Emilys Guatemala – 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

 

 

 

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Guatemala Just Gets Keeps Getting Grosser https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/guatemala-just-gets-keeps-getting-grosser/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/guatemala-just-gets-keeps-getting-grosser/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 06:29:25 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3710 I’ve had some observations recently that I wanted to share with everyone about SPA and the celebration we attended with our friends on Sunday and building latrines with our friend Charlotte at the beginning of the week, but I’ve had no time to write about them all. Then I had something happen that stopped the show. I just pooped out a worm. It wasn’t tiny. We’re estimating that fully stretched it was probably between 10 and 12 inches. Though we don’t know for sure, as we never saw both ends of it at the same time. I am incredibly grossed out. Really, Guatemala? Really?

This country has managed to make me feel like one of the most disgusting beings to walk the earth. Seriously. I’ve broken all boundaries. Amoebas that went on misdiagnosed for a few weeks until I was a bloated, nauseous, sick mess. Giardia until I spent nights writhing in pain from bloating and the worst smelling gas I’ve ever, well, smelt, not once but TWICE. Flue free for five years until this past February after receiving both the regular flu vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine. Sick to the point that I had to take suppositories to stop throwing up. Not to mention the little things like how I get a cold about once every two months here and haven’t had acne this bad since I was a teenager and I NEVER feel like I’m really clean. Now this.

It all started out pleasantly enough, we were in Antigua on Wednesday morning, the morning before our Close of Service Conference started. We went out to the Bagel Barn for breakfast with some friends. I drank, as is my custom, a large mug of coffee with my tasty breakfast and walked back to the hotel. Ironically, on the walk we were talking with our friend Joe about traumatic poop experiences, because we’ve all had them, and we’re all close enough and now shameless enough to share these things. I arrived at the hotel, grabbed my book, went to the bathroom. As I turned around to flush the toilet I almost screamed. “I’ve beat them all on the trauma front,” I thought. There it was, unmistakeable white, dead and floating in the bowl.

We were staying in a Peace Corps favorite hostal, all the rooms around us occupied by our friends and fellow volunteers. “Shut the door, shut the window. Get in here and take a picture,” I said to Jaime. He looked frightened. “I just pooped a worm, and it’s huge,” I whispered, still in shock. Thing is, before we left for Peace Corps, our friends daughter, who is rather into all things gross, told us that if one of us ever pooped a worm she wanted to see a picture. The picture was for Elena, and for the PC nurses.

Here in Guatemala, we’ve learned to deal with things by sharing, so within about 20 minutes, all of our friends at the hotel knew about the worm and had seen the picture. Jaime shared it mostly. I left the hotel and went shoping. The picture is too gross to post. If you want to see it, if you REALLY want to see it, email Fletch and request the photo. But I refuse to post it. This is disconcerting on many levels.

1) I poop in a latrine on a regular basis, which means I never turn around to flush the toilet. How many worms might I have already passed without knowing it?

2) How many other worms are currently inhabiting my intestines? I am on a three day medication to kill all of them, and as the nurse said, “Don’t be alarmed, you might be defecating worms for up to a week after you finish the pills.” Ok, not alarmed, but a little traumatized.

3) Everyone asked, “Didn’t you feel them? Didn’t you feel extra hungry, or weak, or a loss of appetite, or an upset stomach?” NO, no, no, no, and no. Thing is, my stomach just doesn’t feel peachy here. It hasn’t since training. I’m used to feeling tired because if not phsyically exhausting Guatemala is always emotionally exhausting. I always have mild diarrhea. I’ve been doing a lot of physical labor recently and just got over another terrible cold, so feeling weak felt normal. The only thing I can remember is that a few weeks ago while traveling I felt like I was going to throw up every night before I went to bed. I just thought I was road weary. It’s kind of disturbing to me how I can exist with such huge parasites feeding off me and never ever notice. Gross.

So that’s my story. It’s gross. I feel terrible, more emotionally than phsyically. I dread having to go the bathroom. Who knows what I’ll find next? And yet, in all of this I think, “Well, now I know what Guatemalas go through.” I think of children with worms, pregnant women with worms, men eating stacks of tortillas, they’re bellies full of worms who steal their nutrition. It makes me thankful I’ve been taking my vitamins. Maybe I’ve needed that extra boost more than I knew… And also, can I just say, I’m kind of glad to be going home soon. Guatemala, you are at once such a beautiful place yet so disgusting.

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Of Mice and Meetings https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/of-mice-and-meetings/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/of-mice-and-meetings/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 03:00:34 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3657 For quite a while, things were very slowly around here. Hanging out in our village has been me dealing with my limitations. I have to wait until others are ready to proceed. When we got back from our Semana Santa trip I went directly to the health center in town to schedule a meeting with our counterpart and the local community leaders. I wanted to get things moving! He didn’t have time to meet for three weeks. So I waited.

Waiting is hard. I’d like to say that Peace Corps has made me a more patient person–I’ve never been particularly patient–but I don’t think that’s true. There’s always the chance that when I get home and realize how quickly and smoothly so many things move in the states compared to here that I will feel more patient. But being here feels like an endless waiting game. It’s so easy to get discouraged or annoyed and to feel like I’m being absolutely useless. It’s really difficult to feel satisfied with the job I’m doing, when it feels like I’m doing nothing. This isn’t me fishing for compliments in the comments left below either. I’m just trying to convey how it is. In the beginning I felt like I was okay with very basic goals, of cultural exchanges and positive interactions. And at that time, work for me was going well. I had A LOT of health talks going on. But in the beginning of our time here, even when I said this to myself, that I was okay just accomplishing the small things, in the back of my mind bigger goals loomed. Now that we’re approaching the end of our service and it’s become apparent what is and isn’t possible to accomplish (all big goals are off) I find that I’m dealing with the plight of doing nothing all over again. Fletch and I have sort of traded places. I think he felt like he was just hanging out through all of our health talk days. Now he’s working a ton, on the school and construction projects, while I mostly hang out. On the days I ask myself, “What am I doing here?” in utter frustration, the answer comes back something like, “I’m reading books to kids. That’s what I’m doing.” or “I’m figuring out how to make compost and grow vegetables.” And with that I have to be content. It’s a challenge, but I’m working on it.

I’m also knitting socks. I’ve found it helps me relax. The last time Manuel scheduled a meeting regarding what should be done with all the computers in town, I knit through the entire meeting, and I was noticeably less tense at the end of the meeting. But the best part about knitting socks is that, unlike anything else I do here, every time I sit and work on them I see noticeable progress to a very practical end, and that makes me happy. Also, I’ve been working on my yoga headstand, which is only funny because now Delmi tries to do them too. I didn’t even realize she’d seen me doing yoga. It’s usually done with the door closed and no one is allowed to come in. Hilarious nonetheless. Coincidentally she’s also sitting on my lap right now, pretending to type right along with me. She is decidedly my favorite little thing in all of Guatemala.

Since the mice had a party on our bed, we’ve also been dealing with them, mainly by putting out tons and tons of poison is strategic locations. Last Thursday morning as we were sitting in the house working, we heard a squeak. Fletch looked down at his foot to see that a mouse was nearly sitting on top of it. The mouse was not doing well. Fletch put on gloves and took it outside to die in the yard, but that mouse hung on all day long. We knew because periodically kids would walk by our house and yell our names, sometimes including things like, “Come quick! It’s an emergency!” And they would show us the mouse that we put out there in the first place. The meeting I had scheduled so long ago was set to take place late that afternoon, so off we went, finally.

This meeting was an attempt to dispel rumors about why there is no SPA project in our community and talk to the community openly about what we’ve accomplished and what they’d like to accomplish with Peace Corps in the future. I thought the meeting would last for HOURS, but our counterpart drove out here from town on a motorcycle that didn’t have headlights. This meant that he couldn’t stay after dark, which meant we had a definite end time, which was kind of wonderful in a way. It was really just an introductory meeting, talking to the women’s committee and the male leaders. We have a follow up meeting next Saturday afternoon to talk to the whole community about whether or not they want another Peace Corps volunteer. I imagine they will say yes, but we’ll see.

So we came home from this meeting, having already packed for our 5 day trip, ready to relax, eat dinner, and go to bed early. We’d stoked up the fire before we left because we didn’t want to walk into a freezing house. The rain and wind are back of late, which makes the evenings very cold. We opened the door to see a mouse sitting right in the nice warm spot on the floor near the fire. Bleh. Though I couldn’t have picked a better spot myself, I was annoyed. Fletch put a plastic tub over it, so that there was an upturned bowl with a mouse tail sticking out of it in the middle of our house. Surprisingly, that didn’t make the problem go away. As happens almost every time we come home, Chalio seemed to know, and came right over. “What’s under that bowl?!” he asked.

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“A mouse. We need to take it out of the house.” We had sort of assumed it was the same mouse from earlier in the day and I think Chalio thought so too. Assuming this (even though we had no clue how it got into the house again) we didn’t expect to have trouble catching it, as it had been moving hardly at all. We took the bowl off this mouse, armed with a broom to herd it toward the door, and it sprinted away. Fletch, who was wearing gloves, almost caught it, but its tail slipped between his fingers as the mouse ran into our woodpile to hide. Fletch continued after it, throwing wood all over the place. The crowd at the door grew, from one kid to three. If nothing else, we’re great weirdos for entertainment. Jaime was pulling apart the wood pile, chasing down the mouse and by some miracle managed to catch its tail. Here is the photographic evidence. He threw it out the door and into the cornfield.

All matter-of-fact, Chalio said, “You need to kill it, Jaime, or it’s just going to come back in the house.” You know when kids say things that make so much sense you just feel ridiculous? Yeah. So Fletch donned a headlamp and he and the kids went out in the field to look for it, armed with the Peace Corps issued machete. The dog had roughly located it and our friend Yohana found it. All the kids gathered round to watch the big chop, and I thought I heard Yohana let out a little shriek. Fletch walked back into the house, “That poor little mouse, he let out the biggest squeak ever at the end.” That wasn’t Yohana I heard after all. Kind of gross.

We have redoubled efforts with the poison, but continue to find the occasional mouse. Like today, there was a tiny little bugger just hanging out with all our shoes by the front door. It also looked like it had partied with the pink pellets. I wish we had access to vet services. If we did, we would’ve had a cat ages ago. And just for the record, the traps we’ve been sent in past care packages are completely and surprisingly ineffectual. We don’t know why. Who knows when mouse season ends around here? They weren’t always such a problem.

cloudsSM.jpgIn spite of how exciting hunting mice can be, getting out of here last week just before Fletch’s birthday felt good. We were going to get the computers, do a little adventuring, and attend some meetings–a good mix of fun and productive. All in all, it was maybe the craziest 5 days we’ve ever had running around Guatemala. Our longest travel day ever happened on our two years in country anniversary (April 30). We woke up at 3:15 and were out of the house by 3:30am. Lucky for us, it was an amazingly beautiful clear day. Coming down from the Cuchumatanes, Huehue wasn’t even visible under a sea of clouds, and passing by Lake Atitlan, for the first time in months I got a glimpse of it from the highway. We thought maybe this boded well for the weather we’d get on our way up Tajamulco the next day. We were definitely wrong about that, but it was a good day to watch the scenery roll by. The rainy season has returned, which means a) traveling is no longer ridiculously dusty and b) the whole country is turning green again as everyone’s corn is in and growing in every available inch of soil. I like green Guatemala better than brittle brown and dry Guatemla. We didn’t stop traveling until almost 8pm that night, once we made it to Xela, the staging area for our trip up Tajamulco. I think Fletch’s post covers the volcano adventure quite well.

Post Tajamulco, as in as soon as we reached the trailhead, we caught a bus that had seen us hiking down and pulled over to wait for us (very considerate, I might add) and then spent the next 6 hours on one bus or another until we made it to Antigua. It was one long day. I generally don’t sleep on chicken buses, but since I’d woken up at 4 am and climbed all over creation with a pack and then boarded a bus where no one would open a window so that it was unbearably stuffy, I fell asleep holding onto the bar over the seat in front of me. On more than one occasion I woke up just as I was falling into the lap of the stranger sitting next to me. I think this is a sign of becoming culturally integrated. I can’t count the number of people who have fallen asleep or sat on me on all our bus trips. It’s just the way things work. Fletch was sitting in the seat next to me and apparently caught me a few times as I was falling into the aisle. At least it made the trip feel a little faster.

Monday May 3rd was Fletch’s birthday, and a busy day for me. Remember the GLOW camp I wrote about back in January? Well, there’s a lot more to GLOW than the fun and games of having camps. Since I joined the group during my second month of service here, we the committee having been looking for ways to partner with Guatemalan agencies and find sustainable means of funding the program. In January, we felt like we were one step closer to the doing this thing right, but there’s still a ways to go. My first job on the committee, way back in September of 2008, was to go to a meeting with Peace Corps staff where they would hear about what we were doing and give us suggestions on how to improve. That was the idea anyway. Post meeting, we all felt that attendance on the part of the staff had been pretty low (many, many people didn’t come) and amongst those who were there, their focus on the negative had been high. Though we took their suggestions to heart, we left feeling pretty awful and spent almost two years working on them. The successful camp in January boosted our morale considerably, and now I was given a chance to try again. In 2008, I was mostly there to watch how things were done, but this time I was helping to lead the meeting. Since we’re all only here for two years, the face of the committee has changed, so that now I am the only person who was present at both the 2008 meeting and last week’s meeting. This constant change is part of the reason it feels so challenging to make something you’re working on here outlast you. Monday’s meeting was completely amazing. EVERYONE was there, the country director and assistant country director, all six associate directors (in charge of the six projects currently in the works here) and all of their project specialists. This is a very difficult audience to get, as all of these folks are extremely busy people. But we got them, and their full attention, and their support, and their congratulations, and their HELPFUL suggestions, which was simply fantastic. I felt so relieved, like something, even if it was a very small something, has actually gone right in my time here.

Why is this important? Our direct bosses are the associate directors, who have to approve all the projects we work on outside of our primary project. If they don’t know what GLOW is and therefore don’t allow any of their volunteers to work on it, then the program will die off. If they’re excited and enthusiastic about the program they will approve their volunteers to work with the program, and it can keep going. It’s simple and absolutely crucial. This was the pre-meeting meeting, to make sure our Peace Corps folks were all on board before our Tuesday morning meeting in Guatemala City to talk to the agency in Guatemala we feel most positive about working with to establish the program. After the staff-wide meeting I had a smaller committee prep meeting before Tuesday morning, and then Fletch and I had to get down to the business of celebrating his birthday.

May 3 two years ago was kind of a big day for all of us newly-arrived Peace Corps Trainees. We moved in with our host families, which meant Fletch and I began our three months of not living together and he began his three months of becoming part of someone else’s family while trying to learn the language. For me I didn’t feel this was such a big deal, as I’d done it before when I studied in Barcelona, which was also why I was not concerned with the Spanish. Fletch on the other hand was a very private guy who didn’t speak a whole lot of Spanish, and I was pretty worried about how he’d survive the ordeal. As it turned out, he lived with a pretty amazing family, who didn’t find out until months later that Fletch had moved in with them on his birthday. So a few weeks back, knowing about these meetings, I called his Mama Jovita and said, “Since you didn’t get to celebrate his first birthday in country, do you all want to celebrate his last one together?” Being big fans of Jaime, everyone thought this was an excellent idea. So after my meetings we returned to Antigua to purchase a big birthday cake and, on account of the giant cake, got a taxi to his host family’s house.

Mama Jovita made her lipsmacking good pepian for us; Froilan, his host dad, came home from work 2 hours early so as not to miss a minute of the celebration; and as always the kids were ecstatic that their once hero-in-residence had come to visit them again. They were also pretty excited by the size of the cake.

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As per usual, we played their favorite card games and read them their story books. They thought it hysterically funny when they planted trick candles in the birthday cake, so try as he might Jaime couldn’t blow them out. And it was funnier still when Jaime plucked all them up from the cake and dropped them in a glass of water to put them out once and for all. We also got to meet their newest family member, recently arrived PC trainee, Melissa. Even though she’d only had about 6 days of beans and tortillas at this point, she was also thrilled about the pepian and the birthday cake coming her way. All in all it was a great night with the Menchu family. We left stuffed and tired. Happy Birthday, Jaime!


Tuesday morning was possibly the most professional day I’ve had in my two years here. It was a little disorienting actually. I find going into Guatemala City to be like entering an alternate universe. I spend most of my days pooping in a latrine and working hard just to bathe on a daily basis, and suddenly I find myself in this city with tall glass buildings, luxury cars, movie theaters, and designer stores, multi-lane roads, cultural monuments, stop lights and intersections. It’s bizarre. I mean, these things didn’t really affect me on my visits to the US, because these things have always been part of what the US is to me, but these things are NOT part of what Guatemala is to me. So strange… A driver from the Peace Corps delivered my fellow GLOW coordinator and me to a big glass office building with a water fountain out front (what? they use water for decoration and we don’t even have it coming into our house!). Fletch was along for the ride since we were planning on leaving for home right after the meeting.

The assistant country director here is a big fan of GLOW and has offered to help us in any way she can. She’s so far been full of enthusiasm and helpful suggestions, which made us happy to have her with us at this meeting with Child Fund Guatemala, part of Child Fund International. We met downstairs and, thankfully, opted for a creepy staircase to get us up to the second floor rather than an elevator. I’m not sure I could handle an elevator; they make me dizzy when I am not accustomed to using them. Child Fund works on development through youth programs in Guatemala. Our goals and theirs are extremely compatible. They partnered with us through one of their satellite offices for the January camp, so we were coming back to report on how that went, compare the goals of Peace Corps and Child Fund, and propose partnering for one or two more camps to see how they liked the program.

IMG_1438_sm.jpgIt was a strange meeting, being in a mirrored glass office building in a big city. I walked into the conference room and looked down to see Jaime sitting on a public bench right below us. They served us coffee, and it wasn’t even instant coffee with a pound of sugar in it! Everyone was so nicely dressed and groomed. This was not my usual Peace Corps meeting. I myself usually wear muddy hiking boots and days old jeans to meetings. It would only be luck if they had no visible dirt on them. Not the case here. I’d actually showered that morning and put on a skirt. Fancy. In spite of all this, I had to play it cool and along with Rachel, the new head coordinator, give our little power point presentation and field their questions appropriately. They seemed pretty pleased with everything and will be getting back to us within the week about future plans for camps in July. I won’t be taking part in them as I will be on my way home (!), but some lucky volunteers will get to have a mighty good time I hope. It was all incredibly positive. The tone of the meetings, the fact that I was attending meetings at all, made me feel incredibly productive for the first time in a very long time. GLOW has really been a struggle for us, finding people in Guatemala who want to partner with us and provide funding. For a long time it felt like I’d joined the committee just to see it die, and now I feel like we’ve got lots of good people working in the right direction. There’s lots of hope yet.

After this series of good meetings, it was officially time for us to get back on the road. We had a mini tour of Guatemala City dropping off our assistant country director, getting inside the walled housing complex where the Spanish and German ambassadors both live. Why, might you ask, were we being driven around the city? Because Peace Corps is rich? Nope. In the city, it’s 100% a safety issue. The city buses have daily shootings, so are not okay for us to ride in. We zoomed passed coffee shops and McDonalds, Taco Bell, bingo parlors, a real mall, in style in a comfy SUV all the way to the bus station that was to take us back to what is our real life in Guatemala. I told Francisco, our driver, that he should feel free to keep going, all the way to Huehue, but he just laughed.

disturbanceSM.jpgAll too soon we were in a stuffy, unventilated bus stuck in protests on the highway, setting us back two hours so that our 5 1/2 hour trip turned into 7 1/2 hours. We amused ourselves passing the time by making a giant list of things that we need to purchase/replace when we get home this summer. We made a price list and prioritized everything in order of importance. Purchase number one for me? Replacing the friggin’ keyboard on my laptop that decided to stop working last time Fletch cleaned it. This attached USB keyboard is driving me bonkers! We made it to our cheapo but trusty hotel in Huehue exhausted and after all restaurants were closed…except Dominos which delivers to the cheapo hotel. Only five more hours on the bus on Wednesday and we were finally home sweet home in the village. It’s good to be home. With all the traveling and weird eating I ended up feeling nauseous pretty much every night. Yay for eating vegetables and cooking food at home! Also, a big yay for the fresh plums on local trees. Yesterday we spent about an hour picking and eating juicy plums right off the tree at Pedro and Lucia’s house after a grocery trip to town. They’re so confident in our cooking abilities that they sent us home with a giant bag full, to make a marmalade or pie, our choice.

ciruelasSM.jpgThings have picked up since our return. On Friday we started construction for the SPA project, finally! Woohoo! This upcoming week we have 5 more floors to lay and an elementary school health fair on Friday morning. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day (they always celebrate here on May 10), which means lots of activities at the school including a marimba and dancing. I might just have to put on the corte and go down to join them. A few people have already told me I really need to show up because this might just be my last chance to dance in town. They might be right. We’ll see. It depends on how many bolos show up. Last year they were staggering in number, and staggering quite literally all over the dance floor. I stayed away. Regardless, there will be chocolate cake for all the mothers in our host family. Chocolate cake is always a hit.

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Flat Stanley https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/flat-stanley/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/flat-stanley/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 13:04:50 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3591 This blog post is dedicated to Makenna Timmons and her second grade class at St. Matthew’s School in Indianapolis, Indiana. Makenna is a pretty cool cat; we love her and miss her a lot. See you in July chica!

A lot of interesting people have come to visit us during our time in Peace Corps, and for that we consider ourselves lucky, especially since we are so far out in the boonies. It lightens our spirits and recharges us to keep going. Last week we got a visit from someone very special: Flat Stanley.

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Flat Stanley is a pretty normal kid, except that one day, a large bulletin board mounted over his bed fell off the wall and smashed him… and now he’s as flat as a pancake! This sounds terrible, but Stanley soon discovered that he could do things while flat that he couldn’t when he was rounded. His friend Makenna thought he might like to see Guatemala, so she mailed Stanley to her Aunt Emily.

Guatemala is a small country in Central America, about 1,750 miles from Indianapolis. While the United States touches the northern border of Mexico, Guatemala touches the southern border of Mexico. Guatemala is full of steamy jungles, frigid mountains, and everything in between. Since we live high up in the mountains, Uncle Fletch worried Flat Stanley might get cold on his travels through Guatemala, so he made Stanley a capishay to keep him warm. The men in their village have worn the capishay for as long as anyone can remember, and they make them out of wool from the sheep they raise.

The first thing Stanley did in the village was to meet the kids. I like to read to them, so Stanley joined in… even though he doesn’t speak any Spanish! At least the pictures were familiar since we read Where the Wild Things Are, or Donde Viven los Monstruos. Guatemalans speak Spanish, so we took turns translating for Stanley. Some Guatemalans also speak a Mayan language. There are 22 different ones, and in our village, the kids speak Q’anjob’al.

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Stanley played with the kids for a while, and made friends with Chalio. Chalio makes toy boats and airplanes out of cornstalks, and he shared one with Stanley. Then, they went out to play in the garden. The bright sunlight and volcanic soils in Guatemala are good for growing just about anything, like potatoes and carrots and beets and spinach. Some plants like warmer weather, though, so Uncle Fletch decided we should have a greenhouse for growing cucumbers and tomatoes and melons. We like to teach the locals about good nutrition, and growing and eating fruits and vegetables is really good for your health. You guys should try this at home!

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Later that afternoon, we went for a hike. We live in the mountains, but in the nearby valley they have a pretty stream.

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Stanley arrived in Guatemala just before my scheduled girl’s weekend at the lake. Now, I know Stanley is a not a girl, but he was only going to be here for a limited time, so I made an exception and let him come along. Long ago, Lake Atitlán was a huge volcano surrounded by several smaller ones. When it stopped erupting, the crater filled with water until it became a very deep, cold lake. It is the second largest lake in Guatemala, ten miles wide! The locals have tiny boats they paddle out into the lake to go fishing for their dinner.

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Stanley really liked the volcanos, so we invited him along for Uncle Fletch’s birthday trip to climb to the highest point in all of Central America: a volcano called Tajamulco. The trip took two days, and we had to spend the night in a tent near the top. Stanley didn’t mind the climb though, because he rode in my back pack all the way up, so his legs didn’t get tired at all. And, unlike Uncle Fletch and me, Stanley didn’t get soaked on the way up either. We took extra clothes and jackets and mittens, because the freezing wind and thin air would be dangerous to someone without a way to keep warm. Stanley was concerned about being on top of a volcano, but I explained to him that Tajamulco has been extinct for a long time, so we had nothing to worry about. Here’s a picture of me and Stanley at sunrise on the top of the mountain. We could see lots of volcanos in the distance (Guatemala is home to 34 volcanos) AND we could see all the way to the pacific coast. It was pretty cool, and super cold. Frost collected on our hiking boots while we watched the sun come up, and I had to hold on tight so the wind didn’t blow Stanley away!  

stanley_mercedSM.jpgAfter we climbed Tajamulco, I had to go to some meetings near the city of Antigua, Guatemala. It’s the oldest city in the country. It was founded by the Spanish Conquistadores a few years after Columbus discovered the New World. Some of the buildings in Antigua are 500 years old! That’s older than the United States.

