us. The truth is, they are really much more similar than different. I hope the door to our home always remains wide open for whoever is interested in coming in, sharing a meal, and talking for awhile just like theres was for us.

IMG_0004SM.jpgI told the family I’ve never felt so much like a mother in my life, not even to my nieces and nephews at home. From across the cornfield, whenever the wailing wound up like a tornado siren, I could tell in two seconds which child it was. I love them all, especially Michelle and Delmi, but extra especially Delmi. A week or so before we left, the two girls were over at the house and I was reading Curious George Rides a Bike. I burst into tears, unexpectedly, and they looked at me not afraid but just slightly alarmed. I looked at Michelle who always seems to understand what I say even though she can’t respond in Spanish and said, “I’m only crying because I’ll miss you. I have to go home to my family, but I don’t want to leave you either.” She climbed down from the trunk she was sitting on and hugged me. Just for my own sake I continued, “So you’re going to grow up and study hard and be really smart right?” and she said hinye, which means ok. “And you’re always going to be good friends with Delmi and take good care of your mother, right.” She nodded yes and said hinye again. I gave her another hug, and then she said, “Let’s go, Delmi,” in Q’anjob’al and I started laughing. It was as though she was saying, “We gotta get away from this crazy lady!” But honestly, I feel, and this is so cheezy to say, but I feel like they’ve made my heart bigger. They’re innocent and hopeful and so intelligent. It makes me understand in a sense how easy it would be to adopt a child, not talking about paperwork or money, but how really bringing a child into your home and loving him or her all you can would really be kind of easy. It’s like they draw the love out of you, whether you knew it was there or not.  

When everyone was finished talking, it seemed like it was time for us to go. Reyna came up to me with a sleeping Nasito and said, “You should give him one last kiss.” He’s such a beautiful, happy guy. I started bawling, and everyone lined up to give us hugs. I felt like I was spinning in circles and a total mess. I ended up walking Reyna and Nasito to their bed in the back of the house and gave him the last kiss he’ll get from me in a while in the exact same place I gave him his first kiss, when he was three days old asleep in the bed he’d been born in. It’s all very circular, very appropriately Mayan. Maybe that will bring some sort of good to him as he grows up.

IMG_2579SM.jpgWe walked back to our house to really, honestly finish packing and cleaning and storing everything up in the attic so Nas could work on the house after we left and before Catalina came. He wants to add a window to the house and make the existing window bigger; he realized that since we work inside a lot, we made his light bill go up considerably because we couldn’t see anything during the day without the lights on. But packing would’ve been easier if half the family hadn’t followed us to our home. Here people with sit with the dead and dying, they just sit with them without saying a word. I felt sort of like we’re the living soon-to-be-dead, or that this was somehow equivalent to that type of sitting. It made packing very difficult and very frustrating, and the teenage Lina was the last to leave. She left at about 12:30 am. Fletch fell asleep, unable to handle consciousness anymore, at about 1. I was up until 1:30, making coffee for the ride, good Guatemalan french-pressed coffee, so I wouldn’t accidentally sleep through my last ride through the Cuchumatanes. It’s so beautiful up there it sometimes makes my heart hurt. I didn’t want to miss it. Here are the last pictures of our nearly empty house and our MOUNTAIN of luggage. (Fletch is under the covers of the bed, I promise!)

IMG_5548.jpg IMG_5549.jpg IMG_5550.jpg

At 3 am we woke up and dressed. There is construction on the road from the top of the mountains down into Huehuetenango city, causing long traffic lines. Our driver Mario wanted us to get through the construction areas before they started closing the lanes at 7 am. Gela, Abel, Chalio and Alberto all spent the night in the room next door instead of going home, just so they could help us load the van and give us one last hug in the “morning”. Teenage Lina also woke up to give us hugs and say one last goodbye. It was pouring down rain and pitch black as we slipped through the mud and down the hill to the van. Since the only pair of shoes I was taking with me have a hole in the sole that makes them wet from the inside out, I wore my rubber boots as I ran back and forth between the house and the road. I called Reyna by phone and said goodbye so she didn’t have to get out of her bed in the pouring rain. Just before the last trip down to the van, I told Abel that if he followed me I’d give him the rubber boots forever. He laughed and grinned his silly grin and followed me down to the van where I put my shoes on and handed him the boots. It felt like we were spiriting away in the night. My last image is that of swaying shadows, two story tall cornstalks illuminated by the van’s headlights and blown up on the side of the house by the road as the wind blew the rain across the mountain. We shut the van door, and we were off.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-trail-of-tears-part-1/feed/ 1
The Fanjoy Forest https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-fanjoy-forest/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-fanjoy-forest/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:22:03 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4137 Looking around my house in these last remaining days, my eyes fell upon The Stove. I can say pretty honestly that it has become one of my favorite things in our home, and I will miss it dearly. In the half year before we had it, we were suffering daily from the nonstop 40-degree weather and misty rain. Now, in contrast, we can actually go out into that weather comfortably, knowing there will be relief when we come back inside. Before, our clothes took up to two weeks to dry; now it’s two days. But the biggest benefit is psychological. A cheery, crackling fire on a cold night is a place you can gather, rub your hands together, and drink cocoa. Every guest we’ve ever had, both Mayan and Gringo, has marveled at how it transforms our tiny wooden shack into a comfortable resting place.

This marvel of fine living comes with a price, though. Our stove burns a tarea or two of firewood a month (about half a chord?), in a country where deforestation is already a serious concern, and 99% of people cook with firewood. We give lectures about how the loss of forests encourages landslides, global warming, and degradation of freshwater springs, so we’d be hypocrites if we didn’t do something about it.

“I think we need to plant some trees,” Emily said a few months ago. We talked it over, and realized that was no other responsible thing to do. And by “some” trees, we were talking about several hundred, bought with our own money, as an act of contrition.

But where would we plant them? It would be good double-duty to plant them on some of Nas’s land, thanking his family as well as the Earth, but we didn’t know where all of his property was located, or if he’d even accept that sort of gift. After the sheep poisoning incident, he’s refused any sort of aid we’ve ever offered him, thinking it would cause envy in his neighbors and make life difficult for his entire family. But a few weeks later, I found myself sitting at the edge of the field, chatting with him as the sun went down, and saw my opportunity.

“Nas, we’ve been thinking that we need to plant some trees to replace all that we’ve burned in our time here,” I began. “Would you be interested in helping us? We’d like to plant them on your property, if you have the space. This isn’t a project from Peace Corps or some agency; this is a personal gift from Emily and me.”

He stared off into the field for a while, not answering. Then he nodded. “I think I’d like that. How many trees were you thinking?”

“About five hundred. I don’t know how many cuerdas of land you’d need for that many, though.”

He looked up at me, with a twinkle in his eye. That’s when I found out that he’d done reforestation projects long ago, and knows exactly how many trees you can plant in a cuerda of land.

In the next few days, we made plans. Nas spoke with his family a few times, and they decided they’d plant the trees on his land, as well as adjacent properties owned by Abel (his son-in-law) and Masha (his second oldest daughter). By accident, I’d discovered a vivero (nursery) a few weeks ago, right next to the new high school construction site. I chatted with the nurseryman, and found which seedlings he was selling, how much they cost, and how to get them delivered. But the luckiest accident I had was mentioning the idea to my boss Basilio during the COS conference.

“You know, before I was the director of the Healthy Homes program for the Peace Corps, I ran the now-defunct Reforestation program,” he said with a huge smile. Duh, of course! Mike Bosio (who comments often on this blog) worked as Peace Corps volunteer with Basilio in the 70s for that very program. Basilio was really excited about our idea, and gave me all sorts of pointers on what type of trees I should and shouldn’t plant, as well as offering to come talk to Nas next time he was in Santa Eulalia. He was particularly excited about us planting aliso, which I later discovered to be the alder tree. It’s a fast growing hardwood that thrives in the regional conditions that we have, whose wood can be used for both construction and burning, and they regrow when cut down, so they don’t need to be replanted.

After much negotiation, we ended up buying 400 white pine seedlings. Everyone here likes white pine, they are cost effective, and they grow well in our climate. I wanted to plant half in aliso, but the nursery was out of them. “Don’t worry,” Nas said. “I planted aliso last time, and there are still a lot growing up there on the adjacent property.” We finalized the details with the nursery’s office manager, and I took out my money.

“Oh, you’re going to pay?” she said, getting out a receipt book. That’s when I found out there are actually two ways to get the trees. The second way is to have a government technician come out to your land, survey it, and they give you the trees for free- with the provision that you can’t cut them down for 5 years. Neat idea, but we didn’t have time to wait on a government guy that could take months to show up. Better to just pay now, and start tomorrow.

“OK,” she said. “We’ll send the technician by about this time next year, then, so he can check on the trees before he pays the landowner the annual incentive money.” WHAT? Turns out under the pay-as-you-go option, the government has a cash incentive program that rebates money to landowners if they maintain the trees. Sweet! Not only are we repaying our debt to nature and leaving trees for Nas’s family, but they will get cash in their hands for the next half decade as well.


chej_treesSM.jpgThe fateful day finally came, on the last full day in our village. Talk about putting something off until the last minute! We got up early, and went down to Nas’s son’s house, where we’d stored the seedlings that had been delivered to the village the day before. “I got some muchachos to help,” Nas said as he hoisted a bucket full of baby trees onto his horse. I knew all of the guys except for one, a half-dozen friends and relatives who each picked up their own 50-pound sack of seedlings to carry up the mountain. Between the horse and everyone carrying, we had about 250 seedlings this trip.

After about a half hour of hiking, we arrived at the land. It was a wide swath of rocky scrub and sheep pasture, bordered on two sides by immature woodland. “I planted those woods years ago,” Nas said as he took the picks and machetes off of the horse. I looked out over the valley that we’ve called home for the last two years, sighing deeply. What a beautiful day. What a beautiful way to spend my last day in the village.

tree_classSM.jpgGalindo disappeared with a machete and returned with a few long, slender canes he’d cut from the underbrush. Nas measured them to three barrras, the spacing we were going to use between the trees, and everyone gathered around him as he gave a lesson on how to plant seedlings. Then, we broke up into work groups and started planting a forest: one person with pick and measuring stick, the other with a bucket of trees. We continued row by row, working our way down the hill.

“Where we plant this row of trees is very important,” Nas said as he pointed out a red painted rock. “This is the border between two inheritances. Right now, the properties have the same owner, me, but if we plant trees right on the line, it will cause a big fight over the firewood two generations from now.” It amazes me that despite their general lack of preplanning for anything, people here sometimes anticipate subtle social conflicts far in the future and work hard to avoid them. If only they could plan like that for latrines and concrete floors! Galindo waved from atop an alder tree a few hundred yards away, and they sighted between the two markers to keep the plantings straight.

lunch_sm.jpgAround noon, Masha and Gela came up the hill with lunch buckets on their heads and Delmi and Michelle in tow. Boiled potatoes, chili peppers, and coffee for everyone! It was a lot tastier than it sounds, and I ate a half dozen potatoes as Delmi sat on my lap. From this vantage point, I could actually see the roof of our tiny house, nestled in the valley directly below us. Maybe these trees would one day keep a landslide from wiping out Nas’s entire family?

“This is the Jaime Forest!” one of them joked. They all smiled and laughed.

“Actually, it was Emily’s idea,” I said. “You should call it the Fanjoy Forest.” Some confusion ensued, as almost no one here knows our last name, since they don’t have family names in the same sense that we do, and never use them. I explained that unlike the custom here, Americans often share a family name between married couples, and ours is Fanjoy, and that name is passed down from my father.

“Fanjoy Forest it is!” they beamed, thinking it a great idea. “We will call it that, and our children will call it that.” What they don’t know is that calling it the Fanjoy Forest also pays homage to my father and my father’s father, who were both avid outdoorsmen, men of woods and water. I can’t think of anything either of them would like more than to have a stand of trees named after them.

planting_sm.jpgWith lunch wrapped up, we set back to work planting more trees. In the next few hours, our total for the day climbed to 250 saplings. “We’re out of trees!” Nas smiled. “We’ll come back tomorrow and plant the remaining 150 without you. We know you have a very important journey to make.” Empty buckets, picks, machetes, and hoes were all strapped onto the horse for the trip back down the hill.

About that time, I heard a yelp, and turned around to see that a full-on mud fight was under way. Abel, Lucas, and a teenager who’s name I think is Ixtup were slinging clods of dirt at each other and laughing uncontrollably. They closed, and as Abel and Lucas struggled to make each other eat dirt pies, Ixtup jammed a fistful of mud down Lucas’s shirt. In seconds, it degenerated into a mudwrestling match, ending in a cartoon-like ball of bodies, arms, and legs going rolling down the mountainside, flattening bushes as it went. It disintegrated about 50 feet downhill, everyone laughing so hard they were almost crying.

I sat amongst the fresh seedlings and looked out to the west, where the mountains of Mexico fade away towards the horizon in layers of steel grey, and watched as puffy clouds rolled into our little valley to the sound of laughing Mayans. Definitely, my last day in the village was one of the best of my entire Peace Corps service.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-fanjoy-forest/feed/ 5
History Lesson https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/history-lesson/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/history-lesson/#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:12:00 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4153 I found a great book during our COS conference. I’d been looking for it for over a year, ever since I heard about it from Karen, our linguist friend from the University of Illinois. Way back in 1932, an American enthnographer named Oliver LaFarge made a trip to Santa Eulalia, and studied the Q’anjob’al Mayans for about six months. The book he later published, Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatan Indian Town, is out of print and pretty scarce. But by some miracle, a touristy bookshop in Antigua had a translation in Spanish. Mastercard took care of the rest.

After getting over the initial shock that I am able to actually read a “grownup” book in Spanish now, I realized that this book is a treasure trove of great cultural information about the people we live and work with. It’s a shame that I didin’t find it a year ago, when I’d been in site long enough to frame the information in its proper context, but still had enough time left to pursue its inquiry further. As it is, every few pages I find a gem that really gets me. For example, just last week we were riding with a microbus driver and got to talking about place names. A nearby village is called Yich Joyom. We already knew that Yich means “place of,” but the driver informed us that Joyom is slang for the hat worn by people from Todos Santos, and by association, can also mean anyone from there. Apparently, way back when, a Todosantero passed through the area and his hat fell off, so people started calling the place Yich Joyom.

In the book, LaFarge talks about ethnic relations between the Q’anjob’al and various neighboring tribes, and lists off a bunch of slang words the locals use to describe their neighbors. Joyom is one of them. He goes on to say that these words are ethnic slurs (much like the word “nigger”) and will often start a fistfight when used within earshot of the neighbors in question. That’s good to know, and our microbus driver failed to mention that important subtlety.

LaFarge also names several of the most helpful villagers he worked with, and all the names that look familiar: Lwin Ximon, Matin Palas, Pedro Mateo, Antonio Juárez, etc. They love to recycle names here. Although most of his acquaintances were old men, he worked with a 15-year old named Vírvez Diego. Could he yet live? He’d be, what, 93? It’s possible, and even more likely that people who knew him are still around. But I have no idea how I’d ever find them.

His interactions with the locals are also eerily famliar. “As friends,” he says, “they are loyal, considerate, reliable, generous, and tend to be dependant. As enemies, they are tranquil, secretive, meek, and untiringly patient.” Yep. He goes on to say that the Q’anjob’al are laconic, and the best stories can only be had from close friends after sitting around the fire in the late evening.

Old_SantaEwulSM.jpg  santa_newSM.jpg

The large part of LaFarge’s study, though, is religious life and customs. The cover of the book is a black and white photo of Santa Eulalia from the nearby mountainside, showing the church surrounded by a few straw-roofed houses as they were in 1932. It stopped me in my tracks when I saw it; I know that church well, but how the town has changed! I climbed the hill above town a few weeks ago to take the same picture LaFarge took, 78 years later. LaFarge claims that the main town itself had an urban population of about 85 people. I believe it, based on the photo, but now the town center has about 10,000 people, and about 30,000 more can be found in the surrounding villages of the municipality.

sledgehammerSM.jpgAnd the church? Well, it was the same until shortly after we got to our site. The local congregation decided that since they could no longer fit everyone inside, they needed to knock the historic church down and build a new one. After a lot of serious debate and many angry dissenters, demolition began. They’ve been tearing it down piecemeal for over a year, building it back fancier and bigger as they go.

Just last month, I witnessed the final destruction of the two towers flanking the entryway. No heavy equipment or explosives here; they do demolition the old fashioned way: muscle and sledgehammer.

cathedraldoor1SM.jpg

screenSM.jpgWhat’s there of the new church so far looks quite nice, but I am a romantic, interested in both history and architecture. I side with the crowd that wanted to keep the church, or at least, retain its historic façade and towers. I don’t even think they kept the cool old woodwork, like the main doors or the elaborate wooden screen that was in the entryway. Last weekend we were talking with our friend Antonio, and he told us an interesting tale about the church that he heard from his grandfather, who heard it from his. Some time in the late 1800s, the villagers were sleeping one night when they awoke to a noise like an earthquake. They went outside to the field where the church now stands, and saw that the lowest level of the church had sprung from the earth. They were amazed (and probably terrified), and over the course of the next few nights, this continued until the church towers you see in the black and white picture were fully built.

Make of it what you will.

This all gets back to something I’ve marveled at many times, one of the unique powers of our species. Through the miracle or writing, we are the only species on the planet where one of us can learn things from another who’s long dead, crossing the boundaries of time and space. LaFarge’s book has done that for me, and it makes me wonder if eighty years from now, someone will come across the blog of our experiences and gain something useful as well.

constructionSM.jpg

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/history-lesson/feed/ 6
Hospitality https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/hospitality/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/hospitality/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 04:57:26 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4095 Aaaah, site visit. How well I remember our first week in Santa Eulalia, two years ago… the cold, clammy hotel with the brown, grease-streaked bed… the bathroom overflowing with sewage… the days spent wandering around the streets with nothing to do as people stared at us… the bland, not-so-sanitary food eaten in dingy comedores that ended in amoebic dysentery for Emily. Those were the days!

These memories came flooding back last week when I received an email from Peace Corps high command: the new volunteers will be arriving for their first view of their new home. “You are encouraged to show them around your community and workplace, introduce them to key community members, but you are NOT required to provide them with food or lodging,” the email added. They are getting 50q a day for hotel, and 60q a day for food.

Well THAT sounds like a drag, Emily and I decided. It would be so much more fun to host all three of them in our little cabin and cook up some good eats! We talked it over with the newbies at the fourth of July party, and they agreed that would be a fun time. Nas Palas and his family were thrilled to let them sleep in the new room they built onto the side of our house, and after getting their dietary restrictions straight, we made a stop at the supermarket in Huehue to get the good stuff I remember missing during our own training: organic coffee, wine, cheese, bacon, and chocolate chips to fuel our ambitious menu of pizza, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, cashew curry, fruit salad… top that off with a pile of the ambassador’s brownies, and a good time is guaranteed.

Treating guests well brings us back to civilization, in a way. It reminds us of how good things can be, and these sorts of experiences are best shared. It extends beyond food, too: with a little gentle prodding and four armloads of our own firewood, we even talked the neighbors into firing up the chuj so our new friends could soak up the steamy goodness. We introduced them to many of our friends in town, and brought them along to our farewell dinner with Pedro and Lucia, as well as our farewell lunch with the village where we did the SPA project.

So who are these three new women? The volunteer replacing us in our village is Cathleen. She’s energetic and seems to have a lot of good experience and ideas regarding development work; I feel like she will be a good fit. Katal, our friend who’s already been in another village in Santa Eulalia for a year, was really worried that Cathleen would go by Katal as well (that’s the rough translation of the name in Q’anjob’al), so we brainstormed for a while to come up with a new name for our replacement. We weren’t having much success until Nas Palas’s family solved the riddle. “Lina”, they said. Of course! Use the second half of her name, not the first. “Lina” seemed hesitant at first, but everyone else jumped on it so quickly that I think it’s “Lina” for good. And, in appropriate local fashion, there are now three Linas in the household. But hey, the important part is that they can now tell the gringas apart.

The second volunteer is Kelly, and she will be working in a village about 40 minutes walk from here. She was especially interested in meeting the people we did the SPA project with, since some of them are actually from the region where she will be working and living. She’s also volunteered to go a few weeks from now to visit some of the houses that were involved in the project, to do follow up and evaluation. Yay!

The third volunteer is Rebecca. She is quieter than the others, so it was harder to get to know her at first, but she has a sense of humor and reservedness that sits well with me. She is also very independent, which will be a useful trait in her site. Her village isn’t within practical walking distance of ANYONE, more out in the direction of Nick and Katal. She dug right into my Q’anjob’al notebooks from last year’s classes, copying words and asking questions. “The elders in my village told me at yesterday’s meeting that they would politely ask me to leave if I wasn’t interested in learning Q’anjob’al,” she said, explaining her intense study. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not… and I like that in a person, too.


Last night as we sat drinking hot chocolate and tea around our toasty woodburning stove and listening to the cold rain on the tin roof, Emily spoke up. “I hate to interrupt with this sort of thing, but we were wondering if you’d like to collaborate for the food. We spent a little over Q600 at the supermarket, in addition to buying a lot of fresh produce in the market.” She shrugged. “The suggested donation is Q150 each.” They all nodded as they chewed, and the conversation moved elsewhere. Q150 was a pretty generous offer; we actually spent a lot more than that keeping them comfortable and well fed, but I really was having a pretty good time.

This morning as they were packing to go, Cathleen handed me a stack of money. “We talked about it, and decided that Q150 was too much for the food. Here’s Q125 from each of us.” Then she picked up her bag, and walked out the door.

Um, what? I was totally caught off guard, and really unable to respond. As we made our way down to the waiting bus, I wondered at how unthinkable that would be in normal life. Perhaps I was being overly sensitive since it took so much for me to ask for anything at all in exchange for our hospitality… but as Emily says, we’re poor now, so we can no longer just give things away like before. I needed to look at it through their eyes: they are on a REALLY tight training budget. But aren’t they getting a stipend of over Q100 a day for this week? These things bounced back in forth in my mind for a while as I walked through the cornfield with them, until I figured out what was really bugging me: the very Guatemalan way it was presented. Short-changed right at the end, minutes before they left, AFTER they’d eaten the food and drank the wine. Where I come from, that is NOT cool.

I was afraid that I was just being stingy as the issue continued to bother me throughout the day too, but then when Fletch and I sat down to dinner and began to talk about the whole thing, I realized exactly why it was bothering me. It was as though she implied that after all our hospitality, we weren’t giving her a good-enough deal, or that we might be trying to take advantage of the situation and make some money off of her. That was hurtful. The 25q less than we asked for isn’t a huge deal, despite all the incidentals we also bought for them like toilet paper, snacks, and firewood. But our time and the extension of our life and home to total strangers–in the midst of a very emotional life transition–is meaningful to us, and I felt like that sacrifice meant nohting at all to our guests. -emily

As we were waiting for the bus, Rebecca came up to me quietly and slipped me Q25. “I don’t know what that was all about up there, but I don’t agree with it,” she said under her breath, then walked back to stand with the others.

To me, that was a tremendous show of character, and somewhat redeemed the situation in my eyes. I would gladly give up Q25 anyday if it helped me sort out what kind of people I was dealing with. But it left a bitter taste in my mouth about the whole visit, and that makes me sad. Maybe it’s a sign that it really is time for us to go, to move on, and that the pressures of quitting this oddball way of life are more than we’re ready to admit, causing us to be overly sensitive in ways we normally wouldn’t be. Emily and I have both caught ourselves snapping at each other this week as we pack our belongings, take down the faded crayon drawings on our walls, and try to decide which kid is going to get which book. We don’t like to be that way. But it’s almost over. Almost over.


NOTE: In the week since I originally wrote this post, we’ve had a chance to talk to Cathleen directly about the issue. This was mostly at Emily’s urging; I am the sort to just shrug and cease interacting with someone. But Emily is wiser in these things, and I feel like our discussion was productive. Her main concern was to make Cathleen aware that she had done something grossly offensive, not because we wanted to get an apology, but because we hoped to god that she would never mistreat our poor-but-generous Mayan friends in a simliar manner. Besides being rude, it would get her relationship with the village off to a really bad start.

By the time it was all over, we came to the conclusion that much of what had happened was a result of the stresses and alien nature of the situation, for all parties involved. She seemed genuinely regretful about the misstep.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/hospitality/feed/ 5
Despedidas https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/despedidas/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/despedidas/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:10:15 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4111 This week is crammed full of despedidas, or “goodbyes”. For Guatemalans, a despedida is a social obligation for anyone who is going away on a long trip, and it has a semi-ritualistic format. The people gather, some sort of meal is shared, and each person present gets up to “dar palabras“, or say something nice about the person going away. In large groups, this can be a long and repetitive process, as each person thinks up a new way to rephrase things that have already been said five or six times before. But they are Mayan, and have a lot of patience.

After we finished the construction in Yulais, we planned to have an opening ceremony to inaugurate the projects. As per Peace Corps custom, we invited our boss Basilio; coincidence also allowed us to invite the three new volunteers who will taking over after we are gone, as well as Nick and Katal who had been specifically invited by the Yulais elders. Since the inauguration was so close to our departure date, we figured that it would probably evolve into a despedida as well.

yulais waiting_sm.jpgWhat we DIDN’T expect was how much effort they would put into the party. On the selected day, we followed Diego up the path into Yulais, and crested the hill to see a pretty elaborate party set up in the town basketball court: tables, chairs, a backstop, pine boughs on the ground, a sound system. “Come, sit down,” Ximon said over the loudspeaker, gesturing to the chairs at the fore.

onlookers_sm.jpgA little startled, I took my seat in a seat of honor, and watched things unfold. Several town members got up and said how grateful they were for our health talks, how much they’d learned, and how good it was for the community to have these water tanks, floors, and stoves. As they spoke, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how much organization it took to put this party together. Many got up and gave thanks on behalf of the community, and eventually the agenda fell to us.  

“As we were building,” I said as I took my turn at the microphone, “people many times told me, ‘This is Jaime’s work!’ But the truth of it is, this is not my work, it’s YOUR work. This is Ximon’s work. This is Gaspar’s work. This is Eulalia’s work.” They want a hero, but the hero isn’t me. It’s them, and they need to know that, even if I have to say it every single day I work. “You all made this happen. You all should be very proud of yourselves.”

team santa_sm.jpg

Then we got to handing out diplomas. Diplomas hold a special significance in Guatemala, a place where few have education, and there are no organized and accessible records to prove it. Everything of any significance that you do in life deserves a diploma, and those who receive them hoard them away in case they one day have to get a job of some sort, at which time they wheel out these carefully guarded pieces of paper. Knowing the seriousness of the occasion, all four of us experienced Santa Eulalia volunteers dressed in local traje*.

As the ceremony started to wind down, I motioned to Emily to give me the microphone one last time. “I have a few special awards I’d like to give out,” I explained. From my bag, I pulled out several tools that I’d spray painted gold a few days before. “These golden tools are to recognize three special people who did a lot of extra work to make this project happen. All of you worked hard, but these people put in months of extra work, many times working after hours: ordering matreials, filling in paperwork, organizing deliveries, arranging bank accounts. Their sacrifice for the community is an aid to every one of you, and they should be recognized. From this day forward, when ever you see someone working with one of these golden tools, remember that they earned it through sacrifice for the good of the community and they deserve respect. They will forever have MY respect.”