But all good things must end, and so Flat Stanley had to head home. The mail in Guatemala is very slow, so Stanley is probably in a big mail boat in the middle of the ocean right now, sailing his way back to Indianapolis. But he asked that we write a blog post about his adventures, so Makenna and her friends could know what he did in Guatemala and not be worried about him.

Thanks for sending your friend to visit, Makenna. Too bad you can’t fit through the mail, too!

Love,

Aunt Emmy and Uncle Fletch

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Poop https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/poop/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/poop/#comments Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:55:34 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3561 poopSM.gifI know we’re quite close to being done here. How can I forget it, when it seems that every day at least one person says in their sing-song Spanish, “Ya mero se van..” (You’re leaving soon…) letting the end of the sentence trail off, which seems to punctuate the inevitability of this upcoming goodbye. But for the time being, we’re still here, still thinking like health workers, sometimes still shocked by things we’re confronted with.

The other day I was up at the pila washing dishes. It was the afternoon, quiet and glaringly bright. Delmi was playing in the flat space between our house and the neighbors. Looking up from the pila I could see across the yard and down to the apple tree in front of our house. Suddenly Delmi tells me she has to poo, so I tell her to go the field.

Now, I’m not happy to give this response, but it’s necessary. She’s little, she needs to poo, she still asks for directions. My job here has been largely to discourage people from pooping in the fields, thus improving sanitation. But what they never told us in training is that kids are so tiny and latrines so big that it’s actually a hazard to try potty training kids in latrines. They could definitely fall in. The family potty trains the kids in the milpa, the cornfields around the house, and I go along with it, because we can’t change everything in a day.

Up to this point Delmi had been playing with her favorite dog Kiki, running around like a savage child, barefoot, dirty face, crazy hair. She looked pretty content with life to tell you the truth. She follows my instructions, almost, and goes not quite into the recently hoed cornfield (because she’s barefoot and doesn’t want to step on anything). I am washing dishes methodically not thinking much about anything, and there’s Delmi, in front of me, squatting and pooping on the walking path between the house and the sheeps’ pen, Kiki waiting patiently behind her playmate. Delmi stands up as though she’s done, toddles a few steps, squats again because apparently she wasn’t quite finished. I’m hoping someone comes out with a shovel and buries this poop promptly. It’s the best we can hope for, right? Just then, Kiki swoops in and licks the whole mess up. I was frozen watching this, disgusted, but thinking, “Well, as long as the mess is cleaned up I should be thankful, right?”

Delmi stands up, pants around her ankles. She’d picked up a tiny stone while squatting, and now lifts her arm above her head and wings the stone at the dog to make it go away, just as she’s seen the adults do. I see Fletch standing paralyzed and staring out from under the apple tree and can’t help but share my disgust by yelling, “KIKI JUST ATE DELMI’S POO!” in English. “THAT’S DISGUSTING!” he yelled back. We are both watching Delmi toddle toward the house, her little round belly sticking out as she carefully chooses each barefoot step with her pants still down around her ankles. She starts yelling, “TXUTXA! TXUTXA!” to get her grandma’s attention. Her aunt runs out of the house and exclaims, “Ay Dios!”, turns and runs back into the house. She emerges a second later with corncobs in her hand. This is like a train wreck. I don’t know why we both, 20 yards apart, felt the need to stop and stare at this whole thing. Delmi’s aunt bends over her and I hear Fletch yell from under the apple tree, “DID YOU SEE WHAT SHE JUST DID WITH THAT CORNCOB!?” And I yelled back, “YUP.”

Fletch was hooting with laughter. I was just sort of dazed. This job is so weird. Pooping in public should not be something I see on a regular basis, but I have seen it…multiple times. And I always think, “Now, Miss Health worker, what are you going to do about it?” After nearly two years, I still don’t know. What do you do about public pooping?

Lest we think this is a third world problem, I was telling this story to our visiting friend Charlotte the other day and she started laughing hysterically. “Oh my god, you have to hear this podcast I was listening to on the bus on the way here!” She quickly snatched up her iPod and found This American Life’s podcast “David and Goliath” in which David Sedaris reveals the darker side of the retail world, full of public poops that those poor register employees are left to clean up. I hadn’t realized my current job was so similar to working in retail…The world is a very strange place. Our experiences are so varied, culture, education, beliefs can be so different. But if there’s one thing we’ve all got in common, it’s poop.

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300 Q https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/untitled/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/untitled/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:52:33 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3540 The other day we were at the health center giving chicken vaccinations. It was a little crazy, as the center was full of women who were getting their children weighed and vaccinated, and the school yard next door was full of screaming kids at recess, and every so often out of the madness a woman would appear with a chicken in hand or five in a sack.

I was sitting on the vaccine cooler reading a book between shots when a teenage girl came up and said good morning. She and I got to talking about the weather and vaccinations and then she said, “I have a little problem, and I want to talk to you because I feel like I can trust you.” At this point I felt it prudent to ask her name, since I obviously didn’t know her as well as she thought she knew me.

Dominga goes to school in a neighboring community, and according to her story, a few days ago a couple of guys approached her while she was walking home from school alone and threatened to, in her words, abuse her if she didn’t give them 300 quetzales the following day. She said she didn’t know who to talk to about this, and then she thought maybe we could give her 300 quetzales so she could pay the men and they would just leave her alone.

I started off by telling what we’ve told everyone a million times over, and what no one seems to believe as true: we don’t have money. Three hundred quetzales in not a small sum around here, especially for a girl who has no way to pay it back. I told her she couldn’t pay the men, because then they could come back and threaten to abuse her any time they wanted more money. She said they’d promised they wouldn’t bother her anymore if she just paid them this one time…

Had she told anyone else about this? No. Who could we tell about this? Not her parents, she said, because they don’t understand her very well. I guess some things are the same for all teenagers the world over. She said if she told her father, she was afraid he’d take her out of school because he doesn’t really want her to study anyway. She looked like she was going to cry throughout much of the conversation.”Do you know any of the community leaders here who you could talk to?” I asked her. No. “What about the school director?” I tried to impress upon her the importance of talking to someone who could do something about this, and also that we weren’t people who could do much about this, though I was worried for her.

We offered to go with her to talk to the school director, but he was gone for the day, picking up uniforms in Huehue. I was worried about this, thinking about what I could possibly do when she seemed pretty unwilling to tell anyone but us about this incident. I told her she had a couple of immediate options, she could go to school but only in the company of her friends. She told me the men don’t bother her unless she’s walking alone. Or she could stay home from school and we could go with her to talk to the school director the next day. She had to make the decision, I said. I gave her my cell phone number, and she thanked me, gave me a hug, and then asked, “Can you just give me 50 quetzales then?” on her way out the door.


I’m so tired of people trying to get money out of us, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I was so drawn into her story at first, and genuinely worried. But the more I think about it, the more it all feels made up. Maybe I’m just jaded these days, but her story has all the elements that someone like me would fall for: innocent girl, villanous men, girl getting taken out of school for something that wasn’t her fault and banned to a life of housework forever more. Dominga hasn’t called or come to talk to us since she asked us for money, and it makes me wonder what the issue really was. What if she couldn’t tell her parents because they were the ones who sent her to us with this story, because they need money and everyone thinks the gringoes have a backpack full of dollars? I can think of a million possibilities.

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El Mirador https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/el-mirador/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/el-mirador/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:35:46 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3497 jungle_loveSM.jpg

We are back from the jungle, and what a trip it was. Much like last year’s Holy Week, this one was a great opportunity to see more of what Guatemala is all about. But in this case, it was all about natural wonders and ancient Mayan prehistory instead of religious festivities and colonial Spanish architecture. So much happened that we’ve decided to jointly write this post, much like last year’s adventure.

Guatemala is full of ancient Mayan ruins, the most famous of which is Tikal, a Mayan city that flourished from about 300AD on. It’s located in the center of the Peten, a steamy low-lying jungle that is the northernmost panhandle of Guatemala. But soon after our arrival, we learned that there are hundreds of other ruins, and archaeologists estimate that they’ve located less than a quarter of what’s really out there beneath the jungle. Some are simple, small, and easy to get to, like Zacaleu, Ixtatán, or Iximché. They are relatively recent, dating from 1000AD to 1500AD, and are easy to find because they are located in or near cities that are still occupied by present-day Maya. Others, however, are more elusive. The vast jungle north of Tikal holds a plethora of ruins, the most famous of which is El Mirador.

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We heard about El Mirador soon after we arrived in Guatemala, and decided almost immediately that we needed to see it before we left. It was only discovered a few decades ago, and is largely buried by trees and vines. Archaeology work continues, but at a slow pace: access is by a two-day jungle trek with pack mules (or by helicopter)… and that only after you’ve made the tough journey into the Peten. That challenge itself was enough to grab our interest, but El Mirador has other noteworthy distinctions as well. Many of the pyramids predate Christ by 200 years, a full half millennium before Tikal; and the largest pyramid, La Danta (“the Tapir”), is bigger by volume than any of the Egyptian pyramids. El Mirador was the cultural and economic center of Central America for centuries, with highways stretching out to cities in every direction. It’s amazing how much we know about ancient Rome, but how little about classical Mayan civilization, its equal on the other side of the planet.

Travel of any substantial length in Guatemala involves mishaps, and this was no exception. Our original plan was to take the overnight bus from Guatemala City to Flores. We arrived at the bus station in Guatemala City at about 5pm, only to discover that our seat reservation, which Charlotte had confirmed several times, had been lost and the bus company staff was completely unapologetic about having given our seats away. This very Guatemalan outcome was a fortunate mistake; we ended up taking a taxi to a different bus line a few blocks away, where we found seats on a much nicer bus (AC and a bathroom!), if we could wait until 11pm to depart. Guatemala is all about waiting, so we got out the cards and settled down in the terminal. We were, for a time, very amused by the red glowing toilet in the ladies room. Some unfortunate lady’s phone apparently slipped from her pocket and into the bowl. The red glow was eerie upon walking into the dark bathroom, but hilarious once we figured it out. You should have seen the Guatemalans staring at the weird gringos who kept walking in and out of the bathroom in turns, laughing hysterically. We didn’t think to alert anyone to the situation, and after we were all focused on our card game, a local woman and her daughter walked into the dark bathroom and squealed. Hilarious! They did alert the bus station attendant, who couldn’t find anything with which to extract the phone. Finally a local man who looked ready to start his vacation (white sox with brown leather sandals) reached in and pulled it out.

With our departure pushed back, our new arrival time in Flores was set for about 8am. This later schedule proved handy when the bus ran out of gas, just after sunup. “You’d think that if his JOB were to drive the bus, the least he could do was make sure there was enough gas in it,” Charlotte grumbled as we stood around at the side of the road, blinking in the early morning sun. When she’d first asked him what the problem was, he told her, “oh, es solo un pequeno error.” (Oh, it’s just a little mistake.) But these things happen, especially here, and about twenty minutes later, another bus came by and a guy got off carrying a 5-gallon bucket filled to the rim with sloshing diesel fuel. Watching that chubby old driver sweating and struggling with pouring a huge bucket into a fuel filler at shoulder height made it all worth it.

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I’d like to say that we had better luck on the way back, but we didn’t. Just different. The return bus was an old broken down Greyhound from the 80s, and the route wasn’t a first-class route. That saved us about 40Q each ($5), but meant that it stopped every ten minutes to pick up people, adding several hours to an already painfully long journey. And since the seats were filled when we left the station, all the newcomers had to stand in the aisles. Or, that was the idea. In reality, they leaned over the paying customers or pretended to “accidentally” sit on their laps. At one point, a kid was holding his poopy chicken right over Emily and the book she was reading. Luckily, the book was interesting and kept the chicken’s attention long enough to prevent any mishaps.

readingchickenSM.jpgI was pretty excited that we’d get to spend some time in the city of Flores. While visiting Tikal with The Four Witches back in September, I’d read up on the city and really wanted to see it. It just worked out that our in-park rooms near the ruins and nearer still to a cool shimmering pool made the trip to Flores seem too long, too hot, too far away, and not nearly as enjoyable as the shaded corner of the pool or shaded porch of our thatched rooms. In fact, we were expecting a pretty arduous journey into the Peten based on the temperatures we experienced in September. Fortunately, the weather had mercy on us. Don’t get me wrong; it was definitely hot, but not nearly as hot as our first visit. A little behind schedule, our big red bus rambled over the bridge that connects the town of Santa Elena with Flores, a tiny island community in the center of Lake Peten-Itzá. Just the fact that we were on a little island made things feel a bit exotic. Because we’d managed to get the last seats on the 11pm bus, we were in the back seats which do not recline. Though we tried to take turns lounging across one another (at least Charlotte, Sara, and I all took turns), we didn’t sleep a whole lot, but the new scenery woke me up a bit and the prospect of a tasty breakfast kept me going. Guided by the more experienced ones in our group, we were led to Casa de los Amigos, serving up plenty of tasty treats. We all commenced to eat heartily. I felt like our vacation had properly begun.

At first, we thought it unfortunate that this same hostal didn’t have room for us (they don’t take reservations), but it turns out Alana, the first of our group to arrive, had found a great little hotel that offered clean, spartan rooms with private bathrooms. The best part, though, were the fans in each room and rooftop hammocks to enjoy the breeze and views of the lake. After eating, we moved into our hotel, showered, and hung around in the hammocks soaking up the warm breeze and pleasant views. Lake Peten-Itzá is Guatemala’s third largest, following Izabál on the east coast and Atitlán in south central Guetemala. The tiny town feels about 4 blocks wide in each direction, and while the building construction and bright colors seemed familiar, Flores felt a little different than typical Guatemala. The island was originally settled by Mayans that had migrated south from Mexico. The settlement was largely ignored by the Spaniards until late in the Conquest, and was therefore the last independent Mayan settlement before they got wiped out in 1697.

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We used Flores as fueling station, filling up on food and catching up on rest before setting out on our epic adventure. It served us well in this respect, and we enjoyed the quiet streets and pleasant sunset. On our way out to dinner we ran into this giant dead tarantula squashed in the street. Thankfully, this was the only one we saw during the trip. Sunday we had half the day to relax and eat before our microbus showed up to take us grocery shopping and deliver the eight of us on the dusty dirt road to the tiny community of Carmelita, located three and a half hours away in the Mayan Biosphere National Reserve.

tarantulaSM.jpgI got the name of Doña Pati from some PCVs who had done the trip before, so I called her and set up the reservations for all of us. When we’d begun to look into a trip to El Mirador, we’d heard prices between $250 and $400. None of us could afford this, but going straight to the tour guides in Carmelita instead of working through a tourist agency in Flores brought down the cost quite a bit. Most of our group elected to bring our own food and tents, which also helped. If you include what we paid for transport there and back (8 of us renting a van) and the food we bought for ourselves, the trip was quite a deal at about $100/ea. Little did we know what a bargain we were in for.

We arrived in tiny, quiet Carmelita around 4:00 in the afternoon. It felt more like a scene from Africa than the Guatemala to which I’ve grown accustomed; tiny huts with thatched roofs made a semi-circle around the perimeter of the town, backed by jungle wilderness. Pati had informed me that we were welcome to spend Sunday night in her backyard in Carmelita for no extra charge, and as a group we decided this was excellent. It turns out she and her husband, our guide Carlos, had invested much of their earnings into setting up a small campground with latrines and a shower area (bucket bath only, but WAY better than nothing).

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Pati saw that we were all settled and said her good byes for the night, adding, “You might want to put your tents in under the porch. It looks like it’s going to rain.” A few people expressed some skepticism at this remark. Lesson: on matters of weather, you should trust the locals. The rain started shortly after sundown, but it brought cool wind and nice weather for sleeping. We got up early the next morning, and after the guides had loaded up the mules, we were on the trail by nine. Although we were under a light drizzle, I felt generally relieved we weren’t walking through sweltering heat. Everyone seemed in high spirits, and we were off!

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Our guide Carlos was a calm, friendly guy. I got to chat with him on several occasions, and learn about his life and family and work. He has some crops planted, but most of his living is from guiding tourists and renting mules to other guides for their work. He told me proudly that he has over 20 mules. “How much does a mule cost?” I asked.

“About five or six thousand,” he said. “But it’s really more than that, because I have to pay the vet to come out every now and then to give them shots and check up on them.” Wow, that is a huge investment for a Guatemalan. About that time, we passed by a tomb that had a tunnel cut out of the side of it by grave robbers. We’d seen a few of those before, so I asked him about it.

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“It used to be that people came to steal the offerings, to sell to antique traders,” he explained. “People need to make a living, get enough to eat. That doesn’t go on so much anymore, now that we have tourists like you, and the people can guide or lead mules. It all changed about 20 years ago. Now the only robbers are the Mexicans that come across the border to steal the treasures, but that is slowing down too, because now the government posts more guards on the site.” The Mexican border is pretty close to El Mirador, only about 6km away.

mirador-plunder.gifPresident Colom and others in the Guatemalan government are contemplating putting a rail line in from Carmelita out to the ruins. That would change everything so dramatically. It would change the tiny community of Carmelita, as well as the feel and level of development inside the park. I think El Mirador is a treasure to the world, but I also like the present challenge of really having to work to get there (or pay the right price). However, I’m sure over time, access will change and the traffic will increase. I found myself worrying that those who work in and around Tikal might suffer as tourist traffic skips little Tikal, and goes right to the world’s giant. But I will admit, I felt a bit smug after a while. We can tell our great nieces and nephews or anyone silly enough to sit and listen to old fogey ramblings that we walked to El Mirador before the train was there, before things were again so set in stone (literally) and programmed. This did feel like a pretty “epic” trip, as we all jokingly dubbed it in the planning phase. My niece at home will definitely term this as another one of “Aunt Emmy’s aVentures”.

One of the things I like about El Mirador and the surrounding area is that it’s a fantastically huge expanse of preserved wilderness, much like a national park in the US. That means it doesn’t have many of the downers of Guatemala: noisy busses, blaring music, aggressive salesmen. You can even pitch your tent and sleep under the starts without worry of being robbed. This is not to say that it’s perfect; the Peten region has its share of narcotraffickers, illegal logging, and related murders in both industries. But as Carlos explained, the narcos and the tourist guides know where each other frequents and stay out of each others’ way, as it’s mutually better for business.

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There wasn’t as much wildlife as I’d expected, considering it’s a jungle. After the tarantula scare in Flores, we saw very few bugs. No big cats, either… the dry season is hard on the jaguars and they hunt elsewhere. The toucans and jungle turkeys were there, a few coatis, and a fox; as well as the monkeys (both howler and spider). We didn’t see much of the howlers, we just heard them at night, roaring away like King Kong. Our first night at El Mirador, shortly after we’d all bedded down and things had fallen silent, the howlers started up, and got closer and closer. It felt like they had to be in the trees just above us. It was crazy and cool. Then I put my earplugs in and feel asleep. I’m glad they found no need to descend from the trees and investigate those who’d invaded their territory. It would be pretty terrifying if you didn’t know what it was, and Emily got a great audio clip at sunrise for your enjoyment. The spider monkeys were more visible, though, swinging in trees and watching us with mild disinterest. Sometimes they did get interactive, though, like this monkey who decided he didn’t like us in his territory. He grabbed branches with all four hands and shook them like crazy, to try to intimidate us. We thought it was cool, so we hung around to take a video. He was not amused, and took to snapping off branches and throwing them at us. His aim got better on the next throw, and I had to dodge at the last second. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loaCcsycerI

But the most exciting wildlife we saw was the barba amarilla, or yellow-bearded snake. I came hiking up the trail one afternoon and Anne was standing there, staring at the ground.

“Jaime, look out. A snake.”barba amarillaSM.jpg

Anne had been paranoid about snakes the whole trip, ever since our boss told her that the jungle was teeming with poisonous vipers of all kinds. So far, we’d seen none, but I looked past her to see a tiny coiled snake in the middle of the path.

“Huh,” I said, bending over to get a picture. About that time Carlos came up behind me, leading his mule.

“Is that a rattlesnake?” Anne asked him.

He peeked, and shook his head. “No, that’s barba armarilla. Far more poisonous than cascabela (rattlesnake). Be very careful,” he said with caution. “Do you want me to kill it?”

Anne frowned. She’s not a big fan of killing things, and she told him so.

“Well, if we leave it, it might kill one of my mules,” Carlos warned. “A bite from that thing, and a mule will be dead within an hour.”

whackSM.jpgHearing that, we all backed away an extra step, and Carlos took out his machete. I was sortof expecting an Indiana Jones type battle to ensue, but instead Carlos went to a nearby tree and cut himself a stick that was about 8 feet long and as big around as my thumb. “It’s very dangerous to attack them with a machete,” he explained. “It puts your had too close to where they can strike.”

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

With three quick whacks of the long stick, the snake was very decisively pummeled to death. He lifted it with the stick and hung it in a tree, and we were once again on our way. “No, you go ahead,” Anne told me, stepping to the side of the path and smiling.

Carlos informed us at this point that he always carries antidote to the barba amarillo with him on these hikes. While the mule would die within in an hour, a man would die in two (slower heart rate), but with the antivenom and the possibility to call for a helicopter, there’s a chance a man could survive. Again, we were all pleased with Carlos and his preparedness.

FIRST DAY: EL TINTAL

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bridge_sm.jpgWe really lucked out on the weather. The mercury never passed the 90s, a rarity for the Peten. We had planned the trip for the dry season, which was a boon on many counts. The dry earth kept the bugs to a minimum, and it was possible to hike free of mud. Our guide told us that they still work in the rainy season, but everyone rides the mules because the mud is halfway up your thigh. Yikes. Carlos told us how he’s lost more than one mule to drowning, and just for the fun of it he led us across the makeshift “bridges” over the deepest ravines. I can’t imagine how treacherous it would feel to cross these lashed together logs while they’re wet and slippery, with water rushing below your feet.

Speaking of water, during the dry season there isn’t any. Much of the mules’ loads were jerrycans of water, about 5 gallons for each of us. Carlos told me that before he was a guide, he was a laborer at the archaeological site. He got paid 100q a day ($12, a kingly wage around here) to haul water ten miles each way on his back for the archaeologists, 12+ hours a day. He said it was awful work, and he would like to never do it again. The dry season doesn’t just affect archaeologists and hikers; the jaguars don’t hang around the park during that time and the snakes don’t come out much either. We got drinking water as part of the cost of the trip, but if we wanted to bathe in a bucket, we had to pay a guy 10q for some unfiltered brownish water to splash on ourselves. Which we gladly did. Some look at the glass and say it’s half empty. Some say it’s half full. A Peace Corps Volunteer asks, “Hey can I take a bath in that?”

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The first evening we camped at El Tintal, a recently discovered ruin that hasn’t even been excavated yet. It is the remains of a pretty big city-temple complex, with a sophisticated moat system that is still evident if you know what you are looking at. It’s on the saqbe’, or ancient Mayan highway, that runs from Tikal up to El Mirador. We left our gear and mules at the base camp (a collection of straw roofs and a fireplace) and went exploring with Carlos. He took us up El Tigre, a temple that he and another guide discovered some 20 years ago. “He’s dead now,” Carlos explained. “He was an older man, and had been a guide for a long time.” He didn’t speak much more about it, but I got the impression that they were friends, or maybe this other fellow was Carlos’s mentor.  

spidermonkeys_sm.jpgFrom atop El Tigre, we could see an amazing view of the jungle canopy, complete with monkeys foraging for their evening meal. “If you look over there at the horizon,” Carlos showed us, “you can see El Mirador.” It was a green ridge in the distance, and it looked like a lot of jungle between here and there. We could also see another ruin off to the east, a bump of trees protruding from the canopy. It was the temples of Nakb’e, a ruin even more recently discovered than the ones we were standing one, that Carlos also claimed to have part in finding. We weren’t aware it was an option, but if we’d planned a six day excursion, we could have walked a triangle from Carmelita to Tintal, Tintal to El Mirador, El Mirador to Nakb’e, then Nakb’e to Carmelita. It was a shame to have passed it up, but we saw lots of cool stuff anyway. If you’re looking in to doing this trip, be advised that it would be a worthwhile option.

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We didn’t run into many other hikers, but the ones we did meet were friendly. The first evening, we met a pair of Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras who were on vacation with their buddy, a yoga instructor. We returned from El Tigre ruin to find them practicing in the campsite. Oh, wait, did I say yoga? Sorry, turns out they do acro-yoga. We’d never heard of that before, so we sat staring at them, mouths open, until they noticed and invited us to join them. Emily and I once did acrobatic swing dancing, and we do yoga now, so we were totally game to give it a try. I am pleased to announce that we didn’t dislocate anything in the attempt, and will start looking for an acro-yoga studio when we return to the US. It was pretty much super fun and the stretching it provided was much appreciated after our first day of hiking.

Although most of us brought our own food to save cost, Nic and Katie shelled out an extra 250q (about $30) each to avoid the hassle. Who’d have guessed that for the money, you also got a muchacha to COOK the food? Her name was Maribel, and she was very friendly and a quick hand with the frying pan. The first morning in Tintal, she was very worried about those of us who had brought our own food. “Are you sure you don’t want me to fix you something? You have a lot of walking to do today. You’re going to need the energy. I have some extra beans and potatoes if you want it.” In spite of being around our age, she was like a mother hen. We went about making our bowls of loaded oatmeal, with tons of nuts and dried fruit. Maribel was not convinced this would get us through until lunch, and shook her head disapprovingly as we ate. When we were eating oatmeal and ramen noodes, Nic and Katie were having homecooked candlelight dinners, the last of which was broiled chicken. How do you get uncooked chicken to not spoil on a 5-day jungle trek? Easy… you don’t kill it until you want to eat it. On our last day hiking out of the jungle, I saw a larger group pass on their way into the ruins. There were three chickens strapped in make-shift holsters, like chicken straight jackets, to the side of a couple of mules. It was hilarious, but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera to get the picture for you. You’ll just have to imagine. [A note to my mother–notice the travel french press in use for puffy-faced me in the morning. Thanks ma!]

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Maribel’s presence was actually a boon for all of us, and we owe Nic and Katie a favor for hiring her. She shared hot water with everyone, and was the source of occasional goodness like the time we stopped for a break in the sweltering heat and she busted out a watermelon from somewhere amongst the mules. That was the moment I realized that I had to tip big when we got back. And did I mention, the mules were a good thing too? I sure wouldn’t want to hike for five days with a ten-pound watermelon in my backpack. I wouldn’t have wanted to start out the trip like the mules, carrying five gallons of water per person. But I was glad to have it, since we all averaged about 3 litres a day just for drinking.

Sadly, no one told us about the option to buy bathing water this first night. We went to bed sticky with sweat from the days walk, and in the middle of the night the wind whipped up and chilled most of us. Fletch and I were only mildly uncomfortable, but a few people were miserable. When the first of us woke up a little before six, the fire had been lit for hours and our pot of water boiled to make food. Carlos was up and poking the fire; he sleeps in a hammock under the shelters and said it was so cold he couldn’t stand to stay in bed after about 3am. That’s something we weren’t expecting: weather in the jungle cold enough to see your breath!

SECOND AND THIRD DAY: EL MIRADOR

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mirador-laDanta.gifarchaeologoSM.jpgAs I might have mentioned before, El Mirador is an active archaeological site. For several months out of the year, it’s swarming with workers and researchers and students- none of whom were present this week. The dry season makes work essentially impossible right now, due to lack of drinking water, so they only show up during the rains. Conveniently the rains in May, June, and July correspond with when University folks can make it down from the US to work on the project. Unfortunately for them, that means they get to work with mosquitos and foot rot and soggy clothes and 100% humidity, whereas we had a pleasant little jaunt in the woods. Carlos took us around to see some of the work areas that the archaeologists use: storage buildings for ceramics shards, washing stands for cleaning artifacts, tents for the researchers, and a screened-in building where they set up their computers. We also saw two gorgeous bungalows that are occupied by the park and project directors while they are in residence.

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But the main point of the trip was the ruins themselves. I can’t really do them justice with words, so I will let the pictures do the talking. El Mirador is a massive, ancient Mayan city filled with temples and passageways, giant leering faces and lofty terraced plazas.

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We hiked with gusto for two days to get into the park. Once we arrived, we got to take all the time we wanted that afternoon and the next day for resting at the campsite and visiting all the ruins. By this point we’d all taken a liking to Carlos, so whenever we sat down to take breaks and pulled out granola bars, dried fruit, and nuts, we’d collect some from all of us and pass it over to Carlos. On Wednesday we were sitting around camp snacking in the afternoon as he strolled in and laughed, “You guys have so much food! Like it comes out of nowhere.” He went on to explain that while he and Pati were separating cargo and loading the mules right before we started, they’d come to the conclusion that the six of us who said we’d bring our own food had come woefully unprepared. Pati, saying nothing to any of us nor adding any additional charge, had packed surplus food for our cook, Maribel. I think she was under instruction to pressure us to eat adequately. We all now understood Maribel’s concern, and laughed with Carlos. This was just another way we found them to be a very considerate touring outfit.

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There were lots of great things about this trip. The group couldn’t have been better. Being out in the woods and hearing only nature do its thing for five days! No regatone, no honking chicken buses, no screaming kids. But I think what I loved the most was the feeling that we were somewhere with so much possibility. It feels like a National Park waiting to happen. The land is already a protected area/national park, but there’s none of the other stuff…hotels, swimming pools, tourist shops, kids attacking you to shine your shoes, even if you’re just wearing sandals and they’d be blacking your feet. There are some folks who come in by helicopter, like President Colom and Mel Gibson. The latter visited to glean inspiration for his film Apocalypto, which I have not seen but now feel I must when I resume my Netflix subscription, in spite of being told it’s a terrible film. The ‘copter ride is just $400 (witches, you would dig this place, but I think you’d enjoy the helicopter ride in and out rather than the five day trek). Anyway, this absence of traffic was cool and maybe a little eerie. The feeling of solitude was magnified by all the archaeology work stations in pause, all their dormitories and offices abandoned. The ruins are so raw, half uncovered. You feel like you’re standing on so much waiting to be discovered. Who knows what information they’ll have twenty or thirty years from now?

templeface_sm.jpgI also found it difficult, after a few days of just enjoying walking in the woods and appreciating nature, to really comprehend that what we were seeing at El Mirador (and a few stops along the way) were all man made, not nature made. To imagine whole societies and cultures existing and thriving here in a place the present-day archaeologists find uninhabitable for much of the year is pretty interesting. We spent each sunset atop a temple, and the morning we left the park, Charlotte, Sara, Anne, and I pulled ourselves out of bed to go with the ever-patient Carlos to sit atop a temple and watch the sun come up to the sound of howler monkeys in the distance and a breeze stirring the canopy. Many current theories propose that different indigenous groups left their cities (including the Anasazi [1] cliff dwellers in the U.S southwest) for reasons of environmental degradation: the masses of people could no longer support themselves on the available land. It’s fascinating, maybe also a little discouraging, that we humans are still what we have always been.

It was hard to imagine this vast canopy before me gone, to see the city in stone. There are so many ruins in this area. We started to see it in Tikal in September, and it was everywhere evident on this hike, that anywhere there is a rise in the land, there is a ruin beneath the trees. You see a tree growing with rocks squeezing out between its roots. In the middle of the woods, you’d start a climb and realize there were more rocks beneath your feet than before, that you walked up and over such a uniform bulge. Then we’d see the treasure hunters’ tunnels. In the distance around Flores, the hills look unnatural, and if you ever take a flight from Guate to Tikal or vice versa, you can see that the mounds below you are strangely uniform and steep like no hills pushed from the earth. There is so much here in Guatemala, under the surface. It cannot, and I think it should not, all be uncovered, but it’s really mind boggling to see and yet not see what’s there. These trees protruding from the ruins also brought to mind Tolkein’s Ents. The trees rip up, crumble, and move such carefully cut stone. I think the Ents are a genius characterization of the silent, persistant strength of trees. Carlos informed us that the builders of these ruins used obsidian saws to cut the stone and most of the forest was cut down and burned to procure the lime necessary for construction. It seems the trees are taking their revenge.

On one of the informational signs, we saw a timeline that I’d like to share with you.

  • 3114 BC- The beginning of this cycle of the Mayan astrological calendar
  • 2000 BC- Corn appears in the region (a BIG deal)
  • 300 BC- Most of the ruins we saw were active (Tintal, El Mirador, Nakbé, Wakná)
  • 150 AD- El Mirador was abandoned, for whatever reason
  • 300 AD- Ruins to the south were active (Tikal and others)
  • 600 AD- Ruins at Copán (Honduras) were active
  • 900 AD- Most classical Mayan cities abandoned
  • 1200 AD- Postclassical Mayan cities active (Mayopan, Zacaleu, Iximché)
  • 1500s AD- Spanish show up and ruin everything
  • 2012 AD- End of this cycle of the Mayan astrological calendar

This reminded me about this “end of the world” thing. I hear there is some silliness going around about great floods and famines and the earth ripping open and so forth in 2012. However, it’s the Maya who invented the darn calendar, and they know it just means that the wheel is back to the start and will continue turning. It’s like midnight, but for a MUCH bigger wheel.

At present, because of the relatively low traffic flow, the rules of the park are pretty loosey-goosey. What you can and can’t see, what you can and can’t do are often left up to the interpretation of your guide. For example, the previous volunteer group who gave us Pati’s information spent one night camping on top of the temples. We were told that hasn’t been done for 4 or 5 years. There is a tunnel under one of the temples that is full of paintings, and Carlos asked us if we wanted to see it. He told us we’d have to pay 20q each to get in, but he could talk to the man with the keys if we were interested. He also mentioned this had to be a hush-hush thing, so we were not to mention it to other groups and could only do it while if there weren’t other groups in the vicinity. From the beginning, this idea felt like it was just park guards out to make a little extra for themselves. Don’t get me wrong; I would have gladly paid 20q to enter that tunnel and see the paintings, but I get the feeling the official protocol for the tunnel is that it’s reserved for those who come in helicopter and leave hefty donations to continued research. Unfortunately, the man with the keys apparently decided there were too many people about, and we never did get to go in.

Also, upon entering the reserve there are signs saying that no alcohol is permitted in the park. Our first night in El Mirador atop the jaguar temple, there were a few foreign tourists who lit up their cigarettes and began swigging from a gallon size jug of Venado rum (the cheapest and nastiest stuff available). We are not so straight-laced as to completely disapprove; we often fill a Klean Kanteen with red wine for our multi-day hikes as it’s nice to relax around the fire in the evening. We were never told “no alcohol”, we just saw it on signage once in Carmelita; the only reason we didn’t bring any this trip was that we were planning for ridiculously hot weather and therefore concerned with dehydration. Another tour group we spent some time chatting with said their guide told them sleeping atop the temples was no longer allowed because backpackers like their pot and alcohol too much.

As the four of us girls along with Carlos carefully descended the treacherous steps of the Jaguar temple in the early morning light, a group of British boys was running up the steps and one of them cried, “Did we miss sunrise?” He was very disheartened, and his mate muttered, “That’s what happens when your guide spends all night getting stoned.” Tourism is a very tricky thing. Carlos confirmed that many operators spend most of their winnings on drugs and alcohol. Really, I felt some pity for these operators. They’re in charge of all these foreigners who come in, many who don’t speak Spanish with guides who only speak Spanish. They bring in drugs, they bring in alcohol, and they probably think they’re being friendly by offering some to the guides as well, much like we shared our snacks with Carlos. These guides are often young guys and they want to be good guides, they want to get tips. They’re going to try and please and integrate with the groups as much as they can, and eventually they get caught up in acting the wrong part for the wrong group.

One blog we found about the Mirador hike encourages groups to bring in alcohol for the guides instead of monetary tips. “What are they going to do with money in the middle of the jungle?” the author asks. This annoyed all of us. They don’t live in the jungle and barter for food and necessities; they just operate tours there. Carlos, for one, sends his daughters to a boarding school in Guatemala City where they can learn English and German, and come back to help with the tour operation. We were all completely opposed to tipping with alcohol, especially since we work in Guatemala and are painfully aware that alcoholism is the number one killer of the Guatemalan male. A lot of tourists and expats all over the world have this attitude that they can do whatever they please in these parts. And you know what? For the most part they can. No one is going to stop them. That doesn’t mean they should. I love to travel, I love these kind of trips, but all this felt like a cautionary tale about the dark side of tourism. Be mindful fellow travels, if not for your sake, then for your hosts.

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Jaime, Katie, Sara, Charlotte, Anne, Emily, Alana, Nic

On Friday as we got closer and closer to Carmelita, we were all excited to say we finished, to get real showers, to eat heaping plates of fresh food. But once we were back at the campground, packing up our bags and loading the van that we’d hired to pick us up, it was a little sad to say goodbye to Carlos and Maribel, and sad to think how many hours of travel still lay ahead of us. We doled out our tips, our thanks, our hugs, and then piled into the van to begin the lengthy stretch of dirt road back to Flores. We all fell silent, from exhaustion, from a week of talking to each other, from the van’s vibrations being too loud to compete with. I felt in my sleepy daze a sense of satisfaction of a vacation well executed, with the perfect mix of pleasant company, challenge, relaxation, and revelations of new things. The challenge now would be to get back to work and make these last three months count for something.


1. “Anasazi” as a term is under some debate; that is what the current inhabitants called the original people of Mesa Verde when first asked by archaeologists, but it has since come to light that the word literally translates to “ancient enemy”, which is pretty pejorative. We don’t know what the current politically-correct name is.

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Knox In Guatemala https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/knox-in-guatemala/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/knox-in-guatemala/#comments Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:22:34 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3390 AliceMcD2_HDR2SM.jpg

A bright spot in the last few weeks was switching to work on the third goal of Peace Corps: promoting a better understading of Guatemalans on the part of Americans. I have a good friend who was once my Spanish professor at Knox. She was the director of the Barcelona study program while I was there, and went on to be my honors thesis advisor in my last year at Knox. She and her husband were so supportive of our goal to be in the Peace Corps that they invited Fletch to sit in on their college Spanish classes, and then wrote letters of support for him during our very long paperwork process. Now she’s head of the Global Studies department as well, which works in close coordination with Knox’s Peace Corps preparotory program. From the moment we got to Guatemala she was looking for a way to come visit us, and she made it here in July for an investigatory trip to bring students back in March. And March finally arrived, bringing with it Robin, Andy, and 12 Knox students.

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My friend Alice, another Knox grad now a grad student in New York, was also on spring break and had been trying to make it to Guatemala since we got here. She actually arrived 2 days before the Knox group. It was, again as always, great to see someone from home. We’ve been penpals these two long years, so we didn’t have to catch up on too much lost time. She was in the small group of friends (which included Robin and her family) that helped us keep our sanity as the Peace Corps paperwork stalled, and then they accepted us, and then rejected us, and then they decided they’d let us come to Guatemala after all! And we hadn’t seen one another since our departure from Galesburg.  

We had two choices for the trip: either meet up with the Knox students in an area of Quiche we’ve never before visited and only see that area and Antigua before Alice went home, or see the lake and bring Alice to our site before getting her back to Antigua to fly home. She came dedicated (like our previous guests) to seeing our home, way out here in the mountains. I have to give her credit; I hadn’t tagged her as that hard core before this. As she admitted to me as I explained the complicated and honestly annoying way we wash dishes, she’s never even been camping. I would say we are just short of camping here. We showed Alice around the area by taking hikes up the valley to see the views, and down the valley to see the river. She even accompanied me to an HIV talk in Yulais where she was a very proficient tape dispenser for the very tape-dependent activity I was leading. For the few days we were in site Fletch was busy in town, so she was my charla side-kick.

IMG_0863SM.jpgShe gave me the opportunity to have something I frequently miss here, girlfriend time. I like Fletch a lot, but it’s really just so far from the same thing. We had a Saturday spent lounging on the decks at Casa del Mundo and dining in their cafe, while Fletch hung out in the much-less-expensive backpacker hostel we were staying at, the Iguana Perdida. It’s also great in its own right; it just lacks a great swimming area. I have to say, after two years, I feel good about doing Peace Corps as a married couple, but we both comment frequently on how we miss our other friends and alone time, me being alone with my bad self/Jaime being alone with his bad self. So Alice’s visit was a gift to both of us. Jaime got some uber relaxing alone time at the lake.

She was glad to have made it all the way to Temux, and equally glad to make it back to Antigua. The buses were miraculously kind to us on Alice’s account. We made it to Antigua almost 2 hours faster than we’ve ever managed to do before! Bathing and cleaning up in general was our top priority when we arrived, as the stones of the chuj had collapsed the night we arrived in our village… so there was no more bathing for us during her stay at our house.

As I made sure Alice got on her shuttle to the airport, Jaime met up with Norm and Steve. They delivered us to Panajachel in order to make it back to the Iguana where the Knox group was hanging out, thanks to my suggestion during Robin’s July visit.

Robin’s co-director for the program is Andy, a Knox grad who along with his wife served as Peace Corps volunteers in El Quiche (central Guatemala) from 2004-2006. We met Andy and Erin about a month after we recieved our invitation to Peace Corps Guatemala. Galesburg, IL is not a big town, and after 3 different people we know (and who don’t know each other) heard we were going to Guatemala and mentioned they knew a couple who’d just come back, one of those friends decided to host a dinner and introduce us. Turns out they lived about 8 blocks from us. Andy helped organize the Knox trip and he did the driving. He worked on some eco-tourism projects during his time here, and lived quite close to Rigoberta Menchu’s birth site, so going back to his site was literally a trip to take the students to the heart of Guatemala. They also had time to spend the day with a bunch of PCV’s we don’t know, because we live too far away from them!

When we stepped off the dock at the Iguana, Andy and Robin were miraculously right there to greet us, ahh, another slice of home! We promptly took up the couch with a lake view. My friend and fellow volunteer Charlotte (blog listed in the side-bar) also happened to be stopping by the Iguana because her brother was in town. Robin and Andy decided to have the class practice their Spanish that day by having a post-dinner Peace Corps panel in the lounge room, so one former and three current volunteers got to answer lots of questions about why we came, what we love, what we don’t love so much, what we miss now, and what we will miss when we go home, among other things. The biggest challenge for me was speaking slowly, heh.

I have that problem in English as well. Rewind a second. Alice’s flight arrived two hours late and I was in the park waiting for her for quite some time. We were both so relieved when she arrived that we were talking like crazy. I took her to the bank to change her dollars over, and we had to wait in a ridiculously long line where we didn’t waste a second catching up with one another. After about ten minutes the man behind me asked, “Excuse me, are you speaking English?” in accented English. I told him yes. He sighed as though he’d been holding his breath for quite some time, “You speak so fast,” he said, bewildered. Alice and I are both relatively fast talkers with a tendency to mumble; we understand each other. I think eavesdropping was a lot more work than that guy had bargained for.

IMG_0874_sm.jpgFast forward back to the Iguana. It was a really great night, and not just because the owners of the Iguana gave us our room for free because we brought them all the business. 😉 No, really, it was great because it was humbling and calming. Often times we feel way out here, all on our own, trying to make things work by sheer will. As detailed in my last post, a lot of times stuff doesn’t work in spite of our best efforts. But that night, with all these Knox students interested in what we’re doing, my former professor turned friend, Andy who (along with Erin) shared with us what he knew about Peace Corps and Guatemala before we left, my friend Charlotte who I’d have never known if not for Peace Corps–I was completely aware of my small part in something much bigger. Nothing relies entirely on me; we’re all just doing what we can and sharing what we know. We are all part of this bigger thing, of a college that I loved, of a service organization that called to me from the time I was 17. I remember when getting to these places, Knox and Peace Corps, were my goals. And there I was, having made it. I’m part of so many things that came before me and part of what is to come after me. It’s nice to feel so profoundly that none of us is really standing alone, you know?  

The next morning we had breakfast with Andy and Robin as they prepared to head to Antigua and Tikal. We headed back to Panajachel to meet up with Norm and Steve who took us home. I must say, I think we rocked third goal work last week.

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Things Fall Apart https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/things-fall-apart/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/things-fall-apart/#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:54:17 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3361 Where do I even begin? I think I’ve been distracted, constantly, February through March. It feels like my parents were just visiting, but that was the first week in February. It feels like I’m supposed to be planning for my friend Alice’s visit, but I just made sure she got safely back to the airport last week. It feels at once like there is a lot and nothing at all going on. I admit I’m doing a pretty terrible job of living in the moment. My motivation for things in general feels pretty low. I wrote last night in my journal that it feels like my brain has gone into hybernation, like it’s hiding from something. I think it’s hiding from more disappointments and things beyond my control. I was honestly going to attempt a number of small posts, in the style of Jaime, but my brain just doesn’t work that way. Also, with all the malfunctions to the blog lately, a few posts that I did write in that format were erased, so I’m just going to try and lay it all out for you.

Hemingway was of the opinion that to get into a story, you need to know the surroundings; specifically, the weather. It’s changed dramatically in the last two months, from the cold and mist and rain making thick clods of mud, to hot, dry days. All day sun that hurts the eyes, gives us headaches, and burns skin in the matter of a few minutes. The mud has turned to dust, dust the wind picks up and carries everywhere. A book left on the table for a day will look like it was abandoned there weeks ago for the film of grime on its cover. Chicken bus travel is less dangerous (no landslides or slippery spots on the roads) but a lot dirtier. Passengers are reduced to dust rags. It sticks to skin, works its way into hair, forms a film on teeth and inside the nostrils and gums up the eyes. The dust literally darkens the pages of books as I read them on the bus. I turn the page, and it turns progressively brown, turn the page, and it turns brown. Honestly, I think I prefer the rain and mud, though seeing the sun more frequently is nice, and our laundry dries in a matter of hours rather than days now. Also the nights are mild rather than bitterly cold. But the fields are brown and crunch beneath your feet. Green fields are much cheerier. The only green in the field is the blossoming crab apple tree outside our house and our little patch of garden which is finally doing quite well. Those do cheer us up. We’ve also had occasional tremors here since the last week in February. They’re so eerie as you hear the earth rumbling. These happened a lot during training near Antigua, where they’ve got lots of volcanic activity all the time. Just as I did then, I now imagine tremors all the time. I’ll be lying on the bed and feel like it’s begun to shake, or falling asleep and start imagining. Now if a particularly loud, rumbling truck makes its way up the valley I’m put a little on edge. It’s not a huge stress in my life, it’s just so strange. The tremors are pretty harmless, but part of my brain realizes that this harmless natural phenomena could turn into something crazy, especially with news of places like Haiti and now Chile in the news.

Along with the sunny weather and tremors there are many ups and downs these days. When the nurses committed to working with me and the women’s group, I was so excited. We started the process of telling the women there would be no SPA project, but we never got the message through to all the women. The problem is that the nurses have incredibly erratic schedules. When we first planned to give a little summary to the women on the issues with SPA and the fact that they’d have another chance with the incoming volunteers, the three of us planned to do it four days in a row. As I previously mentioned, the nurses have split the women into 4 groups so that the health post isn’t overwhelmed with 150-200 women who wait all day to get vaccines and check-ups, and the last 15 or 20 have to come in the following day anyway because the nurses ran out of time. We made it two days, and then the nurse’s schedule changed. Their schedule can change at 5 or 6 in the evening it seems, well after work is supposed to be done. Instead of coming out to our village, they’re told they need to stay in town to help cover the health post there, or go out with other nurses to vaccinate kids. It makes it very difficult for us to get anything done.

I had hopes of organizing a little parade for International Women’s Day on March 8, but the nurses were gone almost all of the week before, and on that particular Monday didn’t even make it out to the village. Lucia came by to visit with us on the 10th or so. She apologized, as she’d also wanted to plan a small activity, but time hadn’t permitted and on Sunday she was told she wouldn’t be out here at all.

The only thing i did manage to do on International Women’s Day was tell off an overly demanding community leader. This man, Diego (not the same Diego from Yulais where we might do a construction project), helped us organize the chicken vaccine campaign in his community, but he drives me bonkers. This is the kind of thing he does: he sets up a time and place, but doesn’t tell us the place. I called him to see where we were supposed to be, and he told me, then proceeded to tell me I was late and needed to hurry up because people were waiting for us. We arrived to an empty room. I mean, not a single person was there. That just irked me. At the end of the talk on why chicken vaccines are important and why they should set up a committee to vaccinate chickens every 3 months, we also set up a time and place to bring vaccines to help them get started. Diego agreed to the date and time. We took a list of names and how many chickens each woman was bringing, to be sure to have enough vaccines, and the women filtered out as they were added to the list. Then Diego informed us that he simply couldn’t come this day, so he wanted to know when we were going to show up at his house to vaccinate his chickens. I told him we don’t make home visits unless they have more than 50 chickens (otherwise everyone would make us come to their house, and we’d also waste a lot of vaccine, since they come in 100-dose bottles). He said he had about 60 birds, so we told him we could come on Monday morning, but he’d need to call and confirm or stop by the house and confirm sometime on Sunday. We made this rule because he’s set up several activities and demanded that we show up, then no one comes. He never confirmed.