I then handed them out to Juárez, Ximon, and Diego in recognition for their support. Everyone seemed pretty excited about it, causing quite a stir. I wish I could claim the idea as my own, but it came in part from my father-in-law, an avid Boy Scouter who suggested that special recognition be given to Diego for his work. The gold paint idea came from my own Dad, who used to make “golden awards” for achieving Scouts back when I was a kid. Applying a little Scout showmanship to a Mayan ceremony seemed like a sure thing. 🙂

Once all the words had been spoken, it was time for the entertainment. A weird tradition at Guatemalan ceremonies is “lip synch” concerts, where teenagers put on rodeo clothes and hats and shuffle back and forth with a micrphone pressed against their mouths, looking down at the ground so you can’t see that they really don’t know the words to the Mexican banda song they’re “singing”. It’s hilarious (though I don’t think it’s supposed to be). After that, an elaborate troup of masked kids dressed as monsters came pancing up, and pulled us onto the makeshift dance floor to do a few rounds of marimba. The four of us old-timers are experts at this sort of thing, but I can’t help thinking of the three new volunteers, who had the “what the heck?” face off and on thorughout the entire afternoon.

dining_sm.jpg

Once the ceremony was over, we all gathered to dine in Diego’s house. I smiled as we entered; after a year and a half of giving health lectures on his dirt floor, we were eating on his BRAND NEW CONCRETE FLOOR. And I must say, it looks pretty nice! The women all pitched in and made a really tasty kaq trigo, a sortof chicken soup of thick wheat gravy. Originally, the village decided that since there was no money left in the project fund, everyone would split the costs… and Emily and I offered to pay for the other volunteer’s shares as well as our own. But the ladies decided that since we’d not had the chance to eat in everyone’s house during the project, they would pitch in and we weren’t allowed to pay. That was an awfully sweet gesture from people who don’t have a lot of discretionary income. As I sat eating, I looked around the room at so many faces I’ve come to know, people whose houses I’ve spent time in, who I’ve helped to build a water tank or a stove. People I probably won’t ever see again. “Jaime, chili,” a smiling lady said, handing me a bowl of peppers. Most Mayans don’t put chili in their soup, but word got around months ago that I love it, so they all take great joy in making sure it’s available if I am coming to dinner. That’s how they are.

wavingSM.jpgAs I finished, I made my way to the kitchen, which was filled with many women I know from the health lectures. They were all chatting happily, eating their share of the meal (the men generally eat at the Table, with the Honored Guests- an awkward situation for the female volunteers, who are Honored Guests and threfore the only women at the Table). “Yujwal Dyos, mero watx’ kolobej,” I said, thanking them for the tasty meal. The looked up, smiled back, and I came in to give goodbye hugs to my friends. About then is when they realized that they wouldn’t see me again for a very long time, if ever. It all got very sad after that, and I don’t remember much more until I was walking down the hill away from Yulais.

“Take a picture,” Emily said, crying as she was walking away.  

I was confused, and she pointed back the way we’d come. There, standing on the hillside amongst the tin and adobe shacks, were a few dozen women. They were all standing in their Sunday best, watching us go, waving at us as they’d done every week for over a year. But this time, they were weeping instead of laughing.


That was a very public despedida, but we’ve been having all sorts of private ones as well. Here’s Emily, reading to Delmi one last time. I think this was one of the hardest things Emily had to do during her whole service. This near-daily ritual has become so important to both of them, it makes ME sad imagining how they will get along without each other in the coming months. I think this time they read The Best Nest by PD Eastman, an old-time classic that I read when I was Delmi’s age. Emily likes reading it to the kids because they started yelling “Cham Jaime!” every time they got to the picture of the bearded guy sitting on the bench reading. Hmm, I guess he DOES look like me when I have the beard on.

delmi_readingSM.jpg naq jaimeSM.jpg


* Nick still doesn’t own his own capishay, so he had to borrow my spare one. But the good news is, he’s getting his own to celebrate his one-year anniversary in site!

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/despedidas/feed/ 4
Sueño https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sueno/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sueno/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:21:59 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4183 I started writing this prior to the 4th of July excursion. It will all make sense by the end of post, I hope.

Construction is finished, entirely absolutely 100% finished. You could say I’ve got a lot of sueño. Sueño means tired, but it also means dreams, and I think I’m so tired that sometimes the reality of us leaving feels much more like a sueño. I’m so tired that my eyelids have been twitching off and on for the last few days. We kept thinking at this point or that point things would slow down, but it turns out, things haven’t slowed down at all. As the construction work dwindles, we have post-project paperwork and house visits, and people who keep inviting us over for one last visit to their homes. It’s as though the kids, on some level though I’m not sure which, also realize we’re soon to be gone. They come over and visit us constantly, and we in turn feel obligated to welcome them in and share as much time with them as we can eke out of our schedule. Every time they want to read, we read. Every time they want to play in the garden, we go play. The end is nigh and the pressure is on. But tomorrow we leave for the day long ride south, the last time we’ll be doing that ride in public transportation. Honestly we’re both looking forward to eleven hours in a chicken bus where no on surprise knocks on our door, and we don’t have to prepare for three meetings in the same day after we’ve worked at least a half day building. I’m going to read and stare out the window, and enjoy that I’m not moving, but that something else is moving me.

I still maintain that I’m incredibly proud of the community for the work they’ve done, and we’ll all be able to celebrate on July 7 in our grand project inauguration. EVERYONE is looking forward to it; all the people I visited this weekend told me so with great big smiles.

Saturday I’d planned to go walking and get a few signatures and post-project pictures, spend maybe a two or three hours of my morning away from home and then come back to enjoy the quiet house with Fletch off on his solo journey visiting Dan. Just after he took off on his trip I heard the familiar, “Choooo,” high pitched sort of fake-sneeze noise at my door–which is what they do instead of knocking. There were two young girls outside, maybe between the ages of 12 and 14. They politely informed me that their mother, Eva, had sent them over to do our laundry for us.

I was very uncomfortable with this at first, as we always manage to take care of our laundry on our own. Since there’s a lot of jealousy in the community if we pay someone for something, we just don’t pay to have our laundry done, ever. This is additionally funny to me because two Worldview issues ago (our worldwide Peace Corps magazine) there was a man, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, who wrote in commenting on an article about how a volunteer in Latin America spends her time. He was very annoyed that a volunteer would spend hours doing laundry when our time is so much more valuable than that! And I had to wonder, has he lost touch with his Peace Corps service? First of all, for the majority of our service, time was never so scarce that it was a problem. Also noted was the thing about community jealousy. Then there’s the fact that we’re supposed to be learning about their way of life, and this is something I think is important to understand, how back breaking the work is and how time-intensive it is. It’s our second least-favorite job, the most hated being burning the trash, but we still generally do it. I only cheat with the bed blankets which weigh like 70 or 80 lbs soaking went and are incredibly unwieldy. Chalio’s mom always does us the favor, and then we bake her treats. The arrangement works out well.

Anyway, I said hesitatingly, something like, “Are sure? I mean, I can do it if it’s a problem…” and they looked at me so confused. “But our mom sent us to do your laundry…” They also handed me a two pound bag of wheat flour their mom sent me because she’d noticed I liked the wheat tortillas she served at her house two days before. I think Eva must be pretty happy with her new stove, since she was showering us with gifts and help. There were some um’s and ok’s and I got the soap and tried to gather all the dirty laundry and towels from their appointed nails and chair backs and out from under bed blankets and off ceiling rafters. I guess things have gotten a little out of hand, after all… I considered, for a moment, stripping the bed of its sheets, but that made me feel too guilty (they are currently still unwashed and will likely not be changed before we move out). And I led Yesica and Dorcas (who knew anyone still uses that name?) over to the neighbors’ pila where we usually do our washing. It was a grey, grey day, though not particularly cold, but no sun means the spring water is very cold. Then, instead of heading out for the signatures and photos I’d planned to get, I had to stick around the house until they were finished and I could hang the clothes up. The two of them worked for about and hour and a half. When they finished I helped them load up the clothes and bring them over to our house for hanging. To assuage my remaining guilt for employing child labor, I cut them pretty thick slices of homemade bread slathered with some tasty local honey and made them hot chocolate to warm up their hands.

Once the laundry was hung and the girls had left, I headed out the door. It was about 11:30am. I expected I’d be out a few hours, but time has it’s way here; I returned just before 6pm. That’s how I spent my day alone while Fletch was going to visit our friend Dan, bleh. I’d told him I felt things were too hectic for us to both leave, and if I hadn’t spent six hours walking on Saturday, I don’t know when it would’ve gotten done. Maricela, one of the two girls in our translator duo for Yulais, guided me from house to house all day. We had a lot of time to talk between homes, and we discussed what happened at the meeting few days earlier. She informed me that though everyone got awfully upset at first, things had mostly calmed down. Come to find out Ximon and Juarez, who were the angriest about Diego’s floor, both showed up to help with the work to lay it. I guess they got over it? The news made me feel a little better anyway. By the end of the day my legs were like jello. I was hungry and tired and just after dark the rain started pouring down, and didn’t stop until this morning (almost four days of rain). Turns out it was a very good thing the girls came to wash our clothes, or we would’ve been buried in dirty laundry.

Today I spent the majority of the last day of construction walking the hills to take a few more photos and to get the last few required signatures for the paperwork, though Lucia Ramón, the owner of the latrine we were working on, almost didn’t let me leave the house until I promised I would return to eat the lunch she was fixing, more chicken soup! I ran around in a hurry in order to get back for lunch, but it was A LOT of walking, and one near attack by a goose on the side of the road that sent me running, thankfully in the right direction–back to Lucia Ramón’s house. Ah, the adventure of it all, but now the paperwork should be finished on time. I returned to eat my chicken soup, and oversee the end of the construction as Jaime went to town to visit the hardware store and settle what should be on our bills before the leaders go to pay it all off.

It has been one long and tiring process, and now that we’re off for the fourth of July weekend, I feel like we might even get to relax a little in Antigua. I’m particularly looking forward to the fact that no one will randomly stop by our hotel room with questions and requests or spontaneous meetings for us to jump up and attend. That should be quite nice.


We’ve been to the fourth of July party and back. The crazy pace of things hasn’t really slowed at all, and the weekend passed rather quickly and strangely. Since we’ve been working like mad, I don’t think I’d realized that almost all our friends went home on June 17. i mean, I knew they’d left, but I was prepared for the reality. They weren’t around anymore, and the fact that we’re going home so soon is unbelievable. I almost started crying at odd spots throughout the party, like at the national anthem? Not to mention just in the middle of a few conversations. The highlight of the trip was, for me, the journal making and time we spent with our friends from other training groups. Obviously for the Jaimester, the highlight was rocking out. But now we’re back to business.

I just ran out of steam before I finished this post prior to the party. I also want to include some sueño-like pictures. For example, one afternoon not too long ago I was out washing dishes when the light changed and it seemed that everything turned gold. Fletch wasn’t around, as we’ve been splitting up more and more to accomplish everything we need to get done, so I ran into the house to grab my camera and take some pictures of the sky from underneath the apple tree next to our house in case he was indoors and missing this funny trick of the light. Two days or so later, Fletch went out to run some errands and I received a phone call from him, “Look out the window in the direction of the chapel,” so I did. The light was eerie and amazing, with a crisp rainbow.

IMG_5289.jpg IMG_5361.jpg

And finally, my favorite little friend has been coming over more and more these days, requesting “liblos”. What she really wants are libros or rather, for me to read her a book. She’s come over quite a few times in the last few days and fallen asleep on my lap in the middle of the books. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s got a lot of sueño. The thought of leaving her makes me too sad to think about right now. My Peace Corps friends were joking the other night during dinner that if I ever have a daughter I’d have to name her Not-as-cute-as-delmi. I laughed quite a bit because on one hand it’s a terrible thing to say, and on the other hand, what if she’s Not-as-cute-as-delmi? But that’s something to worry about another day a long time from now.

IMG_5434.jpgWe’re all pretty tired here, and there’s a lot left to do. My other job in the last month of insanity has been to plan a post- Peace Corps vacation that involves a lot of rest and relaxation. We just have to make it that long.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sueno/feed/ 3
The Mayan School- final update https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-mayan-school-final-update/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-mayan-school-final-update/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:51:55 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4091 I know I promised an update about the mayan school a LONG time ago, but things have been weird. I last posted about the construction way back in Week 8, and here we are, suddenly in Week 20! How did that happen?

week20SM.jpg

Some time in Week 9, we started to have some of the problems typical in Guatemalan endeavors. A few key community leaders stopped talking to each other and the American donors, and there were some doubts about where the money was all going. Building materials, an important part of any construction project, stopped arriving in a timely manner- further reinforcing the idea that money wasn’t all going where it should. Concerned, the donor held off sending another material shipment pending verification, starting a vicious cycle. No material shipments, no progress on the work. No progress on the work, no material shipments.

About this time, the weather started to move in. The arrival of rainy season coincided with a few missed shipments of materials, and the masons left the site to look for other work. When there are no materials, there is nothing to build… and around here, if the mason isn’t working, he doesn’t get paid. One has to feed one’s family, right? Abandoned footing trenches filled with rainwater, and rusty steel reinforcing was left swinging in the breeze like barren trees after a forest fire.

After all the work I put into the project, this was very disheartening for me, but I realized that these are only temporary setbacks in a place like Guatemala. Given enough time, things start up again. But now my time has bled away, and my inflexible date of departure has nearly arrived. Without me, how will the project continue? I had hoped to be with the building at least until they completed an entire wing, to answer questions and clarify problems. If they could build one wing, doing three more would be a simple matter of re-doing what they’d done before, a really effective teaching technique here.

Last week, I went to the site and talked to León. He was pleased to inform me that they were back to work, and materials were arriving again. Although he’s a little nervous that I’m leaving, he’s still as knowledgeable and conscientious as ever. After a long conversation and a thorough look at his work so far, I feel confident that he can continue without my advice. After all, the building was designed using simple technologies and building techniques that the local workforce is comfortable with.

modelmakingSM.jpg

And me? I’ve spent my (scarce) spare moments in the last month or so working on a scale model to help with local fundraising. Models are great for helping people understand what a building will be like. I haven’t made one since college, and though it’s time consuming, I forgot how fun it is! This model is going to sit on display in a municipal office in town, so potential local donors can get excited about giving money to the cause. I’ll post some pictures when it’s done.

Speaking of fundraising, you too have an opportunity to help the project and it won’t cost you a cent. Chase Bank and Facebook are sponsoring a grant, where people vote for their favorite charities. The top 200 charities will receive a donation of $20,000. Computers for Guatemala, the sponsor for the Mayan school, is currently in contention for one of the spots. Don Livingston, the founder of CFG, told me today that they plan on spending all $20,000 on the Mayan school if they get the grant. If you have a Facebook account(1), you can go here and cast a vote for them, potentially giving the Mayan school a BIG boost. There is less than a week left to cast your vote(2), so don’t delay. Let’s get this school built!


 

1. It seems that Facebook will share your public info with Chase if you vote, but not your private information. You HAVE set your privacy settings, haven’t you?

2. Update: i just got these instructions from Don, in case the voting process is confusing:

1. Go to our website:  http://computersforguatemala.com/school
2. Click on the “Support Us” Vote box.
3. Click on: “Get Started to Vote” in Green
4. Request for Permission to Access Basic information – click on “Allow”
5. Pop up window asks you to “Like” Chase Community Giving – click on “Like”
6. Verify you are still on the Chase Community Giving Computers for
     Guatemala page
 7. Click on VOTE.  If you are not on Computers for Guatemala’s vote page, go up to “Search and Vote”    

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-mayan-school-final-update/feed/ 6
Heavy Metal https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/heavy-metal/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/heavy-metal/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:40:41 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4086 big_hairSM.jpgThis weekend was the annual all-volunteer conference and fourth of July party. In many regards, it was much like last year, except that we knew only a handful of people this time. The majority of our group left country a few weeks early, getting ready to start grad school and other things like that. Where were Matt and Sarah? Zach? Jane? Joe and Katy? These people have been fixtures at every gathering since the beginning, and they are now gone, no matter how many times I thought I saw Zach in the crowd. To make things even more lopsided, Peace Corps Guatemala has greatly increased the numbers of volunteers in each training cycle, putting us old-timers even further in the minority. Next week, they are graduating nearly 60 new volunteers. It was eerie; a harbinger of our coming departure… almost like the Peace Corps has already moved on, and we have been made redundant.  

dansBandSM.jpgThis did not keep Dan and me from rocking the house, however. As promised, his band showed up and we made a scene. I wasn’t really sure how people would take it- heavy metal doesn’t fit everyone’s taste. But as we stepped on stage and people started screaming, I knew everything was going to be all right. The crowd was ready, and they were in the mood to be rocked- Search and Destroy style. It was time to cut loose, and no music cuts loose like Metallica. Luckily (?) , Emily was able to catch some of the concert on video, which can be enjoyed here. I edited out the parts where lightning bolts flew out of my guitar and struck several bystanders dead in their shoes. But metal is like that, and some acceptable losses must be expected.

But it was not all heavy metal mayhem. Several months ago while we were hiking El Mirador, Sara and Charlotte were looking at the journal I made and asked me if I’d teach a bookbinding class. I love teaching anything, so we agreed to do it if we could scrape up the materials. Sara is very resourceful and found us all some leather and paper, so I made a few awls from nails and chunks of wood, and we finally held our class. Everyone was pleased with the end results, and we got to spend some relaxing time with a few of our remaining friends that haven’t yet left the country.

bookbinding2SM.jpg bookbinding1SM.jpg

This weekend was also useful in that we met the new volunteer that is coming to our village. Her name is Cathleen, and she’s very enthusiastic. In the hour or two we spent together, we talked nonstop- so many questions! So much to say! I can remember how anxious I was two years ago: desperate to know what the village was like, if the people were nice, what the housing situation was, how to get there… a thousand questions. I’d also forgotten how little you actually KNOW about Guatemala at that point in your service, basic things like how to use the bus system. She has a big adventure ahead of her, that’s for sure. But I’m really glad she’s coming. Sure, she’s well qualified and has a lot of experience in development work (more than we had when we arrived), but more than anything, she’s ENTHUSIASTIC. She is fresh and ready to go. In comparison, we sometimes feel tired, impatient, and burnt out. Passing the torch will be good for us, good for her, and most importantly, good for the community. We’ve built a lot of opportunities for her in the last two years, and she has the fresh legs to take them and really make them work.

Cathleen, as well as two other new volunteers that will be working in our municipality, are arriving tomorrow to visit their new home before they move here permanently at the end of the month. I have to get some sleep; we have a big week planned for them.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/heavy-metal/feed/ 10
SPA phase 4: Latrines https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-4-latrines/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-4-latrines/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:04:57 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4077 Here I sit at the Peace Corps HQ, finishing up the SPA paperwork. We did the last of the construction Tuesday, and had to leave at 6am the next morning for our last administrative trip to HQ during our service. Besides all the other stuff going on (which will probably appear in the next post), we are meeting with our boss to go over the project details to make sure all the recordkeeping was done right. While we were at HQ, we also took time to take our Language Proficiency Interview, or “LPI”. This is a standardized evaluation the US Government uses to test foreign language skills in its employees, and we have the right to take it as we exit service, in case we should ever want to work for Uncle Sam again. I assumed I’d not gained any proficiency since training, since I work in a non-Spanish-speaking site, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I’m now rated squarely in the middle of the “advanced” category. This is a big improvement from the “intermediate-low” I came to Guatemala with, and the “intermediate-high” I left training with. The interviewer says that I still make plenty of errors, of which I am WELL aware, but my comfort and fluidity with speaking makes up for it in casual conversation, increasing my understandability. He also says I now use the subjunctive enough to further reinforce his claim of “advanced” status.

But that is not what I’m here to talk about; today we have the last post about the SPA project. Tuesday’s work was pretty straightforward, the latrine. We actually only built a single unit (huh) because no one was really interested in having one. Also, to my disappointment, the one they wanted was the less-fantastic “ventilated latrine” type. These are built in essentially the same way as the ones we built with Charlotte a few months back: better than pooping in the field, but not at nice as the fancy composting type. They don’t give you compost, and you have to move them every few years when the pit beneath them fills up. This is extra problematic in our local soil, where the pit walls have a tendency to collapse, causing them to fill in even faster than they otherwise would.

IMG_2399SM.jpg<IMG_2404SM.jpg

When we arrived at the participating house, we found a mixed situation. The good news: the family had already dug the 8-foot deep pit as they’d agreed to. The bad news? All the rain last week had caused the pit to fill completely with water, giving it the deceptive appearance of a shallow muddy puddle. We spend the first hour of work tossing in buckets with a rope attached, to dewater the hole. Despite this setback, we got it done: the last of the four technologies.

Emily was gone for much of the time we were building, collecting the last of the photos of the finished projects as well as the signatures (thumbprints, in most cases) of the people who donated labor. I can’t imagine how we’d have ever finished this if there were only one of us. That was subjunctive, by the way, for any of you who were wondering what “subjunctive” was in the first half of the post. It doesn’t come up often in English, but it seems to sneak into about half of the sentences you hear in Spanish.

leakSM.jpgWe’ve also had to go back and deal with some problems. Most of our tanks leak (aieeeeee!) because we have a cold joint between the base and the walls. This is not as big a problem as it sounds; it just means that the plaster is no longer an optional extra. We are kicking in a bit of money to plaster all the tanks, thanks to the generous donations from several of you who know who you are. I once worked with a contractor in Oregon who told me that “Being a good builder ain’t about not f*cking up, it’s about knowing how to fix the f*ckups when they happen.” True, that.

burnt_kittieSM.jpgI was having the obligatory mosh drink during a work break with one of the families, and noticed this cat. I’d seen her before, but now she had these strange brown stains on her fur. “What are those marks on the cat?” I asked.

“Burns!” they told me.

Huh. Weird. “How’d that happen?” I asked, remembering that cats around here love to sleep at the very edge of the wood stove, the only toasty warm place on the house.

“The neighbors next door ran out of firewood, so they tried to burn the cat instead!” the lady said. There was a pregnant pause, then everyone exploded in laughter. I like these people, they have a good sense of humor.

We still have a lot of other stuff cooking in the coming weeks, but I want to celebrate the end of our construction with the fruits of Emily’s work, a little montage of “before” and “after” photos. Enjoy!


pisos de cemento– concrete floors

casa38b_sm.jpg 25 PedroJuarezDiegoSM.jpg

pilas– water tanks

spring2SM.jpg 1 Diego Juarez DiegoSM.jpg

estufas mejoradas– improved woodburning stoves

casa17b_sm.jpg 23 EulaliaDiegoLorenzoPabloSM.jpg

letrinas ventiladas– ventilated latrines

casa16b_sm.jpg IMG_2405SM.jpg

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-4-latrines/feed/ 6
School Days https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/school-days/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/school-days/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:07:35 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4052 Somehow, in the midst of all our SPA construction, I managed to find yet more for us to do–I planned health fairs at the school. Soon after we arrived in our village, almost two years ago, the teachers asked if I would help them with sex education. They said they’d had a hard time getting support from parents to talk about such a delicate subject, but that maybe the parents wouldn’t mind if we were the ones talking? This was way back when I understood nothing of the way things work here, which means I thought they would come to me with more specifics when they really wanted me to help. Hah, things definitely do not work like that here. This unrealistic expectation, along with the fact that we were incredibly busy for our first year meant that it took me this long to set up anything to do with health and sex ed at the school. As some of you may remember, working at the school has been a bit of an internal battle for me.

saludfaire_sm.jpgThe first time we tried to establish regular health talks in the school, things went quite badly. I came away completely deflated and so uncertain as to how I should proceed that, well, I just didn’t. I had fancied myself as being good with kids, but Guatemalan kids in a school setting are drastically different from American kids in a school setting. In the US, teachers encourage student participation from the very beginning. We are trained to answer questions and then make up our own. This in combination with the fact that the US is so individualistic means that we, as Americans, are generally people who have an opinion and know how to share it. This is not the case here in Guatemala. Participation in the classroom is almost nonexistent. There is no information exchange or feedback from students. Educators have been trained by rote memorization and they teach with rote memorization. Being from a very communal culture, it’s very unlikely that students will ask insightful questions or even feel comfortable responding to simple review questions, as this puts them in the spotlight. The problems I had at the school were mostly my own. I didn’t know how I was supposed to work with no feedback. Somehow I’d learned how to deal with that when it came to giving health talks to the women, but seeing it all over again in young students was thoroughly discouraging. It was especially difficult given that I’ve spent time with a lot of the students outside of the classroom where they are curious, they do ask questions, they do speak–maybe not a lot–but much more than they do in school.

Feeling discouraged was just part of the battle. The rest of me just felt guilty, because the teachers here have been nothing but supportive of our presence and work in the community. But since I felt at a loss of how to approach things and completely unmotivated, I let it slide. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I did. Anyway, when things got REALLY slow here a few months ago, in April or so, I went to the school again to talk to them about how they thought we should work together. Even then, looking at our scheduled meetings and obligations combined with their teacher meeting days and celebratory days off it was obvious we couldn’t establish a weekly routine, so we decided to do a couple of health fairs. I still don’t know how these fairs were pushed so far into the calendar that they landed right in the middle of construction, but that’s Peace Corps scheduling for you. Everything takes much longer than expected.

While these health fairs weren’t as big and exciting as our December community health fair for education and prevention of HIV and AIDS (we didn’t get to burn any more devils…), I think they were quite successful. The first Friday health fair was for kindergarten, first, second, and third graders. There were over 150 students participating, which meant that we needed to call in reinforcements. Katal and Nico, our closest volunteer friends, came to the rescue. They’d also helped out with the December activity. The theme of the day was Mi Vida es Preciosa, or My Life is Precious. We opened up the day talking about how all of us are precious, and because of that we need to take care of ourselves. Personal responsibility is kind of elusive here in a lot of respects, so I have no idea how our message went over, but we talked about how all of us have the responsibility to take care of our health. It’s not your Mom’s responsibility to wash your hands every time you should wash them, or to brush your teeth every time you should brush them. We had four Fun Stations where we talked about nutrition, oral hygiene, hand washing, and clean water. The student groups rotated classrooms with their teachers. The teachers were our translators. These grades are too young to understand Spanish very well, so as usual, every word we said was translated.

An interesting side note: since school was declared free of charge and open to all just before the start this school year, I think the enrollment in our school has a increased between a third to half the number of students the school previously catered to. This compulsory education decree has also meant that kids start school when they’re ten or twelve years old, so that a first grade class will have a few students who are twice as old as most of the first graders. Knowing this in advance, it made me wonder how many students would be bored and aloof because all the information and activities were geared toward young children. In the end, this didn’t seem to negatively affect participation at all.

I was a little worried about how things would go, but for the planning of the fair I decided we needed to pack it with movement, stories, songs, and games while completely avoiding direct student questions. I’d also met with the teachers prior to the fair to discuss their participation, i.e. we weren’t having a fair to give them a half day in the teacher’s lounge. We were having the fair to introduce them to some new ideas and techniques we use for teaching and maybe they would like to adapt them to their classrooms. And we needed them to stay with their class through the duration of the fair to make sure that the students understood everything and to maintain order… I think it worked?

It was an interesting morning. Some of the teachers were incredibly enthusiastic, fun translators. Though it struck me how not a single teacher tried to regulate male/female participation. Boys obviously dominated the scene as long as I didn’t make rules to counteract this. It was interesting, because I felt like some of the teachers were surprised when I enforced equal participation. It shouldn’t be shocking right? I mean, look at the gender divide among adults here, but it was striking. I’ve heard the school director, Minor, a giant ladino who lives in town, talk on several occasions about gender roles and how they are changing and must continue to change. Hah, the first time we spotted Minor down in the school yard while looking out our window some time in the first week here, Jaime jokingly said, “He ain’t from around these parts.” He dresses in a distinctly European style; he has neatly trimmed, but stylishly long hair; and both of his ears are pierced. This in addition to standing over six feet tall and having a sizeable belly, makes him outlandishly different looking. So maybe I was just surprised that the teachers under his direction weren’t more aggressive about gender equality in the classroom?

IMG_1621_sm.jpgAnyway, I think this technique of keeping the students busy while not asking any direct questions was effective. All four grades attended all four activities and then we closed the activity by asking general questions to everyone where there were collective Yes!’s and No!’s. All of the students made a promise, as much as that means coming from a bunch of elementary students, to take care of their health. They drew their hands on a piece of paper and signed their name to affirm that promise. Then they ran off screaming, laughing, and pushing their way to recess! Later that afternoon during Chalio and Alberto’s daily visit, I asked them if they had fun, and if they thought the other kids had fun too. They said yes, pretty convincingly.

Oddly, the teachers disappeared as quickly as the students at the end of the activities. Who knows what they thought of the day? It’s so hard to get feedback, to maintain a dialogue here. I have to say it’s probably one of the most frustrating things about working here. Our job necessitates feedback and dialogue to make sure things are working and to help us improve, but it’s like pulling teeth to get most people to say anything, and then they just say, “Thank you! Thank you for this opportunity,” in a very pre-programmed kind of way. So who knows how that went over?


You know what happens when you get older? Suddenly health lessons are much more embarrassing.

Back to the school director. We’re big fans of the Minor because he not only talks a good game, but for the most part he lives what he says. The other day I walked into the school kitchen before the Teacher’s Day activities and found him helping one of the female teachers cut up a mountain of vegetables to be cooked for the afternoon meal. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s crazy gender-bending around here. What is an even bigger deal is that while I’ve walked by the town tiendo after other activities for things like Mother’s Day or Independence Day to find fathers and teachers completely sloshed, smoking and drinking together, Minor has never been among them. He was the one who specifically asked that we help with sex ed, and he was with us for the entire 4 hour program on HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention for the younger students.

Once again, Katal and Nico came to support us with the upper grades. I now know that when they show up, I have nothing to fear because we’ve worked together enough on big lectures that everyone knows their parts. First Fletch and I would do the big lecture, which involves a plethora of graphic and embarrassing pictures, and then we’d split into game groups.

IMG_2173_sm.jpg IMG_2200_sm.jpg

All four of us lead different games. For example, there’s a game called Globulos Blancos, or White Blood Cells, which explains how HIV is transmitted and what it does to the human body that leads to AIDS and death. It’s a really clever game, but I feel like I’ve led the game a million times in two years, so I begged Nico to do it–he didn’t make me beg very much. I led the call-and-response game that is meant to teach young adults how to resist pressure for sex from their boyfriend or girlfriend. That game and all the yelling took me back to my camp counselor days… One side of the room yells, “Everybody’s doing it!” and the other side yells, “I’m not everybody, I’m ME!” or they yell, “If you’ll do it I’ll marry you!” and the others yell back, “What if I don’t want to marry you?!” Other calls and responses, “If you don’t, I’ll leave you!” “I’ll miss you!” and then there’s a plea for using condoms, “I’d rather die than use a condom!” and the response is, “AIDS will kill you faster!”

While Nico led the White Blood Cells game and I taught kids how to cop an attitude and turn people down, Katal played a game that teaches what behaviors will and won’t transmit HIV and Jaime got to make kids run around in a True or False sprinting game with questions about the disease. Coincidentally, the bilingual education coalition had come to our school to observe teachers and demonstrate and discuss new ways to incorporate both Q’anjob’al and Spanish into their classes. They ended up participating in our program until they had to head back into town. It was fun to have extra, energetic teachers thrown into the mix, and great when we finished and they asked, “How can we do this in more schools? Can you all come work with us at the schools in town and in other communities?”

I think the best parts of the day were the moments MInor spoke. He really takes time for his students to impress upon them the importance of getting accurate information. He tied our lessons back into past health lessons he’d done with the students. He spoke at length about he idea of respect, respecting ones own body and the bodies of future partners. I find it encouraging any time we come in contact with someone like Minor. During the atol break, the students were absent from the classroom. The four gringos loitered, and then Minor appeared bringing us all cans of fruit juice and cookies from the tienda across the street. He and another of the head teachers, Pedro, came to thank us for the program. This is when Minor dropped a bit of a bomb, “You know, this, what we’re doing here today, is actually illegal if you look at the law books regarding what kind of sexual education is and isn’t allowed in schools. But it’s a law of ignorance. How does the government expect their students to progress if they refuse to give them important information that they definitely won’t get at home? That’s why I believe we have to give these lessons to the students.” Interesting! Up to this point, I wasn’t aware that there were laws governing what we could and couldn’t be taught in the schools here. I thought it funny to see someone take advantage of the incredibly lax enforcement of Guatemalan laws not for personal benefit, but to provide a more thorough education to his students.

Listening to Minor, I remembered that our friends in the Youth Development program talked to me once about how, when discussing birth control in schools, they’re only allowed to discuss the collar. The COLLAR is literally a ring of beads with a moving black plastic band that helps you track your fertility, for natural family planning. To me this is ludicrous. This method assumes that A) women are going to understand exactly how to use the collar and remember to move the plastic band every day, which isn’t a guarantee since so many women here can’t even remember to take a birth control pill regularly–they’ve told me as much. B) That they have 29-32 day cycles without a single irregularity, which is virtually impossible because most women’s cycles fluctuate from time to time for illnesses, fevers, complications from malnutrition, and external stress in their lives. C) That they have a say in when they have sex with their partners, which is infrequently the case in the areas where birthrates are the highest because there is a lot more machismo in the rural, less educated regions. If I think about it too much it starts to make me really angry, like abstinence-only education. It’s been proven ineffective for as long as it’s been tested, and still the policy persists in the US. And here I see the further devastating results of our ineffective American policies, when we have a tendency to push those foolhardy ideas on other countries, where people in turn suffer much greater consequences than we do for such shortsightedness. Let me tell ya, the US doesn’t have nothing on the teen pregnancy rates in Guatemala, nothing. So in the end I was just thankful that Minor had asked us to come in, and that we’d finally found a time to do it. Now he’s got the information and resources to repeat these lessons when and how he sees fit.

eskoolSM.jpg

Minor excused himself, and the four gringos continued to loiter in the classroom. We were looking at all the silly notebook designs the students had at their desks. There was a particularly racey notebook cover, and Katal pointed out, “Eskool notebooks are the brand the government gives out to the students.” Isn’t that nice then, that they can hand out these kind of notebook covers, and still make it more or less against the law for students to receive sexual health lessons?

I’d say, thanks to the teacher support, that this health fair for the older students was definitely a small success. As the four of us walked back to the house to take a well deserved rest, we realized that, amongst all of us this was the first health talk we’d ever given entirely in Spanish with no translator. I think this is a sign that the school is doing some things right. You can tell from the looks on people’s faces and the recognition in their eyes, or lack thereof, if they understand what you’re saying. We could tell the students understood our Spanish entirely, and as exhausting as this very long and energy-intense lesson is, it was less tiring than the others we’ve done that were nearly twice as long as they might have been for all the Q’anjob’al translation. Go teachers!

As a side note, I thought this was also going to be our last health talk EVER, but I think I inadvertently scheduled another one with the Telesecundario students, the older students who are high school age, for July 8 while our replacement is here for her site visit. We just keep working, right up to the end, apparently unable to admit that we should be closing up shop sooner rather than later…oops. Better to be busy than bored, we always say.


Finally, some of you readers also have read the articles that are published here on the blog but were written for publication in my hometown newspaper. Way back in December, I wrote an article about literacy issues and the lack of books in Guatemala. Much to my delight, Candice Hinkle’s fifth grade class at Pioneer Elementary School, quite near my hometown, sent me an email the same day the article came out in the paper. They were surprised by the differences between their lives and the lives of students their age here in our village. It was shocking to them that some students here end school after sixth grade, whereas they were fifth graders and planning on at least seven more years of education. A pretty big difference. Anyway, they wanted to do something, and they asked if they could donate books to our school here. I was so touched by their email that I actually burst into tears. This always worries Fletch, the whole me bursting into tears thing, and since our work space is separated by a whole 12 inches and he was working along side me that day, he wondered what kind of bad news I’d just received. I assured him it was nothing to worry about, in fact it was very good news.

IMG_5318.jpgThrough email exchanges, Mrs. Hinkle’s class began to coordinate their efforts, the students collected their pennies, and just before Christmas they sent off their scholastic book order for a load of books in Spanish. Don Livingston, from Computers for Guatemala, helped save the students shipping by letting them send the books to him in New York, where the books were loaded onto a boat with a computer shipment and slowly, very very slowly, they made their way through customs and we made our way down south to pick up the books. They arrived in our village just before we left for our COS conference. I had the pleasure of doing a video conference through skype with Mrs. Hinkle’s students, answering their questions about Guatemala and introducing them to some of their contemporaries here, Yohana and Chalio, before class was dismissed for the summer. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to present the books to the school here before classes in the states ended. But, better late than never. Last week during the double celebration for Father’s Day and Teacher’s Day, I had the opportunity to present the books to the students and teachers and read the inscriptions from Mrs. Hinkle’s students. In case any of you are reading, I think the school was pretty excited for the more than 30 books you were able to pack into that box. Thanks so much for your contribution! Thanks for caring enough to do something.

IMG_5304.jpg

The night before Teacher’s Day was an exciting night in our house. Yohana, our friend from next door, had asked me a  few weeks in advance if she could come over and bake a cake for her teachers. I told her I would definitely help her make a cake, but she had to keep reminding me because I was very busy, and she had to contribute the sugar, flour, and eggs. I told her if it was going to be a present from her then I wasn’t going to just make it for her. As the date approached she would stop by to keep checking if the rules or my schedule had changed, but the answers were constant. A few days before she came by to check again what ingredients she needed and to check and see if she could bring her school friends over to help as well. I said sure, and asked her if she’d decided on banana or chocolate cake? She asked if we could make both. I only have one big circular pan, so I told her if she added the bananas to her ingredient list and found another round pan then we could definitely make two cakes. I was really proud of how on top of things she was, much more than many adults here have been. As per usual, Fletch and I both worked late that night, but I got home before dark, and 15 minutes later Yohana showed up with her arms full of ingredients and her friends in tow. It was a crazy hour after a long time, but the kids were interested and involved in the whole process, and Yohana had brought her notebook to copy down the recipes. Here are the kids licking the chocolate cake batter out of the bowl shortly before going home. Oh, and don’t worry about the fact that they’re all barefoot. They aren’t too poor for shoes, we just make them take them off at the door because the mud lately has been ridiculous. They all put their shoes on and I handed them some plastic sheets to put over them as they made their way home in the rain. Yohana reported that the teachers very much liked the surprise.

Hanging around for the morning activities for the Teacher’s Day celebration got me an invite to play in the women’s basketball came for our teachers against another local school that had come to visit. There are onlly 4 women teachers here. I was quite the blocker, being at least a foot taller than most of the other players, but sadly I could not make a basket to save my life. Ah, my All Saints basketball days are so long gone…but I still received plenty of compliments on my playing from a lot of the female students. 🙂 The game was fun, but as soon as it was over, I had to run to the neighboring community and get back to work on stove construction. We are super crazy busy, and it will probably be that way to the very end.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/school-days/feed/ 1
Guate Rock https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/guate-rock/ Mon, 28 Jun 2010 03:00:51 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4031 Despite the frantic pace of our lives as we try to get things sealed up here, I had to take a trip this weekend to go visit Dan. He’s the last of my friends that I’d promised to visit, and we’re about out of time.

Traveling by myself in Guatemala is kindof strange, since Emily and I go almost everywhere together. This was the third time I’ve done it in our entire service, and I have to say, it was sortof fun. Like us, Dan lives “Hue, Hue out there” and the trip involved three different busses and about 9 hours of travel. The roads are not direct: I had to go over the Cumbre then back though Todos Santos, and it’s quite a haul. Out of curiosity, I checked on Google Earth to see how far apart we REALLY are, as the crow flies. The answer?

Thirteen miles. 13. I can’t get my head around that.

You could probably make that hike in a day, if you knew the way and your mountain legs were up to it. And to give you a better idea of how powerful and effect geography has on human culture and development, bear in mind that if you walked that journey, you’d go through four different ethnic/linguistic regions: The Q’anjob’al speakers (where we live), the Chuj in Coatán that we see across the valley, the Mam people all around Totos Santos, and finally the Poptí in Dan’s site.

huistaSM.jpg

I’m glad I went. His site is beautiful, and he gets even fewer visitors than we do… he said I was the second in two years. Speaking of years, Dan is the one person in our group that is going to extend his service for the extra year. He’s got a lot of good stuff going on in his site: the mayor has asked him to start an Alcoholics Anonymous program (very badly needed!!), he’s working on a SPA project, he’s the goalie on his town’s soccer team, and he’s the lead singer for a Guatemalan heavy metal band.

Which brings us back around to the point of this post.

Dan’s been cooking up this idea for months, to bring his band to play some metal at the annual All-Volunteer Conference and 4th of July Party. He called me up a month or two ago, and it went like this:

Dan: “Hey.”

Me: “Hey.”

Dan: “My band is thinking about playing at the 4th.”

Me: “Sweet. Do it.”

Dan: “You once told me you played bass in a band back in the US.”

Me: “Yeah, I played with The Hoot Hoots. Why?”

Dan: “We don’t have a bass player. You know any Metallica?”

So, basically, I was hooked. I like heavy metal, but I don’t have a lot of experience with it. The good news is that metal bass lines are pretty easy to learn, and the people running the party are only allowing bands to play two songs each. His band is into Mexican speedmetal (um, what?) but also likes Metallica, Twisted Sister, and Black Sabbath/Ozzy. This week was our dress rehearsal.

Dan’s band practices in a creepy little concrete room beneath a darkened bus-repair garage that smells of mildew and used engine oil. This tiny acoustic burial vault is packed with amps, equalizers, microphones, speakers, audio cables, mixing boxes… and instruments. This is good, since I left my bass in the US when I came to Peace Corps. “The ex-mayor lets us use this stuff. I have no idea where it came from.”

As the amps started warming up the damp, chilly cell, I was introduced to his VERY youthful band. Handshakes and smiles all around, then we got down to business. As best we could, anyway, in a room that small packed with a dozen teenage fans that follow the band to every performance and rehearsal. “They’re pretty stoked to have a bassist,” Dan shouted in English over the din of guitars tuning. “Lucas says that metal without a bassline is like a softdrink without the sugar.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I am the Sugar Daddy.

jammin2SM.jpg jammin3SM.jpg

Pedro, the drummer, hammered away like he was the happiest person in the world, and Lucas picked out the riffs like a good boy should. Dan, for his part, growled the lyrics to a wide range of metal tunes, showing off the special skill that sets him apart from every other singer within a day’s drive: he speaks English. We rocked the evening away, until everyone went home with bleeding eardrums and smiling faces.


Despite how much fun it was, it’s probably good that we only get two songs; most mortals have a limited tolerance for heavy metal. In fact, Dan was worried about scaring off the audience. “I’ve been thinking maybe we should learn a Beatles song. Twist and Shout?”

rocking.gif“Yeah, that’s a crowd pleaser,” I shrugged. “We used to play that with the Hoot Hoots, and it got people dancing. Sometimes girls threw underwear.” After a trial run with his boys, though, it looked like Twisting and Shouting was out of the picture. Mexican speedmetal doesn’t do 60’s Fab Four.

“Maybe we should just do two Metallica songs?” I suggested. “Your band seems to like them the best, and those are the ones I’ve been practicing. That, and if the audience is going to hate it, a Beatles song at the end isn’t going to change their minds anyways.”

Dan nodded. If you are going to do a thing, you have to do it all the way. No prisoners. Heavy metal style. “OK. I’ll get the wigs ready.”

]]>
Challenges In the Final Countdown https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/challenges-in-the-final-countdown/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/challenges-in-the-final-countdown/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:51:59 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4163 In addition to how physically and emotionally tiring the construction project has been, there’s been an another exhaustion factor. I’ve felt, the whole time we’ve lived here, that there are always eyes everywhere, watching and judging our every move. In the two months we’ve spent almost every day, six days a week, getting up and walking to Yulais at seven in the morning, that has definitely felt true. I often wondered if it vexed them here to see us leaving to do work elsewhere. Although things are relatively quiet at that hour, I could feel eyes boring through the cracks in their kitchen walls and tiny windows as they ate breakfast or through the corn as they weeded the fields. I don’t think this is just me being paranoid, because for the last few weeks of the project it seemed like every day there was someone from our home community who would stop us on the road and say something to the effect of, “Yulais has a project. You’re doing a lot of work there. What about us? What happened to our project?”

It was hard for me not to get mad about this. I’m so tired of rehashing what happened here, but it’s also my responsibility to explain things when people ask questions. I felt like people were, in their indirect Guatemalan way, pretty annoyed with us. But I was equally annoyed with them. Their sense of entitlement is sometimes incredibly offensive. The explanations always boiled down to, “Yulais did the work required to get a project. The leaders and the people here did not.” People would tell me, “But we welcomed you to our community,” or “We had to work hard to get the gringos in our village…” as though it was a given that because we were here we would parade through the streets throwing money at people. I shake my head at all this, and repeat the explanation over and over and over again.

IMG_5297.jpgIt was a great contrast leaving a somewhat hostile-feeling home every day and arriving in Yulais, where everyone was overjoyed to see us and work on the day’s tasks. We’re kind of treated like royalty there. In fact, at one of the houses, the family for some reason has a pair of absurdly oversized chairs which they sat us in like thrones at lunch. I kept thinking, they’re so ready with their affection here, but I feel like if we unwittingly screwed up, they’d be quick to rescind that affection. That’s how it happened in our own village, and unfortunately, we got the opportunity to test this theory in Yulais as well.

Way back in April as we were beginning construction, we realized the schedule was going to be tight, and we wanted to go home on time. For this reason, after about the first two weeks of construction, Fletch came up with a plan. He saw that Diego was working amazingly hard and he thought this could be an asset for us. So Fletch talked to him and said, “Listen, we need to go home on time, but we have to finish the construction by the end of June if we’re going to do that. If you promise to help us get this all done by the end of June, we’ll help you out in return. We’ll put a floor in your house since you let us use it for community meetings for the last two years. It would be better for your family, and it will make a better community meeting space in the future.” Diego then promised he’d help us get out of here on time, and in so doing get his family a floor.

Fletch and I had talked about this plan some. It made me uneasy, but I couldn’t come up with a real reason why we shouldn’t do it. With no real reason to give, I never said firmly that we should not do it, which always means that if Fletch is convinced he’s got a good idea, then it’s done. And so it was. The problem began when, a week before we were to finish construction, a huge truck full of sand and cement arrived. We happened to be working with the stove teams on that day, and there were lots of people talking about Diego and his floor.

While I was working with my team, some of them asked me after a lot of talk amongst themselves, “Why is Diego getting a floor?” I explained to them that he had shown up and worked with us every single day of the project, including a few days that we couldn’t show up. He’d donated his house to all the meetings for over a year and worked tirelessly to secure the bank account, then did all the material orders and coordinated the drop offs and material distribution in the community. He’d worked so hard that he’d not even weeded his fields in the last few months, and his family was embarrassed by the state of their milpa. I made sure to tell my group that Diego had never, at any point, asked for the floor or used community funds or project funds to pay the floor, rather that it was a paid for by donations from outside of the project because of all the work he’d put into the project to help us go home on time. After that, my stove team was happy. Diego hadn’t used community funds or tried to cheat anyone. That was important information, because everyone here automatically assumes the worst, just like every day that we showed up to build something and they all automatically assumed we didn’t have enough materials….

Just after I finished explaining things to my group, Fletch called rather angry and annoyed. His stove team had taken to bad mouthing Diego and decided not to listen to anything Fletch told them regarding the how and why of Diego’s floor. Unfortunately, Fletch’s group contained two of our other hard workers, Ximon and Juarez, who’d been pretty good friends to Diego throughout this whole process. While Ximon and Juarez had worked a lot, they hadn’t worked nearly as much as Diego. In fact, every time we tried to thank or congratulate Ximon on work we thought he’d done, he’d say, “I didn’t do it. Diego did! Thank Diego.” And now that Diego was getting a floor, Ximon was angry that Diego’s work was being compensated. This turned what should have been a good day near the end of the project into a very difficult day.

After our construction that day, we had double booked meetings: one in Yulais regarding the details of the upcoming inauguration parties, and one in our own village regarding whether or not the community wanted to welcome another volunteer since (in their eyes) we’d let them down so badly. We’d already planned to split up and do two things at once; Fletch was too angry to stay in Yulais, so I stayed while he went back to deal with our village.

Though my meeting was supposed to be about the party plans, more than half of my two hours there were spent trying to explain the deal with the floor. I rehashed to the whole community the things I’d explained to my work team. Unfortunately, the whole community wasn’t as understanding as my team. They were upset that the everyone didn’t benefit from the donated money that went to buying the materials for the floor, and they were annoyed they hadn’t been informed about the floor construction before the materials showed up. Some were just distraught that Diego would abuse their confidence. It felt like a total mess and it was all our fault.

In our time here I’ve been on guard, trying to make sure we’re doing things conscientiously and in harmony with the communities and their needs. In the middle of the meeting, I was afraid for the first time that we’d really messed things up. Were we trying to push our American values on them, with this idea that hard work really should pay off? Would it have been better to not give him the floor? But he’d done such an unbelievable amount of work, and it really would benefit his family and the community in their future meetings. It was a hard call. And I was very confused and anxious about whether or not we’d done the right thing. You know, we’ve been trying to do a good job, and to feel like we’d inadvertently screwed things up was sort of wretched.

After I explained the facts repeatedly, I ended with saying, “Look, Diego never asked for this floor, Jaime offered it to him in compensation for the work he’s been doing for more than a year. We weren’t giving him a handout; the guy WORKED. And regarding the idea that the community won’t benefit from this, you all will benefit. When another volunteer comes to work in the community, now you’ll have a space in which to meet that is easier to clean and less full of mud and dust and flies.” One man in the community said, “Then Diego should sign an agreement right now that his floor is property of the community!” This particular man really pisses me off sometimes, and I had an urge to slap him right then. But I didn’t. I just cut him off and said, “Furthermore, the whole community IS benefitting from the donations we received from the states (all of you blog readers) because remember how we used more materials than we originally purchased? Remember how Jaime and I told you we’d look for ways to get those payed for? We had the option of charging each participating family something like 100quetzales more to cover those costs, but we told you we’d try and find a way to keep your costs down. Well, the same donations that paid for the floor covered all the extra material costs as well, because Jaime and I did you all that favor. Now I would like to ask all of you a favor: if any of you are absolutely set on being angry with someone, don’t be angry at Diego, please be angry with me and with Jaime. Diego never asked for this floor, and he doesn’t deserve the treatment that some of you are giving him today. If you want to be mad, be mad at us. You made this project happen by working together as a community. If you let anger over this floor destroy that unity, then I will go home with a very sad heart. Please don’t let that happen. Let’s be happy with what we were able to accomplish together.”

A few people from my work team backed me up by saying,”You know, I don’t think we should be mad. Look at their village down the road, they didn’t even get a project and we did.” I was thankful for their support. And with that, the meeting more or less returned to planning the inauguration party. They only had a few questions to ask like, “How many gringos are coming?” because they wanted a food count. You could tell they were thrilled that there would be 7 gringos, plus our boss, the famous Engineer Basilio Estrada. When this man’s name is spoken beams of light stream down from heaven. After I answered all their questions, I was free to go and let them continue planning the party. I was still uneasy about how things with the floor would settle down, but the direction of the meeting had changed entirely and for the better. That was something anyway.

I started walking towards home and realized that I felt like my bladder was going to explode. I was supposed to walk directly to the meeting Jaime was suffering through, which could last for hours more. I didn’t know whether or not to swing by our latrine at home, and then it began to feel like I wasn’t even going to make it that far. And then I started eyeing the cornfields on all sides of me as I tried not to slip down the muddy sloped path towards home, and then I realized that if I did slip I would most likely wet my pants because when I get nervous in meetings I tend to unconsciously guzzle the water in my nalgene bottle and I’d drank a full liter in the space of an hour. It had been a very nerve wracking meeting, and so for the first time in two years as a volunteer, I made the decision. I jumped off the path and down into the cornfield, checked to make sure I couldn’t see anyone, and squatted in the cornfield to pee before continuing home. I just thought it funny that with two weeks to go as a volunteer, this was the first time I’d ever peed in the cornfield.

I walked into our village meeting hall, where there was quite a showing of towns folk. Don Tomax leaned over and whispered, “It’s a good meeting. A lot of people are speaking out against Manuel. We asked him to come to the meeting, but he refused.” This was not the same translation of events that Jaime was given, but there was quite a lot going on. People were speaking out against Manuel, complaining about things we didn’t do, others were sticking up for us about the things we did do even when the community didn’t do it’s part.

After everyone took their turns talking, they had to decide if they wanted to form a new committee and invite another volunteer into the community. The situation felt precarious. For months I’ve felt uncertain about what would happen in Temux. I’ve wanted them to choose to receive another volunteer, and I’ve worried that they wouldn’t do it on account of their own shortsightedness, or that they would receive another volunteer and then repeat the same mistakes they made with us. I’ve felt responsible for what’s going to happen with the next volunteer and uncertain that I’m doing the right thing at any given moment. In the end, it was up to them, and they decided that instead of letting their volunteer go to another community, they would reform a committee to work with the volunteer and try again. So our little village has got a lot of challenges ahead. I hoped the new volunteer, whoever she would be, would be happy.

This was a very very long day, one of the longest in the last few months. We returned to a cold house at about 8pm with no food ready to eat. It was all we could do to eat, bathe, and get up again the next day to work. We are unbelievably exhausted these days.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/challenges-in-the-final-countdown/feed/ 2
SPA phase 3: Stoves (continued) https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves-continued/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves-continued/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 01:51:22 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=4024 estufaE1animation.gifWhen we last spoke of stoves, we were building the bottom half. This was a timesaver idea we had to help us get 15 stoves done in four days of work. The issue is that the stoves have a concrete “table” that we pour on the ground, to save on the time and expense of formwork. For the concrete to reach its seven-day strength, we have to leave it undisturbed for a week (obviously). During this window, we’d go build the rest of the tanks and take a Sunday off.  

The big downside to this system, besides my secret fear that the tabletops would crack when lifted, is the actual process of lifting them. Like I said before, I estimate the weight of each one to be about 600 pounds. And they’re flat on the floor. I had some ideas how to do this with levers and blocks, but Emily said I should just let them figure it out. Being from a primitive setting with little equipment available, the locals are really good at physical labor, and working out the specifics of how to do it.

I was not disappointed. The day came for me to teach the class on how to do the upper half of the stoves, and my three team leaders showed up… along with twelve strapping men. “Where do you want this thing?” the asked, and I pointed to the base we’d built last week, with a fresh layer of mortar on top. They hummed ad hawed for about two minutes, then picks and poles came out of nowhere, there was some grunting, and they had the entire slab a few inches off the ground, set on some blocks of firewood. A heave-ho and a bit of grunting later, and a 24-legged monster scuttled its way across the room and our table was set.

picks1_sm.jpg heave-ho_sm.jpg

“OK, see ya” they said and they all filed out the door. “We’re off to the next house.” What? Turns out, they are good at organizing, too. Diego and the leaders told the guys to just run ahead to all 13 houses that day, and lift all the slabs. Nice!