On Monday morning I was washing clothes at the pila and Fletch had gone into to town to monitor the school construction. I looked up from my washing and there’s Diego, hands in the air. “Why didn’t you show up at my house this morning?” he said, very huffy as though he was trying not to be angry with me. I told him we’d waited for him to confirm, and since he didn’t, Fletch went into town to check on the school, and I was working around the house. “I told you I’d be there Monday morning,” he insisted.

“And I told you that you needed to call or stop by on Sunday to confirm, but you didn’t,” I replied. He relented a little, but wanted me to drop everything that second and go vaccinate his chickens. He lives about a 30 minute walk from our village (on Sundays he passes right by our house both going to and returning from the market), but because I feel like my job here is to help people out, I said I’d go. I asked him to wait for me by the health post. I finished wringing out the wet jeans I was washing, and walked to the post, which was deserted. He’d left me and expected me to find his house on my own! I only know roughly in what direction it is, as I’d never been there before. I called to ask him where he was, and he said he was walking home. I told him I didn’t have the keys to get the vaccines, as I’d just remembered that they were with Fletch. He got very angry at me and started complaining about how I should’ve showed up on time and how this was all my fault.

I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was walking through the cornfield and stopped dead, like it was too much effort to walk and talk at the same time. “Listen, I am trying to do YOU a favor. You have wasted our time before, demanding that we show up to give health talks and then no one comes. Four different times you did that to us! You set up the chicken vaccinations for Saturday, and then you told us you couldn’t come. You expect us to make a separate trip to your community just for your chickens. All we asked is that you confirm that you were going to be there. I want to help your community, I’d even like to help you, but I do not appreciate you coming over to my house and getting angry with me when you were the one who didn’t follow through. I brought these vaccines all the way from Huehue, the least you could do is follow through with us when we ask you to. I want to help, but I do not appreciate you disrespecting me in this way. Please call me back when you have time to get the vaccines and we’ll coordinate this again.” All he could say was, “That’s true, that’s true, that’s true.” We said good-bye and hung up.

I don’t know if he would’ve acted the same way with Fletch or not, but he was literally ordering me around. I feel like I cowtow a lot more than I would ever dream of doing in a job in the US. In an effort to maintain working relationships, I let a lot of things slide. The only problem with this is that I was starting to feel beat down. It’s one thing if people are demanding–I don’t have a problem with that if they hold themselves to the same standard. But since we’re volunteers who have stated over and over again that we’re here to work for the people, in some instances the people have started to take this for granted, and put unnecessary demands on our time. At the same time they forget that we’re people who are working to help them, and therefore we deserve some common respect. I don’t need or want standing ovations; I just want to be treated decently. And after I told him off I thought grimly, “Happy International Women’s Day to me,” and went back to my washing.

The next day, I made myself go talk to the school director, but he wasn’t there. The assistant director was there and had me give him the full message. I just wanted to let them know I really wanted to make more of an effort to collaborate with the teachers in the ways we’d discussed and never managed to do last year. The assistant director is also the teacher in charge of the newly-added middle school grades that meet in the afternoons. He told me he’s been required to collaborate with a non-school organization to carry out some sort of HIV/AIDS education program. It just so happens we have loads of materials for HIV/AIDS education. I returned later in the afternoon to lend him the HIV/AIDS teaching manual that Peace Corps provides for all of its volunteers. He said he would talk to the director and get back to me on coordinating a little seminar.

That was almost two weeks ago. I should be persistant and go to the school yet again today once classes are out (I have about an hour). It’s as though my shoes turn to lead when I think of going. With the women’s groups, I finally got them to the point that they would participate and answer questions at the end of the talk. It’s still not the easiest thing in the world, but it works much better than in the beginning. I think my biggest fear is standing in front of these young kids, who during recess are plenty willing to run up to our house and talk our ears off (even when they can only speak Q’anjob’al and we miss over half of what they’re saying) but who, once in the classroom, are back to being little automatons who only write exactly what you say without ever thinking about it, without understanding how to ask questions or even answer the questions asked of them. It doesn’t just break my heart, it really feels like it breaks my spirit. BUT I do believe teaching kids is probably the most important thing we can do here, and since there’s very little work otherwise these days, I feel like it’s irresponsible of me not to make an attempt again.

I think I’m more down than Jaime. He’s got the school construction and he’s been working like crazy to get the SPA project papers approved. We’re both hopeful it gets approved because we’ll be so much more happily occupied building stoves and putting in floors. Though if I had to pick one of us to be busy, I’d pick him, as I think he gets restless and annoyed about idleness much more quickly than I do. Here I’m the one issuing complaints, which says levels of idleness at home have been pretty high. I’d like to be ok with reading books and knitting socks, but I’m really not. That’s not why I came. Hah, though I guess sometimes reading books is ok.

A couple of weeks ago we were both working around the house, when the kids started migrating over for a visit. At one point I turned around and there were something like 8 kids in our tiny little house. For a split second it stressed me out, making me a bit clausterphobic and I wanted to holler, “OK, everybody out!” Then I asked myself in WWJD fashion, “What would a better volunteer do?” Instead of ushering them out, I asked, “Who wants to read a book?” Smiles all around, “Ayin, ayin, ayin!” Me, me, me! So I had them all sit on the floor. My mother-in-law has taken to including a new children’s book in each care package sent, and I hadn’t yet read The Little Engine That Could. Here was my chance. They were enthralled with the pictures, dancing toys and smiling oranges and apples, candy! I had to explain to them what a train was and how it worked before we started the story. They were all pretty content to be ushered out of the house afterwards, and I think I escaped being dubbed “grumpy gringa” in Q’anjob’al.

Later in the evening as Fletch was watering the garden and I was hauling water to boil for the bath and the next day’s drinking water, we saw the kids galloping in lines like a train, up and down the fields shouting, “Taca, taca, taca, taca, taca, taca, taca, pienso que SI puedo, pienso que SI puedo, pienso que SI puedo!” That’s the Spanish for ” I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” It was honestly precious. I stuck my head out our window laughing to myself, and saw Fletch doing the same.

The kids seem to hold us together when everything else make us feel like things are falling apart. The “falling apart” feeling extends to many aspects of our lives: all of our clothes are falling apart, thread bare and full of holes. Our pots and dishes seem to be falling apart, chipped and warped. Our projects have largely fallen apart, except for the SPA project we’re still holding out for. A week ago we were once-and-for-all shut down on our midwife project.

Last fall, my friend’s medical school in Chicago said they’d like to take up the cause and fundraise for the midwife kits. We were elated because this project sounded like it would be simple, not too expensive, and a great idea. We wanted to raise about $3000 to purchase stainless steel medical tools to make birthing kits for all the local midwives. This would keep them from depending on unreliable stocks of disposable tools the Ministry of Health and outside/international donors sporadically provide. Additionally, disposable isn’t a good idea in Guatemala because of the lack of proper trash disposal. The stainless tools can be sterilized between each use. We wanted to buy the supplies in Guatemala, so as not to spend a ludicrous amounts of money and time shipping things from the US. The idea was that each midwife, depending on where she works (which determines how much money she earns per birth) would pay a small fee for the kit after attending a 2-3 day seminar. The money would be managed by the midwife group and reinvested in their future trainings and seminars. In the seminar they were to be instructed on the use of each tool, and get to practice using them, as well as on how to properly sterilize the tools. We’d also found an organization in Guatemala that does midwife trainings, including very useful training on massages to stop post-birth hemorraging, which we wanted to include in the seminar. The two major causes for maternal mortality here are hemorraging and infection due to nonsterile conditions, in that order, so we’d be tackling both those issues.

Once the med school offered their support, we pretty much stopped seeking funds. They said the fundraising would take a while, coming in sometime in February of 2010. We knew this would make it one of the last activities we did as volunteers, but we were ok with that. At the end of February we sent him an email to see how things were going, and a week and half ago he responded with an apology and a follow up email came from the student who had since been put in charge of the school’s philanthropic group:

Sorry, there was a giant miscommunication here. No one told us about this project, and we don’t usually raise that much money anyway. We had raised $500 dollars by the beginning of the year and we sent it to Partners in Health for their Haiti relief fund.

Fletch said he’d expected this (I call this strategy “defensive pessimism” -f); I was pretty crushed. And I found the situation ironic since I had just sent in my article “A Lesson from Haiti” a few weeks before that. I’ve talked to the other two volunteers in our municipality to see if they want to take up the project since they have over a year left here. They are interested. We have a list of materials requested by the local doctor, and I already talked to the med supply companies in Guate to get the price quotes and bulk discount prices for the materials. We have a lot of the research end of the project taken care of, we just don’t have the funding. So another one bites the dust.


processionSM.jpg

With all of these challenges, we’ve just been hanging on, trying to enjoy our host family, the kids, activities around these parts. A few weeks ago as we rode back from town, we noticed the road was lined with small altars. I’d never seen this before, then I saw that the pictures in the center of the altars were the stations of the cross. It was Friday. Once the micro stopped to let us out, we saw the first altar and a crowd of about 50 people from town all waiting to start the procession. I dropped my things inside the house and went back out with my camera after the procession had already started. Delmi grabbed my hand and came along with me.

altarSM.jpg<crowdSM.jpgI went to the first station, where the picture had already been removed. They deconstruct the altars as they go, so that no one has a chance to the damage the pictures. I managed to sneak my way ahead of the procession and get some photos. Each of the altars waiting to be visited had family members guarding them from destruction by children, dogs, donkeys, pigs, or whatever might come along. I asked a neighbor man if they’d done this before, as I didn’t remember it from last year; he confirmed that it was something new they were trying this year. I tried to take pictures in the harsh four o’clock light as the sun across the valley made its way down to the horizon. The views here are so beautiful and airy, quite the contrast from my Catholic school days. We spent lenten Fridays in what always felt like a very stuffy church, following the ways of the gross and singing with Sister Elva. Maybe it was stuffy because it was Friday, because we just itched to be free, because I was looking forward to the Friday night lenten dinner, my mother’s tuna casserole that our family referred to as fish wiggles. At any rate, the way of the cross out here, accompanied by music and incense, on our dirt road overlooking the valley, was an oddly nostalgic trip on a very pretty afternoon.

boilingSM2.jpg<dyingSM2.jpgLent always leads to Easter, and since we received an egg dying kit in the last carepackage as well, two days ago we showed the kids how to dye eggs. They were pretty interested and excited about the whole process, and we were bored and in need of entertainment. Since we aren’t going to be in town for Easter, we decided celebrating early would be better than not at all. Chali, Alberto and Yohanna were the most excited. The others are still pretty tiny, but I did help each of them draw an invisible crayon design on their eggs and they picked the dye color to reveal their little drawings. We have 29 colored eggs hidden in the yard right now. We told them about the egg hunt yesterday, declaring we’d do it once class was out today. Chali came over during recess to check and see if we were really going to do this thing. He’s a pretty funny kid. Though I tried to explain to them the idea behind eggs and bright colors for spring, I wasn’t sure they really understood what was going on. They were just having fun. The same night we dyed eggs, we’d also fixed dinner for the Palas family, because it’d been a while and we wanted to share something and hang out with them. They’ve recently installed a television in their rustic kitchen, so we can watch programs around the open fire, hah. Anyway, the television was turned onto a rerun of Winnie the Pooh, and what were they doing but dying and decorating Easter eggs, hah. Perfect timing, the kids were pretty excited about that. Below are the pictures of this afternoon’s hunt, and happy kids with their eggs. I boiled 30, and 1 exploded. We decorated and hid 29, but just before the kids got here I saw the neighbor’s dog sniffing around and noticed a few eggs had gone missing. We counted the kids eggs and they had 27 between by the end of the hunt, so just two were missing, hah. Ah, Guatemalan chuchos, they’ll eat anything.

running_sm2.jpg many_eggs_sm2.jpg

And now I think it’s almost time to let you all go back to your regularly schedule routines. Just a little update: In the time it’s taken me to type this monstrous post, the nurse Lucia stopped by our house and informed me that the Ministry of Health is sending all of our nurse practitioners to work in other muncipalities, which means we’ll be left woefully understaffed. We’ve been without a doctor in the municipality (pop. approximately 47,000) for a few months. Now things will be run entirely by nurse’s assistants with just one year of training. Lucia looked pretty sad and overwhelmed. Additionally, all the nurses are now required to go from house to house to check for malnourished children, and she has no one to help her. This means she will have no time whatsoever to work with me and the women’s group. She also wanted to let me know she won’t be out here at all next week. I told her when she comes back to let me know if she wants someone to accompany her on the house visits.

The school director says they would like me to start working with them, as well. I just have to give them a schedule of what days and times I want to come work, starting of course after Semana Santa, Holy Week. For those of you who don’t know, that’s next week. It’s like spring break, but for the whole country. There will be no working; it’s against the rules. Apparently our SPA project has also been approved, and we should expect the money mid-April.

Some things do fall apart, and when they do, we’re here to figure out what we can salvage and how, at least for a little while longer. Our replacements arrive in Guatemala the end of next month.

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The MAGA Redeemed https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-maga-redeemed/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-maga-redeemed/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:51:51 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3174 Today’s story is a little shorter than yesterday, but here goes.

The last time I talked about the MAGA (the Ministry of Agriculture), I was pretty frustrated. They were a complete pain to work with, even though their representative, Nelson, was quite nice when he finally showed up here to vaccinate chickens. He told me at the end of his day here that if I ever wanted more vaccinations, now that we knew how to do it, all we had to do was call him and he could meet up with us in Huehue, the state capital, to give us more.

When my parents came to visit, we were in Huehue for thier first morning visiting the ruins, and Jaime asked me if I’d called Nelson and see if he could get us some vaccinations. Now, by this time, the suggestion of having to call the MAGA was enough to put knots in my stomach. Talking to them in order to get something felt like pulling teeth. I hated it. But I tried, because we’d promised to bring back more vaccines. It turned out that he and I called called one another back forth about 5 times that morning, until the time came to meet up in the park, at which point he stopped answering my calls for some reason. I was annoyed. I wanted to focus on my parent’s visit, but I felt obligated to try and bring back more vaccines. As we passed through Chiantla, where the MAGA offices are located, I gave up.

So all month, every once in a while, Fletch would say, “You should call Nelson and see about getting more vaccines.” I had to go to Antigua for a meeting regarding the GLOW project, which meant I had to pass through Huehue on the way there and back. Fletch said, “You should call Nelson.” I hated it, every time. I wished HE would call Nelson. But Fletch still hates talking on the phone in Spanish and generally makes me handle the calls. And then I had to try and hurry home for the Mayan blessing of the school grounds (which I missed because of a two hour waylay due to protests that closed the highway) and he excused me from having to call Nelson. YAY!

Last week we had to pass through Huehue again. We got to town absolutely beat, and ran our errands, took food to our favorite little dive hotel, and didn’t leave the room again. In the morning, just before we started eating a pleasant little breakfast, Fletch said, “You should call Nelson and see if we can get some vaccines.” I cringed. I felt sick. I didn’t want to do it. I know, I sound so immature, but seriously people I hated the thought of having to talk to the MAGA again.

During the course of our breakfast at my new favorite little coffee shop, the owner strolled in and began talking to us about what exactly it is we do here, and how he’d like to have an in-depth conversation with us before we leave. I will write a post about this conversation later, but there are some funny connections between the coffee shop owner and us. Suffice it to say, my mood was greatly improved by the chit chat, so when we walked out on the street to catch a bus home (conveniently they pass a block from the coffee shop) and Jaime said, “You should call Nelson about the vaccines,” I did it.

And he picked up! And he said he was working in a small community close to the office so I should let him know when I catch a bus and call him back. We hung up, a bus came around the corner, we hopped on. I called Nelson, “We’re on the Angel Terrestre bus leaving the center of Huehue now.” He said he’d try and look for the bus on the highway. He’d be on a motorcycle, and he’d flag us down.

This plan, at least to me, sounded ludicrous. We moved on from the center of town and sat for a few minutes at the last stop leaving the city. I asked the bus drivers if they could look for a MAGA guy on a moto as he was going to give me a cooler of chicken vaccines. They responded positively. Apparently the plan did not sound ludicrous to them. I called Nelson to check his progress, and it was so loud, I could barely hear what he was saying. He told me the name of some stop, and made me repeat it to him.

Spanish is great because it’s entirely phonetic. Usually when someone says an unfamiliar word I can guess pretty much to a T how it’s spelled. I had no idea what he was saying. The word wouldn’t form in my head. I felt I was just miming sounds to the bus driver and his assistant. Again, they seemed to think I’d made a completely reasonable request, and I was encouraged by this.

So I guess the good thing about Guatemalans being so last minute about many things means that sometimes you can get things done in a flash at the last minute. We proceeded a few minutes into the town just north of Huehue, and the bus pulled over. The driver hollered at me. I looked up. We were at a gas station, and Nelson was just jumping off his moto! Wonder of wonders. He handed me a cooler with 4000 chicken vaccinations on ice and two handfuls of syringes. “Please just write down the names of the communities where you vaccinate and how many birds you got. Oh, and don’t lose the cooler or they’ll charge me for it,” his smile went from jovial to serious. “I promise I’ll return the cooler. Thanks!” We shook hands, I jumped back on the bus, and we were off for home. It was amazing. It wasn’t even 10am and I’d had a great chat with the coffee shop owner about Peace Corps and what we do, and I was leaving the city with 4000 vaccines–a task I’d previously deemed impossible.

Ironically, when I jumped off the bus in our village, a community leader from up the road was standing right in front of me and demanded to know when we were coming to vaccinate the chickens. Whoa. I wasn’t ready for that. But we quickly decided a date over the weekend. On Friday night we got a call from Yulais, our other regular community, and they asked when we were going to bring the vaccines because some sort of plague ravaged the chicken population in the last few days of the week.

That’s how we ended up spending all afternoon today giving a talk on chicken vaccinations and administering them to a few hundred birds in Yulais. I don’t know whether to say we were a little late, or right on time. I fear we were a little late, but at least there were still a few hundred left to vaccinate, right? Anyway, it’s all in day’s work.

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Working with the Women https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/working-with-the-women/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/working-with-the-women/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:52:49 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3162 The greatest joy as well as the greatest challenge of my Peace Corps service is working with women’s groups, specifically the group here in our home community. I’m in a strange spot these days, reflecting on all the things we’ve done and how they’ve gone over, and at the same time trying to make a strong finish in our last four months. Thinking about the beginning of our service, some of my favorite song lyrics come to mind, “Dawn breaks like a bull through hall.” I think this aptly describes how our work began here. There was no shortage of things to do. We were in high demand both here and in many neighboring communities. For months we worked tirelessly to establish dedicated groups, which whittled themselves down to our current two. Then we focused on teaching them about what seemed like the most pressing health issues here. For a long while, this model worked.  However, making a strong finish has been challenged by the fact that the group here in our community has sort of disintegrated through problems both internal and external.

As most of you know, our great wish was to do an infrastructure project in the homes of the women who participated so avidly in our weekly health talks. And you also know that the women’s group was led not by a woman, but by Manuel. In Spain I learned this saying, la bendicion de la bruja, which means the witch’s blessing. Manuel has been this for us, which is to say, not quite the kind of blessing we’d hoped for. Between him and the fact that our meeting center, the health post, was in total disarray for two months (and still is not quite fixed up), we had no human support, and no physical place for us to meet with the women.

With the beginning of February came the realization that we couldn’t do a project here. We’d given January 31st to the community as the due date for their part of the project paperwork. Nothing changed from where I left off in So Much Talk, So Little Walk. It appeared that everyone’s enthusiasm for the project was gone.

We were back to no work, no communication, and no support from Manuel as head of the health committee. Thus, the same day Don Basilio came for a visit, we also invited the local nurses over for lunch in order to discuss what had happened and where we should go from here. We talked about what we’ve done and where we’ve failed and where we should go in order to prepare the community for the next volunteer(s). It was a really productive luncheon at the clubhouse (and it’s not hard to get the nurses to show, up as we’ve convinced them that we only cook super delicious things 😉 ). We decided as a group that the best thing to do is to focus more on the women. In addition to doing health talks, we want to begin talks about self esteem, leadership, and women’s roles in the community. The goal of doing this is to prepare the women to take a more active, if not take over entirely, the direction of projects that might happen with the incoming PCV.

In our difficulties working with community leaders and the women’s health committee representatives, the people that have caused the most delay are the men. They themselves disbanded their health talk group after just a few months of weekly talks. They aren’t as invested in the projects. I don’t think they’ve ever quite seen the value of a home-improvement project, as noted by their opinion that 30,000 quetzales was too pitiful a quantity of money for them to bother with. The men are so used to running everything around here that the women feel like they aren’t supposed to do anything without their consent. I urged the women to act without the men, but since the structure was already set up, they ladies wouldn’t budge. It paralyzed the whole process. And the men always complain about how busy they are, and how difficult it is to attend meetings. Why should we require them to take part in administering a community project then? Aren’t we doing these men a favor by not giving them yet another thing to worry about it, another series of meetings to attend?

The women in the community are really in the community. They take care of their children, their homes, their fields. The men go to work for a week at a time in Barrillas taking care of their plots of coffee and cardamom, bananas and oranges–I don’t bedgrudge them this, it just slows things down a lot if we have to wait on them. The men go work at the coast when they feel short of money. The men decide they have no prospects here and slip off into the US to work illegally. Whereas men as community leaders might have worked twenty years ago, might have been effective in getting things done, it’s not anymore. When we arrived here we were greeted by the community mayor, and we were quickly informed that he was, more than anything, a warm body. His son, young and enthusiastic, had been elected for the position, but he literally handed his stick (auxilary mayors carry short wooden sticks with pom poms on them to denote their position, he literally handed over the stick) to his father and left for the US when the opportunity arrived. He was elected for the highest position in the community, and he abandoned it! I’m not proposing we make a woman the community mayor. That wouldn’t be possible in my wildest dreams, not for a very long time, but I am proposing we show them the value of their opinions, ideas and willingness to work for change. And the nurses were 100% behind me. So we scheduled our first meeting with the ladies for March 1.

Unfortunately, some times those with good intentions are not 100% reliable. I called the nurses on Sunday as I didn’t get the chance to talk to them at the end of the week, to ask about the meeting and they sheepishly admitted they’d forgotten all about it. Oops. But, unlike others we’ve worked with, the nurse Lucia showed up at the house at 8:30 Monday morning to apologize, again, and set up another meeting. There are so many women in the community that must come in for vaccinations and information that the nurses split them into four groups so as not to be completely overwhelmed and to make the women’s wait shorter (how thoughtful!). Lucia asked if I could come to the health post every morning from today through Friday to talk to all four groups.

Something that has bothered me about the “project” is that no one has taken on the responsibility of giving bad news to the community. Women keep asking me when we’re going to do the project, and I have to keep telling them we’re not. But it seems so wrong to just let gossip spread the word, and I don’t think the leaders, any of them, are willing to stand up in front of the community and give the news themselves. It looks like the task has fallen to me. I told Lucia yesterday that I didn’t want to plan any health talk today, rather I’d talk about where we’ve been and where we’re going. In this way I could include the information that they aren’t getting a project directed by myself and Jaime, but they’ve got another chance once the new volunteer(s) arrive(s).

This morning I walked into the health post a little before 8 and found the nurses finishing up their breakfast and about to start work. Manuel was with them, and instead of saying good morning, he walked out just after I walked in. Lucia said, “Emily, we were planning on looking for representatives from each of the four groups in the community to take part in these leadership classes, but Manuel says that the health committee is already formed and that next week they’re going to have a meeting to start the paperwork for the project, so I don’t think we can pick group leaders. Manuel says Jaime is just behind on his work for the project and that’s what they were all waiting on.”

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this anymore, but it kills me that he keeps telling people we’re so lazy and always behind on our work. It makes me so angry every time, too. I think it was more a protective angry this time. If he’d said I was behind, well that’s one thing, but Jaime has been working like crazy, and Jaime is the one who was seriously saddened once we knew the project was a no-go.

Since Manuel had promptly left, I shut the door to the kitchen and took a seat. I explained to them that the project was not going to happen, and for some reason I neither know nor understand, Manuel apparently does not listen to the words that come out of our mouths. This morning the plan was to explain to the ladies they weren’t getting a project and why, but that they shouldn’t become angry or annoyed because they’ll get another chance when a new volunteer comes. Once the nurses understood what was going on, we went out to talk to the group of women assembled in the waiting room.