DonaSuzannaStoveSM.jpg

As an interesting side note, our friends Joe and Katy built stoves in their village as well, but didn’t add the table. They looked more like this one we built during training, and took a lot less time and money to build. But we try to make the project suit the culture and climate of each village, and their village is in the blazing-hot jungle climate of the south coast. No one wants to be anywhere near the fire if they can avoid it. In contrast, our village is in the bonechilling highlands, and everyone can be seen gathered around the fire when they’re not working the fields or sleeping. Having a little fireside table is the rage in all the homes here. It’s such a good idea, in fact, that I want to invent some sort of analog for avant-garde homes in US when I get back. 🙂

Now, without any further ado, the rest of the stove building process.


Day 2: The Upper

Like I said, the Brute Squad already went around an hoisted all the 600 pound concrete slabs onto the block bases. That streamlined things quite a bit, and some groups (like Emily’s) were able to do two stove uppers in about 5 hours.

IMG_2328_sm.jpg IMG_2334_sm.jpg IMG_2340SM.jpg
Lay out the fire brick in the center of the table, but don’t mortar them down. Grab the blocks you filled with concrete last week, and set them along side to make sure everything fits right. You will have to cut a few bricks. This can be done easily by tapping the brick with the trowel, but around here they like to use a saw. They ruined my hacksaw blade after three bricks, then switched to their own crosscut saws. Set the blocks in a bed of mortar, then mortar in vertical firebricks to line the side of the firebox.
elbow_sm.jpg IMG_2336_sm.jpg IMG_2358SM.jpg
We need to make an elbow to support the chimney and pass the smoke. Take a block and knock a hole through it with a chisel or piece of rebar. Cement it in place at the back of the stove, with a brick to close the opening at the back. Using a hammer, straighten the hooks on the plancha and door frames. The tabs help hold the frame in place, but the hooks stick out of the finished plaster. Lay a thick strip of mortar on top of the firebrick, and set the frame for the plancha. Check for level. Plaster the door in place.

juarez_chimneySM.jpg

IMG_2356_sm.jpg
sifting_sm.jpg
Set the chimney on the stove with mortar so you can get it plumb. Plumb is important, because it’s really heavy and we don’t want it falling over. Cut the roof as needed to let the chimney pass. Most of the installations need three chimney sections, but some have low roofs and only need two. Contrary to local belief, the chimney should extend a few feet above the roof, so it can draft properly. Pack the opening with mortar.* You’re just about done. Plaster the whole thing to make it pretty and easier to clean. At one point we ran out of fine sand for the plaster, so they just got a screen and sifted us some more from the gravel.

ouchcornerSM.jpg

IMG_2352SM.jpg
turwex_kidsSM.jpg
Sometimes you have to fix messups, too. On Gaspar’s stove, the crew broke three of his four corners off the table because they were too rough when they took off the forms. Yikes! Perhaps next time Gaspar’s voodoo charms will be more effective at warding off this sort of bad luck. I was hanging around at the very last house waiting for my assistants to show up, and these kids looked like they needed some toys. So I made them some turwex (dragonflies) out of some scrap wire left over from Day 1.

You guys know how much I like SketchUp models. Click here to download a model of the stove I made to help check materials quantities and be sure it all fit together with the things we were ordering.


*Everyone around here uses mortar to seal chimney openings through their tin roofs. It makes me crazy! Concrete is NOT waterproof, and its also very stiff so it can’t move with the tin roof as it expands in the sunlight or moves with the wind. How can that possibly NOT leak? What they need is a proper flashing, but no one here does it that way and there are no pre-made ones available in stores.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves-continued/feed/ 4
What a Mayan meeting is like https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/what-a-mayan-meeting-is-like/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/what-a-mayan-meeting-is-like/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:25:21 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3992 Besides all the insane SPA construction going on, we still have a lot of other administrative tasks to do to prepare for our departure and the coming volunteer’s arrival. A few days ago, Emily went with Aurelio (our counterpart) to visit a few nearby villages where the new Santa Eulalia volunteers will be living. Peace Corps has to evaluate all proposed living sites in general, as well as survey the specific residence to make sure it meets minimum safety and hygiene standards. Our boss Basilio normally does this, but he’s swamped right now and we’re the farthest out of all the sites he manages, so Emily offered to do it for him and send the results back via email.

Last night, however, was probably the single most important meeting we’ve had regarding the future of our site. After the numerous problems with the leadership in general and Manuel in specific, there was some uncertainty as to whether the Peace Corps was even going to replace us with a new volunteer when we leave. This would be a big blow to the community, but the reality of it is that if volunteers can’t work here, they shouldn’t be here. Basilio and Aurelio, being clever and politically-minded guys, worked out a plan: the village needs to replace the Health Committee with new leadership if they want another Peace Corps volunteer. Basilio sent an official fax to Aurelio explaining this, who then acted surprised to get it and sent it along to our village elders.

That was a few weeks ago. Last night we finally had the Big Village Meeting to discuss this. I got there early (about an hour after the announced starting time), and waited outside the community hall with all the people I’ve come to know in the last two years. What would happen? They’re all friendly and nice to us, but there’s also this undercurrent of misunderstanding and blame… why are we working in Yulais, and not here? What happened to the “project” they were promised? Almost simultaneously, Aurelio and Nas Palas showed up.

“Let’s go upstairs and have a talk,” Nas said, leading Aurelio by the shoulder and nodding me towards the Health Post. “You have a key, right?”

I do, so we walked across the square to the health post. The four or five others in the oligarchy of the village magically appeared out of thin air to join us. You see, this is how it works. There are some older, respected men who sortof run things, but have no official position. They’d all met at Nas’s house the night before to discuss this very issue, and even invited Emily and I to answer a few questions at the end of their meeting, making sure they knew how to handle everything before it happened in public. They’re wise, community-minded guys… and now they were going to brief Aurelio. I felt kindof pleased to witness it, especially since I knew every one of them and trusted their judgement: Nas Palas, Don Ximon, Don Tomax, Santiago. And the people I don’t trust in the community were notable absent.

The conclave happened in Q’anjob’al, and I followed most of it not because I have a high competency with our Mayan dialect, but because I am pretty familiar with the material. The one notable change in the plan was that they’d decided not to replace the Health Committee leadership. Instead, they were going to form an entirely new committee, with the exclusive purpose of working with the Peace Corps. Aurelio and I both approved of the idea, so we all returned to the community hall.

There were about 50 people in attendance- not a big turn out for our village, and a little disappointing for a meeting that seems so important to the future of Peace Corps in this area. Would they vote to do what’s needed to get another volunteer? Or would apathy, petty grievances, and misinformation rule the day? Aurelio picked up the microphone and convened the meeting, inviting someone to come up and give the obligatory opening prayer.

To my great glee, Don Marcos appeared out of the crowd to lead a short prayer. He’s always been one of our staunchest supporters, even though his busy schedule of church work, coffee growing, water commission, and running a business in Barillas keeps him from participating a lot. He smiled at me as he finished.

Aurelio reclaimed the microphone, and started taking about our work. He explained that we’re not lazy (an occasional rumor here), that we’re working on projects in Yulais, that we’d brought computers for the village, and that the other Santa Eulalia volunteers were already doing a water project in their village after only a year of service. He read the fax from Basilio, and presented the idea of forming a committee especially for working with the Peace Corps.

Looking around the room as he talked, I was pleased to realize that I could stick a name and interesting story to the majority of the faces looking at Aurelio. That’s so different from two years ago when I started across a mass of indistinguishable brown faces welcoming us to their tiny village.

About that time, Antonio stood up. “Why does xxxxx (village name withheld) have a water project already after just a year, and we’ve got nothing? Who is at fault here? That letter you read hints at the Health Committee. If that’s so, we should replace them. Who is at fault? Maktxel culpable?” He seemed pretty agitated.

“I don’t know,” Aurelio lied, “I don’t live here. You’d have to ask the committee.” This meeting was turning into a showcase of indirect communication and careful maneuvering. Once again, I noticed Manuel was conspicuously absent.

Nas picked up the microphone. “The point is that Jaime and Emily are leaving on the 13 of July. If we want more volunteers, we have to organize a committee. If not, we don’t need to have this meeting.”

There was some more chatter, then an older guy in a weatherworn capishay stood up. “But what about the morral project? What happened to that money?” The thing about Mayan town meetings is, they are all over the place. Topics fly in from every direction. But you have to have faith; after everything is exhausted, they eventually come home to the main theme. You just have to be patient.

Several women then got up and said versions of the same thing: “Jaime and Emily really support us and help us, but we don’t speak a lot of Spanish. The leaders don’t help us to understand what’s going on.”

Then Malin* stood up to talk. I cringed; she’s a total wild card. She’s been really helpful and understanding at times, and a few weeks ago she even invited us over for dinner to talk about what happened to the project, actually ASKING US instead of listening to the gossip. However, she was also one of the main perpetrators in the fiasco with the girls from Yulais. “You know, Jaime and Emily found us some money for the project. They did a lot of work for us.” Yay Malin!

Then Petrona stood up next to her. “Yes. And they also told the leaders that we needed a NIT (tax ID number) to receive the money. Then the leaders did nothing; I was there, I saw it.”

The discussion went around a bit more, and landed on Marcos. “Jaime and Emily do lots of good. I don’t generally benefit personally, because I am too busy to be involved, but I know that they brought computers to our community.”

Then Antonio stood up again, still mad enough that he was shaking. “But what happened to the project? Who is at fault? We have a right to know that.”

Nas leaned over to me. “He’s just being mischievous. He knows good and well who is at fault. They all do.” And that is one of the keys of indirect communication: saying leading things over and over, and never actually saying the person’s name. So many people in this room had been cheated by Manuel; Antonio was just keeping it in the front of the meeting. In fact, after the meeting ended, Antonio was one of the last people to leave. He came right over to us, and apologized repeatedly. “I want you to know that what I said was not aimed at you. I know you worked hard. I am sorry if I offended you. Very sorry.” He was still shaking from emotion. We reassured him that we understood who the comments were aimed at, and didn’t take offense. His effort to comfort us was very kind and appreciated, though.

About that time, Palxun stood up. He doesn’t speak often, but he and his wife run the store down the hill from us and are always exceptionally kind. “Is the morral project still going? What’s happening with that?” No one really answered, and the discussion drifted.

“We have to WORK, to collaborate, if we want to reap the benefits from our volunteers.” Nas said. “Yulais is kicking in 400q each and a bunch of physical labor to get their projects.”

“There are women here who are good workers,” Petrona replied. “But there are also lazy ones. In the morral co-op, we have some that show up late, or do bad work. They don’t get the benefits if they don’t put forth the effort.” That is a good parallel, and I was pleased that SOMEONE got the point. “Emily also organized us to teach others how to make morrales. We were ready and willing to do it, too. It’s not our fault if other women are too lazy to come.”

Then the capishay guy got up again. “We have to support these volunteers.” Some nods, some murmurs.

“But every meeting, they ask us for money,” Lukie’s mom piped in. It was like that record-scratching noise, and the meeting erupted into bedlam.

What? Money? We never ask anyone for money. We’re not even allowed to HANDLE community money. I looked over at Aurelio, and he was looking down, massaging his temples with his thumbs. This happens to almost anyone who tries to help the community, and he has been accused of it as well… taking money, abusing power, corruption.

I took the microphone. “Which group? The morral group?” I asked her. “Who took the money? The leaders? Us?” Through a translator, she said the morral group.

I tried not to get angry. “All of you listen. We aren’t allowed to handle money, and we don’t. And I know for a fact that no one has EVER taken money at a morral meeting.” I looked at Lukie’s mom. “And I don’t know how you could say these things, because you have never even attended. Not once. Repeating that sort of gossip is bad.”

The bedlam continued for a while, but eventually got talked down. Then Lina, Manuel’s wife, stood up. She was there to look out for her husband’s name in his absence, surely. “What we need here is clarity, transparency. We need a committee for just these Peace Corps projects, to keep things simple and not confuse the people.” Whew, getting the meeting back on track!

Bernabe stood up. “I think that only those who want to work, want to participate, should do so. There shouldn’t be a penalty for those who don’t.” This seems obvious to you and me, but “obligatory participation” is pretty common in Mayan culture, and is enforced with powerful social pressures.

“What do these volunteers bring to us, anyways?” Marcos asked, handing Aurelio a cleverly-timed rhetorical question. He knows that answer better than almost anyone in the village, and has always been fully on board with our mission of health education.

Aurelio responded with a 5-minute lecture on the lasting benefits of education in third-world development. “They want to help. They are only working in Yulais right now because we’ve denied them the opportunity to work here. Then, out of nowhere, Aurelio called a vote. It happened really quickly, hands up and down, and the village decided to nominate a new committee and to host another two years of Peace Corps volunteers. That fast.

Then Nas Palas got up and gave a very animated speech about how the village wasn’t working with Jaime and Emily, and it was their own fault for not getting full benefit from their volunteers, and how they had to do better in the future.

“We need to elect a committee that’s energetic, one that will work,” Don Ximon said.

The capishay guy got up, and said “I nominate Marcos.” Then he walked out of the meeting. Another guy did the same.

Marcos stood up, and explained that he’s love the job, but he had too many other obligations to dutifully serve the villagers in that capacity. We were a little disappointed; he’d be a perfect candidate: organized, smart, understanding, commmunity-minded. But knowing your limitations is important, and we respect that.

“How about Nas Palas,” someone else nominated. I looked over at Nas Palas, whose face was an unreadable mask of fatigue. That poor guy is supposed to be retired, and he already gets shit from the village because some people still think the gringoes give him sacks of money to live in his house (which is actually donated to us, at personal expense to Nas). Being on the Peace Corps committee would only deepen his headaches in that respect.

“I don’t want the job,” he said, leaning over to me, “But I serve the community when they want me to. I hope someone else comes forth.”

A few more people were nominated and declined for various other conflicting obligations. Then the meeting broke down in to more hubbub. The trouble, it became apparent, was getting the women involved. Emily asked if she could get up and say a word to animate the women, and Don Tomax said, “Sure, but first we need to elect a president.” I was more caught off guard by that sublime sexism than Emily, who grudgingly conceded that we can’t change the world all at once. Just getting some women to be vocales (committee members) was going to be challenging enough.

It looked like no one was going to volunteer for the committee. It’s all fine to raise your hand and say, “It’s OK to have a committee and allow the volunteers to stay,” but when it came time to actually do something, no one was interested. We were about to fail from apathy.

“What’s wrong with you all?” Aurelio asked, taking the microphone and launching into an impassioned speech about civic duty. “This is the problem with Guatemala. We’re a third-world, underdeveloped country why? Because no one wants to stand up and change it.”

Then, as if by magic, the room emptied… leaving seven people standing before us: Don Tomax, Don Ximon, Nas Palas, Bernabe, Petrona, Juana, and a woman I’ve never seen before. “Congratulations,” Aurelio said. “This is your new committee.”


A postscript to all this is that there was a second drama going on concurrently in the meeting, regarding the posada, or living-place. We think our house with Nas’s family is cute, safe, and comfy- a perfect place for the next volunteer. After much discussion amongst themselves over the last few months, the family decided that having us was so much fun that it made up for them not having use of one of their rooms, and they’d like to host the next volunteer as well. The problem, though, is that they were socially obligated to give the rest of the village a chance to host us. Several people had been asking, seeing the $$ they might be getting from the new Gringoes.

But Nas is a clever guy and knows how to work the system. He announced at the meeting that anyone who wanted to host the new volunteers should come talk to Emily and Jaime, who would visit their house to evaluate it based on the Peace Corps requirements, and that the village agreement of “rent free” would be continuing, as decided upon by the leaders. This subtle reminder, as well as the daunting idea of actually talking to the scary gringoes directly, put off any would-be suitors. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s 99% likely that the next volunteer will be living with Nas’s family as well. And that thought is comforting indeed.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/what-a-mayan-meeting-is-like/feed/ 4
SPA phase 3: Stoves https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:40:16 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3991 The majority of the projects we’re building for our SPA grant are stoves. They’re an important key to improving health; the World Health Organization says that more than half of human beings cook over a fire, and the majority of them live in smoke-filled environments with a poor or nonexistant chimney. Medical studies sponsored by the W.H.O. show that a housewife cooking in such conditions is doing the same damage to her lungs as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That’s sad, but not as sad as the life of the baby tied to her back that’s getting the same thing.

casa43aSM.jpgAs important as these stoves are, we were at first hesitant to do them here. In our villages, most of the families already have some sort of rudimentary stove, and other project types (floors!) are hardly in use. But a LOT of people wanted the stoves, so we surveyed their houses too. That’s when we started to realize that this was still a good project: nearly all of the stoves were substandard, with broken chimneys, no doors, and cracked tops. The majority were handmade from xan (adobe), crumbling and leaking smoke into the house. Those stoves are better than nothing, but still a health hazard worth replacing.

This presented us with a quandry. The specifics of the grant, as well as good development practice, prevent us from building a second stove in a house. It’s wasteful of resources, unethical, but happens here sometimes… and everyone has an excuse. “Fijese que, this stove belongs to my father-in-law. I want my own.” Stuff like that. Emily has been a real hardass, and told several people that there are NO EXCEPTIONS, and the old adobe stoves had to be removed before we put anything new in. This even caused a few people to drop the project. So imagine the conflict when last week Diego asked us what the families are supposed to do for food during the two weeks it takes the new stoves to dry. In a perfect world, we’d be building for families that were currently cooking over open fires, and adding two more weeks of smoke inhalation while the new stove dries isn’t going to do much extra harm. In the end, it was Emily that came up with the solution: they can keep using their adobe stove while the new one dries, but we won’t give them the magic final part (the plancha, or stovetop) of the new stove until we return and see that the adobe stove is really gone. Then, we just drop the plancha into the steel frame that is cemented into the stove. It’s sad, but we have to use a “trust but verify” system; if we just assume people will do what they say, some will not- either out of laziness, or seizing the opportiunity to have their two stoves after all.

In two of the 15 houses, we’re just going to do “upgrades.” The owner already has a reasonably nice stove, but it doesn’t have a door and the plancha is old and warped. A new plancha will not let the smoke out, and the door is AWESOME TECHNOLOGY. Besides holding in some of the heat to increase efficiency, it has a little vent on the front that can be adjusted: wide open, for maximum heat and starting the fire, or partially open, for better efficiency and lower heat for making tortillas, or closed at the end of the day to kill the fire by oxygen starvation. This makes some nice charcoal in the stove to start the next day, instead of a bunch of useless ashes. Everytime we explain how to use the door, the women are besides themselves with excitement at this amazing new idea.

So, now that you know the What and Why, here is the How…for your reading pleasure.


Day 1: The Base

To get 15 stoves built in two days, we had to break into teams. The actual “working time” per stove isn’t much- two hours to build the base, wait about a week for the concrete to cure, then two or three more hours to build the top. But to make the schedule, we are doing two bases per day, for two days, in four separate groups. Then, the following week, we’re doing it again for the tops (with work on more tanks in between. No rest of for the wicked).

IMG_2243_sm.jpg IMG_2251_sm.jpg IMG_2253SM.jpg
Cut the 2×4 formwork and nail it together. These women are having a blast, using “men’s tools” for the first time ever, under the watchful tutelage of Emily. Level the ground, and lay out your 2×4 formwork with some nylon underneath it. Check for level and square, then stake it down. This needs to happen in the same room as you’re going to build the stove (more on that later). While this is going on, have some other workers cut the reinforcing steel and wire it together into a grill. Bring it in and put it in the formwork.
IMG_2249_sm.jpg IMG_2281SM.jpg IMG_2255SM.jpg
If things are confusing, you should take notes. If you don’t have paper, improvise. Place rocks under the steel, so it will be in the center of the slab. We will be lifting the slab into place next week, and if the steel is NOT in the center, the slab might explode. Avoid this Epic Fail. Mix up about 4 wheelbarrows of concrete. By now, you should be very good at it. Here we see Brenda helping out with the water.
IMG_2258_sm.jpg IMG_2273SM.jpg IMG_2264SM.jpg
Shovel the concrete into the forms. This is going to be the “table” of the stove, and I estimate it will weight about 600 pounds. We have to pick this up next week, hence building it in the room where we’re going to install it. Trowel the slab smooth, and leave to dry. Protect it from animals. You’d think that being indoors, it would be safe from the chicken footprints we had on other projects. Not the case! I’ve already had to fix some. Fill the cores of six blocks with cement. Set them aside to dry; we’re going to use them in Day 2. For what? You’ll have to read that post to find out.
IMG_2277_sm.jpg IMG_2266_sm.jpg IMG_2261SM.jpg
Cut trenches where the concrete block base of the stove will go. Make them about 4 inches deep, if you want a low stove or your soil is soft. Throw some concrete in the trench, to give you a level base for the first course of block. Start laying up the block. It’s funny; I’m not a mason, but I took a two-hour class on blocklaying one weekend in architecture school, and amazingly, I found the things I learned 18 years ago to be exceptionally useful here. Blocklaying is not rocket science, but is definitely a “skilled trade,” with lots of tricks to make it easier and improve quality. You will have to cut two blocks to get it to all work out. No one here has a masonry saw, so they do it with… a machete! What Guatemalan construction project would be complete without THAT? Incidentally, chipping block is prohibited in the specifications of most architects I’ve worked for.

Well done. Clean up your tools, drink your mosh, and get on to the next house. We still have a lot of work to do.

Day 2 is coming soon….

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-3-stoves/feed/ 5
Splitting the check https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/splitting-the-check/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/splitting-the-check/#comments Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:53:23 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3964 One of the nice things about all this SPA construciton is that it’s a great chance for the comunity to pull together and work as a team. However, as is the case in human endeavors, not everyone wants to play ball. Mayans have a strong sense of community, a willingness to look out for the less fortunate or those struck by disaster or misfortune… but when taken to extremes, it becomes an incontrollable sense of “fairness” that almost looks like greed.

Last week I was assembling the galvanized steel water piping for a tank, and realized that I was out of Teflon tape. For those of you that don’t do plumbing, Teflon tape wraps around the threads of the pipe to ensure a tighter, more waterproof connection. It’s not necessary, but it’s a cheap way to increase the quality of the work- especially if no one has a monkey wrench and you have to tighten the pipes with vicegrips. Anyway, I had used some on the previous tank, so I sent a kid to run down to that house and get me some from that tank’s owner, José.

“He doesn’t have any,” the kid said when he came back 10 minutes later. Um, bullshit. He had some two days ago. I walked down the hill to José’s house, to exert some gringo influence.

“Hi José!” I smiled as I walked into his yard, and casually leaned on his brand-new tank. “Man, this tank stuff is a lot of work! Say, how’s your tank drying?” Playing innocent/ dumb is usually the best way to master the Latin American system of “indirect communication,” and beating around the bush is always a good intro.

“Great!” he said. “We’re all very excited about it.”

I smiled. “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” I smiled. “I’m working on Eulalia’s tank up the hill, and realized that I don’t have any Teflon tape! Silly me. You don’t happen to still have that almost-empty roll from two days ago, do you?”

His eyes lit up. “Actually, I do, Jaime! Let me get it for you.”

And that is how it works. Part of it is that I’m The Gringo, and people will do things for The Gringo that they wouldn’t do for their own blood relatives. But more than that, it’s a need to be recognized that they’re making a contibution or sacrifice, and I’m a high-profile witness for that sort of thing.


As I’ve mentioned before, we have had some “misses” on materials estimation. One fortunate error is that I over-estimated a tiny bit on the steel required for the tanks, so instead of 16 bars of steel, we just used 15. I explained to each tank owner that the extra material belonged to the community, not them, and that we might need it elsewhere before the project was all done. If we didn’t claim it by July 1, then they could have it as a gift. A few weeks later when we started the stoves, we were a tiny bit under on the steel order, and I sent runners to reclaim our rebar.

They didn’t have much trouble recollecting the supplies, because I’d thoroughly explained the deal to the various owners. Yesterday, however, we went to Lataq to build a stove base* and we needed another bag of cement. “Thank goodness,” I thought, “that we had one extra after we built that floor two weeks ago.” Lataq, as you might remember, is about an hour walk from here, on top of the mountain, and has no road or electricity. We are doing two projects there, because there are two ladies that come a LONG way every week to hear our health lecture. Our supplies had run a tiny bit over on the first one, a floor, and at the time I told the owner to hold onto that extra bag of cement, because it would be a bear to try to get another one up there if we needed it suddenly for the second project.

Diego hung up his cell phone as we were climbing the mountain. “She says that it’s hers, and you said she could use it when we put a floor the other room of her house.”

rapelloSM.jpg

Ugh, that was an unfortunate misunderstanding. She’d asked me if we could put a floor in the other room of her house, and I told her we’d be happy to show up and help her, but she’d have to buy the materials. If we didn’t need to use the extra bag of cement elsewhere, she could use that too. Part of what we try to do is encourage people to take their projects that extra step: in the case of the tanks, for example, we aren’t plastering them if they hold water as-is. We’re keeping the project cost down, and they can save up their money and make these sort of aesthetic improvements on their own anyways. And in many cases, they are.

This lady never did anything about her second floor, but the thought of losing something she thought was hers was painful to her. I explained that the cement belonged to the community, for the benefit of all, and that that we were coming to get it. When we arrived, she was conveniently gone and we got the cement from her teenage daughter. Yep, she was pretty mad.

This all seems petty and senseless to me, but it comes from their cultural history and poverty. The Mayan idea of “mine” is strong; once the material hits their property, they all assume it’s theirs and no one else has any right to it. I suppose this is a factor of their economic situation. As Diego and I were walking back from Lataq, we crossed the new bridge the community had put in a few months ago. The old wooden one was lying in the field next to it. “What will they do with that?” I asked him.

new bridge2SM.jpg

“Nothing, until the community has a meeting about it,” he said. “They could re-use it, but they might just decide to chop it up and give every family a handful of kindling for their kitchen fires.” Oh, that. The Mayan obsession with fairness takes things to extreme, sometimes absurd, ends. I vividly remember when we first proposed our project, the leaders heard that we were only going to bring enough money to build sanitary infrastructure in about 40 houses. Their response? That it wouldn’t be fair, and that we should split the money between every single family, maybe buying each a piece of sheetmetal roof** or something. To them, giving everyone the same thing and having no useful improvement in their lives was FAR more important that doing something that would actually make a difference.

But right when I start to dismiss this equality obsession as a purely Guatemalan condition, I remember how aghast I was the first time I ate in a restaurant with Emily’s family. The bill arrived, and everyone broke out the calculators to figure the shares to the nearest penny. Money changed hands, bills and coins, even to the point of someone writing a check to someone else because they didn’t have exact change. Dude, in MY family, half the time everyone just throws some twenties into the center of the table and if it’s a little bit over, it’s a good day for the waitress. The other half of the time, someone says, “I’ll get it,” knowing that someone else will get it the next time. But, the truth of it is that Emily’s family has always had a little less money than mine, and that drives their level of care. And our villagers have a LOT less money than anyone I’ve ever known before.

I said goodbye to Diego as I we parted ways. I started down the gravel road to my village, and he stopped me. “One more thing. Can I put a roll of Teflon tape on the material list for our final delivery? José says we used up his, and he wants it replaced.”

I nodded, too tired to point out that he’d “given” it to me, and just petty enough to notice that we’d be replacing his almost-empty roll with a brand new one.


*A post on how to build efficient woodburning stoves will be coming out very soon, don’t you worry.

**Interestingly, Nick and Katal are now starting to work up a project in their community, and came across EXACTLY the same thing. How can a sheet of tin roofing improve the health of a family? In both cases, we avoided the issue by explaining that if the project doesn’t make a demonstrable improvement in family health, the aid organization wouldn’t fund it.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/splitting-the-check/feed/ 3
Chucho https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/chucho/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/chucho/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:10:02 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3959 Today I am at home, sick, feeling like a chucho. Chucho is Guatemalan slang-Spanish for “street dog”. Not your ordinary dog that has a home and an owner… that’s a perro. A chucho is a mongrel, usually with mange, underfed, covered with flies. You wouldn’t want to pet or even touch one, and heaven forbid you actually get BIT by one. They are forever hungry, and can be seen in streets of every Guatemalan town*, eating the most revolting trash and dead mice and vomit and other things too horrible to mention. And that is how my intestines feel.

casa33aSM.jpgMy dad emailed me several days ago to tell me that I needed to slow down or I would get sick. But to stave off any “I told you so”, I must explain. Way back in training (two years ago! wow!), we had a panel of volunteers come in and talk to us about the SPA project process. They all mentioned as a side note that the participating families would be very grateful for the aid, and it would be almost impossible to avoid eating in their homes one or two meals a day for the entire duration of the project. That, of course, means eating in Guatemalan sanitary conditions… if they’d have paid attention during our lectures, they would be boiling their water and taking all the other sanitary precautions. But the reality of it is, some of them forget or didn’t “get it” in the first place. As a result, Emily and I have both been exposed to several dozen opportunities to catch some gastrointestinal illnesses. With odds like that, you can only get lucky for so long.

So here I sit, within running distance of the outhouse, thinking that the “I told you so” actually goes to the volunteers from two years ago, not my Dad. Thankfully, Emily was feeling a little better than me today (last week was the opposite), so she’s supervising today’s pour on one of the pilas.

I want to start off by thanking everyone who responded so positively to the appeal from a few days ago. It’s humbling to see how many people want to help, and to realize how many friends I have. Besides the numerous people that commented, I received several emails directly from others who want to participate. I will be sending out an email to everyone involved sometime before Monday, explaining what the options are. To all of you, thanks.


Onward to the day’s post about apodos, or nicknames. They aren’t really common in the US, except for odd situations like summer camp (Emily and I still call each other by ours to this day, hence the occasional reference to “Fletch” in her posts). In contrast, Guatemalans love them. So much so, that it sometimes makes it hard to know what’s going on in a conversation. My host family during training had a nickname for almost every adult, and they used them interchangeably with given names all the time. The best one belonged to Guillermo, Froilan’s son-in-law. They called him mono rojo, or “red monkey”. Apparently, when he was young, Guillermo went to see Planet of the Apes with his family. Like my brother Dave, he always picks a favorite character in a movie, and upon exiting the theater, he exclaimed “Yo soy el Mono Rojo!” (I am the Red Monkey) and beat his chest like an ape. Nickname unavoidable, for the rest of his life.

Once we got to our site, though, we didn’t come across any more nicknames. Could it be that Mayans aren’t into that sort of thing? Of course not; we just weren’t in their confidence at first, and they were very formal with us. Little by little, though, we started hearing them. Mateo, the village drunk, is called El Burro (the donkey), because he’s very strong and always carries 200 pounds at a time when he’s sober enough to be working. Mario, our friend that drives a microbus, is apparently called Tx’itx (the rabbit). Maybe it’s because he drives fast? Last night, Lina the Younger was visiting, so I asked her about nicknames.

“Oh yes, just about everyone here has one,” she said.

“Really? Interesting,” I replied. “Can you tell me some examples?”

She thought a bit. “Well, you know Lucas down below? They call him Bomba (The Bomb). And Abel, they call him Lustre (shoeshine). And Ixtup, they call him Paj (shoulderbag).”

“Wait, do any women have nicknames?” I asked. She shook her head no. Wow, there is a cultural difference between Ladinos and Mayans. “How about the older guys? Do they get nicknames? What about Don Tomax?”

She shrugged. “He’s Yal Nawal“. That means “little earth spirit”, more or less. The nawales are these semi-divine beings that roam the countryside, causing mischief or doing good, depending on their nature.

“How about Nas Palas?” I asked.

“They call him Tzul,” she said. I have no idea what a tzul is, and neither did Lina, so the next day I want and asked Nas’s wife. She laughed. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There used to be this guy named Nas Tzul that came around, and since the both have the same first name, people started calling our Nas, “Tzul”. Who knows where that guy is nowadays? He could be dead.”

The thing about nicknames is, they almost always have an interesting story. They could be a reminder of a strange or memorable incident that happened long ago, but more often they’re a looking glass into how your friends and neighbors see you, what your place is in the community. A few days ago, we were having lunch with Diego, Ximon, and several other people in Yulais, and we got to talking about the long, long road we all traveled to do the paperwork for the SPA project. Manuel came up, and we were all relieved that Yulais had narrowly avoided the trap of his deceitfulness. He’d told them he was en expert at paperwork, and he would do it all for them. “Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t trust him,” Diego said. “We’d be without a project, just like your village.”

As I was sipping my soup and likely ingesting this thing that is keeping me home right now, my mind drifted to nicknames again. “Speaking of Manuel,” I mused aloud, “does he have a nickname?”

They all chuckled. “Sure. Everyone calls him “The Chucho”.


*Except Antigua. Being a well-organized city that relies heavily on the tourist dollar, Antigua has a special patrol of guys that makes chuchos “disappear” mysteriously in the night.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/chucho/feed/ 3
Tanks for the memories https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/tanks-for-the-memories/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/tanks-for-the-memories/#comments Wed, 16 Jun 2010 03:37:30 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3956 TanquePilaRender.jpg

We’re getting close to done with the tanks. This morning we did the base of the next-to-last one, and as I was gluing all the PCV drainage plumbing together, I kept thinking “one more time… one more time…” I think I like the tanks (pilas) the best of all the projects we’re doing, but MAN, are they a lot of work. As part of figuring out the construction sequence, I made a SketchUp model of the tank, showing how the forms all go together and the bracing and the construction sequence. You can download it here, much like the latrine model I posted last year, to explore and play with on your own.

This week’s good news is that Diego and Ximon are at the point where they can pretty much build them without my assistance. That’s the point of the exercise, to build capacity in the local leadership. A few of the days, I just showed up at the very end to make sure everything was right before they poured concrete. There have been frustrations, though. One day I decided I would do NOTHING but watch and wait, allowing them the chance to make their own errors, and only step in when a disaster was about to occur. I think this is a very important aspect of teaching, and it’s my weakest area. It was super annoying, since I’m a get-in-and-do-it kind of guy. Another frustration happened when we didn’t properly brace a form, and the pressure of the concrete caused a blowout. Concrete went squirting out, things got out of alignment, and we had to run around like our hair was on fire disassembling forms, scraping concrete, reassembling forms, then refilling the walls before the concrete set. Ugh. But the bright side? When it happened THE SECOND TIME a few days later, Diego and Ximon knew how to take care of it. I just sat back and bit my fingernails for a tense two hours, “supervising”.

Part of the stress of this is the schedule. We can’t let up, or we won’t get our project done in time. To the guy that commented about the material distribution, yes I know, we have a LOT to do in very few days. But life wouldn’t be interesting if were easy, right? Here is where I should mention that Emily is really picking up the slack. I have been a bit scattered lately, very tired, and not completing sentences. She keeps on jumping in, making people work, taking on stuff that she is only just now learning herself. Granted, she’s pretty good at building things after all we’ve been through, but a lot of this stuff is new to her. Thankfully, she’s great at improvising, visualizing, and has a get-it-done attitude that is unstoppable. She’s the bomb.

The stress of this project is now further complicated by financing. We have had a really tight budget all along, so we could reach as many families as possible on the fixed grant we received from USAID. However, as happens in the “real world”, several things have gone awry. We took the latrine out of the grant, since we thought Rotary was going to pick that up. Due to a miscommunication on my part, they no longer want to… their funds were alotted for composting latrines, and this family wants a ventilated latrine. This is not meant as a criticism of Rotary, either: they donated a big chunk of money to put a floor in the school, and that helped a lot. I just need to find $250 somewhere for the latrine. Also, I missed a few times on some material estimates and we had some unexpected expenses come up. For example, the forms on a few of the tanks weren’t braced right, and we used too much cement. Or the stove bricks availble locally are much smaller than what we’d used during training, so we needed to order more. These types of errors happen in construction, and most professional projects have a contingency fund of 10% to cover it. We don’t, as I was trying to budget “tight”, so now we are a few thousand quetzales over. But the worst expense of all is purely a paperwork problem. We were told that we would be refunded the 10% sales tax we paid on the materials, since Peace Corps is an aid organization, and I budgeted accordingly. Last week I emailed the Peace Corps accountant to get our 10% back, and she told me that I was actually supposed to send her the receipts BEFORE i paid, she would make a form, fax it to me, I would hand it to the business, and they’d give me a discount at the time of purchase. Wow, it would have been nice to know THAT several weeks ago. Her best advice to me was to go visit the business, and ask them to hand me some cash. Riiiiiiiiight.

10% of our project, by the way, is about 6,000 quetzales. More than Emily and I make in a month, combined. I am once again holding out the hat, hopefully for the last time in our Peace Corps service. If any of you awesome blog readers are interested in financially supporting the little village of Yulais, you can comment it or email me directly.

Despite all this stress, Diego mentioned something in passing today that made me feel really good. “Can you draw out another sketch for me, with the dimensions of the horizontal steel spacing?” he asked. I’d drawn him about everything else in the last few days, so one more sketch was no biggie. He continued, “I’d like to make another tank for some of my relatives after you leave.”

Now THAT is what it’s all about.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/tanks-for-the-memories/feed/ 8
Sacrament Adventures https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sacrament-adventures/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sacrament-adventures/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:59:59 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3953 You’ve all read the post about our trip to Aguacatan with our friends Pedro, Lucia, and their family to celebrate a first calendario Maya_sm.jpgcommunion and baptisms. Our friend Reyna, mother of the famous Delmi, has also been trying to have her children baptized for months and months. Her first problem is that the church here in her community and in the main town, in her words, “doesn’t welcome her because she is an unwed mother.” So the baptisms couldn’t be done there. Then she wanted Jaime and me to be the godparents, but she was fairly certain the church here wouldn’t allow that either, so she had to find Guatemalan godparents. She was finally able to arrange something with the church in a town across the valley where she works weekdays, so she decided that Delmi and Nasito would be baptized during Holy Week. Then Nasito contracted rotovirus and was hospitalized, which spent all the money Reyna had saved for the baptisms. That was sort of lucky for us, as we weren’t going to be able to attend the Holy Week baptisms. But finally, all things were in order this past weekend for a second try at the baptisms. We were invited to attend, even though Reyna was apologetic about us not being their actual godparents. There was some sort of class we would have been required to take, and of course we’d have to present little diplomas at the baptism proving that we’d attended the classes. Also, in the states it’s permissible for one of the godparents to not be baptized in the church, but here that’s not ok. I’m still a little confused about all the details. Anyway, we are padrinos de corazon, or godparents in our hearts, she says.

IMG_1917_sm.jpgThe morning of the ceremony, we woke up to the sun shining brilliantly, a good day for baptisms, less mud to dirty things up. Reyna had seen the pictures from the previous baptisms and said, “So you’re going to wear your traje right?” Of course I would wear my traje. This trip was a short one to the church across the valley, so I wore the whole thing as-is. I wasn’t feeling fantastic, so when I was tied into the skirt I asked Lina to leave the belt a little loose for the ride. It almost fell off upon our arrival, but I caught the whole mess and Reyna cinched me in tight after that–as if she didn’t have enough work to do getting her kids ready for their big day. Here I am adding to her work, but she doesn’t look like she minds terribly.

I reflected back on the baptism in Aguacatan. We had to travel 4 hours to get there, so I wore the traje top with jeans and a fleece jacket over it. When I took my jacket off at breakfast, everyone ewwed and ahhed at the me, and these were all people we know quite well. Most of the family, including the children to be baptized, changed in the parking lot so that no one got anything wrinkled or dirty during the trip or through breakfast. One of the funniest things to happen to me that day was standing in the parking lot just on the outskirts of the Aguacatan market while Pedro’s wife Carmen tied me into my corte as a crowd of about a dozen older women in traje watched and smiled and laughed and pointed at me. I just might have been the most entertaining thing to happen to them all day.

Things were much more low-key at the second baptism in San Rafael. We climbed into the microbus with the family here, and upon arrival less than an hour later, only Delmi and Nasito were changed into their gleaming white dress and miniature suit. But much like before, Fletch and I got a lot of stares, since we aren’t known around that town and we were two giant gringos in traditional Mayan dress.

While growing up, I became accustomed to family baptisms that were relatively small, quiet affairs. MaIMG_1992_sm.jpgybe one or two other babies would be baptized on the same day. Apparently this approach is too time and money intensive for the priest to population ratio. Here it seems that everyone pays a fee to the church, and there are en masse sacraments handed out. In Aguacatan there were some 200 children baptized plus Ronald’s first communion. This past Sunday there were two couples married and I20 children baptized. They do each step of the baptism ceremony in giant assembly lines. It’s actually one of the most organized processes I’ve witnessed while in Guatemala. Everyone gets in the lines they’re supposed to, and no one pushes. Impressive–maybe it’s because God Is Watching. Every candle in the air here is for a child that’s being baptized.

These events are funny. As we watched the assembly lines file past for the various stages of the ceremony I thought about how the whole day felt like an orchestration against the nature of children. First of all, the kids were woken up early, and made to travel for an hour without having eaten breakfast. This was the case for the whole family (though we definitely ate), but kids don’t deal well with these changes in routine. Then they were dressed in gleaming white clothes, which they were expected not to get dirty at least until after the ceremony. This means they’re supposed to sit still, not move, not play, not slide across the nicely tiled church floor. It is ideal that the children not cry, even though they’re forced into fancy, uncomfortable clothes and told to be still and quiet for hours at a time. It made me shake my head and laugh when they decided to give Delmi a

IMG_1959_sm.jpgpurple jello cup to quiet her down in the church. I mean, I was eating popcorn I’d bought on the street. Wouldn’t it make sense to give her a food that matched the color of her clothing to have a small chance at keeping her clean? In a few seconds she had purple jello dots down her dress. In the end, these kids are restless and forced over a bowl where cold water is poured over their heads and smelly oil rubbed in a cross on their forehead and/or chest. Check out the little skeptic’s eyes. She didn’t cry at all during this part, even if she didn’t readily trust that padre.

Afterwards everyone wanted to take nice, smiley dress-up pictures. The expectations are just a little unbelievable, which is why the following picture is maybe my favorite of the whole day. Look how happy these smiley children are after being cleansed of original sin! Pretty big smiles, right? Oh wait, that’s just me and Fletch smiling and laughing at the absurdity of it all. Though Nasito’s grandma Lina assures me that since his baptism he’s been a very contented happy baby, more so than he was before. Maybe the effects just took a bit of time to catch up with him? Delmi is usually a pretty happy kid, just don’t try to brush and braid her hair or you’re in for a screamfest.

IMG_1981_sm.jpg

As the ceremony ended, we were ushered to the house of a friend that Reyna had hired to prepare a big celebratory meal, a requirement both to celebrate events and to thank the people who stood up as godparents for the children. As we found out, the bulk of the money doesn’t go to the church, but into the clothes people feel obligated to buy for the ceremony and all the food purchased, which always includes some sort of bird. Ours was a turkey. We ate the meal in San Rafael because the godparents are from there, and it would be inconsiderate to expect them to come over to the family’s home back in the village. At the end of the meal, a giant box of sweet breads showed up and were dished out to the participants. This continued when we returned to our own village as well. The box came with us and all the sweet breads were divided in bags and delivered to the houses of family and friends to celebrate the baptisms. It was very quaint I thought, and they were hands down the best sweet bread rolls I’ve eaten here.

We are not a particularly religious pair, but going to these things always feels pretty important, and it’s fun to spend time with our friends in different settings. Sometimes I’m struck by these flashes of how much we’ll miss them when we’re gone. We’re having fun with them while there’s still time left, but there’s not much…

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/sacrament-adventures/feed/ 1
Site envy https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/site-envy/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/site-envy/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:38:06 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3942 moqlil_sunrise_deskSM.jpg

Even though we’re buried to our ears in work, we decided to take a Saturday off to visit some good friends of ours, the other volunteers in our municipality. Or maybe it was because of the work. You see, Nick and Katal work in a village even more remote than ours, one that doesn’t even have electricity. Basically, a day of forced rest.

I often brag about the view from our window, and I have posted a lot of pictures of how beautiful our village is. But if there’s a Peace Corps house in Guatemala with a prettier view than ours, it would be this one. After 26 months of Peace Corps*, Emily and I finally experienced our fist twinges of “site envy”. I suppose it’s a good sign that it took so long; like I said, we love our site. And I realize that if we actually LIVED in Nick and Katal’s site, the honeymoon might be short lived (What? We have to leave at 5am or not at all?”).

But it has so much to recommend it. Their cute little houses are nestled on a mountainside, with no neighbors in sight (though they are just over the hill, about 3 minutes away). Majestic mountain peaks rise up on all sides, and when the clouds roll in, they fill the valley below. Their road is 40 minutes of 4×4 trail, so they only hear a car or two per day. No electricity would seem like a bad thing, until you realize that the neighbors can’t play loud music and many modern distractions are unavailable. Even better, though, is the nighttime view of a valley completely devoid of electrical lighting as far as you can see. A view completely unavilable anywhere in the US, except for perhaps the deepest reachest of Denali national park in Alaska.

washbasinSM.jpg watercatchSM.jpg panel1SM.jpg

What they lack in services, they make up for with ingenuity. Their kitchen sink/ laundry station is a board on stilts at the edge of their yard/cliff. Nick set up a 55-gallon drum and gutter system to collect rainwater for drinking and domestic use. They also have some technology; besides their solar panel that runs their rarely-used lightbulb (they use candles like the neighbors, to not isolate themselves culturally), they have a handcrank shortwave radio for entertainment. I occupied myself with it for an hour, tuning in stations from as far away as Russia and somewhere in Asia. Then, we played euchre. Simplicity.

After they’d visited us so many time, it was nice to give them the opportunity to show is their style of hospitality. The food was great, the quietude was restful, and it was fun to see other volunteers living the same sort of life we do: working with very poor, very rural Q’anjob’al Mayans in a personal, one-on-one setting.


*Just one month from today, we leave our site for good. Ohmygod, how did that happen so fast?

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/site-envy/feed/ 4
SPA CRAZY https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-crazy/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-crazy/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:35:20 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3921 Fletch has been posting avidly about the design and construction of our infrastructure project. His posts come out looking very neat and organized. The projects look polished and done. This doesn’t really portray the reality of what has been a rather frantic and taxing mental and physical effort. These posts don’t ever let on to the fact that this project consumes most of our waking hours. We thought the week of floors was difficult, but that was before our first week of water tanks. Holy cow.

IMG_5293SM.jpgThe Small Project Assistance grant from USAID is an interesting facet of Peace Corps service. Not everyone chooses to take on the task. I have said many times before and still believe that I would never have done one of these projects as a single volunteer. That said, I have heaps of respect for our friends who came in with no building training (which I actually had before Peace Corps), who’d never written grants or managed projects, and who all completed successful SPA projects in their communities. Fletch has been working like a madman. First it was all the trials and tribulations of getting largely illiterate communities on board with getting a bank account and filling out a mountain of paperwork for the US government. Then there’s all the red tape through which that paper work has to pass for an undetermined length of time. During this phase the communities often become confused, doubtful, even suspicious that you just made them do a hundred and one silly things and they’re not going to get anything in return. So we must reassure and assuage them until finally we get the call that the money has come in. Then there’s the task of getting materials ordered, materials delievered, and materials recounted to make sure we got all that we ordered. ALL OF THAT comes before building anything. Building, the phase we’re in at present, is where the project shines. First of all you’re asking the locals to work hard. This is something they do anyway, but they do it with gusto when their work means they’re going to have a floor in their house or a water tank in their yard at the end of a day or two of work.

Because of all the things that came before building, we are running this final p hase pretty late in the game. All of our friends who’ve done a project finished a few months ago, except for one who is running her second project. That means that on most days we’re a little worried about when and how things will all get done before it’s time to pack up and say our good-byes. Fletch worked three 12-hour days last week and the other 3 days were between 8 and 10 hours of work not including all the time spent figuring things out after physical work hours. I was feeling a little sick when we returned from our two weeks of craziness on the road, but last week at the busiest point of the project I was unable to move without feeling like I was going to be violently ill. This left him working solo, and worse, when he came home at the end of the day, there was no bathwater hauled in and heated or food on the stove. It was bad. I felt awful for letting him down. Friday I was able to start working again, but by Saturday morning the guy couldn’t think straight. He was impatient and jumpy. I have to say, he’s been putting a superhero effort into this, but I can’t allow him to knock himself out before we’re done.

Part of the insanity comes from the fact that we decided it would be better to let each family identify their greatest health need, choosing between floors, stoves, latrines, and water tranks, rather than making the entire community decide on one thing they all needed. I would say most of the SPA projects are done as a way to build one type of infrastructure. Each family gets the same thing so that only stoves are built or only floors are laid. We thought letting them choose would increase ownership of the project. It has also created a giant headache for us. Our materials lists are crazy long. The actual construction picks up as we get used to one thing, like floors, and then slows down tremendously as we figure out how we need to do the next thing, like water tanks, and now we’re in the middle of water tanks figuring out how to run the stove construction. Since we’ve given people the freedom to choose, some of them have interpreted it as “freedom to demand changes and exceptions at will.” Again, most of the work falls to Jaime. He’s the one who’s organized everything and he has a better grasp of how everything goes together. Though, in addition to being mentally swamped, he has a tendency to tell everyone YES!

I started out saying that this was his project and I’m only here for moral support, but it’s become apparent that if we don’t do a lot of problem solving and communicating between the two of us and if I don’t manage the overall building days while he hones in on teaching specific aspects of the project to the participants, then we aren’t going to get this done in an organized and timely fashion. Both of us are get-it-done kind of people. If we are given a deadline, we will make the deadline no matter how much work it takes, but we keep thinking, “Work smarter not harder.” How do we do this? I counter a lot of Jaime’s YES! responses with a No. This way he doesn’t have to feel like a bad guy and he can tell people he’d like to do that but…and I can tell people it’s just not possible. A lot of their requests are minor, like what direction their water tank sinks are facing, but if we change it on every one we spend extra hours refitting the form work every time the next family decides they want it a different way. This also makes the learning process more confusing for the guys who are learning the job. I came up with a short term solution as Fletch seemed to be floundering on Saturday afternoon. I reorganized our time a bit. Instead of just taking Sunday off I had him draw diagrams of the rebar cage, measurements, and number of pieces we needed in each shape and then explained (read: did not ask or give them an option) to the leaders that we would show up on Monday at 11am (rather than our usual 7:30 start time). They were expected to have everything set up and we would come check their work before the concrete was poured. This gave Jaime two days that he didn’t have to jump right out of bed and out the door.

We had to show up at 11:00 you see (instead of noon or not at all, even though they were perfectly capable of doing that day’s work without us) because we needed to be there to eat. EVERYONE wants to feed us. A typical work day involves a 10am atol break where we drink rice, corn, or oatmeal mush usually with some sweet bread. Somewhere between 11:30 and 1:00 there’s a lunch break. To show their appreciation, the families all purchase meat or kill a chicken from their house to feed us; this is a big expense for them. In the afternoon, when the work is finished, we’re treated to yet another atol and sweet bread snack. Sometimes we get a soda and sweet bread. If the woman has paid attention to our habits and our health talks then we’re presented with bottled water (bought fresh from the tienda) and sweet bread. We’ve talked a lot about how it’s a good idea to drink more water than soda, and we’re also constantly swigging from our nalgene bottles as we give talks or work on the project. Last Monday I actually went to the site with Fletch even though I knew I didn’t feel well; I just didn’t realize how bad it was until I finished my rice atol and felt like I was in grave danger of it all coming back up. I made a million and one excuses in order to walk myself home–even though they offered to let me rest in their bed many times, set up a seat for me in the shade, and begged me to stay. You should have seen the look of disappointment on the cook’s face. She really wanted me to eat lunch. Turns out she’d made a delicious beef and cabbage stew, which on a normal day I’d probably enjoy eating, but on that day might have been the end of me.

Remembering that face, I stayed away from construction for an extra day to make sure I really was okay before I had to go back to eating so much food again. There is one little trick that both of us employ, which is to ask for a bag. Even at regular family gatherings, it’s so important that everyone get an equal share that the hosts will provide plastic bag for taking home pieces of fruit, extra rolls, or bits of meat that someone was too full to finish. Fletch can’t stomach boiled platanos though the locals are a fan of this squishy, sweet treat. In general we’ve just had our fill of sweet bread, though all the women insist we take two each. So we eat a bit in front of them and then ask for a bag. As we walk the winding dirt road home between the two communities at the end of the day we always run in to kids, but now we’ve got treats to hand out to the first kids we come across, and it makes them pretty happy. I can assuage my guilt over giving away sugary soda when, like yesterday, I find a group of 5 or so children who get to share the bottle instead of giving the whole thing to rot one little kid’s teeth. The health worker part of me is so automatic, I give a bottle of pop to a group of smiling kids and say, “Now, don’t forget to your brush your teeth!”

babythrowsm.jpgGiving orders to kids is easy, but giving them to all the guys on the project has been met with mixed reactions. Mixing cement for one of the floors, we’d tried to impress upon everyone the benefit of not putting too much water in the mix. This makes your floor spall, or have tons of spider cracks and chipping. At our second floor, the group of young guys and men working reacted to my comments of “remember not too much water” by looking me in the face and continuing to dump buckets of water in. Make your floor crappy, boys! See if I care. Every time they started standing around, I’d grab a hoe and start doing their jobs. They’d rush in to take over. At least I can keep things moving, even if they don’t particularly like me. At another house, the third water tank, the father of the family treated me kindly as some sort of cute curiousity. I found this more funny than offensive. He referred to me as Emmy the whole time and when I gave them the next step to work on or friendly reminders on how and why to do things a certain way he’d say, “You understand a man’s work so well!” like he was genuinely impressed. Every time I picked up a tool he’d kindly show me how to do a task I was already familiar with. In most cases, I think my ability to make the guys move isn’t a straighforward expression of sexism, but an unconscious reaction to their gender expectations. I don’t think guys are even aware of the fact that they take my tools out of my hand–even Chalio does it when we’re working in the garden! It’s as though something registers with them as out of place and they have to fix it, so they take over for me and it’s fixed. At least I can use their reactions to our advantage. Generally I alternate between giving instructions, jumping in doing bits of work, and playing with babies. The ladies like it when I play with babies. Here a woman is throwing her grandson at me. I think it reassures them that even though I don’t have any of my own I’m not a total alien, because I still like them…Sometimes I am amazed at how strange I must be to them.