Manuel was taking attendance along with some of the women, and as he was about leave, Lucia asked him to stay. I don’t know why, maybe because I’m a people pleaser who hates to let anyone down, maybe because I had so many aspirations when we arrived –probably a mix of both– but I was really nervous and upset with having to make this announcement. My stomach was in knots, and I’m accustomed enough to public speaking this doesn’t usually happen. I tried to follow Guatemalan guidelines, which is to say, make the announcement sound as positive as possible without making any one sound particularly at fault. I tried to relay the events and sentiments of the leaders’ meetings to the general public without specifying exactly who said what.

The women had questions. Some of the women who were part of the leaders’ meetings said that they were annoyed with two other women, who they named specifically and who were not present to defend themselves. I probably talked with the group for an hour. There’s so much repetion in this job. I had to bring people back to the fact that our first job here is education, not construction, and education is what we’ve been working on and will continue to work on for as long as the women want to come to the talks. I talked about how Peace Corps isn’t an organization that comes in with money and gifts, so it’s not right for people in town to expect us to give them regalitos, or little gifts.

“What we do as Peace Corps volunteers,” I explained, “is collaborate and cooperate. This means that we do part of something, and the community does the other part. With this infrastructure project, Jaime and I couldn’t do all the work, only part of it. We were ready to do our part of it, but when it come to coordinating the leadership in the community and for people here to do their part, something went wrong. I don’t know if people didn’t understand us–we still don’t speak Q’anjob’al very well–or if people just decided that they weren’t excited enough about the project to work for it. I guess we’ll say that there was malentendimiento, a misunderstading, between us and the leadership. We’re not angry that the project isn’t happening, maybe a little sad, but not angry. I feel like you all need to know what happened though, because when the next volunteer(s) come(s) you will have another opportunity. I still have a lot of hope for this community, and I want you to be able to do better with the next volunteer. I want you to understand what your responsibilities are so you can use the next opportunity rather than lose it.”

Responsibility is very evasive in these parts. I often find myself wondering why that is. From what I’ve observed, it’s a mix of things. One, as Americans we’re taught responsibility through various methods starting at a very young age. From kindergarten on, we’re taught to take responsibility for certain things, from putting away the toys we took out to play, to doing our homework and turning it in on time. We’re given pets or chores in our home to teach “responsibility”. And in order to really drill the point home, we have accountability systems. If you don’t put your toys away, you sit in the corner instead of playing during the next break. If you don’t do your homework you get a detention. And these accountability systems exist at all levels of society, with positive reinforcement when things are done well (like a promotion) and consequences when we fail to live up to those responsibilities (like a judicial sentence). That’s not the case here.  Families here are great at making sure their bases are covered, that things are taken care of to the extent they need to be to survive. But it’s a communal system where everyone covers for everyone else. While there is a beauty to this approach, I also think this system diminishes personal responsibility. That, and because of corruption and racism and poverty that has been the norm here for so long, there is little to no accountability. This means that there is little positive reinforcement when things are done right, or punishment when things are done poorly. Where are the incentives? Social accountability is, well, flexible. Police sometimes arrest people who break the law, but that hardly means criminal activity is punished. Sometimes a person is released in a day or two.

It took me months of being here to understand how responsibility wasn’t a common concept. Since then I’ve included it a lot in health talks. For example, we talk about “responsible parenting” and what that entails. Still, I’m never quite sure they understand what I’m talking about when I try to discuss responsibilidad in any situation. Today, I tried it again. “My responsibility as a volunteer is to plan health talks, and when a day and time is announced, I have a responsibility to be in the right place at the time I promised. When I say ‘let’s have a health fair with the nurses’, my responsibility is to come to the health center when I say I will and plan the activities. The nurses are responsible for working with me and helping carry out the activites. As a community with volunteers, should you choose to participate in the activities, your responsibility is to show up on time when meetings are announced and to participate. This is collaboration. When you collaborate, everyone has a responsibility. If you want to achieve a goal by collaborating, everyone has to do their part, they all have to take responsibility. This didn’t happen with the project we tried to do here. But now that you know what it takes you can do it right when the next volunteer is here.” In upcoming talks, I’ll figure out lots of ways to reframe this idea and illustrate it for the ladies.

I let the women know about Don Basilio’s visit of two weeks ago. I told them plainly that I recommended Temux get another volunteer because there’s still a lot of work to do here, and that I believe the women are capable and ready to work on health projects in the future. I was so annoyed with people accusing Jaime of being behind on his work or seen as lazy that I took the liberty of making a general announcement about the teacher’s school he’s been working. He’s pretty well known in town these days, but not everyone out here in the village is tied into what happens in town. Now they know he’s partially responsible for the school that will begin sprouting from the ground this week. Maybe that was immature of me? I just couldn’t resist, and I’m also pretty proud of Jaime and his school.

Manuel was in the the health post for the beginning of the talk. He began to look frustrated at one point and walked out. The nurses looked at me knowingly. I never incriminated him in any way, not once; I didn’t even mention his name. He never left entirely. I saw him pacing outside the door of the health center. And eventually he came back in to stand in his spot, front and center, to listen to the closing of the meeting. I just couldn’t stand that he continued to delude himself and everyone around him that this project was somehow magically going to happen. Now all I have to do is return 3 more times to the health center (Wed, Thur, Fri) and repeat the same 40 minute talk so that everyone understands. I did ask them if they want another gringo to come live with them, and if they’re willing to work with the gringo. For what it’s worth, they said yes and yes. I also asked them if they wanted me to continue giving health talks, and they also said yes. That last bit makes me happy.

I don’t think everyone walked away happy, though. Quite a few of the women who were in line to receive some sort of infrastructure were in the meeting, a lot of them were women who I like a lot, who were willing to do the physical labor of putting in a floor, building a latrine, or building a stove. Maybe we could have done the project here, if we’d held ten people’s hands and guided them step by step everyday for the last week before the deadline. But honestly, I don’t think that’s good development. I believe the people here are smarter than that. If they’re excited about something, they don’t need much to get them going. I’ve seen it before. We both refused to coddle them into doing a project just because we wanted to build stuff. And as I said before, I’m not angry about the project not happening, and maybe I’m not even sad about it anymore. The whole things has been quite the learning experience. And the craziest thing? I’m sure there’s a whole lot I still don’t understand.

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National Peace Corps Week https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/national-peace-corps-week/ Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:20:02 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3158 Hello All
I feel I’m always apologizing for letting so much time go by between my posts. Sorry! February went by in a flash, and I have a plethora of stories to tell regarding how we’ve been spending our time. Yesterday we volunteers recieved news from Peace Corps Washington that this Week, March 1-7 has been declared national Peace Corps week in honor of the 49th anniversay of its founding.
You can read the official release at  www.peacecorps.gov. In honor of this week, I promise to catch up on the blog and regale you with some more stories about life in Guatemala. Keep your eyes peeled for email notices of blog updates. :)I’m going to start typing now.
Best,
Emily

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The Delm https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-delm/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-delm/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:26:31 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3040 IMG_2458sm.jpg

I thought it was funny that Fletch posted about Delmi. That day I was thinking the same thing needed to happen. And, as per usual, here I’ve made it in my own sweet time.

Delmi is one of my most favorite things in Guatemala. She was eleven months old when we arrived. The first night in our village we ate dinner with our host family, and the first phrase the family taught me in Q’anjob’al was “tz’ebatx nena“, or “Come here little girl.” They instructed me to say it to Delmi so she’d come sit on my lap, which she did, staring absently into space unsure of what she was doing on the lap of this big, white stranger.

I have a great bunch of nieces and nephews, including the two newest additions on the Fanjoy side, that I’m quite fond of. Even so, I have never, in my life, spent so much time with one kid. We’ve been the photographers at her first and second birthday party. I’ve helped her learn to walk and talk. She sings the Em-i-la song for fun, but she actually pronounces my proper name better than anyone else in town. She stands at the door knocking shouting Emily! Emily! Until I open it. And if I’m taking too long, she growls my name impatiently. Sometimes I make her wait because the growling thing is hilarious. It is exactly how her mother growls Delmi’s name when she’s not listening to her mother’s instructions.  

IMG_4477sm.jpgWith all my recent frustrations, she’s been the one thing that still cheers me up. She cares nothing for the things that are frustrating me, she just wants to come and play. She wants me to swing her and tickle her. She wants to help me work on the computer or bake bread. She likes to read books while I read my book. She loves the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are. She’s like a little mockingbird that follows me around repeating every word I say or little noise I make. She clicks her tongue or gasps just like I do as soon as the noise has left my mouth. I never realized, before I had an echo, how many noises I make as I asbsent-mindedly go about my business. The girl has even started following me to the latrine to do her business right after I do instead of in the field. This is funny, because she’s so tiny she could fall into the latrine if I didn’t hold her over it. But she insists.

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She likes Fletch, too. She “helps” him play guitar any time he busts it out. She’s learned to make all the animal noises he makes around the place, imitating chickens and cows and pigs and cats and dogs. She “helps” him in the garden when he’s down there working. IMG_4495sm.jpgIMG_4502sm.jpg           

This kid is so precious. I was only a little weirded out the time she asked for pecho, basically if I could breastfeed her. It was very weird, yet funny. The breast feeding culture here is such that aunts will breast feed nieces and nephews, and even grandmothers will breastfeed their grandchildren if there is an age overlap between their children and grandchildren. Sometimes grandmothers and aunts “breastfeed” their grandchildren even if they no longer have milk, in a kind of pacifier gesture. So I guess the request means I’ve successful become part of the family, or at least part of Delmi’s family. I, however, have not become such a part of the family as to actually participate.

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Because Reyna works outside of the village and spends most nights in the health center where she works in order to save money, Delmi is probably the most independent kid in town. She is headstrong, and if you’ve annoyed her, or she is just generally annoyed, she’s pretty fantastic at pretending you don’t exist. Because she takes off whenever she wants to go, someone in the family always seems to be looking for her, and much of the time they stop by to see if she’s with me. It’s usually a good guess. “Delmi, let’s go home now,” they’ll say. She looks at whoever has come and usually answers, “Maj.” No, she doesn’t want to leave.

What I love about Delmi, besides her just being cute and funny, is that she gives me hope. She’s a testament to how children are so observent and flexible. You can teach them so much good stuff so easily. She knows all the rules of our house. She takes her shoes off at the door to keep mud outside. Every time I tell Delmi, “Tzil hasat, nena“, your face is dirty, she will run to the stream and clean up. She always comes back to show me, her face is clean, her hands are clean. Every morning she comes to show me how her has been braided for the day (even though she screams through the entire process). When her mother buys her a new outfit, she runs right over to show me her new clothes. One day she came to show me what was in her pocket, a 10q bill. That’s a third of a day’s wage around here, a lot for a 2 year old to carry around. I asked her what she was going to do with the money, and she told me she was going to buy food at Don Palxhun’s, hah. A second later her mother ran out of the kitchen, just up the hill, yelling Delmi’s name, and I hollered back that she was with me. Reyna asked if she had money, and I told her she did, and that she planned to go buy food. Reyna started laughing, then hollered at Delmi to wait for her older cousin, Chalio, to go with her to the store.

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The Delm, as Fletch refers to her, sort of keeps me sane. A few weeks ago when we were having so many problems with the accusations of money-laundering and bad leadership, I was standing outside under the apple tree, nearly in tears. Along came Delmi, who gave me a big hug, and I instantly felt a little relief. It’s pretty silly, but true.

I often think IMG_2461sm.jpgit’s interesting that she will have no memory of us, just pictures her mother will keep to show her. She’s been such a great part of my life here. I’ve long been uncertain about the kid issue, having my own I mean. I’m always of the opinion that we should be flexible and commit neither to having nor not having children. It’s a big committment, and honestly I still feel too young (which is ironic since I’m 26 and I’ve met plenty a 14 and 15 year old mother while here in Guatemala). While Delmi hasn’t quite inspired me to run right home and get pregnant, I feel like because of her, I get it. I understand why having kids could be a pretty funny, good thing. Maybe some day when we’re more or less settled into some sort of life in the US and the bread is the oven (literally not figuratively) and I miss the little girl skipping and dancing in front of the oven doing her pan dance in happy anticipation of the bread and jam to come, maybe then. It’s going to be hard to leave her behind, for me not her. But for now I’m pretty content with having a little Delmi on loan.

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So thanks, Delmi, even though you may never know how great you’ve been to me.

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APROFAM, the MAGA, and “Fijese que” https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/aprofam-the-maga-and-fijese-que/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/aprofam-the-maga-and-fijese-que/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:56:34 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=3013 As Fletch explained in his post regarding the chicken vaccinations, part of our job as volunteers is to try and connect the communities in which we work with local organizations that will provide them with assistance and services that will be available long after we’re gone. Sometimes the issue is that folks in rural areas are simply unaware of what services are available, and sometimes it’s a matter of not knowing how to get ahold of services they know exist. Other times, and rather disappointingly, it’s a matter of being a gringo. Some local organizations, though in place to help the general population, are not egalitarian in their approach to helping those around them. It’s disheartening, but through my personal experiences here, seems to be true.

I mentioned in November that we thought we’d finally succeeded in bringing a local Guatemalan NGO, APROFAM, to our municipality. APROFAM provides low cost medical services but specializes in family planning: tubal ligations, vasectomies, jadelle implants, IUD’s, etc. When ALAS came to give a two day workshop to the local midwives about the benefits of family planning, the midwives thanked them for their information and immediately asked, “Now, how do we get these services to the women we work with? They want access to operations and family planning; they’ve told us this.” ALAS connected me with APROFAM. I was thrilled to be leaving for vacation knowing that the families all over our municipality had the chance to access these services, FINALLY. You see, the ministry of health, at least in theory, provides these services for free, but most health posts aren’t equipped to actually administer the services. Families here have to make the long and expensive journey from here to the capital. A one-way bus ride from our village to Huehuetenango costs slightly more than a day’s wages, so it’s a big, difficult investment for families who want and need family planning services.

As all of you who read religiously know, the day before we flew home for vacation, APROFAM called me to say that there were protests blocking the road from Huehue up the Cuchumatanes, the only road that gets from here to there. APROFAM never made it. I spent a lot of time on the phone in December trying to reschedule, but everyone goes on vacation in December. No one could tell me when exactly they’d have time. Finally, someone called and said they could do it January 19 and 20th here in our municipality. I was thrilled and began making the necessary preparations. I called the tecnico, who coordinates health services, and he reserved the community center. I confirmed things between the tecnico and APROFAM. It seemed like we were on a roll and this would really happen.

While at GLOW, I got a call from APROFAM saying that the community center is an inadequate place to perform operations, and they asked that we find a suitable space for them to work. I called the tecnico and he said he could find someplace. I tried to let it go and focus on having fun with at the camp. But let me tell you, calls from Fletch regarding how the SPA meetings were proceeding, then this, were really putting a damper on my fun.

I returned home and called the tecnico, who said I needed to call the Huehue director of the Ministry of Health to ask permission to use the health post in town for a day. This would mean that regular appointments and consultations would be put on hold for a day so that APROFAM could use the space and provide bonus services. It took me two days of calling to get ahold of the director. He said that we could use the space if a wrote a letter of solicitation that was signed by the nurse in charge of our local post, so I then called the tecnico and relayed all of this information to him. He seemed to think this was fine.

Later that day the tecnico called to say the head nurse was headed to Huehue and wanted to talk to the director in person; she would get back to me. This was a Friday, the APROFAM visit was supposed to take place the following Tuesday and Wednesday. I heard nothing, not from the tecnico and not from the head nurse. On Sunday the tecnico came to visit us to discuss the SPA mess, and I was finally able to ask him about the matter in person.

“Well, you see, the nurse couldn’t talk to the director because he’s on vacation.” I thought this was very annoying. Why was I able to call and talk to him at home and she wasn’t? [because you’re a gringa -jaime] “You see, we have a little problem. The government right now, on a national level, is really trying to bring people into the health posts and centers by pushing the fact that all the services are free. If APROFAM comes and charges people for services for a day or two, everyone will be confused. They’ll think that we’re taking advantage of them. They won’t understand that APROFAM isn’t the Ministry of Health and that they have to charge a small fee to stay in business. The director told you that if Magali (the head nurse) signed a letter approving it then APROFAM could use the post. He wants her to sign to the letter because, if there’s a problem, she’ll have to take responsibility for it. Magali talked to a different man at the ministry who is taking over the director’s duties during his time on vacation. He wouldn’t approve the use of the health center. You see, no one wants to take responsibility because if someone higher up gets angry, no one wants to be the one to be reprimanded.”

“Alright, but what does all this mean in terms of APPROFAM coming to the muncipality for this health campaign?” I asked.

“Well, all the schools are back in session, so we can’t use one of the schools like we thought. They’re starting earlier than most schools because we have to get ready for the town fair the second week in February. The only other place they could work is the private hospital, but it’s Catholic. So APROFAM would have to pay to use the place, but since the hospital is Catholic, they wouldn’t let APROFAM operate there anyway.”

I was so sad and annoyed. Why didn’t APROFAM have a problem with this building the first time they planned on coming? Why couldn’t APROFAM talk directly to the tecnico? I’d passed the tecnico’s number to the NGO and the NGO contacts’ numbers to the tecnico. I was so tired of being in the middle of this increasingly ridiculous chain of communications that were apparently going to amount to nothing. This medical campaign wasn’t going to happen, not matter how much I wanted it to.

Aurelio said, “Listen, APROFAM is a good organization. You know I worked with them for 4 years before I took this job, and the work they do is really important. I don’t want to cause problems between our municipality and them. Instead of you telling them that we don’t have anywhere for them to work, maybe you could tell them that all the spaces they would be able to work in are occupied because of the Fair preparations. You know, leave the door open for the future.” Not only do all of my efforts amount to nothing, now he was asking me to lie for him?

Monday morning I called APROFAM and told them the situation. I didn’t know what else to say, so I followed Aurelio’s instructions and blamed it on the Fair. I felt defeated when I hung up with them. One more project off the list, chalked up to a fail. It seemed like such a simple, easy and positive thing when I started to work for it. To find out that our municipality doesn’t even have and adequate space to host a tiny aid agency like APROFAM means they’re still years away from being able to do justice to the needs of their citizens. And it was such an interesting, as well as incredibly annoying, lesson in evasion of responsibility. No one was at fault. No one did anything wrong. There is no blame, no responsibility. Rather than doing something that might be “wrong”, everyone’s individual decisions added up to no one doing anything at all. The midwives are back to their original stance, “Thanks for the information on why these services are important, now how do we get these services to our patients?”

This is a disclaimer: I’m about to repeat quite a few things the Fletch has said, but if I leave them out, then this story won’t flow very well, so bear with me.

Simultaneously, I was making a ridiculous number of calls to the Ministry of Agriculture, also known as the MAGA. We came back from vacation ready to go for our December 9 chicken vaccination day; that is, until the MAGA employee I was working with, Sebastion, called me at 8 pm the night before and canceled on us. “Fijese que my car broke down so I have no way to get there.” I must tell you, there are few things I find as annoying as the term “Fijese que”. We were told during training that when we hear this phrase we could interpret it as, “I’m about to lie to you.” If you want to get all euphamistic about it you could say, “I’m going to give you an excuse”. The thing is, I hate lying. All I ask is that people tell it to me straight. This part of my personality clashes terribly with the way people interact here. So his car had suddenly broke down, and I was left with the responsibility of canceling what looked like it was going to be a very big day of teaching and vaccinating chickens in two communities here. Everyone was incredibly disappointed by the cancelation, and I got to hear about it, over and over again, as I called all the relevant parties.

I was really disappointed about the cancelation too, but I felt like even though I was only the messenger, I was somehow being blamed for the activity not happening. This was additionally aggravating because the community didn’t even know the MAGA guy had asked us to give him 100Q for gas money, and instead of asking the community to pay for it, the two of us decided it would be easier for us to pay for his stupid gas out of our own pockets and not tell anyone about it. Doesn’t this guy have a job? Doesn’t the MAGA have a vehicle at its disposal? I mean, the health ministry has a small fleet of vehicles, so I didn’t think this was so unreasonable. I know plenty of nurses who pay out of their own pocket for transporting medicine and vitamins from Huehue, so why was the MAGA guy asking us for money? Is he better than the nurses? We just wanted to figure out this vaccine thing, so we told him we’d give him the money he asked for.

And then folks began to say, “Well, you know the government doesn’t care about us because we’re indigenous. The MAGA is a government organization, and they’re supposed to work for all of us, but you know, they only work in the city, where it’s easy and most people don’t need their services anyway. It’s because we’re Mayans.” And this was also disheartening to hear, because the fact is, even if that isn’t the case in this instance, every time a government organization just lets the people here down, it reinforces this age-old racism theory regardless of whether it’s true. I promised everyone that I would keep trying until we got the MAGA or someone here to help us learn about chicken vaccinations.

I spent much of December calling Sebastian. When he answered his phone, after greeting me, he would usually jump right into another “Fijese que”. I think it seriously began to affect my blood pressure. It made me so annoyed! His car was broken, I should call back in a week. I called back in a week, and he didn’t have enough money to get the car fixed. He said it in a way to suggest he could get here faster if we could help him out. He said I should call back in a week. Then he stopped answering my calls for a while. The first week in January I called, expecting no answer, and he picked up! But he couldn’t tell me whether he could come or not. His car was fixed and he had it back but, “Fijese que” all the MAGA employees were waiting to see if their government contracts were going to be renewed for the new year. He couldn’t do any work until he figured out if he was officially going to be rehired. I should call him back in a week.

I tried calling him, several times, to no avail; no one answered the phone. Then, out of the blue, last Thursday he called, minutes after we received an email requiring us to report to Huehue to receive mandatory vaccines from the PC nurses. There was no question of whether or not we had time or if there would be a day that was good for us. “Hello, Emily, Sebastian here. I’m going to come on Wednesday.” I stammered, “But, well, we aren’t going to be here. Could we do it another day? Tuesday or Friday maybe?” He wasn’t available either of those days. “I could come on Thursday.” This was far from ideal, because we’d have to race back from the vaccines on Wednesday and end up walking 45 minutes in the dark to get home. But we didn’t want to wait another month or two for this to happen, so we said ok.

We notified the leaders of our village and they notified leaders from the surrounding communities. I was still not sure this was even going to happen, but no one called to cancel all day Wednesday. We had a long and tiring day, ten hours of travel for about 3 hours in the city. We came home and ate with the family and bathed in the chuj. Just as I was getting ready to go to bed, the phone rang. Fletch has a no-answer policy after 8, so he handed me my phone and said, “I wouldn’t answer it if I were you.” But I did.

“Hello, are you Emily? I’m Nelson. Sebastian can’t come tomorrow, but I work for the MAGA also, so I’m going to come up. I don’t have a car, so I’ll be coming in public transport. It only takes an hour and a half to get there from Huehue, right?”

“Um, no, it actually takes about 5 hours.” He told me no, like I had no idea what I was talking about, even though I’d done the arduous trip TWICE that day. I was tired, and fed up with working with these people, and they hadn’t even bothered to show up yet. “If you want to get here for the 9 am meeting we’ve set up, you need to leave Huehue at about 5 am, and you’ll still get here a little late.”

“Ok, well, how much does it cost to get there?” he asked, so I told him. “Now, Sebastian said you’d give him some money for gas. I’ll only be bringing enough money to get there. So you’ll give me money to get home, right?”

Where do these people get off being so presumptuous? “Fine, yeah. We can give you some money.” I gave him directions to our village. Things seemed precariously “on” for the morning.

I woke up to the six o’clock announcements mentioning the days’ program and inviting everyone. Shortly thereafter, I got up and started moving, sort of waiting for things to happen. At 8 o’clock my new friend, Nelson, calls to say he hasn’t yet left the city, “Should I still come?”

I figured him showing up late would make us look less bad than not showing up at all. “Yes,” i said, restraining myself from yelling at him. And then I got to do one of my most favorite things EVER, talk to Manuel.

“What? He’s not going to be here until when? Why didn’t you tell me this before I made the morning announcement.” Again, why attack the messenger? It’s misplaced blame and frustration. I get that, but I hate it, especially from the mouth that has caused us more problems than anything or anyone else in our entire time here. I actually looked at him and said very testily, “You know, if I’d known at 6 am that he was going to arrive late, maybe, but seeing as how he JUST called me, and it’s 8 o’clock, I couldn’t tell you something I didn’t know at six o’clock this morning.”

He backed down some. “Well, you have to come make the announcement with me that he’s going to be late, because if you don’t everyone is going to blame this on me.”

You know, Manuel has a funny dilemma. Since the guy usually takes credit for everything, quite gloriously, he has to deal with a lot of annoyed people when things don’t go according to his phenomenal plans. But I was pretty sick of getting blamed also, and so I took pity on him this time, telling him that it would be fine. I’d go announce the time change with him. As we walked down to the school to make the announcement, I called Nelson to see how far he’d made it, to estimate his arrival time. It turns out he ended up in a private car after all, and would get here sometime around 11. Fletch ended up joining us and somehow making the announcement as well. I talked to the early arrivals who were apparently very excited about chicken vaccines, and very disappointed in me for letting this thing happen late after they’d already arrived. Sorry.

In the meantime, I made phone calls to ladies who lived far away and told them of the change in plans but asked that they please find a way to come. I ran to the houses that were near by, to tell people in person and to encourage them to bring their chickens. “You know, we were thinking about bringing our chickens, but what if the vaccine kills them?” I tried to explain that the vaccine would only kill birds that were already sick, but I got nothing but skeptical responses in return. “You know, bring a chicken or two if you want to. If you don’t want to bring any, don’t. Just please, come and listen to what he has to say and learn how to give the vaccines. You’ll learn some good stuff, I promise.” And then I cringed at my desperate promise realizing I didn’t have a clue what the guy was going to say or how he was going to handle anything.

I ran around a lot up to and even after Nelson arrived in the village. Fletch talked to him first, assured me he was nice guy and all. I decided I was going to let Fletch handle things as soon as the program got underway. I felt exhausted and defeated before things even began. I felt myself annoyed at the announcement that he was a “nice guy” because he’d already succeeded in so thorougly annoying me. Fletch hadn’t dealt with any of the phone conversations, consequently he wasn’t already carrying the grudge I was.

Finally, women and a fair number of birds were seated in the salon. The early arrivals had returned, still eager to learn. The nurse and her assistant showed up and began to help with getting the program underway. Nelson did indeed begin with an eloquent apology on being late that I had trouble taking to heart. I feel, overall, pretty fed up with words. Since no one really tells things straight, their actions are quickly becoming all that matters. And as the title of my last post indicates, much of the time, the words and actions don’t really add up.

Nelson got into the information he’d come to disburse, and it was all very useful. Yet, I couldn’t help but find irony in his announcement that, “We don’t charge anything to you all for coming out here. We, the Ministry of Agriculture, don’t charge for vaccines. These are all provided by the government. We will only have to charge you if you need medicine for sick animals. This isn’t something we can give for free.” Where was the irony? In the fact that the only two MAGA employees I’d ever talked to had both asked me for money.

The vaccinations got underway with a chorus of squacking and brawcking. Everyone seemed excited to get a chance to practice putting in eye drops and giving injections. There were so many people who wanted to try, I decided it was best to get out of the way and let them practice. I made sure our own birds were vaccinated, and helped manage the lines until things wrapped themselves up.

Nelson left me with all the unused vaccines, which was great. Originally we’d planned for the MAGA guy to visit two communities in his day here, but as they became less and less reliable, I decided it would be best if we did the workshop in our village only, and then Fletch and I could give the talk and help the other communities interested in getting their vaccinations taken care of. As it turned out, I was quite relieved I’d decided to do it that way.

As I was going to put the vaccines in the animal vaccine fridge at the health post, the early arrival came up and asked if he could take some of the vaccines back to his community, as they’d already planned to do vaccinations that afternoon. He’d even brough a cooler. As I was hooking him up with ice and vaccines, Manuel jumped in. “But,” he sputtered. “Wait. But, what about the rest of the community here? If he takes all the vaccines there will be none left for us.”

The early arrival persisted, “But what about the people waiting to get vaccines today? We’ve already called them together in our community.” Manuel looked mad and unsure of how to proceed. And the women who’d come from Yulais wanted to know when we were going to come give them their share of the vaccines. In general, people are pretty passive here, but suddenly everyone was tense and demanding their fair share.

I was so tired at this point. I just wanted to take the vaccines and march out. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. “Manuel, the people here received numerous announcements about this activity today. Anyone who didn’t show up missed out for the time being. They’ll have to show up next time. Diego, (the early arrival) how many vaccines do you need?” He requested about 450. I gave him his vaccines on ice and packaged the cooler myself. “Now, as for Yulais. We have more vaccines here. Please tell Diego (a different one, who is leader in Yulais) that we’ll schedule a workshop and vaccination sometime in the next week. Jaime and I will bring the vaccines with us from here to there in a cooler. We can’t show up today, but we will do it soon.” The woman I was talking to didn’t speak Spanish, and Manuel just stared at her blankly, refusing to translate. Pedro, our language teacher, was standing there and jumped in to help me out. He’s been well informed of all the problems we’ve had with Manuel of late.

Then I turned to Manuel. “Look, Nelson told me all I have to do is contact him when I’m in Huehue and he can meet up with me and give me a package of vaccines. We will schedule another meeting here when I get the vaccines. For now, this community has had their turn.” I felt like an exhausted mother with bickering children. Everyone seemed to take my decisions and final, and filed out. I was left with Nelson who was on the verge of asking for his money, I was sure. I handed it over, thanked him, and walked to the health post to put the vaccines in the fridge– half afraid that Manuel would come take them without telling me. I went home to rest.

The turnout for the workshop, based on the number of people who told us they wanted it, seemed low. But there were so many time changes, which I’m sure didn’t help. I came home, and though it could have been declared an overall success, I just felt defeated. My interactions with the APROFAM mess and with the MAGA were so draining. It made me acutely aware of the lack of professionalism in anything but words, the lack of respect for a person’s time and effort, and the overall inefficiency in the way people communicate and work here. I was defeated, and thankful that the whole thing was finally done. And it made me very sad.

Fletch always beats me to posting things, and generally I try not to repeat him, but in this instance I feel it’s important. Although we were taking part in the same activity, he was much more upbeat about the whole thing. I’m glad he can be upbeat. It generally keeps me from going crazy, and frequently lightens the mood in our house. I’m the first to admit that I brood and get overly serious about things sometimes. But honestly, I have been feeling in the last month that people are just taking and taking and taking from me and I’m not sure how much energy and effort and enthusiasm I have left to give. It’s an awful feeling.

I want to be here. Or at least, it feels like these days I want to want to be here. Most of the time I’ve enjoyed this experience, and a lot of the time if I’m not exactly enjoying what’s going on, I’ve been learning so much that the experience is fascinating. To me that’s worthwhile. But lately, I’m just tired, absurdly tired. My patience is nearly non-existant. It’s bad. It makes me glorify coming home in July, as though once that happens everything will be better. Realistically I know that’s not true. Reintegrating to American life will come with its own set of challenges and heartbreak. I know this. I’m just having a hard time feeling postive and being content with being here now.

That said, my parents arrive in two days. I’m looking forward to this visit, not just because I love my parents and am really thrilled with the opportunity to give them more than a virtual tour of our lives here. But I’m also hopeful. Generally when we’ve had visitors its given me an opportunity to see things anew, and it helps me adjust my perspective for the better. It also doesn’t hurt to know that a week from today we’ll be enjoying some R&R at Casa del Mundo and celebrating my mom’s birthday.

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Serendipity https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/serendipity/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/serendipity/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:29:53 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2994 sox_sm.jpgThis weekend I was learning some new sock knitting techniques, which means I was knitting little practice socks. Really they were baby socks. I finished up a pair of blue baby socks just before we started walking to the neighboring community for a meeting. I thought it a shame I don’t know a baby small enough to wear the socks or I’d just gift them. Reyna’s little boy is too big. Anyway, off we went to a SPA meeting.

The meeting on Sunday was supposed to have taken place at our house because we needed to use the scanner to make copies of some documents, so we thought it would be easier for the three town leaders to just come over here. An hour before the meeting Don Diego called. He asked if we could possibly come over to his house instead. He said his wife was sick and he couldn’t leave her at home alone. The change in plans was a little annoying, mostly because I’d started bread dough under the assumption that it would be cooking during the meeting. I punched it down and let it rise a second time, hoped that the meeting wouldn’t take too long, and off we went.

We arrived at Don Diego’s house and everything seemed pretty chill. His wife was laying down in the back room. He walked in and out to check on her. I asked him what was wrong with his wife, Carolina. “Oh, she had a baby. It was born a few hours ago. It’s a boy.” WHAT?! hahah. I didn’t even know his wife was pregnant. We, Jaime and I, are constantly joking about how difficult it is to tell if a woman is pregnant when she wears traje. Fletch usually can’t tell at all, which makes me tease him and point out pregnant ladies so he can maybe start to spot them. Thing is, Don Diego’s wife is a gordita (not the Taco Bell kind), she’s really a chubby lady and has been the whole time we’ve known her. There’s one woman in Yulais who has ten children who I’ve thought the last few times I saw her could be pregnant again, but she’s a really tiny woman. Don Diego’s wife: not tiny. This is, however, her eleventh child, though only seven (including the new born) are alive. Whoa.

comadrona_sm.jpgAs we were sitting waiting patiently, a man walked right into the house and back into the room to talk to Diego’s wife. I asked Diego, out of both curiosity and boredom (waiting for the meeting to start) if I could see the baby. “Of course,” he said with a big smile and led me back to his wife’s bed. I recognized the man who’d just come in, though I don’t know his name. He’s a regular at our midwife meetings, but I always assumed he was part of a community health committee. He said hello to Fletch and me as he sipped his atol, “We had a good birth today. Her pains started at about 4 in the morning, and the baby was born at a quarter to seven.” He looked pleased. I wondered if this man was Diego’s father-in-law. He certainly looked old enough to be. Then Diego said, “He’s our midwife.” No way! I didn’t realize this culture allowed male midwives. I was double surprised, as was Fletch, first about the baby and then about the midwife. This whole time he’s been faithfully showing up at the midwife meetings because he IS a midwife. So here’s a picture of the male midwife, his patient, and the new baby boy who does not currently have a name–though one of the town leaders suggested they name him Jaime. hehehe.

Now I know who gets the blue baby socks I just finished. It was all very funny and surreal and a little serendipitous as well.

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So Much Talk, So Little Walk https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/so-much-talk-so-little-walk/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/so-much-talk-so-little-walk/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:31:36 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2985 I’ve been putting this post of for about a week. It’s been stressing me out for the entire time, not the writing of the post, but rather the subject of it. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to stop being upset, but I’m not sure how to let it go. So maybe writing will help with that.

SPA drama is never ending these days. We told the leaders in both communities two months ago that the due date for grant paperwork is January 31. There are a few reasons for this, one is because we have to have time to make sure all the paper work is in order before we can turn it into Peace Corps. The second reason is because the Peace Corps SPA committee meets only once a month somewhere between the end of the first week and the end of the second week of the month. We have to have our boss approve all of the paperwork before that meeting. And the third reason is because we can’t wait any longer to get paper work turned in or we run the risk of not finishing the projects before our COS (close of service) date in July. Things go SLOWLY here, and people are used to doing things on their own time, which means having deadlines is a pretty difficult thing for these folks to work with.

We left off on posts about Temux and their project a while ago. The community leaders had decided that they should get the project beneficiaries together to discuss if they wanted to continue with the project or not. At the end of this meeting we held Nas back to talk to him for a moment and he told us that the community has no bank account. This is a huge problem, because a community bank account is a requirement to receive the USAID grant, and it takes weeks for all the processing for an account to go through here, and it was already the end of the first week in January. Manuel had told us months ago, back in October when we first went over the papers with the leaders, that there was a community bank account. We’d never seen a paper, physical proof, but we believed him. We’ve definitely learned the hard way since then that we should probably not ever believe what Manuel says.

This happened just before I left for the GLOW camp. The leaders scheduled a Sunday meeting with the women and then came directly to our house to discuss the decision with Fletch since I wasn’t here. They told Fletch the women wanted the project, but they didn’t know how could the community do this if there was no bank account. They insisted that the amount of money was so pitifully small that it really wasn’t worth their while to try and get a bank account. “If the project were one of 150,000 quetzales or 200,000 quetzales, then it would be worthwhile. But this project is only for 30,000 quetzales.” Fletch said they tried to figure out how much it would cost the town leaders to open a bank account. The leaders figured, with Fletch’s help, that including costs for trips to town, paper work processing, and a lawyer to put their paperwork together, plus money for lunch on the days they had to go to town, the cost came to about 450 quetzales. Fletch tried to explain to them that this was a very small amount of money to pay in order to get 30,000. They didn’t buy it. He didn’t know what to do, and didn’t want to make any big decisions while I wasn’t here, but he wanted to tell them they were right, the project obviously wasn’t worth it. He didn’t want to say this because he believes the project isn’t worthwhile, but because if the leaders of the community aren’t willing to work and stand behind this project, then it will have no worth in the community.

He called me at the camp the next evening to tell me what had happened and to voice his frustrations. “That’s it then,” I said, “we’ll just convince them that they’re right. This project isn’t worthwhile. If that’s the way they feel, that’s the way it is. They haven’t worked for anything up to this point, why should we be pushing them? If they can’t see enough benefits in this to work for it, then it doesn’t need to happen.”

“Ok, that’s kind of how I feel,” was Fletch’s response, “but I didn’t want to say anything too definite without you here. And you can tell the leaders all of this on Friday, because that’s when we’re having our next meeting. They want to tell you everything they just told me because they think I don’t understand them.”

Great. So Friday once I was home from GLOW we had yet another meeting with our community leaders. These meetings become ever more difficult because Manuel shows up, and we’re both to the point that just being in his presence makes us angry and annoyed. But we try to suck it up and do our jobs here. I was making coffee for everyone as folks filed in slowly. Manuel asked, “Jaime, is it true that Lake Atitlan is changing?” Jaime gave him some short answer. I was still hyped up about the Lake presentation we’d had at the camp, so I jumped right in. “Yes, it’s true the lake is changing, and it’s going to be a disaster if it doesn’t get fixed.” I told them about the bloom, how it feeds of chemical fertilizer and raw sewage that people thoughtlessly dump into the lake, and how it’s grown to as big as 30 meters under the surface of the lake and threatens the fish population. I talked about how the responsibility for the problem belonged to everyone: taxi boat operators, the indigenous communities, hotel owners and tourists as well as the government. The leaders asked a few more questions and we turned to talking about how if they don’t take care of the problem tourism in the area will die off, and all the people who depend on the tourist industry will be out of a job. Indigenous villages will lose part of their cultural heritage as well as the fish they’ve always lived used as a food source, and Guatemala as a country will lose a beautiful piece of cultural and national heritage. “Really it’s a problem of shortsightedness. So many people on the lake only look at today, not a lot of them think about how what they’re doing today will affect the lake tomorrow. This problem of being shortsighted isn’t just a problem at the lake, or just a problem here in Guatemala. There are shortsighted people all over the world who destroy things or come close to destroying things because they just don’t think about tomorrow.” By the time we finished talking about Atitlan all of the parties that were going to arrive were present, so we started the meeting. Though this lake discussion definitely set the tone.

Nas started off the meeting. He was upset our tecnico, Aurelio hadn’t shown up. I asked if anyone had called him. Everyone looked at Manuel, “I tried to call him, and he didn’t answer…I called the US to talk to my son and daughter today and I ran out of phone minutes, so then I couldn’t call him after that.” Just listening to the guy drives me crazy. This all really meant that Manuel had not called Aurelio, who promised he would come out for any meetings he was called to in Temux. I’d also talked to Aurelio like three times that day. Nas was upset because he felt like we weren’t communicating well and without Aurelio’s help the leaders wouldn’t be able to fully express themselves since they aren’t very confident Spanish speakers. Jaime told Nas we should invite Reyna and she could help us out, so that’s what we did. Then Nas proceeded to explain that we were having this meeting because the leaders had come to discuss their problems with Jaime on Sunday and it was difficult because Jaime doesn’t speak Spanish. I must say this is a persistant untruth here, that Jaime doesn’t speak Spanish. The poor guy has been so discouraged by this comment in the last year and a half. His Spanish is proficient. His improvements have been incredible. Still, everyone in Temux seems to believe that Jaime doesn’t speak Spanish, because he doesn’t speak it like I do.

So the leaders began to tell me exactly what Jaime told me they told him at the previous meeting. They said the size of the project was so small that they didn’t think it was worthwile. “If this was a project of 150,000quetzales or 200,000 quetzales, it would be worth it. But just 30,000 quetzales isn’t worth the trouble to get the bank account.” Exactly what Jaime had told me they told him on Sunday…but it’s just that Jaime doesn’t speak Spanish. And it was just as annoying, if not more, to hear first hand a second time, exactly what I’d heard second hand the first time. I took the stance I’d told Fletch I would. “You’re right. This project isn’t right for the community right now. This is too difficult, in too short a time. I don’t think we should do it. Don’t worry that you’ll lose the opportunity forever because once the next volunteer gets here, you’ll have another chance. I just don’t think this is right for the moment.”

Everyone was silent. Then there were some Q’anjob’al exchanges. Nas spoke again. “We don’t want the women who’ve attended these talks and done so much to participate to lose out on the project. We just think maybe if you guys could get some money for us for the bank account fees we could do this. But this is too much money to ask from the community.” We can not give them money for this. We told Yulais the same thing, many many times, and they still managed to get their bank account. I asked Manuel what happened to the money they always collected from the women, because after every single talk I’ve given they take attendance and collect money.

“Well there wasn’t that much money, just a few quetzales from each woman each meeting.” Sometimes there were a hundred women, as few as forty, at these talks though and I’ve given something like 30 of them. This money collection has been happening since we got here and started giving talks a year ago in August, so I pressed him again to tell me where all the money went, how is there none left? “Well we had to make a meal when your mother-in-law came and then we had to do it again during the Health Fair. These meals aren’t cheap” I could sense behind me that Fletch wanted to jump out of his chair at Manuel. So I said, “I just want to point out that when my mother-in-law came we asked you SPECIFICALLY not to make a meal for her. You did it anyway. Then while planning the Health Fair we decided that the community would just have a snack and there would be no lunch so that we didn’t spend so much money. I left for vacation and when I came back, you’d planned a big lunch and invited all sorts of people from out of town; most of them didn’t even come. These meals were made against my recomendation both times.” He started to tell everyone that it was the nurse who said we had to have a lunch and it was Aurelio who sent out invitations to the lunch, but I interrupted him. “This isn’t about blaming people. This conversation is about money. You all want money to open a bank account. I want you all to look at how community money has been spent, to recognize where we can improve and to learn from the past. In the future, maybe we can spend it more wisely. The meals weren’t cheap, and that’s exactly why I said we shouldn’t make them. Look at the costs you’ve all listed for this bank account.” They looked at the itemized list on the board they’d made during the Sunday meeting with Jaime, “You have 50 quetzales of 450 quetzales listed for food. Jaime said he mentioned to you all that maybe you should pack your lunch from home and then you’d save that money. He said you responded by laughing at him and saying, ‘Yeah right, that’s what our grandparents did.’ Did you ever think maybe your grandparents did that because they were smart about not using what little money they had on unnecessary expenses? We HAVE to think about how we spend money, as individuals, and as a community. If those lunches hadn’t been made there’d still be money to take to the bank.”

I generally use personal anecdotes when trying to illustrate a point, and this time was no different. I talk a lot about how my parents have a lot of kids, and how they dealt with it. This time I used a story about how school lunches were more expensive than if my parents packed our lunches for us, so that’s what they did, and I ended with, “Even now, every time we take a trip, I pack bread and fruit and nuts and take it with us in the bus so we don’t spend money on things we don’t need.” And that last bit is true. Fletch usually makes fun of me for how much I tend to carry when we go on trips, that is until he starts to get hungry and asks, “Hey, did you bring anything to eat?”

I told the leaders how in Yulais they collected money from the women to pay for the account expenses, thinking this was an easy solution. “The problem,” Nas explained, “is that there are some men who aren’t supportive of their wives receiving projects and if we ask them to give us money for a bank account their husbands won’t allow them to participate. And we just don’t want the women to lose out.” Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the problems ever end here. It’s the money that’s a problem, but the money is a problem because their mentality is so skewed. I agreed that this is a problem, but suggested that maybe as leaders they should visit these men personally and discuss the reasons this project is a good idea. “We can’t do that. No one would listen.”

Off I went again, “Manuel once told us that if we went to carpenters to ask for furniture donations to the computer center that no one would give us anything. But we went anyway, and you know what? Now we have tables and chairs for the computer center. Listen, I don’t envy your job as leaders. This isn’t easy, but you have to be willing to take these risks if you want projects. Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but if you want change, you have to be willing to change. If you want things to improve from the way they are now, you have to be willing to try new things, to do things a little differently. The community, if it wants change, has to be willing to change.

You’re asking for more money, for bigger projects. You say that would make this worth the effort. But have you ever thought about how many people the project will help and for how many years rather than just focusing on how much money the project brings in? You need to refocus. If the community and you all as community leaders aren’t willing to change the way you think about and do things in order to make a change in your community, no amount of money will help you improve your situation.

Look at the composting latrines that the DECOPAZ organization built in the neighboring community. They bought the best latrines money could buy for the community. How many of those latrines are used today? They didn’t help the people they were supposed to help. People don’t know how to use them properly, or they just decide they don’t like them, probably because they’re unsure how to use them properly. The money DECOPAZ spent on that technology didn’t help most of those people. Why? Maybe DECOPAZ didn’t educate the people well enough. They gave out packets of information on how to use and maintain them, but the packets were in Spanish, and they were given to a Q’anjob’alese community that is mostly illiterate. The people next door didn’t have enough information about what they were getting, or why they were getting it, or how it would help them. If people don’t have the desire to change or if they don’t have the information they need to allow them to change, they can’t do it. All the money in the world won’t help this community if we don’t know how to use it.”

At this point Nas seemed to understand, there was some talk around the circle about large funds that the community had received from the same DECOPAZ organization, and how those funds disappeared, and no one knows where the money went or if it improved the community at all. There was nodding and agreement. When they were finished with this point, I continued.

“You know I didn’t come here thinking that I would get all the women in this community to change all the ways they take care of their families. That’s not my goal. If the women are learning things from the talks, that’s great. But you should know that what I really hope is that all the young girls and young women who hear the things I say can use that information to make their lives a little better. I didn’t come her to change things overnight. That’s not possible. Your work as leaders won’t happen quickly either. Just like the situation with the lake, you can’t look only at today. As leaders, what do you want for the future of your community? Does a community bank account seem like something that will be useful to the community, not just today, but for opportunities to come? Does this project and the people it will benefit fit into your plans for the future of your community? I can’t decide this for you. Jaime can’t decide this for you. You all have to decide this with your community.” They were quiet, as they usually are when anyone finishes talking. Then they explained that they’d have to talk to Aurelio, and they’d have to get another meeting together. We called Aurelio, and set the meeting up for Sunday.

Aurelio, our official counterpart, seems loath to let this opportunity pass the community by, even though we explained to him that we don’t believe the community is ready for the project. He seemed to think he has a way to save it, by using an account that will open on the first of February as a community account for all the tiny communities in our county to use as their Emergency Action Plan money, for the evacuation and hospitalization of anyone sick or ailing. It’s sort of like an intro to the world of insurance. While this idea of using the new county-wide community bank account sounds like it might be a great idea, it totally misses the point. It means the leaders once again evade work, time and money input, that shows they’re invested in the project. On Sunday I felt like Aurelio flew in here and promised to clean things up more or less, and I believe he’s very well intentioned in doing so. However, I don’t think this community “gets it”, and Aurelio’s plan to save the project doesn’t even address that.

An entire week went by after Aurelio’s appearance in town before anyone came to us to ask what the next step was. Don Tomax showed up last night. He’s a leader not at all liked by Manuel (which could be a good thing?), and held in suspicion by Nas (which could just be cautionary?). He came by to ask what the final word on the bank account was and what the leaders need to do next. We told him that they need to talk directly with Aurelio about the bank account, and if they want the project to happen they need to get their jobs done and their paper work filled out by next Sunday. That’s in less than a week.

During this entire conversation Nas and Manuel were in the new room that’s been attached to our house. They were partaking in some Sunday drinking and there was, prior to Tomax’s visit to our house, a lot of animated conversation that Jaime and I didn’t understand. Both of us were painfully aware that Tomax’s visit aroused the attention of the other room, as all talk ceased. It was so obvious that we were talking to three leaders, not just the one who’d come to visit. We told him honestly that the community’s prospect of getting a project, at this point, did not look good simply because the leaders have not done the work they needed to do in order to make it happen. He said he’d talk to Don Ximon, and maybe he’d talk to Manuel and Nas tomorrow because he’d “heard they were drinking.” We told him that was probably a good idea. Once Tomax was out the door, we heard the pop and pishhh of another beer can opening, and slowly the talk resumed.