This has all led to some interesting discussions with Diego, Ximon, and various families we’ve worked with regarding the ideas of Men’s Work and Women’s Work. Ximon is a really calm, pensive guy. We like him a lot. After one little talk about how Jaime and I share tasks he said, “You know, we’ve been talking about these ideas in church, about la dignidad de la mujer (the dignity of women).” Apparently what I was saying concurred with the ideas discussed at church, that a man can wash clothes just like a woman can and a woman can work in the fields just a like a man can. I told him, “When people say, ‘Oh he can’t do that he’s a man’ or ‘Oh, she can’t do that she’s a woman’ it’s not that he or she cannot, but that they don’t want to try or that their parents or grandparents don’t want them to try because they believe in Man’s Work and Woman’s work as two separate and distinct things.” Working with these families and watching them it gives me a much greater appreciation for a culture or societies struggle for gender equity. It necesitates so many deeply rooted ideological changes, and the difficulty of those changes I think are greatly underestimated by those of us who’ve not had to struggle out from under them. Particularly I think it’s so easy for women, say in a college gender studies course, to demonize foreign men. It’s so much harder to undersand the subtleties of gender inequality and how to counteract them. I think though, that what I’ve observed has left me hopeful. People are listening to these message about gender. They’re thinking about them, mulling them over. It’s a process that takes time. Slow as it may be, I think things really are changing for the better.

I keep thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of the project. A group of us were talking at the COS conference a few weeks ago, commiserating about what a headache even attempting one of these things is, and my friend Anne (who managed a water tank project in her town) said, “Yeah, first of all it’s a pain, and second I don’t think it’s that sustainable. Teaching them about why these types of infrastructure are important so that they build them themselves is sustainable, but doing a SPA project isn’t sustainable.” I have to say, I agree with all that. So as volunteers obsessed with sustainability, why do we continue to seek these grants and help build? I think SPA projects can build trust and confidence in a community, and these two things when developed can help everyone achieve a better state of living.

Trust is built over the period of time the community and volunteer establish their relationship and decide they want to do a project. When the project happens and the community sees that you didn’t just deliver the common politician’s empty promises, they trust that things can be done to improve their lives. This entire process has been a learning experience for the two main community leaders, Diego and Ximon, on how to manage community funds and a community bank account. But they’re doing it responsibly and well, which builds trust between the community and their elected leaders. This is something Guatemala is greatly lacking, trust in elected leaders, thus doing a SPA project helps to build that trust on a small, local level. In this case, our home village is a counterpoint–the leaders didn’t manage to get their act together and run a project, thus community trust in their leaders has disintegrated to apathy.

Confidence is built slowly through the process as well. Diego and Ximon build their self confidence as they realize they are capable of running a project with an international aid organization. Through all the work the project entails, Diego, Ximon, and all the participating community members become more confident masons by acquiring new building skills and insights to construction. Finally, building infrastructure that improves the quality of their home increases self confidence within the participating families.

ix_brendasm.jpgDoing a SPA project is also a question of economic opportunity. Do the communities we’re working in have enough economic opportunity to allow them to save money in order to build infrastructure without outside help? Is there a way to create or better use that economic opportunity? Here we tried to create that with the Temux Mayan Artisans, with their participation in the social program Mi Familia Progresa, and talking about how they can better spend money sent to them from family working in the states. All of the participating artisans were also participants in the health talks and slated to receive a project in their home. The money they earn from the bags could have gone to building. We wanted to make that a very clear connection, but since the SPA project here totally fell through, that attempt also failed.

In Yulais, there are very few men in the states (which in some ways is GREAT), and we haven’t been able to develop the artisan project enough to include their community as well (though this is a future possibility). We focused on teaching them how to better spend their welfare money from Mi Familia Progresa. The fact is, there are plenty of places in Guatemala (and too many other places in the world where there are yet more Peace Corps Volunteers deciding for or against SPA projects) where there is no economic opportunity. The community in southern Huehue where we helped our friend Charlotte with a latrine building project appeared to have no resources and no income. The homes were simple adobe, everyone cooked over open fires. The homes lacked many of the comforts that we see in poor houses all over the country–televisions and stereos. They had nothing to offer beyond what they could provide in labor. To do a SPA project or not do a SPA project is sometimes a question of do we leave them hanging with these vague notions of health and what it takes to make their health better but no clear path to get there, or do we clear the path for them to clarify these notions and make them a reality? If the crux of the argument is economic opportunity, by doing a project are we simply treating symptoms instead of the root of the problem? In this case is that bad or good? I’m not really saying that we should all approach our jobs in one specific way. To me, it’s just an interesting debate I’ve had rolling around in my head since we jumped head over heels into this project. Evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of what we’re doing is the only way to try and improve. It’s worth thinking about.

I think overall the project has been and will continue to be very beneficial for the community of Yulais. There’s the improved trust and confidence I talked about, but there is also the fact that the SPA has been a great extension of official Peace Corps goals of cultural exchange. Every time we take an atol break or sit down to lunch with a family, we have an opportunity to talk to them about things that are important to them. We’ve been giving mini-charlas on all sorts of topics: family planning, gender equality, deforestation, using resources wisely. We exchange jokes, learn new Q’anjob’al words, dance to the marimba in time with compacting cement. There’s a lot of laughter. Many of the families blast the radio all day long. We aren’t super fans of this, but making a joke out of it helps us deal with it. Fletch’s sense of humor has been amazing through all of this. He can keep himself and others laughing long after I feel done for the day. He says he feels terribly impatient, but I think I’m the only other person that ever notices. Everyone else keeps working and smiling at their usual unhurried pace. That’s just the way it is. It will be close on all accounts: money, time, materials, and our stamina, but we’ll get ‘er done.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-crazy/feed/ 6
A surprise ending for the Computer Center? https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-surprise-ending-for-the-computer-center/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-surprise-ending-for-the-computer-center/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:44:37 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3914 You all remember Galindo, right? Nas Palas’s grandson that tried to commit suicide a few months after we got here? Well, I’ve not spoken of him in a while, but he’s been around, doing various things as young men his age do. Sometimes he goes to cut firewood, sometimes he cleans trash out the stream, sometimes he paints the house. But he also has a “job” that is pretty atypical around here: he’s The Cable Guy.

3844_TheCableGuy.jpg

You see, a family in our valley has a big satellite dish in their yard, and there’s coax cable all over the valley to bring TV to those who crave it. For some reason that is beyond me, Galindo is the designated guy who hooks up new customers, collects the money, and writes receipts. Perhaps he has a teenager’s affinity for technology, and he’s a clever guy like his cousin Chalio? He’s done this job since we met him; about once a month I see him in his room with a desk and a pen, writing out receipts in a little book. Occasionally I bump into him as I’m walking somewhere, with a reel of cable under his arm and a pair of wirecutters, on his way to hook up someone else.

But this all changed in January, when he got accepted into post-secondary school. Galindo decided that he wants to be a PE teacher, and that requires taking classes full-time in the capitol city Huehuetenango, about five hours away. Nas Palas went with him to find a room to rent, get him settled in, and we didn’t see much of him after that except on the occasional weekend.

Then, disaster struck. A few weeks ago, Emily and I had a meeting planned with the leaders of the village to decide if they want a new volunteer after we leave. Nas Palas, being a staunch ally of ours and a respected village elder, was key to the meeting. About an hour before start time, his daughter mentioned to us that Nas had gone to Huehue to “visit”. ARGH! He knew about the meeting, and just bailed? We tried not to be hurt, and held the meeting without him.

Turns out, though, that Nas had actually gone to get Galindo and move him out. There isn’t a lot of gang activity outside of Guatemala City, but apparently there’s enough that one of them came across Galindo and tried to extort him. This kid has rotten luck! Now, he’s back in the village, helping around the farm and being The Cable Guy once again, and trying not to be bored.

And this is where the computer center comes in. After we initially explained to the leaders how the computer center would work, they all just sortof lost interest. Things have stalled out again, much to my dismay. “Why not talk to Galindo?” Emily said.

What a great idea. I went over to his room, and explained to him everything I’d told the leaders and they’d then ignored. He listened intently, and decided he was game. He really seemed to understand the basic ideas behind what I had in mind- a group of young people that could watch over the center and keep it open, collect money to pay the bills, and work together to develop the center further. I also told him that getting other people involved would protect him and Nas Palas as well- if it was only Galindo, rumors would start that Nas’s family was trying to steal away the computers, or that they struck some sort of deal with the Gringos. He said he understood, and would get some more people together and do it.

In our time here, I’ve learned to be suspicious. It seemed too easy… would he follow through?

This evening, though, I saw the proof. I went by the Health Center to get our cheese out of the vaccine fridge (heh) and saw lights on in the adjacent computer room. Galindo was in the computer center, with a few kids I’d never seen there before, as well as a teenager who was working on homework! I was floored. This is how I’d always imagined the center being used, and finally, in our last weeks here, it happened. We still have a long way to go (especially with collecting and managing money, paying light bills, and getting internet), but this somehow makes me feel like finally, we have success.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-surprise-ending-for-the-computer-center/feed/ 6
Distributing materials https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/distributing-materials/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/distributing-materials/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:56:02 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3934 We’re still working on the pilas. We’re well into the rainy season, but we’ve been lucky so far and the sun’s been out almost every day. We only need the luck to hold out a little longer, and then we’ll be building the stoves… indoors. The materials for the stoves arrived yesterday, so after we had poured the base of yet another tank, Diego invited me to go up the hill with him to supervise the distribution of materials. I say “up the hill” because there are actually two roads that wind into our valley: one that follows the river, and another that snakes up the wall of the valley and passes nearer to the ridge. The village leaders had been clever and scheduled deliveries down both roads so that the supplies would get as close to each house as possible. This is a big deal, as we’ll see shortly.

deliverysm.jpg

When we arrived, villagers were already unloading the two trucks that contained all we needed for 15 stoves, totaling about 10,000q in materials. A festive atmosphere prevailed; everyone was smiling, the sun was out, and there were lots of new toys for everyone. Kindof like Christmas. A bucket brigade of women in traje were unloading concrete block from one of the trucks, and the other truck was disgorging steel planchas, fire brick, bags of cement, precast chimneys, you name it. Everyone was carrying materials, chattering to each other, comparing notes. I saw three ladies sitting together on the ground, looking at the planchas. A plancha is a cooktop made from plate steel with removable holes for pots and pans, where all the meals are prepared. “Pim!” one lady said, smiling. The other nodded. “Pim.” I learned that word last week, it means “thick”. They were excited because we bought some high-end stovetops that won’t warp after a few years of use; thicker is better, and these brutes are a whopping 3/16″ thick.

unloading_sm.jpg IMG_2156_sm.jpg pim_sm.jpg

Out came my camera, and everyone started goofing around, wanting their picture taken, saying stuff to me in Q’anjob’al so I could reply with my limited vocabulary. At one point, I looked back at my backpack I’d set on the ground, and saw that a bread I’d been given as a gift was lying on the ground next to it, half eaten. “Blah blah blah no’ tx’i!” shouted the women, laughing. I had to laugh too; I caught enough of what they were saying to know that a dog had stolen my snack. “K’am miman xeka!” (My big bread is gone!) I yelled back, feigning horror and bringing even more laughs. “No’ tx’i!” That darn dog!

diegotalking_sm.jpg

I looked over my shoulder to see Diego standing, notebook in hand, talking to people and marking stuff down. I’m proud of him; he’s done a great job of managing a lot of the back-end of the project, and has been diligent in making sure that everyone gets their fair share and the right things show up at the right place at the right time. Times like this make me realize how much work the leaders are really doing for this project.

200lbsSM.jpgOnce all the materials were present and accounted for, people started carrying off their stuff, to store at their house until the work crews can arrive. I saw guys load up with two 100-pound sacks of cement on their backs at once, then start down the mountain trail to their house a quarter mile away. Old ladies only carried a single 100-pound sack. Even little girls joined in; I saw one with a cinder block attached to her headstrap, and another carrying the steel door to a stove. I must not forget that it’s more than the leaders doing the work; each and every family has put a lot of time and effort into this, carrying hundreds of pounds of gravel, cement, brick, and so forth over great distances.  

The brotherhood of working together for something good, combined with the sense of pending success, was almost tangible. Quite by accident, it turned out to be one of my most rewarding days as a Peace Corps volunteer.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/distributing-materials/feed/ 3
Local craftsmen (and women) https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/local-craftsmen-and-women/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/local-craftsmen-and-women/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:07:53 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3910 plane_w_lightSM.jpg

One of my favorite things in life is “making”, the process of creating something out of nothing. Creation is mankind’s highest calling. I’ve done it all my life, and I’m attracted to people of the same cloth: blacksmiths, knitters, homebuilders, woodworkers, painters, writers, cooks. Making is not something that is much valued in most of Mayan culture, so when I find people engaged in creative endeavors, it brings me special joy.  

IMG_0749_sm.jpg

One of the examples I’ve mentioned before is Chalio. He’s a pretty creative kid, always drawing and making toys. Last December, he found a discarded set of Christmas lights and took it apart (another thing I like: people who take things apart). “This airplane needs an anticollision light,” he must have thought to himself, so he scrounged up an old battery, and wired up a lighting system for the toy plane he’d built out of cornstalks. Pretty awesome.  

Although airplanes and helicopters are his favorite, he makes other things as well. He built me a little house out of the cardboard from a care package my mom sent, and he made this awesome boat out of, you guessd it, cornstalks. Mayans love corn.

A different time, I’d left my toolbox out as I was working down below the house. After asking if he could use my tools, he found some scrap wood and got his little brother and some other kids together and they had a toy car building session. I got a lot of it on tape, and my friend Brian patched it together into a fun video, that you can see on YouTube or right here (if I got the video to embed correctly)

Brian’s daughter is in presechool, and being an active parent, he wanted to host some kind of virtual exchange between my village kids and her class. He showed this video to the kids, and he even brought a toy car he’d built the way Chalio does.

“What’s interesting about this car?” he asked the kids, holding it up.

“It doesn’t have wheels!” they said. I guess they really liked the video, and thought it was cool that kids build toy cars, even if they don’t have wheels*. But the funniest part is that Brian tells me the teachers had shocked looks on their faces during most of the video; he figures they were expecting to see a bunch of Mayans dressed in traditional garb walking around in an idealistic rural village. Heh.

mam truckSM.jpgThis car thing seems to be pretty universal, too. Besides all the other toy cars and busses and trucks I’ve seen kids make around here, I saw more examples when I went to one of Charlotte’s Mam-speaking villages. Everyone likes cars!

winecozies_sm.jpg

It seems like most of the creative stuff in this culture comes from kids. It makes me wonder if the realities of subsistance living eliminate the time or energy required to create, or if there is some cultural prejudice against it that only allows the eccentric to participate. Regardless, some adults around here are creative as well. One of the most visible examples is morral making. Many women do it, though some are more creative than others. Like most things Mayan, there are a few designs that are really popular, and the majority of the women do the same ones over and over, almost like a nervous habit. Some ladies, though, show up with new and innovative ideas, and are really excited when Emily challenges them to make something they’ve never made before. A few months back, we tried wine cozies as an alternative new product idea for the ladies in the co-op. Sales have been lukewarm, except for a big order we got from Pete, a long time family friend and one of my father-figures from thirty years ago. I can imagine his friends and family getting pretty awesome Christmas persents this year, and I am sure that he will send them with a nice botte of wine as well. The ladies have finished the order, and they all came out great. Look at that variety!  

jaime_weaving_sm.jpg

Speaking of which, we’re still waiting to see what will become of the crafts co-op when we leave in July. Since the beginning, we’ve wanted to get it to a place where it could be self-sufficient. But the reality of it is that things move so slowly here, no one is ready to take the reigns, do the books, check the Etsy site, go to the post office, or any of the other millions of little jobs that we do to make it work. We’re now pinning our hopes on the replacement volunteer, that she will be interested in supporting the project and continuing to develop leaders amongst the women.

We also have a BIG pile of inventory, and Emily and I will probably buy a few when we leave. If any friends and family want one, let us know and we’ll bring it back with us, saving you the shipping charge. There’s still a lot of stuff in the Etsy store (as well as some new items), and we have a mountain of stuff that isn’t shown well. Email us if you’re interested.

And me? I’m still making my first morral. It’s slow work, but it’s going to be awesome… a mix of Mayan technique and pop gringo culture. It’s still secret, but I’ll post pictures when it’s done.


*Historical fun fact: Mayan culture never invented the wheel. Man, were they shocked when the Conquistadores showed up on motorcycles listening to their CD players! And to this day, their ancestors feel the wheel to be inconcequential to toy car building.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/local-craftsmen-and-women/feed/ 4
SPA phase 2: Tanks https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-2-tanks/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-2-tanks/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:57:28 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3885 This week we started the second part of the construction for our SPA grant: water tanks. Technically, they are pilas, which is a particularly Guatemalan phenomenon. A pila is an open-top water tank with two wash basins attached to it. Like the stove, it’s one of the centerpieces of the Guatemalan household. The women gather there to wash clothes, slaughter chickens, rinse corn, get water, wash their hair, and many other daily tasks. The household pilas that you see in more urban areas are relatively small*, able to hold about 30 gallons of water in the central reservoir, and are made from precast concrete. I say “relatively”, because they weigh hundreds of pounds and I once had to help a dozen people move one. Now I know why so many Guatemalans need hernia surgery.

pilaSM.jpg pila2SM.jpg

In some rural communities, however, the traditional pila is a much larger affair. Unlike in the city, where the water might be shut off for 6 hours every night, the pilas around here have to hold enough water to get you through a few months of dry season. They still have the two washbasins, but are built on-site and are about two meters square, holding around 3,000 liters of water.

Being very poor, most of the villagers do without and get by during the dry season by making the women haul jugs of water from the river a quarter mile away. Besides the obvious social implications, this has a lot of negative health effects as well: less water for cleaning, clothes washing, and toothbrushing; less time for the mothers to spend properly maintaining the household; and less education (health related and otherwise) for females who are hauling water instead of sitting in school.

When we were deciding what projects the community wanted, tanks was the most requested. At first I was hesitant to do them, since I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but after I looked at a few, did some design calcs, and estimated materials**, I figured it would be possible make them… but they would be the most expensive of the projects. That scared away some folks, but we still have 8 families that want one. In one case, a family joined the “tank group” late, and I was standing in their front yard with the village leaders when they got the news that they would receive a tank. The father nodded, looking pleased, but his pre-teen son started jumping up and down, waving his arms, singing “We’re getting a tank! We’re getting a tank!” There are no sisters in his family, so guess who gets to haul the water…

After a few painful 12-hour days of work, we have the process streamlined. Again, for your enjoyment, I present How to Build a Pila.


Day 1: The Base

Expect to work about 8 hours using four people, depending on your crew. Mayans are hard workers, don’t complain, and toil tirelessly… but do it at their own pace. That includes the celebratory chicken stew luncheon, as well as the mandatory breaks for corn gruel that always seems to occur just as you add water to the concrete mix. If you had four Peace Corps volunteers doing it, you could probably get it done in 4 hours. But then, the locals wouldn’t be learning to do it themselves, making the whole exercise pretty pointless.

IMG_2008_sm.jpg pila_plumbingSM.jpg IMG_2060_sm.jpg
Level the ground, and lay out your 2×4 formwork. Check for level and square. Assemble the PVC drainage tubes. I ended up making a sketch so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. Then I got smart, and started giving the sketch to the brightest looking teenager present so I could do something else. There is a drain off of each washbasin, as well as a drain in the bottom of the tank for cleaning. The cleanout drain has another section of PVC tube in it that is NOT glued, that acts as the (removable) plug. It’s left open at the top and will later be cut off just below the high water mark of the tank, to serve as an overflow drain.
lavadero_sm.jpg IMG_2066_sm.jpg IMG_2064_sm.jpg
Decide where the basins are going to go. They can go in any corner; each tank is designed for two. The housewives get really excited about this part, since they don’t get a lot of choices in life. One lady was so grateful, she insisted I allow her to wash the concrete out of my shirt after we were done for the day. Cut the trench for the plumbing, deep enough so that the cleanout drain will be 1/2″ inch below the level of the formwork. Slope the tubes slightly so they drain away from the tank. Hopefully some day, there will be a sump or (heaven forbid) a sewer to connect this all to, but for now, point the free end towards the cornfield. Bury, and pack down the dirt. Assemble the galvanized steel water supply plumbing. It can come up anywhere in the wall of the tank that there isn’t a washbasin. If there is a water line, connect it. If not, cap the bottom of the plumbing so it can be connected some day in the future.
IMG_2023SM.jpg pila_hierroSM.jpg IMG_2031SM.jpg
Cut all the rebar you need for the tank. Every now and then, the women get excited and participate too. Yay! I made this sketch to help them understand how to fabricate the individual pieces of the rebar puzzle. Circled numbers are how many of each; other numbers are length (in centimeters). Bend the rebar into the shapes shown in the sketch. For this, we use a tool call grifas to get tight, exact bends where we want them. It’s really fun, and I am going to makes concrete stuff when I get back to the US just so I can use grifas more.
IMG_2022_sm.jpg IMG_2025_sm.jpg IMG_2053SM.jpg
Once the pieces are made, assemble the rebar cage. I don’t put all the horizontal wall reinforcing on until the second day, so we can reach into the tank to work with the concrete. Tie the rebar together with wire at every intersection, and place rocks beneath the rebar to ensure that it’s entirely encased in concrete when we pour. Check that there is 5cm clear between the steel and the wooden formwork, to ensure adequate concrete coverage. Attach the uppermost of the horizontal rebar bands to the verticals, to hold them in place. Mix up the concrete, just like for the floors. This first day, for a 2-meter-square base, we need 6 wheelbarrows of mixed gravel and 3 sacks of cement.
IMG_2045_sm.jpg desnivel_sm.jpg roostertraxSM.jpg
Pour the concrete in place and level it with a 2×4 screed, working in from the sides of the tank (this is why we don’t tie on all of the horizontal reinforcing until tomorrow). Taking the overflow tube out makes this easier, but be sure to stuff it with paper so it doesn’t fill with concrete.
Taper the concrete in the center towards the drain, then trowel it all smooth. Leave the concrete to set for 24 hours. It’s a good idea to put barricades around it: not so much for the kids, but the animals. We shooed a curious dog away from the first tank, but weren’t fast enough on the second one and a big ol’ rooster strolled across the wet concrete.
IMG_2029SM.jpg IMG_2070_sm.jpg
Tie together the reinforcing cage for the washbasins. We will attach them tomorrow, because if we do it today and drop one, it will make a big mess of the wet concrete. Here is a happy housewife doing laundry as we work on her new tank in the background. I bet the smile is because this is the last time she’ll have to do laundry this way.

rubyboss_sm.jpgInterestingly, the time it takes to do this phase of the work is cut in half if Emily is present. She missed the first few days of work due to illness, but when she showed up for the third tank, she was all business. I am not always good about keeping others busy, but when she sees people leaning on their shovels, she’s all over them. It’s pretty funny watching her go to work on those poor guys… they really don’t know what to make of it. None of them have ever been told what to do by a woman before, and they are so taken aback they just get busy, with confused looks on their faces. Sometimes she just picks up a hoe and starts working herself, and that gets them moving even faster… within seconds, someone relieves her of duty and hops to it. I can’t decide if they hate to see a women doing a man’s job, or they feel guilty that a woman is outworking them. Being a man and somewhat oblivious, I didn’t notice the phenomenon until she pointed it out to me. “Hey Jaime, watch this”, she said in English as she picked up a trowel and started smoothing concrete. Within seconds, someone came over and tactfully offered to “help” her.


Day 2: The Walls

Expect to work about 10 hours, depending on your crew. We actually worked 13 hours on the first tank, because we had to also build the wooden formwork to support the wet concrete. Subsequent tanks went a lot faster, even with the added step of removing the formwork from the previous tank.

formwork2SM.jpg drain_sm.jpg IMG_2034SM.jpg
Take off the 2×4 formwork around the slab perimeter. The concrete is still green, so walk lightly and don’t bang it with tools. Clean out the drain, scraping away any extra concrete with a steel trowel or machete. Tie on the rest of the horizontal bands of steel, making sure that any splices overlap at least a foot and are staggered around the tank.
IMG_2036SM.jpg IMG_2039SM.jpg IMG_2035SM.jpg
Re-assemble the formwork, making sure that it’s plumb, level, and spaced correctly to assure that the walls of the tank will be 10cm thick. Wedge rocks between the rebar and the walls of the forms where needed to make sure that the steel will be located in the center of the concrete. Cut off the drain pipes at the right height for the washbasins. Heat up a nail in the fire, and push it through the side of the drain, to make a lint catcher. It will also help key the pipe into the concrete.
IMG_2042SM.jpg IMG_2041SM.jpg IMG_2052SM.jpg
Brace the formwork. This is as much art as science; you have to imagine where the pressure of the concrete will try to explode outwards, and counter it accordingly. Counterintuitively, you want more braces at the bottom, as the hydrostatic pressure is greater there. BRACING IS SUPER IMPORTANT, because if you have a blowout, you waste a lot of concrete, have a huge mess, and time is not on your side for fixing it. At the top, you can nail a bridge across the forms, using the inward and outward forces to counter each other. At the bottom on the inside, you can run some 2x4s from one side to the other, using two opposing inward forces to counter each other. See? Bracing the formwork is so important that it deserved three times as many pictures as the other steps.
mixing2_sm.jpg buckets_sm.jpg vibrating_sm.jpg
Mix up some concrete, 6 wheelbarrows at a time. Much more than that and it’s too hard to do it all at once. The second day of the tank will take about 14 wheelbarrows of gravel and 7 more bags of cement. Start the bucket brigade, and fill the forms. Work your way evenly around the tank; if you fill one side first, the forms in the center will move and your walls won’t have the same thickness. Disaster! Run a stick or piece of rebar in and out of the formwork as you pour, and tap the sides of the formwork with a hammer. This consolidates the concrete, getting rid of air pockets.
honeycombSM.jpg basinwalls_sm.jpg lavadero_sm.jpg
If you don’t, you will get honeycombing and voids. It looks bad, makes the concrete weaker, and if they’re big enough, might even cause a leak. When you get to the wash basins, mix up the concrete so it’s extra stiff (dry). Mold the sides of the basins by hand with a trowel. You could form these, but it would add a lot of extra days to the construction schedule… days we do not have to spare. Taper the bottom of the basin towards the drains, so the water runs out. Take care to make the bottom really smooth. If the owner wants, make a washboard bottom by repeatedly pressing a piece of rebar partway into the smooth concrete.
trowelingSM.jpg soapdish_sm.jpg wilmerSM.jpg
When the forms are full, trowel the tops so they’re nice and smooth. Add some nice finishing touches, like carving out a soap dish next to the basin, or having the owners put their name and/ or date into the top of the wall. Go get some rest; we’re starting the base of another tank tomorrow.

Day 4: More Walls

Wait, where did Day 3 go? Well, we started over, and it was Day 1 all over again… we have eight tanks to do, remember? But the second day of every tank after the first begins with a few extra steps, like this:

stripping_sm.jpg legbraceSM.jpg finsSM.jpg
Strip the formwork off of the previous tank. Go easy; the concrete is still pretty green and you’ll break it if you’re unnecessarily rough. Cut a 2×4 to the right length to fit snugly under the corner of each washbasin. For the first seven days, concrete has a lot of creep and the basins could sag if not supported. Knock off any fins and extrusions from between the boards. Take something hard, like grifas or a crowbar, and rub down all the sharp edges and corners so people don’t get hurt on them.
IMG_2055SM.jpg carryingformsSM.jpg day2SM.jpg
Tell the family they can’t use the tank for two weeks. After that, they can take the temporary braces out from under the basins. If they save some money, they can plaster the tank to make it pretty- though it’s fully functional as it is. Enjoy! Now, carry all the forms over to the next tank, where the base of the tank is in place from yesterday. Continue with the aforementioned Day 2 routine.