You know what, I’ve turned into a preacher for development. Everything, EVERY thing that happened in these meetings felt like it turned into me giving a mini-lecture to our equivalent of the town counsel. Both to participate in them and to recall them makes me feel like I’m turning blue in the face. For the last week both of us have woken up and gone to bed with headaches. We feel like we’ve tried everything. We haven’t succeeded in simply getting them excited enough to participate. We haven’t succeeded in making them feel a sense of responsibility so that they’ll participate. We haven’t even made them feel any pressure at the possibility of losing the project that makes them jump to participate. What else can we do? I have begun to dread these entmoots, and I’ve also begun to wonder if the leaders dread me just as much? Are they even learning anything? Am I making any sense at all to them?

As far as things are going here, it feels like both Fletch and I are losing steam in this community. We’re pretty energetic and excitable people most of the time. But here it’s feels like that’s been sucked right out of is. And this feeling of “I’ve got nothing left” isn’t at all helped by my wondering if people still like us. Do they think we’re lazy? Do they think we’re liars who promised them these magical, wonderful projects and then didn’t come through with them? I feel like there’s a good chance at least a few of them do think that. I know I shouldn’t care. I know this means I’m taking things personally, but then again, if I didn’t care I wouldn’t be here. If this wasn’t at least a somewhat personal endeavor I wouldn’t work so hard at it. It’s all very draining and disheartening.

We’re still hopeful about Yulais. In our meeting with their leaders yesterday they asked if we’d be ready to start building after the local fair, which ends the third week in February, “We just want to make this happen already!” Don Diego said, snapping his hand up and down in a very Guatemalan gesture to show that he’s excited and ready to go. Their grant paper work is also near completion as well. For some reason, it’s still not enough to get me really excited. I guess it’s the feeling that here, in our home, we’re surrounded by, literally boxed in by anxious anticipation of this project that everyone wants, in fact that many people seem to think they’re entitled to, and that no one really wants to work for.

Fletch told me today that we should be ready for things to turn around dramatically, for everyone to get excited and start working and pump this project out. That’s what’s hard, feeling like it’s not going to happen, but being ever on the ready in case it just does.

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GLOW https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/glow/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/glow/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:02:46 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2958 Hello again, after another long absence. I’ve been busy, and I’ve been away. Most of last week I was just north of Huehuetenango (the city) helping facilitate a pretty exciting project that female volunteers in various parts of the world, including of course Guatemala, have begun as secondary projects. G.L.O.W. stands not for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling in this case, but Girls Leading Our World. It’s a 3-4 day camp, designed along the lines of an American-style summer camp. When I heard about this program during training, I knew I had to do it. The camp counselor in me wigged out with excitment.

GLOW was started by volunteers in Romania in 1995, and it is in Romania that GLOW has had the most success. At present the camp is run entirely by Romanian women who took part in the camp as girls. There is a GLOW organization that funds the program, as well as clubs similar to girl scout troops that get together the rest of the year and a GLOW website (in Romanian) for girls to visit, ask questions, and talk with other campers. The program is really well developed and very sustainable. That’s not quite the situation with GLOW in Guatemala.

p2.jpgAs I was told when I was appointed to the GLOW committee a month after swearing in, GLOW was something volunteers had wanted to do for years, but since we’re all only here for 2 years at a time, no one really knew how to get it going… until about 2 years ago when a very dedicated bunch of women asked for donations from the states and were determined to make it happen. The first camp was a success, but logistically very complicated and expensive. They paid bus fares for girls coming from all over the country to get to the central camping location, which meant there were ladinas and mayan girls from all different backgrounds at the camp. That in itself was fantastic, but the expense and hectic travel for the girls to get there was a bit much. The volunteers asked HCN’s to participate–Host Country Nationals, or Guatemalan women. There were HCNs who agreed to come, then didn’t show up, or only came for a few hours and left. The HCNs didn’t really understand the concept of the camp or the importance of the exercise as a whole. The volunteers learned that money spent on Domino’s pizza is not money well spent in Guatemala. Many Guatemalans are lactose intolerant, and for half the girls, pizza is more of a frightening concoction than a tasty treat.

The second camp took place while I was still in training near Antigua. They decided to concentrate on bringing together girls from one area. The camp took place in Tecpan and was primarly attended by Kaqchikel girls. The volunteers said one of the coolest parts of the camp is that all the girls dressed in their nicest traje to come–you know, the traje reserved graduations and weddings. The participation from Guatemalan women was better. There was even a discussion panel of professional Guatemalan women for the girls to talk to. Each camp gave the GLOW committee enough success to remain hopeful and taught them lessons for improvement.

This camp was the third GLOW camp for Peace Corps Guatemala. The Peace Corps is an organization very concerned with sustainability, and after the third camp the original GLOW funds would be depleted or inadequate for another full size camp; therefore, the committee had to come up with a plan. We never intended for a year and half to go by without doing the third camp, but that’s how long it took us to find an aid organization interested in funding GLOW and to get committments from more Guatemalan women to help facilitate the camp. A volunteer who finished her service in November and two who will head home in March are credited with the leg work that led us to find Child Fund International, an organization that has satellite offices in most departments in Guatemala. Additionally, there are volunteers stationed near almost all of their offices to further facilitate cooperation between Peace Corps and CFI. CFI heard about the program, said it was great, and said they’d make GLOW part of their annual budget. YAY! The next camp was set to take place just north of Huehuetenango, heading up into the Cuchumatanes.

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The volunteer who finished her service in November worked like crazy to have the camp before she left. Unfortunately, though, the CFI office in the area told us they were dedicated to hosting the camp, but interfered with the efforts by double booking their employee who was to oversee the camp. As things were being finalized for the camp on Nov 3-6, our volunteer was told that the woman who was to be present for the entire camp would not be present for any of it due to other work meetings. So much for better HCN participation or sustainability. The camp was then rescheduled three different times, until we were able to settle on the January dates and draw up a contract with the CFI office that they would not schedule their facilitator to be at other meetings during the duration of the camp. Por fin! Finally, we were ready to go.  

IMG_4385_SM.jpgTen volunteers–eco-tourism volunteers, municipal development volunteers, ag-marketing, youth development, healthy homes, and healthy schools volunteers– showed up on Sunday afternoon to head out to the camp where we would be staying in order to decorate and set things up for the following morning. The campground we stayed at is an Evangelical retreat center pretty much perfectly suited to our needs. There were multiple “cabins” (made out of concrete block) with two rooms and a large bathroom between the rooms, a meeting room, and a huge dining hall. The camp had cooks that were preparing all the meals for us. After all the set up, we headed back to our volunteer host’s apartment in the city where we finalized the schedule and decided who would be running each activity.

IMG_4333_SM.jpgThe girls showed up at the Oficina Municipal de la Mujer, the County Women’s Office, at 8 am to be transported out to the camp. And from there on out it ran like camp, the most significant difference being a focus on some pretty serious subjects. We did icebreakers and get-to-know you games. We tie-dyed shirts that say, “Estrellas de Hoy! Chiantla 2010”. GLOW doesn’t really translate, so we call it Stars of Today! We talked about self esteem: knowing our bodies and ourselves to have confidence in who we are. There was a workshop on the importance of setting goals. The girls decorated diary/notebooks to keep with them and write down anything that came to mind or was interesting to them. The first night, we had a bonfire and roasted marshmallows and made s’mores. Chiky cookies are graham cracker-like cookies with a chocolate coating, very popular here, and they totally make s’mores even easier to make than normal. They were a hit, and so was the fire because for the 4 days we were working on this camp Guatemala was having a cold spurt, and it was heinously chilly for most of the time there. I didn’t so much change clothes as put on a fresh base layer and put everything else back on again, including doubling tshirts, thermal shirts with sweaters, and a fleece on top. Yikes.

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We had workshops on sexual health, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention, family planning (as this ties in a lot here with developing goals and working to achieve them since so many girls have babies at such a young age), and nutrition and exercise. Being that I work with the Ministry of Health and know what services they offer and also that I work with women’s groups on a weekly basis, I co-facilitated a lot of the sex and sexual health workshops. It also helps that I’m married, because in this very conservative society even these teenage girls could think I only know these things because I’m a loose woman, to put it mildly. But I’m married, so obviously I can know these things and still be virtuous. The girls’ responses to the information were amazing. I feel like their frank and very specific questions were a sign that we’d succeeded in making them feel like this was a place of trust where they could get real information. There was a lot of dispelling rumors they heard in school. It was exciting. I even had ladies from the Women’s Office pulling me aside to ask questions about all the family planning information, which was really great.

Rosario was our greatest asset among the Guatemalan women who came and participated for the entire camp. She and her coworkers from the County Women’s Office facilitated a few workshops. Rosario was particularly fantastic in the planning and execution of the camp. She worked for the last two years alongside the volunteer who finished in November. The first time I met Rosario during a planning meeting, I thought she was older than I am. She’s so with it! It turns out, she just turned 21. She’s a full time employee at the Women’s Office, a full time student, and a new mom. She lost her brother in a drive-by shooting two years ago. She’s had a lot to deal with her in life, and still she’s got a ton of spunk and a desire to make things, all the things around her it seems, better. She and her coworkers talked about domestic violence and what women’s rights are in Guatemala, as the Women’s Office’s main job is to help women understand their rights and the services provided to them by the government. It’s an interesting job. In some places it seems the office is simply full of the mayor’s friend’s wives who aren’t really interested in doing a job per se, and in other areas it’s full of really fuerte women like Rosario who want to make a difference in their community. The domestic violence charla as well as their discussion on what rape is were really powerful for those of who knew that one of the girls attending the camp has a sister 7 months pregnant with their father’s baby. The social workers suspect the two of his daughters have now fathered his children, and the mother is too scared to report him. And she’s scared with reason. Just last month we heard a man across the valley from our village killed his wife because she reported him for the same crime. He spent two days in jail and was then let out. Teaching these girls what their rights are, and that they deserve these rights, was really powerful.

IMG_4357_SM.jpgRosario also brought in a friend of hers, a woman who’d started a side-business in jewelry making, and the friend was recruited to teach all of girls to make a jewelry set. This was to go along with a discussion about small business and the possibilities offered through micro-loans. It was a great idea. Realistically I think the girls were just thrilled they had not only tie dyed t-shirts to take home, but also a set of earrings, a necklace, and a bracelet they’d made on their own. They might have missed that it was supposed to be about possibilities for small businesses, but hey, they had a lot of information co ming at them.

On the last night Rosario gave a presentation on civic participation and leadership. She and her coworkers talked about corruption and how no matter how many people try to bribe you, the ballots are secret, so no one will ever know if their bribes worked. This is funny, because it’s true. You can accept all the bribes you want from candidates, but they’ll never know if you voted for them or not. Corruption is a huge deal here. As the UN committee on impunity found in their first report six months after arriving in country, Guatemala is so deeply sunk in corruption at all levels of government that the country is incapable of dealing with the problem on its own. Rosario talked to the girls at length about examining each candidate’s platforms and voting for the person you think is best for the job. She also went through all the steps to register to vote. Next year is a presidential election year, and there were quite a few girls between 17 and 19 present. To me, sitting in on this talk was rather amazing. I was never pulled into a workshop that explicitly told me how to deal with corruption in my government. Not to say it doesn’t exist in the US (*cough* Blagojevich!), but it’s not the dire problem it is here. And usually if the folks are caught in the US, they are punished.

IMG_4343_SM.jpgTo drill home the point of conscientious voting, Rosario had nominated four of us volunteers as representatives of made-up political parties with ridiculous names. We had to make up our own platforms. The girls were supposed to exercise their right to vote on whichever candidate they thought was best. We had a good time making up our mayoral platforms and giving the speeches. One of the parties promised to pave all the roads from the farthest rural communities into the county seat–which was very apropos, since two of the girls spent six hours on a bus coming in from the most rural aldea of Chiantla in order to attend the camp. One of the parties promised to fight domestic violence that destroys families, saying that strong families make strong communities. I was next up, promising to make sure our health center and posts were always stocked with the necessary medications, vitamins and vaccines as well as beginning an educational campaign for parents regarding family health. The last and most dynamic candidate of us all promised to build a beautiful central park with fountains and drinking fountains, even dog fountains, and a theater where we could all enjoy the premiere of Romeo and Juliet. She had the crowd chanting her party name, CHIN-BON-BIN! CHIN-BON-BIN! CHIN-BON-BIN! at 3 different times throughout her rousing speech. It was fantastic. This particular volunteer was an actress with Second City in Chicago and then for a time in LA before joining the Peace Corps. She is unsuspectingly hilarious at times. Mayor in Spanish is alcalde, but a female mayor is an alcaldesa. We were all tense during the elections, and I felt that Chin-bon-bin had a pretty good chance of winning. But once the votes were in, I came out the victor and was hitherto addressed as Alcaldesa Fanjoy. The thing about the name Fanjoy is that it’s rare enough in English, but in Spanish they pronounce it Fan-Hoy. Hilarious. It’s probable I will be addressed as Alcaldesa Fan-hoy for a very long time by one friend or another.  

Following our funny campaign, one of the volunteers who’s a little less than a year into her service gave a presentation to highlight civic participation in an everyday way. Lake Atitlán, one of the most famous tourist stops in Guatemala along with the Mayan ruins of Tikal, is in serious danger. Aldeous Huxley declared the site one of the most beautiful places on earth, and it really is breathtaking. The lake, 10 miles across at its widest point and home to 3 volcanos, has been the center of the Mayan villages that surround it for thousands of years, but the population has grown considerably and the volume of tourist traffic there is often immense. In the last 60-70 years, it seems everyone has been transfixed by its beauty while being rather careless with the way they treat it. Raw sewage and garbage, gas from all the boat taxis, and chemical fertilizer runoffs from the steep cultivated slopes running down into the water have reached unbearable levels.

Lake Atitlán is normally deep blue in the morning and evening, bright blue during the day, or grey blue when the rainy season storms blow in. But in October, it turned green with a massive algae bloom feeding off all the lake toxicity. It’s a big problem. It threatens indigenous populations that have fished there for centuries, as the bloom will choke out the fish if it gets big enough (and it will if it goes untreated). It threatens the economy of the entire area, now so heavily dependent on tourist traffic. One of our fellow volunteers gave a presentation on the gravity of the situation and what has to happen to keep the lake from dying. She explained how the newly formed organization Todos por el Lago, Everyone for the Lake, operates, with community representatives showing up at formal meetings in central locations and taking the messages back to their communities, how everyone from poor indigenous fishermen to McDonalds are pitching in to make sure the lake isn’t destroyed. At present the blooms are seasonal, but they’ve reached as deep as 30 meters under the surface of the lake. The volunteer was so passionate, and I think all of us learned something from her talk.

I think her situation is one of those great moments of serendipity or fate or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, in life. She was placed in a lake town as a community tourism volunteer shortly before the bloom presented itself, but she’s got a masters in environmental science with a concentration in fecal water contamination. Now she’s changing her job to deal solely with issues of the lake. She’s already helped write a grant to fund the first testing lab on the lake, so samples don’t have to be schlepped to Guate or sent abroad for testing. It was a ten minute presentation, but it was great for its urgency and how well it illustrated what citizens should do for their country. But this was a rather heavy way to end the night, so we broke away from all the seriousness with our crazy dance-a-thon talent show.

The last day of camp, the girls had time to ask questions and clarify anything they were confused about. Then they were asked to make Action Plans. What are they going to do when they go back to their communities to share the information they’ve received? They all chose different activities, gave dates and times. The plan, at the moment, is for the Women’s Office and their local PCV to follow up on the girls and their activities as well as support them if/when they need it.

We all spread out and talked to the girls over lunch. They talked about how it felt so good to identify with different facilitators, their attitudes and passions. I asked some of them what sort of things they learned, and most of them agreed that they’d heard of most of these things before, but vaguely. They were all appreciative that they’d been given the opportunity to learn about these things so in depth, “not like in school” they said. Whoa.

It occp1.jpgurred to me, as I was giving talks during different sessions and sitting with the girls at meal time talking, I thought it very ironic that there were MANY sessions and conversations that wouldn’t have been allowed to take place in a lot, if not most, schools and summer camps in the United States. Here the information is just as taboo, but there are no laws to prevent discussing these things (think “abstinence-only sex education”). At summer camp in the US, counselors are told very explicitly what they can and can not discuss with campers. It’s a BIG deal. The difference, I think, is that in the US the information is there, guarded by the adults, held in libraries, searchable on the internet. Any kid who really wants to know things has resources to find them out, including adults who can talk to them if asked. Here, the resources just aren’t available, and the adults are not guardians of information–they too lack information on health, sex, sexuality, civic participation, self-esteem, and women’s rights.

I’m convinced that without all the days, weeks, and summers I spent at Girl Scout Camp, I would’ve turned out a totally different person. I gained basics like self-esteem and teamwork, and well as my dreams to study abroad after meeting so many foreign counselors from my time at camp. Foreign counselors sparked my interests in other places and people, and a constant drive to (as the pledge says) “serve God* and my country; to help people at all times, and to live by the Girl Scout Law.” It’s been such a positive influence in my life, I was convinced that GLOW has the same potential. Now that I was finally able to participate in a camp here, I know it’s true. You put a bunch of energetic and determined women and girls in a room, all with different interests and backgrounds, and everyone is bound to have a good time and walk away a little smarter. I love girl time! Don’t get me wrong, I do like boys, a lot. I married one. But wouldn’t you know I also found him at Girl Scout Camp? No joke. 🙂 Anyway, it was one rewarding week, doing my job here in what felt like the most dynamic environment I’ve worked in during all of Peace Corps. I have a lot of hope for GLOW in Guatemala, and for the next six months I’ll be working as support where needed to convince others of the validity of the program and working always toward the big “S”, SUSTAINABILITY.

For more information on how GLOW is going and growing worldwide you can Google GLOW, Peace Corps. Pretty interesting stuff.

* The word “God” can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on one’s spiritual beliefs. When reciting the Girl Scout Promise, it is okay to replace the word “God” with whatever word your spiritual beliefs dictate.

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The Hold Up https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-hold-up/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/the-hold-up/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:02:33 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2855 So Christmas in site was nice, as I mentioned earlier. But by New Years we were ready for a little break. You see, things have been moving painfully slow. We don’t know what to do to get people excited or to inspire them to be proactive. In November at our last SPA project meeting before going home we told the leaders, “We can’t let another month go by without meeting or we’ll end up wasting too much time to be able to do a project.” We gave the women a job to do in our absence, and we gave the men their job and said we’d meet in early December. We were back in site on December 2, and athough we’ve gone to Manuel’s house every week, sometimes more than once a week trying to organize another meeting, the entire month and more went by without a meeting.

We’re frustrated. I realized after the third time that Manuel told us we’d have a meeting on such and such a day at such an hour and no one, including Manuel, showed up that he probably wasn’t talking to anyone about having a meeting. I bothered him one more time and he said in the a whiney, high pitched voice, “Si la gente no viene…” which translates to, “But no one comes…” Of course they don’t come to meetings if they don’t know they’re supposed to because no one ever told them. The thing about the women here is that they’ll show up when they know they’re supposed to. They do it for the health talks. They do it for the morrales meetings. They come when the men don’t come, if they’re told. So obviously Manuel wasn’t talking to anyone.

We also have a household breakdown in communication. You see, I feel like Nas Palas doesn’t really like to talk with me about work here. He appears much more comfortable talking to Fletch, so when someone needs to talk to Nas it falls to Fletch. But since Fletch has to ask Nas to get us firewood, and about our light bill, and a million other things, Fletch hesitates, understandably, because we don’t want to wear Nas out. He’s our most trusted ally in working here. It was mentioned to him that we needed to have a meeting, and he always goes directly to Don Ximon. The only problem is that in addition to Christmas festivities going on, the coffee harvest happens in November and December. Don Ximon has a sizeable plot of land in steamy, hot Barrillas about 3 hours away where he’s been spending most of his time cutting his coffee and cardomom (the latter having reached very favorable prices this year, which means he’s not coming home without everything harvested). So we’re stuck. Where do we go?

I’ve been meeting with the morrale making ladies, most of whom do double duty as both morrales artisans and leaders of the Women’s Health Committee. At one point, our neighbor Petrona, who’s invovled in both, asked me about the project. I told her we need to have a meeting and that for some reason I didn’t understand the male leaders weren’t getting together. Then I suggested that she get the ladies together and come to our house. She looked at me like I’d just grown another head, saying “But we can’t meet without the leaders.” I explained to her that, actually, we could meet without the male leaders. “If we wait for the guys to show up, and they just decide they don’t have time to meet or that it isn’t important enough for them to meet with us, then you women will lose out on house improvements.” She didn’t look comfortable with this at all. At first I thought she didn’t want to lose the opportunity to put a floor in her house. “Yes,” she reiterated, “but we have to wait for the men.” I finished up our meeting and went home.

This conversation took place 3 more times in the course of visiting her to check on how her morrales were coming along and discussing when to call all the artisans together for meetings. The only difference was that the last time we had this discussion she ended with the question, “But what if Manuel gets mad us for meeting without him?”

“What would he get mad at you for?” I asked. “Because he’s been too lazy to get a meeting together? We’ve talked to him several times and he says he’s going to get everyone together, then he doesn’t. So if you women want this project to happen we need to have a meeting.” She said ok, that she’d talk to the ladies on Sunday when she saw them. And though it felt like we’d maybe gained an inch, or maybe just a centimeter, I didn’t hear from her again. Then we left for New Years.

We came home and went to Manuel’s house and asked him when we were going to have a meeting. It’s more of a joke on us at this point. “Thursday at 4,” he said. We knew he had no intention of coming or of telling anyone else.

This past week Reyna came over. She’s on vacation from work and I’m teaching her how to knit a hat. While she was visiting, we somehow got on the topic of our frustrations as well as our hesitation to bug her father. She started asking questions. I told her about Petrona, and how if we didn’t do something very soon the community as a whole would lose out on the project. The frustrating thing is that we feel strung along. We explained to Reyna that we don’t have to do this project, that if the community doesn’t want to do it, that’s fine. It would make our jobs easier. However, if they do want it, then they’d better get a move on. I told her about the conversations with Petrona.

She brought up several points, and one was that the community thought that the meetings weren’t happening because we were being lazy and unwilling to work. I was immediately heartbroken. We’re dying to do some work, but no one will work with us! Where’d they get the idea that we’ve just been lazy? And in regards to Petrona she said, “If a woman here stands up and starts to take action to make this project happen, she won’t succeed. Everyone in the community will tear her town. They’ll tell her she doesn’t have any official place in the community leadership and therefore she’s unqualified to call meetings. People won’t come to the meetings.”

I know this is true. I’ve seen things like this happen before, and I suspected this was behind Petrona’s hesitation to act. “But do they realize that their behavior means everyone loses? Do they care?” Reyna shook her head, “Asi son la gente.” That’s just the way people are. They don’t think about things long term. They think about things in the moment, and their thoughts and actions are decided on these lifelong social and cultural strictures they’ve set up for themselves. I find it so disheartening that the women here are held down by more than just fear of the men. What actually happens is that there are established gender roles for women and men, and both sexes are in charge of policing the community to make sure no one steps out of bounds. Women haven’t had leadership positions here before. Why would they start today, just because a couple of gringos came to town saying they have the right and the ability to be leaders of their community?

How can we go up against this? The women won’t act without Manuel, and Manuel’s actions have made it pretty clear to us he’s not going to do anything. I asked Reyna for help. She said she’d talk to her father, so we were stuck waiting again. When would she talk to Nas? How long would we have to wait? Tomorrow night is Reyna’s birthday, so I’m making a double batch of cinnamon rolls, her favorite of the things we make, and we’re going over to the family’s house for a celebratory dinner. Sometimes, when everything else sucks (to sound like a pouty 13 year old again), hanging out with the family is the most fun we have all day.