There you go. I’m pretty proud of these pilas, not just because they will be so helpful to the community, but because they look great and are built to last. Everyone keeps saying how they are a “memento of Jaime” as we work, and I have to keep correcting them, saying they’re “a memento of how the community worked together.” One thing’s for sure; these 4500 pound chunks of concrete are going to be getting use long after I’m dead.


*In older communities, there is sometimes a central town pila with dozens of wash stations. They can be quite artistic, and harken to a more romantic era when women congregated to work and socialize in a semiritualistic way.

**I forgot to add in the cost of the wood to make the reusable formwork, which ended up being nearly as expensive as another tank. Belkar, an old friend and regular commenter on the blog, came to the rescue. His donated funds for the formwork not only saved my ass, but also helped about 50 people have access to water year-round.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/spa-phase-2-tanks/feed/ 18
The Last Hurrah for the Garden https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-last-hurrah-for-the-garden/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-last-hurrah-for-the-garden/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:49:53 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3801 papas1SM.jpgWhen we got back from our big trip, Reyna came over to talk to us. “You need to dig up your potatos, or they will all rot in place now that the rains have come.” Knowing the locals to be knowledgeable about such things, we did so and were pleasantly surprised to find that the 40-or-so square feet we’d planted yielded about 8 gallons of pretty awesome spuds, definitely enough to get us through the end of our Peace Corps service. Unless we give them all away first, that is. Gela (Chalio’s mom) came over the other day, wanting to buy 10 pounds from us. Word got around that we didn’t use chemicals, and even uneducated Mayans living in the hills can see the value in that. But Peace Corps doesn’t allow us to engage in moneymaking, and we definitely wouldn’t sell them to HER, since she always offers to wash our blankets (a backbreaking job to do by hand) because she likes Emily so much. So, we gave them to her and told her that Chalio already paid for them by helping us dig them all up.

The next day as we sat looking out the window at our garden with a big hole in the middle where the potatos used to be, we noticed that the whole thing was completely overgrown with weeds. I guess that’s the downside of having super fertile soil. We then realized that this is THE END, at least for the garden. There isn’t anything we can plant besides radishes that will be ready before we’re gone, and this month is going to be so busy with the construction crunch that we won’t have time to garden. It’s time to pass the torch.

IMG_5282SM.jpg

“Chalio,” I said as I saw him on the way to Yulais, “come to my house this evening, and we are going to look through my seeds to decide what you want to plant.” When he came, he was pretty excited to look through my massive collection of half-used seed packets. He selected broccoli, pumpkin, watermelon, and popcorn. I was surprised by the last one; there isn’t a seed packet for that. I just planted some popcorn kernels from our supply in the kitchen, and they sprouted. Chalio didn’t forget. He never forgets.

Emily wasn’t surprised. “Every time we’re down there, he points to the rows that you told him are popcorn, and reminds me,” she said.

So today we went down to the garden with all the kids and planted a few flats of greenery to leave for when we’re gone, our legacy to gardening. I’m pretty confident that Chalio will do a good job tending everything until the harvest, but I have visions of total neglect after that, the earth being returned to boring old cornfield. After all, he’s only 11 and has an attention span to match.

“Lina also told me something while you were away building water tanks yesterday,” Emily added. “Nas Palas has decided that the garden is such a great idea, he’s going to do his own once we leave.”

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-last-hurrah-for-the-garden/feed/ 6
Trying to Understand https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/trying-to-understand/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/trying-to-understand/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:57:32 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3794

Trying to Understand

by Emily Richardson Fanjoy

Guest Columnist

I’m just under three months from finishing my Peace Corps service in Guatemala, and while my husband and I have had many good experiences here, we’ve also had our challenges. The fact that lots of the ladies think my husband needs to take a second wife because I don’t wash his pants for him isn’t really as bothersome to me as it is funny. Gender expectations are much greater for women than they are for men; women wash and cook and clean and work in the fields and take care of children. If they don’t do these things, they might suffer physical assaults, psychological abuse, or their husbands might just replace them with a new wife. The men, however, are rarely held accountable for anything. They generally work in the fields or otherwise occupy themselves to bring in money for their families, but if they don’t, no one really does anything about it. To all appearances, men tend to act more irresponsibly than women, which leads to what has been one of my biggest challenges as a volunteer.

Alcohol abuse is rampant in Guatemala, so much so that it’s the number one cause of death for Guatemalan men. Peace Corps volunteers are constantly confronted with it. Whether in the city or in the middle of the countryside, we’ve come across men passed out in public, sprawled in the middle of the road, draped in the city water fountain, soaked with mud in a roadside ditch, or nestled into a natural rock formation in the mountainside. The issue is so in your face here that it’s startling.

Personally, alcohol abuse and its effects on the community have been the hardest things for me to watch. In my work, I am constantly focused on prevention, and what could be more preventible than drinking yourself to death? Additionally, consumption of alcohol is a drain on already scarce resources. It exacerbates problems of malnutrition and lack of education, as family money goes to buy alcohol instead of purchasing food or paying school tuition. It increases incidences of domestic violence and infidelity, which in this machista culture that shuns the use of condoms, increases occurrences of sexually transmitted diseases. Alcohol abuse makes me angry, it makes me upset, and in the end it makes me feel helpless. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I strive to understand the culture I live in. For a long time I just wanted to dismiss this painful part of it, then I started to blame it on the men’s total lack of responsibility. But now realize it’s even more complex.

Last fall I was reading about Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming man who was murdered in a famous hate crime case that was later turned into a popular play called The Laramie Project. I didn’t think Mathew Shepard’s death had a lot to do with alcohol abuse in Guatemala, but a September 1999 Harper’s article about Shepard’s murder helped me to see alcohol abuse in a different light. JoAnn Wypijewski’s article “A Boy’s Life: For Mathew Shepard’s Killers What does it Take to Be a Man?” is a thorough examination of the lives of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, Shepard’s killers. It describes the cowboy culture in which these two were raised, as well as violent crime in sparsely populated Wyoming at the time of Matthew Shepard’s death. Wypijewski outlines the unspoken rules of this culture: men don’t show emotion, they must be physically tough and able to hold their own in a fist fight, and they can’t show outward signs of sentimentality towards the women they love. She even discussed their lives as construction workers and the emotional toll that doing hard physical labor day in and day out with no sign of upward mobility can have on young men. Drugs and alcohol become an escape for many people in these circumstances, and Shepard’s killers had been on a five day alcohol and speed binge leading up to the attack. Wypijewski does not blame Shepard’s death on socioeconomic conditions and cultural expectations; rather, she attempts to explain how and why such a tragedy happened. Without examining these questions, we can’t be confident that such a thing won’t happen again. She suggests the crime, as well as the other violent crimes in Wyoming around the time of this murder, was a crime of self loathing. This leads me back to alcohol abuse in Guatemala.

In Mayan memoirs such as I, Rigoberta Menchu by the Nobel prize laureate and the lesser-known A Mayan Life by Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez, the authors talk about alcohol consumption in their communities. Both of the authors attribute alcohol abuse to the desperation of the Mayan existence: racism, extreme poverty, hard physical labor, and the knowledge that no matter how hard they worked they would never be able to change their situation. Unexpectedly, a bit of cowboy culture is something Wyoming and Guatemala have in common. In rural Guatemala, most indigenous men have replaced their native garb with cowboy boots and hats. These agrarian workers, made strong by the hard physical labor, are expected to be unsentimental. In their lives, so many things are out of their control: where they will get clean water, how they’ll send their children to school, what they’ll do if their wife has a complicated pregnancy. That’s when I began to rethink the idea of men suffering no expectations in this culture. In fact, they are expected to be somewhat super-human, strong silent providers for their families. If a man should fail, he bears the burden of knowing he has failed everyone.

As I considered Wypijewski’s argument, I started paying more attention to cultural clues as to how men should act. It all began to make sense. The most popular movies shown on public transport are war films, tough guys with guns. The message coming from the popular Banda musicians and cultural icons like Vicente Fernandez, is that men can show emotion -and can even cry- just as long as they’re drinking. This message came home, quite literally, when the father of our host family felt the pressure of finding a way to send his kids to higher education. He’s a man we respect a lot, but we noticed he was drinking much more frequently as he struggled to put his two family members through college. He wants them to be able to get regular salaried employment some day, but school is expensive for subsistence farmers. One day my husband found him very intoxicated but talkative. “We drink to remember, and we drink to forget,” he said. He still hadn’t figured out how he was going to pay for school, but he wanted to forget about the stress and struggle. In the end he was successful, and on the night before his loved ones left for school, he once again got drunk to deal with the sadness of saying goodbye. This is the way he’s been taught to deal with things in his life. Once they were off to school, his drinking all but stopped.

Whether we’re at home or abroad, it can be easy to dismiss people who abuse alcohol or any other substance: they’re ignorant, they’re lazy, they’re selfish. But seeing an entire country affected by alcohol abuse, having it in your face all the time, means you can’t simply dismiss or demonize the abusers. This doesn’t mean that I pardon them for the harm they may do to others, but rather that I try to understand why they are doing this thing that is so harmful not only to their own health, but to the health and well-being of their entire family? Recognizing it as self loathing helps me to understand the pressures that affect alcohol abusers. Empathy helps me deal with the how difficult it is to witness such destructive habits. To alleviate a problem, we have to understand its origins. Thankfully in Guatemala, cultural predestination is changing for Mayans born into a life of bitter poverty. Opening up economic opportunities to relieve these pressures is a good way to start addressing the problem, but the cultural expectations of men and their acceptable behavior patterns need to change along with it. That second task is difficult. It will take generations for things to change here, but it’s a necessary course of action if we hope to improve the quality of life, in Guatemala or anywhere else, where substance abuse is a problem.

]]> https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/trying-to-understand/feed/ 3 Go Organic!? https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/go-organic/ Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:41:44 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3793 Go Organic!?

by Emily Richardson Fanjoy

Guest Columnist

Last month I talked about why it’s important to be invested in international development all the time, not just in moments of crisis. That article might hint that all we can do is support large scale government decisions on international policies, but today I want to talk about personal decisions we make on a daily basis that affect international economies and individuals throughout the world.

While waiting for my Peace Corps paperwork to clear so I could start my service, I worked at a locally owned natural food store and organic bakery. It was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn a lot about food, nutrition, and certified labels. The coffee wall I had to stock was such a jumble of words that my coworkers and I would have contests to find the longest coffee labels, with examples like “Organic Fair Trade Shade Grown High Altitude Kilimanjaro Swiss Water Process Decaffeinated French Roast Whole Bean”. Organic? Fair Trade? What do these certifications mean, anyway?

According to the USDA in their consumer brochure for the National Organic Program, “Organic food is produced by farmers who emphasize the use of renewable resources and the conservation of soil and water to enhance environmental quality for future generations… Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.” This is the basic idea, though certification requirements vary depending on the certifying agency. “Fair trade” is a label to help consumers buy products from farms and cooperatives that have proven they provide fair wages and healthy working conditions. The label prohibits child labor, and a percentage of the profits are applied to social projects in healthcare, education, micro-finance, and women’s initiatives. Fair trade certifiers also work with farms on land and water conservation and environmental education. While organic and fair trade labels apply largely to comestibles, the market is expanding to include non-food items and artisanal products. However, most notable to consumers is that these labels carry higher price tags and this sometimes breeds contempt. While working at the store register, I heard many arguments both for and against these labels, and I really wasn’t sure who was right or wrong.

To my mind, organic seemed like a good idea for the environment. Organic foods are healthier for the consumer as well, keeping chemicals off of food and out of water sources. However, my downstairs neighbor’s car sported a bumper sticker that never failed to annoy me: GO ORGANIC! I couldn’t afford to buy exclusively organic, and I was selling the stuff. For the average American, to GO ORGANIC! requires a major shift in their personal budget—a shift most people are understandably unwilling to make. And if one is to go organic, where does it stop? Do we buy organic pet food, decorate with organic flowers? Do I only purchase organic yarns to support my knitting habit? Furthermore, how important is Fair Trade when it carries such a high price? As one customer remarked from across the counter, “I hear the producers don’t get that much more money for their product anyway.” I like to be conscientious, but I don’t like to be duped.

In Guatemala I’ve seen the argument from a new angle. The municipality we live in covers an area encompassing cold, high altitude regions good for growing wheat and potatoes for local consumption; as well as warmer, low-lying valleys perfect for producing coffee and cardamom as export crops. About a month into our service, we visited one of the poorest places I’ve ever seen, a small coffee producing community situated five hours west of us. The only public transports are 4×4 pickup trucks where passengers and cargo are piled into the back for the harrowing dirt trail that winds across the mountain ridges. The views are breathtaking, but it’s a hard trip… though it’s not as hard as the lives of people in this community. I arrived with my health worker eyes on, and what I saw was formidable. Their houses are rudimentary boxes of wood planks with dirt floors and open cooking fires. The region is constantly suffering from water shortages, and the natural springs aren’t sufficient to provide for the population. Families collect barrels and plastic tubs, setting them around the perimeter of their tin roofs in an attempt to catch as much water as possible. More sophisticated homes have gutter systems that flow into open concrete tanks. During the rainy season, the families do ok; but for the four or five months a year with next to no rainfall, everyone suffers.

I was in this community to assess their health needs and begin a health education program. I visited homes and shared meals with some of the families, and during my four days there, I realized that no one in the community had changed their clothes. The people don’t own a lot of clothing, but worse still they don’t have enough water available to bathe or do the laundry every day. When they have to choose between using water to cook their beans and corn, or to wash clothes, they use it to cook.

I also discovered that all of their coffee is certified organic. The mayor of our municipality has never made it out to visit this community in his jurisdiction, and local health care professionals have only been arriving there for the past two years to give vaccines and provide family planning. But three or four times a year, a man from the organic certification agency comes out to test the soil and make sure the growers aren’t secretly using chemical fertilizers. What does organic mean to this community? They no longer have to use chemical fertilizers that would stay on their skin and clothes for days, until their next opportunity to bathe and do laundry. Chemical fertilizers are incredibly potent and dangerous, as they aren’t meant to be absorbed by human bodies. Your organic decision makes a direct impact on their health.

Being part of an organic cooperative insulates them somewhat from the larger commodities market fluctuations. When I returned to my home village, I talked to our neighbor Nas Palas about coffee production. “You know,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for the market crash in coffee in the late 90’s, we wouldn’t be living here. The whole family would be on our land in Barillas (the neighboring municipality).” He explained that he’d worked for years to get his coffee trees planted, cared for, and producing coffee to sell for export, and though it was incredibly hard work and separated him from his family for much of the year, he made good money. But in the late 90’s, the price of coffee fell from 800 quetzales for a 100 pound bag of beans to 100 quetzales. Nas wasn’t selling organic or fair trade coffee, and the crash devastated him financially. He was totally at the mercy of the market; he abandoned his coffee trees and came home for good.

Many organic and fair trade certifications are used as a means of helping some of the poorest of the poor. They protect their health by keeping those in already adverse living conditions away from harsh chemicals. They help farmers and their families manage their land and water resources to prevent pollution and erosion that will only hurt them in the future. They empower women artisans and provide them with an income to provide for their families, to send their children to school. The fair trade programs offer education, access to microfinance, women’s initiatives, health education—many of the same things your Peace Corps Volunteers are doing in countries all over the world. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that organic and fair trade labels with their big price tags are not meant to make these small farmers and artisans wealthy, but rather to give them a stable income and help them make the most of that income by giving them the tools to use it wisely.

This doesn’t mean I now think we should all GO ORGANIC! or purchase only fair trade artisan products for birthday and Christmas gifts. There’s still the issue of how pricey it can be to purchase these certified foods and goods. I think we should try to understand these labels, and since they aren’t all exactly equal, we shouldn’t hesitate to investigate different certification standards. But I also believe these labels, as ridiculously trendy as they’ve become, can actually help us to make powerful purchasing decisions that are also small and frequent investments in development. Now that I live amongst producers and beneficiaries of these programs, I’m much more convinced of their utility and the fact that there are benefits we don’t always see. These benefits don’t come with a price tag, such as protecting the health and livelihood of entire communities through purchasing organic coffees, teas, chocolates, or bananas. The decision to spend or not spend more money on food and goods according to their labels is a personal decision that I think is best done on an individual basis. Just in case you still wonder, “Is it really worth it?” My answer is yes, it is.

]]>
Conference Calls https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/conference-calls/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/conference-calls/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:05:27 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3792 Oh.my.goodness.
Things have been busy, as you might have noticed from Fletch’s post. It feels like we were living on the road in Guatemala these past few weeks. Let’s recap and look at our calendar:

Sunday (May 16): baptism and first communion in Aguacatan

Mon/Tue: latrine buildng in San Sebastian, bus to Antigua

Wed/Thur/Fri: COS conference, COS meds began, program dinner

Sat/Sun: escape to Earthlodge treehouse

Monday: COS med exams in Antigua

Tuesday: Vital Voices Conference in Guate

Wednesday: catching up with you all by starting blog posts

Thursday: final meeting with the Ministry of Health, Huehuetenango

Friday: climbing back into the mountains to finish up our service.

Saturday (May 29): meetings all afternoon with community leaders

COS conference was a bit of a doozy. I didn’t quite expect it to be like that. I think I went in without fully realizing that this is it. It was the last time we saw some of our good friends who’ve supported us through the hard times and the good. I’ve been so mentally and physically occupied with the SPA project and with health fairs I set up at the school here (more on that later), and we rushed out of site so early in the morning and so far in advance of COS conference for the baptism and latrine building, my head just wasn’t in the game for reflecting on all the things we’ve done. There were more tears than I expected, but everyone had lots of fantastic stories to share.

When we came in as trainees we were required to read a book called Culture Matters. In general, most of us found the book too basic and kind of annoying, but it did have some great little story excerpts from Peace Corps volunteers around the world. I remember walking into the training center one day and asking my friend Katy, “Did you read that one from the volunteer in Nepal?” She responded, “Are you kidding me, I was tearing up.” Even so, this required reading has been the butt of many a joke in the last two years, as one of us counters another volunteer’s story or newest frustration with a twisted smile saying “Hey, Culture Matters.” Our friend Tim shared a story about his first day of being really really sad in site, one of those days where it feels like everything you try fails. At the end of the story, a little neighbor girl’s simple “Thank you” made me start bawling unexpectedly, and I thought, we are Culture Matters. We could all write these anecdotes now.

Peace Corps is a really unique job. I know it’s true, because I don’t ever expect to work at another place where, just before a big conference, nearly all the attendees have seen a picture of my morning poo with a giant worm in it. Nor do I ever, in the United States, expect my bosses to prod me about having children. The staff here seems pleased that all six of us “marrieds”, as we were termed, have come in and are going out together–they’ve witnessed Peace Corps divorces in the past. And now, in typical Guatemalan fashion, they expect some procreation. As our trainer David said to Jaime, “I don’t mean to get all Guatemalan on you, but you two really need to start thinking about this when you get home.” Thank you for your input, David.

The COS conference made me something I have never been before while thinking about our return home: sad to leave. Things have been exhausting, frustrating, mentally and physically challenging. It wasn’t me, but again my friend Katy who introduced me to the Mark Twain quote, “You forgive a place once you leave it.” I think Katy usually puts an exclamation on the end when she says it, a sign of desperate hope that this be true. In all honesty, there are things I have loved tremendously about being here, people from both sides of the border I’ve connected with and will remember always. Even so, I’m ready to go home. I feel worn down. I am so tired of being sick so frequently. My stomach has been as freaky as the natural phenomena of Guatemala this past week and half, and that’s minus the worms that should now be dead and gone. I also feel a little lost, disconnected from friends and family in the states and I can’t wait to reconnect with them all again. But I will leave with a heavy heart on many accounts. Guatemala is a staggeringly beautiful place, but with mountians of internal difficulty and challenges to overcome, if their citizens are to have a chance at a life of dignity. I suppose we could say the same for the United States in some ways, but the scale is so different.

I’m currently reading Dorothy Day’s biography (prolific writer and one of the founders of the Catholic Worker’s Movement), The Long Loneliness, and it makes me wonder what my place will be in the scheme of things, social works and improvement, when I get back to the states. There’s only one way to find out. But for the next six weeks I will try to mostly leave these things in the back of my mind and finish up here.

VITAL VOICES

Due to suerte and coincidental connections, I was able to attend a conference on women and development in Latin America following COS. My friend and former professor, Robin, emailed me to let me know about the conference and that another Knox alumna who works for Vital Voices in Washington DC was going to be there. Long story short, Becca, my fellow Knoxian, got my friend Anne and me entradas gratis for the conference held in the nicest hotel in Guate, the Westin Camino Real.

Vital Voices is an organization co-founded by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in 1997 to promote women in leadership. Much like Peace Corps, it is non-partisan and its goal is capacity building, specifically training women from all over the world to be affective leaders and businesswomen, the movers and shakers of public policy in their respective countries. As a result, chapters of Vital Voices have been forming all over the world. Guatemala’s chapter began in 2008 (which means I was already here at that time; a lot can happen in two years) and this was kind of like a debut party for the chapter with their Latin Amercian counterparts from Argentina, Costa Rica, Columbia, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, and perhaps a few other places. It was an exciting day. The invitee list (in addition to my very busy and important self) included 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, Guatemala’s first lady Sandra Torres de Colom, U.S. ambassador Stephen McFarland, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately Madame Secretary is even busier and more important than I am, and couldn’t make it. She did send a recorded message to the conference, though.

Anne and I spent the night in an inexpensive Antigua hostal, got up early, and took a chicken bus into the city. As we sat six to a row in the seats, cramped, sweating, and holding on for dear life to the bars in front of us as we speedily wound our way up and then back down the mountains between Antigua and Guate, Anne asked, “With a 400q entry fee ($50) I wonder how many other women are getting to the conference this way?” We were relieved to get off at the mall and grab a taxi into Zona 10 where the hotel is located (Peace Corps rules forbid us from using Guate City public buses). “I heard that once you get into Zona 10 it’s just like being in the states,” Anne said. I shrugged my shoulders. The hotel came into view, “Where are the marble streets? Where are the golden lamp posts?” Ah, we were cracking ourselves up. But then we stepped into the hotel that really was full of marble, fancy upholstered furniture, and crystal chandeliers. Whoa.

“It’s a good thing I managed to find heels yesterday,” I said. I felt slightly less out of place wearing the nicest clothes I own down here (should’ve ordered that business suit sooner!). My only other option for footwear was a pair of worn out, dirty Keens, so the day before the conference we delved into the used American clothes resale market, the paca, with a little hope that they might have a decent pair of shoes in my size. With size 10 1/2 narrow or 41 in European numbers, this was my only hope of finding shoes for me in this country. Just when it looked as though I would have no luck and we were headed out of the maze of stalls to lunch, I spotted a great looking pair of brown heels. “They’re only 20q!” Anne whispered. I flipped them over, size 8 1/2 american but 40 1/2 Eur. Like a hopeful Cinderella I tried them on, and it felt like a minor miracle. They fit. I think I might have heard angels singing softly in the distance… Honestly, living here and being dirty all the time has made me so much more self-conscious about my appearance and dress. As in, I’d love to go home and fill my closet full of clothes from Anthropologie and look wonderful every single day. But I won’t, because it would easily cost an entire readjustment allowance to do so. It’s just strange, because the only times I’ve ever bothered to wear make-up or high heels prior to this venture were usually for acting or speech and debate. I feel like I understand now why everyone in the village makes such an effort to dress up on special occassions. It’s kind of a nice break from the norm. Leave it to Peace Corps to make you feel like a champion just because you’ve found a pair of cute, affordable heels. As Fletch said upon my victorios return from the market, “If 20q (about $3) is the price of your happiness, I’m happy too.”

So there we were in Camino Real looking for Becca, our “in” quite literally, since we had no tickets. Though we’d exchanged emails, I was fairly certain I’d never seen her in person in spite of a small overlap at Knox. Suddenly she appeared, giving us our entrance bracelets and a digital recorder for us to do interviews, before she rushed off to a breakfast meeting. So Anne and I wondered into the mostly empty convention center and found seats just behind the assigned seat section (read: the important people at the conference). In walked Rigoberta Menchu and the press corps jumped all over her. Then there was the ambassador with Rigoberta, then the First Lady with the ambassador and Rigoberta.

We had this digital recorder and were supposed to be interviewing people, and this seemed like the perfect time. Except Becca had handed us the recorder and said, “This thing came with a three inch thick instruction book. I don’t know how it works, so just try and figure it out.” We spent the frantic press shoot time trying to figure out how to make the recorder record, but we couldn’t get it to work.

rigoberta_sm.jpg

Just then we noticed that all the press had gone, and the ambassador and Nobel Prize winner were sitting calmly at their tables. It would’ve been the perfect time to have a functioning recorder, right? We decided to just go say hi to the ambassador anyway, as he’s always a big supporter of Peace Corps. The press jumped the Busy and Important People table again as we wound our way up there, but things calmed down again. We said good morning to ambassador McFarland and he asked us to remind him where each of us worked. From this information he continued, “Oh, so I’ve been reading your blog, even though I don’t comment. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve had some meetings with the Ministry of Health and Aprofam. I think this upcoming week they’re going to sign an agreement between them to allow APROFAM to use Ministry of Health facilities.” The APROFAM struggles all came to a head for me at the end of January, but after writing about it on the blog I mostly forgot about it since I’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to fix the situation. Ironically, I’d just been thinking about this issue the day before and considering writing letters to a few local and international NGO’s, to support APROFAM with some sort of mobile medical unit to avoid the problem we had here in Santa. But getting APROFAM and the Ministry of Health to sign and agreement is a MUCH better solution in that it’s more sustainable, less costly, and farther reaching than one little mobile medical unit. This was the best news I got all day, and somewhat appropriate to the themes of the conference as well.

As a little recap, APROFAM is an NGO that specializes in women’s health and reproductive services. They help fill the gaps where the Ministry of Health thus far hasn’t been able to provide more sophisticated family planning services such as tubal ligations, 5 year jadelle implants, or IUD’s. Because of beauracratic issues, APROFAM couldn’t work in my municipality, which put the women here at a serious disadvantage–and I’m certain we weren’t the only municipality in the country with this problem. Guatemala’s population is set to double in the next 13 years if the birth rate stays the same as it was last year. Their employment opportunities are forecasted to grow by only 10% in that same time, and the national educational and health programs are already strained with the current population. So an agreement for APROFAM to work with the Ministry of Health, using their facilities for one- and two-day medical campaigns throughout the country, gives women a much better chance to plan their families, lower the current birth rate statistics, and hopefully avoid catastrophe/crisis mode in the next two decades. It’s a big, small thing.

This also highlighted what is one of my favorite things about Peace Corps. I’ve felt like my job here is to be a bridge, and that in many ways is a great job. I think it’s fantastic that Peace Corps has no money to give, just volunteers. They give us to communities and we’re supposed to connect the communities to things and people that can offer them additional assistance. It brings home the fact that every player in this game is necessary. While I’ve often felt a lot of pressure as The Volunteer to make things happen, because I’m supposed to be connecting people and organization the pressure isn’t all mine. The responsibility isn’t all mine. Success or failure aren’t all mine either. I dealt with a lot of frustration trying to bring in APROFAM services to our region, and through no fault of my own I failed. But it wasn’t in vain, because other people who are better connected than me were paying attention and took up the cause. Now we’ve experienced change, a small but positive step forward.

This news went so well with the ideas of the day. The Vital Voices conferences is all about realizing positive change. We had the opportunity to meet, listen to, and speak with women of influence throughout Latin America, such as the Secretary of Education from El Salvador, the Secretary of Public Works in Costa Rica, and one of the higher ups in the Justice Department of Columbia. After the initial introductions, the conference split into discussion groups in five different categories: Public Administration, Violence and Crime, Education and Health, Economic Development, and Employment and Social Security. In these discussion groups we identified our common goals for improvement, outlined obstacles that stood in the way of reaching them, and proposed solutions to reach those goals. The conference is to be a basis for developing public policy and designing programs to reach goals in the aforementioned areas. It’s a way to teach people to identify their common goals and give them steps to achieve these goals.

Remember the bit about the 400q entry fee and wondering how many other attendees would arrive via chicken bus? We were worried about the diversity among the attendees, but were pleasantly surprised to find a number of women dressed in traje. I would say somewhere around 1/3 of the participants identified as indigenous women. Many of them were young women and girls. Had this not been the case, I would have deemed the day less successful. The morning opened with a Mayan ceremony. It was so short, in fact, that I think it was probably only part of a Mayan ceremony: we’ve been to the real deal, and they never go quickly. Anyhow, I was impressed with the turnout and assume that there were some sort of scholarship entries to complement the entries amongst some of the businesswomen, which were won in work contests. The women represented all sectors in their age, economic bracket, and cultural identity–and therefore the conference information was well dispersed. I even met a woman from our municipio who speaks Q’anjob’al but currently lives in San Marcos.

After the discussion groups I was thinking about the methodology. I wanted to be skeptical. I mean, sitting around talking about our common dreams, how could that help anything? But we were all asked to identify way to make these dreams a reality. One question asked, “Who would be responsible for enacting and overseeing these changes?” In almost every instance the answer to that question involved more than one group, usually at least two, the government and citizens. I liked how this was reinforced over and over. It seems to me that in Guatemala’s tumultuous history, the government has mostly been a lead-by-command organization. Many people, especially out where we live and work, feel completely detached from their government. It’s a lack of psychological rather than actual enfranchisement. Yes, people here vote, but apart from that they feel they’ve no say in anything that goes on in their country. I think this is often true in the US as well, but it’s more pronounced here, especially combined with their “If God wills it” attitude toward everything. It seems the Vital Voices methodology is introducing people, in particular but not exclusively women, to the tools they need to make changes.

As I was testing my skepticism, I realized -uh- I’m in the Peace Corps. This is all about trying to make real, positive change slowly and steadily. I remembered the short conversation with the ambassador, and then the words of a BBC correspondent in Washington as he wrote his farewell to living in the states. He critiqued, as only the British can, how ridiculous we Americans are (despite staggering obesity rates, we insist on holding donut, hotdog, and pizza eating contests). But then he switched tones and said something to the effect that, “Americans have the audacity to think they can change the world. But you know what? They will, if only because they believe they can.” It’s kind of the truth. We have to start somewhere, and teaching others they can change their lives is not beyond us, if we start little by little.

I participated in the Education and Health group and sat at a really great table. The oldest woman at my table was the mother of the Vital Voices Guatemala president. In the middle of the discussion, she said quite frankly and without bitterness (maybe even with relief), “Let me tell you ladies, to be a woman today is pure luxury. When I was growing up, you never would have come across something like this. Women didn’t speak until spoken to. Women stayed in the house where they belonged. Look at everything that’s possible for us now.” It was so simple it was touching. Maybe because the woman reminded me of grandmother, but also because what she said was definitely correct in my case, but her experiences were the same as many women in Guatemala and all over the world still have today. Their lives aren’t quite as luxurious.

IMG_5277_sm.jpgI had a great day at the conference. During our coffee break I found out that Becca and I are almost related. Hah, we lived with the same host family in Barcelona, Amelia and Manuel on Calle Muntaner. “I was living with them when they got the invitation to your wedding,” she said. Becca and I talked about them for a while, then about Knox, and then about her Fulbright studies in Vietnam that were strikingly similar to a lot of Anne’s and my Peace Corps experiences. Anne, who hasn’t returned to the states once, said talking to Becca was making her feel thrilled to go home. Here the three of us are enjoying the delicious lunch. Just after that Becca and I got a shot with Rigoberta Menchu to send to the Knox Magazine. Coincidentally the first time I ever heard of Rigoberta Menchu was when she came to the University of Barcelona in October of 2004. I went to see her speak, and was sweating trying to understand everything she said–didn’t speak a lot of Spanish then. Thankfully, she’s a very clear speaker. I never imagined then that I would have spent two years here, or that I ever would have seen her again. Life’s funny sometimes.

Due to protests on the Interamerican highway we couldn’t stay until the end of the conference. Graciously, our bosses had agreed to drive us to our respective departmental meetings with the Ministry of Health early Wednesday morning. All day Tuesday, ending in the early evening, the roads were blocked and they were set to be blocked again at 4am on Wednesday, which meant we had to get out while we could. It was a long ride after a long day to reach Xela, where Jaime and I spent the following day catching up on sleep and eating well until it was time for Basilio and Ana Isabel to take us the rest of the way to Huehue. At one point Fletch asked, “How do you feel?”

“Frantic” was my response.

“Yeah, I feel like we don’t really get to relax from here on out.” That’s about the size of it for the next six weeks.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/conference-calls/feed/ 7
Agatha Update https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/agatha-update/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/agatha-update/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 02:40:58 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3783 Nothing happened! The sun shined all day, and now the stars are out. We spent most of the day at a double baptism and a half hour after we got home and were running around crazy–starting bread, digging up potatos, getting ready for some heavy yoga–we were spontaneously invited to dinner. Magdalena had killed one of her chickens for us today.  We’ll see if we get even a drop of rain out of this thing. It did rain for about 30 hours with 2 short breaks until last night around midnight, but the storm was set to hit Guatemala at 5 am this morning, which means that was just regular rainy season rains. So we’re tired and safe and headed for a busy day tomorrow.  See you all back here in the near future.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/agatha-update/feed/ 8
Agatha https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/agatha/ Sun, 30 May 2010 05:48:13 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3782 TropicalStormAgatha.gif

Things are getting exciting! The storm is getting worse, though for us that just means buckets of rain. We’re still trapped (administratively) in site, but some PCVs on the pacific coast of Guatemala have actually been evacuated. Hmm. I don’t figure that will happen to us, because we’re actually safer here than trying to go anywhere else. But look at all the rain we’re expecting! This map shows this thing heading right for Huehuetenango. I’m not scared, though, because we have the massive wall of the Cuchumatanes Mountains to deflect the worst of it. We’ll keep you updated.

]]>
Standfast https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/standfast/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/standfast/#comments Sat, 29 May 2010 04:23:21 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3776 beetsSM.jpg

We are back from our long trip, and just in time. A few minutes ago we got a text message from the security chief that Peace Corps Guatemala is on “standfast”, and we aren’t allowed to travel anywhere for the next 48 hours. Some sort of tropical storm is on its way, and might bring landslides, washed out roads, and so forth… as happens in the third world. I’m actually kindof excited about it; I am tired of traveling anyways and it will be nice to be stuck in site for a while. I feel bad for some of our friends, though, who didn’t get out of Huehue in time after yesterday’s meeting and are now trapped away from home.

This is the first time in our entire service that we’ve seen the emergency action plan activated. Being a federal agency, the Peace Corps is all about disaster preparedness. The first level, standfast, means that we can’t travel. The idea is to keep us where they can find us, in the even of some sort of natural disaster or civil unrest. Experience has proven that being in your site is usually the safest place to be, where you have friends and neighbors: locals that know you and can help watch out for you. If things get worse, then phase two is consolidation, where we all move to a predetermined (and secret!) central location. Apparently it happened twice in the year before we arrived in Guatemala. Uncle Sam picks up the tab for our time in the hotel with all the other volunteers, as we wait for the emergency to pass or degrade further to the final phase. That’s evacuation, and it’s a pretty big deal. We like to joke that this is when the Marines show up with Blackhawk helicopters and rescue all the volunteers. What it really means is that we as a group use any means at our disposal to escape the problem; usually a bus to the border or the airport. Evacuation hardly ever happens, but Peace Corps Bolivia had to evacuate in 2008.

Strangely, this has nothing at all to do with Volcano Pacaya erupting yesterday, as we originally thought when we got the message. I am sad to say that we JUST MISSED being in Antigua to see the rain of ash and sand all over the city. We’ve climbed that volcano twice, and got to see molten lava pooping out the side. Sadly, a journalist was killed when he was hit by rocks shooting out the top of the volcano, but for the most part it has been more of an inconvenience than a serious danger. The airport is closed right now, so some of our friends who are finishing early might be trapped in Guatemala until the ash cloud subsides.

We returned to our village to meet the happy faces we’ve come to know so well in our time here. Our friend Antonio invited us into his house for lunch as we were waiting to switch buses in Santa Eulalia, and we had a dozen conversations with various locals within the first few hours back in site. It reminds me that we really HAVE made friends, and I’m going to miss many of them. As is their habit, the neighbor kids started jumping up and down and chanting our names from the mountainside as soon as we stepped off the microbus, then came tearing down the valley to help us carry our various bags and packages up to the house. It’s a ritual now: let’s see what neat stuff the gringoes brought back from their trip. Occasionally we have a sweet or little toy for them, but more than anything they just want to see all of our strange travel items: collapsable toothbrushes, goretex hats, sleeping bags, deodorant.

This particular time, we had a care package from my parents that we’d picked up at the post office in Santa Eulalia. The kids can sniff these out like bloodhounds, and know by now that they often contain a kids’ book in Spanish. My mom started sending them after her visit, and the kids now love to read new books. It’s our private little battle against illiteracy, and I feel like we’re winning it on a small but important scale. Emily had the kids in a circle and was reading to them before I’d even opened the potato chips my Dad sent.

broccoliSM.jpg alberto sunflower_sm.jpg

As usual, Chalio and Alberto did a great job watching the garden while we were away. Since the rains are in full swing, it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. To everyone’s glee, the sunflowers are now taller than Alberto (they still don’t believe me when I say they will get taller than I am). The potatoes are ready to harvest, and we have about five melons. The guicoy (Guatemalan zucchini) I planted has put on fruit, and will be ready soon. I am especially pleased about that one, since Nas’s wife gave me the seeds to plant because she loves guicoy and can’t get it to grow. Heh. The cucumber harvest is now over, but Chalio says they ate a ton of them, and the new ones are already past their seedling leafs. A tomato is FINALLY growing, and my chili plant has mature fruit now as well. The broccoli has heads bigger than my own, though one went all the way to seed while we were gone. Except for a few sweet corns that were munched by the stupid cow, all is well… though the entire garden could stand a good weeding.

So, we’re back and we’re safe, ready to launch in to the final lap.


UPDATE, this just came in:

000
ABPZ20 KNHC 281739
TWOEP
TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1100 AM PDT FRI MAY 28 2010
FOR THE EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC...EAST OF 140 DEGREES WEST LONGITUDE..


SATELLITE IMAGES INDICATE THAT THE BROAD AREA OF LOW PRESSURE

LOCATED A COUPLE HUNDRED MILES SOUTH OF THE GULF OF TEHUANTEPEC IS

GRADUALLY BECOMING BETTER ORGANIZED. ONSHORE WINDS TO THE EAST OF

THE DISTURBANCE CONTINUE TO PRODUCE LOCALLY HEAVY RAINS FROM EL

SALVADOR WESTWARD ALONG THE PACIFIC COAST TO NEAR THE GULF OF

TEHUANTEPEC. THESE RAINS COULD CAUSE LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS

AND MUD SLIDES IN THESE AREAS OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS ARE FAVORABLE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT...

AND A TROPICAL DEPRESSION COULD FORM LATER TODAY OR SATURDAY AS IT

DRIFTS NORTHEASTWARD. THERE IS A HIGH CHANCE...70 PERCENT...OF THIS

SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.



ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE

NEXT 48 HOURS.


$$
FORECASTER BROWN/STEWART

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/standfast/feed/ 1
COS medical https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-medical/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-medical/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 12:29:24 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3770 Our travels continue, including several days of medical testing. Uncle Sam tries to return us the way he found us, so that means checking us out for all the things that could (and probably would) go wrong while living in the jungle for two years. A few more of my compatriots were diagnosed with tuberculosis, bringing the total number to I think 8 out of our 29-person training group. I do NOT like those odds, but it seems that Emily and I have dodged the bullet once again. The doctor says I have good blood pressure and heart sounds, good bloodwork, and so forth. The dentist proclaimed us both cavity-free. The jury us still out on the fecal tests, and I hope I do not suffer the same fate as Emily.

To my surprise, my weight had dropped even further, but the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) says not to worry about it. It’s still within acceptable limits, and appears to be from a lot of exercise and improved diet. Huh. So, yeah, I am now officially TWO POUNDS heavier than when I was a skinny 10th grader. I was 178 when I got to Guatemala, and now weigh 149. Between the two of us, Emily and I have lost over 60 pounds in these two years.

froilan measuringSM.jpgAfter yesterday’s testing, we dropped by to visit Froilan, my host dad from training. He is a tailor and has a little shop in Antigua, where he does really nice work for very reasonable (by American standards) prices. Emily wants a new business suit for interviews when we get back to the US, and has been printing off pictures of trendy and attractive suits she likes from the internet. She showed them to Froilan, who assured her that he could definitely do that, which I do not doubt having seen some of his other work while I was living with him. We looked through his vast fabric sample collection to pick just the right material, and asked him how much it would cost. “And I want the real price,” I told him. “Don’t you dare give us a low number because we’re friends.” He would probably do it for free if I let him, and that wouldn’t be right. It IS his livelihood, after all.

He thought about it a bit, and when he hesitated, Emily said, “You have to tell us the real price, because all the other volunteers are going to ask us when they see it.” That logic worked, and he said the normal price would be about 1500q, but he’d like us to pay only 1200. We agreed without hesitating; besides helping out a really good friend, getting a custom-tailored, custom fabric, hand-tailored business suit for $150 USD is a pretty amazing deal.

So amazing, in fact, that I think I will have to get one for myself. Only one question remains: how much material to have him leave in the seams, for when all that weight comes back.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-medical/feed/ 4
COS conference https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-conference/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-conference/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 13:53:13 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3766 treehouseSM.jpg

Here I am, spending the night in a treehouse in the mountains overlooking Antigua. My friend Belkar saw that we’ve been having a rough week, so he suggested we treat ourselves to something nice and he’d send us a few dollars via Paypal. My friends are the best.

We just finished our COS Conference (Close Of Service; the government loves acronyms). It’s several days of seminars to bring to a close our time in the Peace Corps. The topics are retrospective, like evaluating the success of the program and how to fill out all the final paperwork, as well as preparing for the future: how to leverage Peace Corps service when applying for federal jobs, getting ready for reverse culture shock, and how to get health coverage. It’s nice that the government addresses the importance of making tidy ends; apparently in the early days of the Peace Corps they returned shell-shocked volunteers to normal society to fend for themselves, with little preparation.

swank hotel_sm.jpgI think the best part of this week, though, is all the incidental stuff. Peace Corps put us up in a very swank hotel for the seminar, and we have all our evenings free. This is the last time all of us from our training group will be together, and we all know it. I hate goodbyes, and that’s what this is all about. After the day’s meetings, Tim broke out the guitar and we all taked and sang and enjoyed each others’ company until the wee hours.

guitar_sm.jpg

It all reminds me a bit of summer camp, saying goodbye to a small group of energetic, happy, skillful people that have become a surrogate family by virtue of an intense, shared experience. Back when I was a camp counsellor, we jokingly called every other Friday “Cryday”, because we would have a big closing campfire and all the kids would reminisce about the experiences they’d had, and cry buckets knowing that the end was near. Of course, at the last campfire of the summer, the counsellors were always the ones crying the hardest.

The Peace Corps is probably the most “touchy-feely” branch of the entire US government. Several of the sessions were retrospectives, where we looked back on that we’d learned and experienced, sharing our thoughts openly with each other. At one point, David Castillo, who lead our training during the first three month in Guatemala, came out to speak with us. We all smiled immediately when we saw him; we haven’t seen much of him since we swore in, but he was always there to answer questions or give advice, his voice always cheerful and unceasingly enthusiastic.

“Today, we are going to talk about shoes,” he began in his singsong accented English. “Where have your shoes been in these two years? What have they seen?” We were all thinking about the unexpected paths we’d trodden, both literal and metaphorical, as he stretched out casually on a chair in front of us. “Take for instance, these shoes…” He nonchalantly pulled up his pants, showing a classy but well-worn pair of cowboy boots. Raucous laughter broke out in all sides; we recognized them immediately as the boots* we’d pitched in to buy him as a thank-you present the day we graduated from training.

Many volunteers shared their personal stories, as well. Our group has volunteers with parents who immigrated from places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Colombia, and Bolivia. I was surprised to learn that ALL of them had to overcome negative feelings from their families about their Peace Corps service. “Why would you want to go back THERE, after all the work we did to become Americans and escape that sort of life?” they were asked. But now, after all my friends have done and seen, their families are seeing the importance of how they’ve given back to others who are less fortunate, as well as served their country as Americans. That’s one of the things I love about America: we really are a melting pot, citizens regardless of where our ancestors came from.

After that discussion, Gregorio brought out letters that we’d written to ourselves the day before we swore in as volunteers, two years ago. I laughed aloud when I read mine, and I will share it here:


July 17, 2008- S. Lucia, Guate.

Dear Jaime

I hope you were smart and focused on the “now”, especially since it will be “then” now that you’re reading this. Was Qu’anjob’al (sp) as scary as you’d feared? Did you get your Wanderings book done? Did you learn to live simpler, both mentally & physically?

I hope people from home continued to support you. Does a finish come easily (& quickly), or are you doing an extended year? It’s a shame time travel is a one-way street, as you cannot answer. But I guess it’s better this way, I don’t REALLY want to ruin the surprise.

If you are going home, please say hi to Ryan and Brian and Dave and the padres for me. Travel the US some and get reacquainted with it. It’s a good place and we should forgive some of its faults and silliness– every place has them.

That is all, you brave footsoldier of compassion*. Now go out and play, before you’re 40.

-f


I laugh because several times in the last weeks while thinking about our impending return, Emily has repeated a Mark Twain quote previously unknown to me: “You forgive a place once you leave it.”

On the last day of the conference, we met with Basilio (our boss) and broke out in to small groups to brainstorm ways to improve the program for the coming volunteers. Basilio’s command of English is modest, so we did the exercise in Spanish. He left my group at one point to go check in on another, and we kept on jabbering away.

jane_speaks_sm.jpgThere was a pause. “Creo que es la primera vez que hablamos en Español hasta entrenamiento,” I though aloud (You know, this is the first time I think I’ve spoken to any of you in Spanish since training). Everyone laughed, realizing how far we’d really come, linguistically. A few minutes later, our groups rejoined to give presentations over their findings. Jane got up to speak for my section, and people started applauding after just a few sentences: we all remember that when she got to Guatemala, she had the lowest level Spanish of everyone and was deathly afraid of public speaking. Yet today, she gave a ten minute briefing in a foreign language with full, natural confidence. Maybe that is one of the best parts of this entire thing, seeing how far each individual has come, how much they’ve developed, how much richer they’ve become for this experience.

After the conference ended, Basilio and Ana Isabel (his very capable assistant) invited all of us Healthy Homes volunteers to dinner at a pretty nice restaurant in Antigua. This is not the norm, and we’re pretty sure he did this out of his own pocket. We have developed a special relationship with Basilio over the two years; he’s been very fatherly to all of us, taking a personal interest in our well-being that goes beyond the general parameters of his job requirements. We, in turn, were the first volunteers in this new program, and performed far above expectations. It was a very emotional evening.

Here I want to pay homage to all the special people that have become my family over the last two years. Many of them have appeared in the blog, a few of them have not. But they will all be forever welcome at my table.

all_of_usSM.jpg

Back Row: Thea Chun, Ana Nightingale, Jessica Vandivort, Carmen Muñoz, Aliyya Shelley, Maggie Hume, Jane Zimmerman, Tim Slattery

Middle Row: Anne Ballard, Ashley Kissinger, Lynn Nguyen, Grant Picarillo, Kelsey Field, Ellen Ostrow, Amanda Geller, Kaying Vang, Emily Fanjoy, Sarah Allen, Matt Crane, Casey Kittredge, Faviola Rubio, Kristen Petros

Front Row: Joe Busch, Zach Nosdal, Dan Grinnell, Freney Giraldo, Katy Clark, Jim Fanjoy

Not pictured: Leoti Laferriere (medically separated the week before, still received COS status)


*George W Bush called us “brave footsoldiers of compassion” in his 2008 Volunteerism Day speech we attended at the white house. We have all joked about that unfortunate wording ever since.

]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/cos-conference/feed/ 5
Charlotte’s latrines https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/charlottes-latrines/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/charlottes-latrines/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 13:16:42 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3746 IMG_1818SM.jpgWe just spent two days visiting our friend Charlotte. We like to visit her, but this time it was for business. You see, Charlotte’s program is Municipal Development, which means she’s really good at things like creating women’s groups, organizing people for political action, and working to enhance services provided by local governments. She’s not very construction oriented, though, so when she got a grant to build latrines in a rural village in her municipality, she called us for help.

Latrine_SanSe2SM.jpgThere are two basic types of latrines in use here: letrinas aboneras, or composting latrines; and pozos ciegos, or sanitary pit latrines. The composting latrines are generally better: they last indefinitely, protect groundwater, and you get some fertilizer out of them every year as a bonus- though they are a bit more expensive. The pit latrines aren’t quite as nice, but are WAY better than nothing and they seal the pit so that flies and rodents can’t spread diseases. On the down side, they fill up every five years or so and have to be moved, and can contaminate groundwater if the geologic coditions are wrong. Unfortunately, they are the local favorite in many areas because of their low cost, ease of maintenance, and most importantly, the people are just accustomed to them. After talking with the village, Charlotte found that they really wanted the sanitary pit, despite the good reasons to go with composting… and as we see time and time again, if you give someone something they don’t want, they abandon it. We went with the traditional.

Her town has many Ladino (spanish-speaking) city dwellers, but most of their outlying villages are rural Mayan. Unlike the Q’anjob’al we live and work with, these are from the Mam ethnic group. Their dress is a little different, and their language is VERY different. It’s strange to be surrounded by Mayans jabbering away and not understand a word of it. Some things were the same, though: their friendliness, the communal way they work together, the kids smiling and giggling, and the babies screaming in terror at the sight of white people.

We piled into the back of a pickup at 6am to travel with the teachers headed up the mountain to the village. It was a beautiful, half-hour climb up a steep 4×4 trail to a verdant vallley near the top of the mountains. When we arrived, the villagers were waiting in the schoolyard; only one truck a day comes up there, and they’d heard it long before we arrived.

Charlotte had done her homework, and most of the materials we’d planned out had already arrived: precut wood, sheets of corrugated steel, PVC tubing. Over the course of the next few days, we divided up all the materials amongst the 41 participating families. The extent of the careful planning reflects in part on Charlotte’s good organizational skills, but also on the Mayan preoccupation with everyone getting their fair share. This is important in a culture that is both communal and VERY poor; they even counted out how many nails each family would get: 25 three-inchers, and 50 roofing nails.

tubesSM.jpg IMG_1833SM.jpg IMG_1830SM.jpg

One of the most exciting challenges was getting the materials from the staging point in the schoolyard to the individual houses scattered across the mountainside. They do this the way they do everything else here: by mecapál. This is a headstrap that ties to a rope that goes around whatever you’re carrying. Across hill and dale, through mountainside cronfield, down steep ravines, until you come to the adobe hut perched precariously a thousand feet above the valley floor.

The construction went really well. Most rural families have great do-it-yourself skills, and I was able to stand out of the way most of the time. I am a hand-on guy and love to build things, so this is sometimes a challange for me. 🙂 In a way, our presence was largely ceremonial, an endorsement of the validity of the project; their presence was a sort of thank-you for helping connect them with the resources they need to make things in their village a little better. We built one latrine one each of the days we were there, and I am confident that they will have no trouble doing the rest of them themselves (which is really the point of the exercise, anyway). We’ll know for sure when Charlotte goes and does the evaluation sometime next month.

And now, much like last week, here is a play-by-play of how to build a sanitary latrine.


IMG_1825_sm.jpg IMG_1826_sm.jpg IMG_5237_sm.jpg
Having been warned beforehand, the villagers had the pit dug before our arrival. This one is about 10 feet deep. The loose soil here is great for farming, but makes for crumbly pit walls and rim. Logs help distribute the weight of the slab away from the edges of the pit. The concrete slabs that seal the pit were prefabricated in town. They weigh about 200 pounds, and are a fair bit of work to haul through the jungle. Once the slab is in place and leveled, the next job is to plant the vertical wood posts of the outhouse. They go about 2 feet into the ground, so the outhouse is resistant to being blown away but can be moved in the future.
DSC_0151SM.jpg IMG_5240_sm.jpg IMG_5247_sm.jpg
Getting the posts plumb (vertical) makes it all fit together better, and is easily done with a level. Once we get the 2x4s around the top and bottom of the walls, we can attach the corrugated steel siding. 2×4 beams at the front and back are nailed into the vertical posts, to support the roof.
IMG_5252_sm.jpg IMG_5245_sm.jpg DSC_0195SM.jpg
The same steel is used for the roof. A string with a weight is hung above the vent hole in the slab, to locate the hole for the vent in the roof. It’s then cut out with sheet metal shears. The vent pipe is painted black, so it heats up in the sun and starts a convective current that draws air and odors up and out of the latrine while drawing in fresh air through the seat. Bug screen at the top prevents flies from getting in, and the T keeps rainwater out. Once everything is in place, the concrete taza (seat) is set in place. It’s actually quite comfortable once you’re used to it, and WAY better then the typical muddy board with a hole cut in it. I built a lid of scrapwood while we were waiting, an important mechanism for keeping flies OUT.
IMG_5260_sm.jpg IMG_5257_sm.jpg IMG_5262_sm.jpg
No Guatemalan project is complete without a little machete work. Here they are doing the fine joinery for the corners of the door. The final joints, testing for fit. I was very proud of them; I was planning to do the joints a different way, and they suggested this stronger, easier to fabricate option. “Go with it!” I told them. The corner joints are nailed together, then the door is covered with a sheet of corrugated steel. Besides giving privacy, the steel acts a bit as a shear panel to prevent wracking in the door frame.
DSC_0267SM.jpg oldlatrineSM.jpg DSC_0227SM.jpg
The door is on and ready to go. They were still pretty intrigued about how spray paint works, and while we weren’t looking they tagged the inside of the door. Here’s the old latrine, about ten yards away. By comparison, the new one is puro lujo (pure luxury). While we were working, the grannie of the family receiving the latrine invited us into her kitchen to have some tortillas and thin coffee. I would think it was to say “thanks”, but it’s more that they’re just naturally hospitable people.

And that was our latrine adventure. In the next few weeks, the village will continue to build the remaining units, and towards the end of the month Charlotte will return to the site to evaluate the final installations for conformance with the projects specifications, as well as give some additional training and answer any questions the villagers might have. And us? We’re off to the South, to attend a bunch of work-related conferences. More on that in coming posts.

rubysmileSM.jpg
]]>
https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/charlottes-latrines/feed/ 3