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Things I’ve Forgotten https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/things-ive-forgotten/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/things-ive-forgotten/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:51:13 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2837 I find it interesting how adaptable people can be. We’ve lived here for a year and a half now, just half a year left, and in that time we’ve developed numerous systems for personal higiene, water purification, washing dishes while polluting the river as little as possible, laundry, food preparation…everything. What I’ve recently realized is that we’ve become so adept at using the systems we’ve put in place that we’ve forgotten about how things worked before Peace Corps. Every time I think of something else it makes me laugh. Here are some of the things I’d forgotten:

While our friends Matt and Sarah were visiting us in August, we started talking some about how painful it can be to wash our dishes in the river. It’s painful because the water can get so cold that we start to lose feeling in our hands, so when we come inside they begin to sting as they regain feeling, like we’ve just built a snowman without wearing gloves. “Why don’t you use gloves?” Sarah asked. I thought about this for a second, and the idea seemed absolutely ridiculous. I can’t remember how we responded to this question exactly, but Sarah did seem taken aback, and decided she’d best drop the subject. I just kept thinking, “Why would wearing gloves help? Gloves would just get wet and cold like our hands get wet and cold, only they’d hold onto the soap and oil and stuff we were trying to get off the pots.” Yes, I decided, wearing knit gloves to do the dishes was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard in a while, and I let it go. A few minutes later Sarah reluctantly brought the subject up again, only this time, from something she said, I realized she wasn’t talking about knit gloves. She was talking about rubber gloves! I began to laugh hysterically at my own stupidity. Suddenly, I remembered that at home we could make the water so HOT it was equally uncomfortable to wash dishes, and for just such a time, someone somewhere along the lines had come up with rubber gloves. I’d completely forgotten about the existence of rubber gloves. Now if only I knew where to get some here in Guatemala, that might be a good idea…

When we go into the cities here in Guatemala, the bathrooms look pretty similar to the way they look in the US. The sink usually has two nozzles, one for hot water and one for cold. The catch is that here, the double-handle faucet is more about looks than function. Lots of them are even marked HOT and COLD as they are in the states, but one of two things happens. 1) Either one of the faucets doesn’t work at all or 2) both nozzles release cold water only. While I was in the states one evening, spending time with our friends, I went to the bathroom and followed it up by going to the sink to wash my hands. I saw that the nozzles were indeed marked HOT and COLD. I looked at the HOT nozzle and laughed to myself, “If only, I thought…” and then I realized where I was. Wait! Hot water really should come out of that faucet. Indeed, it did. It was thrilling, and oh so very nice. Another difference is that I wouldn’t put any water from a faucet here directly in my mouth without boiling it or purifying it with a few drops of bleach. I don’t even use water to brush my teeth anymore. [jaime note: in some cheapskate convenience stores in the US, they hook cold water up to both taps as well!]

The other day I was making toast for breakfast. Now, I’m a bread maker and was one well before coming to Peace Corps. As I was toasting the bread on our wood burning stove one chilly morning, I thought, “When we lived at home it was so nice to have a toaster that didn’t require such close monitoring to prevent turning the bread into charcoal. But how did I get the bread the right shape so that it would fit into the slots?” Then I remembered, I had bread pans! I think it’s amazing, if you really stop and think about it, how much we can live without. I think in the US, most of us have come to depend on so many small tools and conveniences quite unconsciously.

Conversely it’s also amazing the extent to which we Americans have gone to make all aspects of our lives as comfortable as possible. Take, for one, carpet. I’ve never been anywhere in Guatemala, in all my travels anywhere for that matter, that has wall-to-wall carpet like America. But it’s so comfortable! I love to run around barefoot and lounge on the floor with big pillows while hanging out at my parents house. It’s got some give and warmth to it. Sofas…also very comfortable and warm. Again it’s rare to see them so big and squishy outside of the US. I was the envy of my friends during training because my host family actually had a couch, and that’s when we were living in a more urban area. People here don’t have cars, and squeeze as many people as humanly possible into a vehicle. Not only do we usually have multiple cars per family, but everyone gets their own seat and seatbelt, and it’s more and more common that your car seat comes with a built in heater for those cold winter days. Let’s not even go into kitchens, what with companies like Tupperware and the Pampered Chef that come up with a special gadget for every individual task in the kitchen. One of my sisters actually owns a pair of wooden tongs from Pampered Chef to pull your toast out of the toaster slot. The summer I lived with her it usually made me mad because I’d see it sitting on the counter after I’d nearly burnt my fingers pulling the steaming toast the rest of the way out of the slots… I don’t know, it feels kind of humorously absurd, all the the stuff available to us.

I’m not trying to bash on all of these thing. Ok, maybe I am bashing on the toaster tongs, but the rest of it just makes life so comfortable! Our big dream is to have a house with radiant floor heating, and I will run around in socks or barefoot all the time. It’s not as though we plan to be ascetics for the rest of our lives. The thing is, if you want to know what our lives are like here, what they are really like, imagine pretty much everything that makes your life comfortable and convenient, then mentally throw those things out the window. Now, we’re Americans through and through, so little by little we’ve come up with things that make us sort of comfortable again. Here are the domestic things we value most in our Peace Corps lives:

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1. Oven–it’s not well insulated, so in addition to making it possible to bake breads, cookies, cakes, pizzas, and roasted vegetables it also heats the house some.

2. Wood burning stove–one of us comments almost every day about how this stove has changed the quality of our lives here in fighting against the drafts and cold.

3. Internet modem–we don’t have to travel 40 minutes to town and 40 minutes home to use a junky, virus-ridden public computers with the “@” and “ñ” in the wrong place, all while a pack of little kids gawk at us.

4. Down sleeping bags–nuff said

5. iPods–we use them to drown out the blasting marimba music when we just can’t take it anymore

Things we miss the most:

1. A refrigerator/freezer so we don’t have to cook every single meal right before we eat it. I never realized how truly amazing modern refrigeration is until I moved here.

2. A washing machine

3. A shower so we that we can exercise any time we like and then be clean afterwards. We’d also save time not having to haul buckets of water to the house and heat them to wash up.

4. Being able to stay inside when we have to go the bathroom

5. OUR TRUCKO so we can travel where we want, when we want, with nobody crowding up in our business.

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We try not to dwell on these things too much because it would get weird and depressing. Though, it’s true: there have been a few days in the last year and a half where we’ve laid on the bed for a little rest and just dreamed out loud about the things we miss. They aren’t things you can send us in care packages, but rather things we must come home to enjoy again. Most days we just live here; this is just what are lives are for the time being. We’ve figured out how to do it to the best of our abilities and that’s that. It feels like anybody could do this. Other times we remember that things are really quite challenging and difficult in ways we never would’ve experienced if we hadn’t come. What we miss, look at the list–comfort, convenience, and personal freedom–are all things we have willingly given up for our 27 months here. I think when RPCV’s (returned volunteers) talk about how Peace Corps has changed them, a lot of what’s changed them is the change in their perspectives on the world and themselves precisely because we’ve had to give up these things in order to do this job. This doesn’t make us saints or martyrs of anti-materialism. But if this blog is meant to try and explain our lives to you all at home, it would be a great omission to pretend we didn’t miss these things or to ignore what they mean to us and who we are. Honestly, I find it crazy that my brain feels like it works differently here, on a different level than it did before. It makes me wonder what more I’ve yet to remember I’ve forgotten.

This entry has taken a strange turn. Initially I just wanted to share the things I’d forgotten, and now I’m talking from the part of me that realizes in a few days we will officially be into the year 2010, not just a new decade, but the year we finish up here– the year we go home. In a way, as thrilling as going home sometimes sounds, it also very definitely scares me. There will be so much to love, yet so much to which we’ll have to readjust. Ah well, here’s to another year of adventures, everyone, wherever and whatever they may be. Cheers, and Happy New Year to you all.

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Our Guate Christmas https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/our-guate-christmas/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/our-guate-christmas/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:51:01 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2833 This year we opted for a village Christmas. While we like to run around and visit other parts of Guatemala, see the sites and get to know the country as a whole, we feel like our host family is sad every time we leave. This year we decided, since we’d just gone a long trip to the states, that staying here with our host family was a great idea. We could spend some days at home working on things that are usually ignored or put off by our regular work schedule and we could enjoy the festivities that interrupted that work schedule.

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turtleshellsSM.jpgOn the 23rd we went to one of the last nights of the Posada. The word posada literally means “inn”, and the word here is used to describe the reinacting of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem for the census. I’m not sure when this begins, if it’s the beginning of advent or if there’s a specific day in the church calendar here, but once it begins, there’s a small altar with Mary and Joseph, dressed in the local indigenous traje, that travels every day to a different house in the community. The long procession of villagers begins wherever the altar has stayed the night before, and travels to the next house where it will stay the coming night. They carry burning frankinscence and little boys carry two turtle shells they use as a kind of drum. I’m not sure where the tradition of the turtle shell comes from, but it does sound like the clippity-clop of donkeys hooves, which is the way Mary traveled, so they say. A band of musicians walks with the procession while another group is already inside the house of the processions destination. Once everyone arrives at the house, the musicians outside the house knock at the door and sing a song asking if they can come in and sleep for the night. The musicians inside sing a tune back, giving them permission to come in. Once inside, there are readings and reflection questions–advent preparations for the coming of Christ. When that’s all over, out come the snacks! Last year we just got sweet bread and atol, but this year we had full-on mini tamales and pineapple punch– fancy. And all the musicians sing Christmas carols while the rest of the crowd eats.  

IMG_0013_sm.jpgThe whole thing takes 3 or 4 hours, which is why I’m glad we only went to one, because doing this every day for weeks could get pretty tedious. At this particular one the prayer leader, who was very happy to have us there, decided to say everything in Spanish for us and then Q’anjob’al for the rest of the folks, which was very nice of him, and made everything take even longer. 🙂 We walked home in the dark and cold, happy we went and happy to rest in the quiet and warm of our little clubhouse.

cookieDec_sm.jpgThe 24th started out as a fairly quiet day. Fletch and I made something like 300 cookies throughout the week, and by Thursday morning the only thing left as far as cookies were concerned was the decoration of all the gingerbread cutouts. We had four different kinds of cookies–nutmeg logs, peppermint chip cookies, chocolate crackles, and gingerbread (not much compared to the quantities and types my family manages to make at home, but we were pleased with our efforts in adverse conditions: ). I whipped out a ziplock bag, snipped the tinniest hole in the corner of the bag, and got to work decorating. As frequently happens, Chali and Alberto came knocking minutes after I started, so they came in and I showed them how to decorate the cookies. They were pretty excited to take their turns. Not long after that the littlest kids– Michelle, Delvin and Delmi–stopped in for their morning visit to the Christmas tree. Christmas felt well underway.

miman_olla_sm.jpgOnce the cookies were done and left to dry I decided to head over to the neighbors house and check out how the tamale making was going. This is one of the days of the year where the biggest pots in town come out; Nas’s family even bought an extra one the week before from a wandering door-to-door salesman. All the women in the house were busy with one task or another. Some had to cook the corn dough, the others were boiling tomatos and roasting the spices, others toasting the leaves that were to wrap all the tamales, and others cooking the meat, the crowning jewel that goes in the center. They showed me how everything was put together. I watched Lina, the family matriarch, squish pieces of meat dipped in the spice sauce into the middle of the dough pile in the center of the leaves, and lick her fingers between each one. It made me laugh. They gave me the easiest of jobs, placing the prepared, wrapped and tied tamales in the big pot. I couldn’t possible mess that up, heh. They had hours of work still ahead of them, but they told me the lunch tamales would be ready a little behind schedule, at 1:00 rather than noon. I decided to go home and rest. The smoke in their house was crazy since the cooking fires were going full force.

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Almost exactly on time, one of the kids came to tell us the tamales were ready, and over we went. The tamales of the Palas family were enormous, so that they struck fear in my heart at the thought of being gifted numerous tamales from other families and having to eat them ALL. The day before, in a casual conversation with Galindo, I asked him if the families all made their tamales differently. He told me no. He was wrong. Turns out Lina just likes making huge tamales, and Nas appears to love eating them. The family made half of theirs out of a pig Fletch had helped slaughter the day before, and the other half out of chicken. The families who did gift us tamales made some of chicken and some of turkey, and those that came from Manuel’s wife, also named Lina, were much spicier than the others. She used coban chili, a very spicy, smoked, delicious choice for tamales. All the tamales brought to our house were about half the size of those we ate with our family, whew. All the families send tamales to their neighbors and friends, but it’s almost like a trading game. At first this confused me, but later Nas began to explain. “We’re used to putting up with being hungry here, but on these two days of the year, no one is hungry. Everyone eats and eats and eats, and there’s meat.” I realized, the trading is more of a symbolic thing. For example, a poor family could send one tortilla to a family that gave them four or five. The point is 1) to share, and 2) to make sure that everyone has enough to eat. We certainly had plenty.

In the afternoon we decided to go out caroling. This was not a spur of the moment decision. Don Marcos, in the course of constructing his composting latrine, found out that Fletch plays the guitar. Once the construction was done, Marcos showed up at our house with a guitar to lend. He said it belonged to his son who is in the states and that Fletch should use it while he’s here and leave it with Marcos again when we go. So we decided to learn how to play and sing Oh Holy Night and go to the closest houses of families we see most frequently, to sing and pass out cookies. Unfortunately, Marcos and his family spent the holidy in Barrillas, so we didn’t get to go visit them as we’d planned. Manuel and Lina, our neighbor Petlon (mother of ten and maker of morrales for the co-op), and Nas and his Lina plus their children, all seemed to be fans of our little cookie-and-music parade. We saved our host family, and the bulk of the cookies, for last and sang for them at dinner time. When we unveiled the entire tray of cookies, they asked, “Is this all for us, or do you two want some too?” We told them they could eat them all, and everyone swooped down on the tray like pigeons in the park. They were gone in no time.

The nice thing about Christmas here, as with our family in the states, is that everyone is just in a good mood, happy to be together with the excuse of celebrating. We’d heard that fireworks were going to be part of the night, and we’d purchased some big surprise ones in town earlier in the week. As the tamales and cookies disappeared, everyone’s attention went to fireworks. Nas whipped out some big bills and called for more; Galindo and Rigo ran to the nearest store to buy even MORE fireworks. Suddenly I felt like maybe we didn’t purchase enough ourselves, so I sent Fletch off to get us some additional fireworks as well. We didn’t want run out before everyone else! He came back from the store laughing hysterically, all of his pockets stuffed with fireworks. Now, did I mention we were sitting in our host family’s kitchen, around an open fire? The boys handed everything over to Lina, sitting right next to the fire. I thought, this could be a disaster! I laughed mostly to myself as she patiently counted out every single sparkler, fountain, bumblebee, and Roman candle then put them in little piles to redistribute to all the kids. Chali and Alberto grabbed burning logs from the fire and ran outside to light up their loot. The festivities had begun. We joined in lighting up some of ours until it was decided at about 7 o’clock that all the rest should be saved for the big festivities at midnight. Everyone in the family went to settle into bed so they could wake up at midnight, and we went home to bite the heads off our gingerbread men and watch movies until the appointed hour. There was no way I’d be able to wake up if I went to sleep.

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The second movie finished up about 10 minutes before midnight, so we went over to wake up the kids. Chali and Alberto had decided to sleep next door instead of at home with their parents, as we’d told them we’d bought a big surprise for them at midnight. Once the kids started to wake up, the rest of us ran up the hill to where we’d get the best view, and watched as the valley lit up, end to end as well on the mountainside across from us. Giant booming bombas and rockets streaked up into the sky, whistlers were zooming all over, Roman candles spat off different colored flames, and sparklers were handed out all around. It was quite festive. Reyna said she hadn’t gotten up at midnight in years, but this year she was going to be up with us, and she was true to her word. Nas woke up and stood at the door of the house watching out over his kids and grandchildren with a sleepy smile on his face. Midway through the fireworks, everyone paused a second to exchange hugs and Feliz Navidad greetings, then went back to lighting things up. “And this big one you said you had?” Reyna asked. Fletch went to light it up. It was fantastic. Fletch and I were laughing hysterically, the kids were mesmerized. The colors were brilliant. We’d gotten the second biggest one at the store, one that would probably be illegal in most states in the US. Once it was over, though, we were a little regretful we hadn’t gone for the BIGGEST. It was fun anyway. As we were going to go to bed, Manuel’s daughter showed up to invite us over to their house for some midnight tamales too, so we went. We didn’t get to bed until about 2 am.

Christmas day, as well as the weekend for that matter, we used for a little bit of work on things like the garden and a lot for catching up on sleep and projects. Now it’s back to work for us, for a few days anyway before we venture out to meet up with other volunteers for New Years celebrations. But we did get one nice Christmas card, that Fletch wants to share with you.

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A Few of My Favorite Things https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-few-of-my-favorite-things/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-few-of-my-favorite-things/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:16:33 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2785 It’s 11 am. I just finished breakfast, and there are white-out fog conditions outside. I keep reading the news of snowstorms at home. Facebook posts are full of complaints regarding flight delays. I must say, I’m kind of jealous. If I could be bundled up and taking a snow walk or making a snowman, or watching the snow fall while knitting in front of a fireplace, I’d be happy as clam. That’s not to say I’m unhappy here. It’s just a very different Christmas this year.

We’ve had so many invitations since we’re not going back to the states, and we’ve decided the right thing to do is stay home, make a little Christmas here and share with our host family. We love them, so why leave them? Last week after we finished up our crazy big days of work we decided we’d better get some Christmas decorations and get in the mood.

Now, anyone who knows me well knows I love Christmas trees, and not just any old Christmas trees, I’m talking a real pine chopped down and set up in the living room. It makes the whole house smell delicious, and there’s something magical about having this big living tree in your living room. And the other thing–I strongly dislike fake plastic trees. I’ve planted enough trees (and plan to continue to plant trees) so that throughout my life there is a net positive of trees I’ve planted rather than cut down. But here in Guatemala it’s illegal to cut down a whole tree. Theses folks hover dangerously on the edge of a pretty big deforestation problem, because they cook with wood they get from the forest. We considered chopping off some branches to decorate our house, but something more appropriate and more hilarious came up. The thing about Guatemala is that their decorating style is a lot of flash and pizazz on the the outside, but not a lot of functionality and substance on the inside. Their houses, for example, have fun flourishes, colors, painting schemes, and on the inside they’re frequently almost entirely empty. So we debated for a time and decided the right thing to do for our Guatemalan Christmas was to buy a plastic Christmas tree (the one and only in my lifetime, I hope). ‘Tis the season…for me to be a hypocrite as I’ve said this is a thing I will never do, and now it’s done. It’ll be something nice to gift to the next volunteer here. Also, it goes so well with the decorated felt “stockings” one of the girls from Fletch’s training host family made for us. They’re very cute, but definitely one-sided so we can not fill them. 🙂   

bartolo1_sm.jpgWe went to town and checked out what the stores were offering. We tend to shop at stores where people are nice to us, because it makes it a more pleasant experience. There is one pharmacy in particular, the Farmacia San Bartolo (owned by a man named Bartolo) with a plethora of daughters, something like 10 of them (even more than can be seen in the picture), and every time we show up a lot of squealing and laughter ensues. This time we were attacked with hugs. The younger girls were selling wares from tables in the street, and were more than happy to show us all the lights available for our house or tree, and all their functions. It’s difficult to find static lights and lights that DON’T play music. Crazy flashing lights, running lights, lights that dim off and on timed intervals while playing (often out of tune) Christmas music are all very popular. We decided on a Christmas tree that would fit under the window in our house, and lights that were inside of red, blue, green, and gold balls with stars stamped out all around them–they served double duty as ornaments and lights, and I purchased a small box of ball ornaments from another store down the road, where we were invited over for a Christmas tamales should we come into Santa Eulalia on 24th or 25th.

The day we bought all the decorations was the same day as our big maternal mortality workshop. By the time we got home, we were beat, but the always-on-guard gang of kids that hang around our house saw us get off the microbus and walk up the path with boxes and bags. This is their cue to come stand in our door and watch us unpack everything.

xmastree_sm.jpgOnce the house was in order, we invited them in for the unveiling of the tree. Chali jumped right in and put the whole thing together, grabbed the lights and strung them up with only minimal help from me. I was feeling a little bummed, as I love decorating the tree, and once it was up kids were tripping over each other running the 4 feet from the tree to our bed to pick up another ornament and throw it on, nearly tearing the tree down with each ornament they hung. It was kind of funny and ridiculous. They were so very excited. I was just waiting for the first time the tree would fall over. It did. We picked it back up, replaced the ornaments. “You should tie this tree to the wall,” Chali said– exactly what I was thinking. Chali always gets points for being a smart kid. My whole life my dad has secured our Christmas tree with florist’s wire wrapped around hook in the ceiling. The hook is white, like the ceiling, and stays there all year. When the Jaimster and I got our first apartment, we could not stabilize our tree no matter how we tried, so it ended up tied to the wall. It just seems like the smart thing to do.

jaimetreeSM.jpgMy nieces and nephews in the states, who weren’t expecting that we’d surprise them by coming home last year, decorated a set of wooden ornaments for us, half of which are picture frames for them to put their school pictures in. I brought them back after last Christmas, even though it felt a little bit excessive, to save for this year. The kids were enthralled when I pulled those out. There are snowmen, penguins, reindeer, elves, trains, all sorts of things they’ve never seen or heard about, so we tried our best to explain what each ornament is. After we finished, I asked if anyone wanted to hear a story. Our friend, Karen the linguist, sent us a few books in Spanish, including “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. Chali, Alberto, and Yojana were absolutely enthralled. The littler kids got bored and left.  

Sometimes I think I do these things, reading to the kids, because it makes me feel good, but this time I think all four of us had a good time. Reading a Christmas book just seemed right. My mom collects Christmas books. There’s a basket full of them that comes out in December for all holiday reading, and every time I visit them over the holidays I find myself reading children’s Christmas books to myself long after the nieces and nephews have moved on. So at least I have one book with me this year. 🙂

toritosSM.jpgThe day we brought in the tree was also the beginning of a 3 day celebration of the Virgin de Guadalupe. Last year I explained the importance of the Virgin here in our village. The local Catholic church is named for her, so it’s their celebratory feast day. Friday night was the night of the torritos. For those of you who’ve missed earlier posts on this funny little activity, let me explain. The torritos, or little bulls, are wood-and-cardboard boxes with a bull face attached to the front, and placed over the top half of a guy. He runs around a designated area, in a sort of mocking way “provoked” by a bull-fighter. It’s similar to their mocking dance of the conquistadores, but the catch is, the box that makes up the bull has tons of fireworks attached to it. Dangerous? Yes. Hilarious? Yes. For some reason, the fireworks are always lit from a cigarette the men smoke on the sidelines. There isn’t a lot of cigarette smoking here, but during festivals they always come out. It’s like there’s some unspoken rule that you can ONLY light your firecrackers with a cigarette (except during the Health Fair, haha). The activity takes place at about sundown. The firecrackers shoot off wildly into the crowd, and when they happen to fly directly in to the giant Christmas tree (made of cut branches laid over a frame and spray painted green so that your tree doesn’t turn brown before Christmas) there is a group of masked characters who jump and stomp and pound out any erupting flames. So many things here shout WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! I can’t help but think, “this would never fly in the states.” That’s part of why it’s funny, but also sometimes it makes me think maybe we are just a little too uptight sometimes? I know, I know, it’s all about risk reduction. It dawned on me that this activity was a perfect mix of two of my favorite things–Christmas trees AND fireworks. And it was a beautiful evening in the village to watch the sun go down. Here’s a peaceful picture of the mountains at night, looking out into the distance from all the craziness happening in the churchyard below.

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Next week we start baking Christmas cookies. We made a trip to the departmental capital last weekend to load up on hard-to-get ingredients like butter and canola oil. We didn’t anticipate not being able to find peppermint candy canes, but for some reason they only had candy canes that were chocolate mint or watermelon flavored. 😛 Fletch doesn’t get any peppermint patties this year. We’re still going to do gingerbread and nutmeg logs though; we secured the rum and molasses necessary for these two.

It’s tradition here that people go house to house for visits on the 24th and 25th, sharing tamales. We’re going to share cookies and hot cocoa I think–not sure how it’ll work out, but we’re going to try it. I don’t know how many tamales we’re going to be expected to eat. I think they’re tasty, but they’re so very filling… we might explode.

henley2.jpgAnd finally, another of my favorite things, CHICKENS! Our three new chickens are great. They come home every night, and spend a lot of the day wandering not too far from the house. But the best part? Two of the three are laying eggs here at the house. We were getting one egg every other day, but on Thursday, Whitey laid her first egg, and Henley II has started laying one a day instead of every other day, so now we’re getting at least one a day and sometimes too. There’s a lot of egg laying songs happening around our house, and it’s pretty funny. All these eggs will be very handy for the cookie baking coming up.

I hope everyone is enjoying the season in your own favorite ways. I know we were just home, but Christmas always makes me miss friends and family. We’re thinking of you all down here.

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Exito https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/exito/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/exito/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:29:28 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2752 peepsSM.jpg

Hello all! It’s been a while. Suffice it to say that vacation surpassed any expectations we had about its possible excellence. I was so frequently humbled and awed by how great our friends and family are. It was fantastic to see you all; thanks for making it such a great vacation.

The trip there and back again was funny to me. I almost felt like we were time traveling. There are so many stops and changes along the way. The mode of transport changes, people’s appearances change gradually, the languages change, the technologies change. It’s really interesting to watch the world go by in this fashion. While visiting with my grandparents we were looking over a pile of photo albums as my grandma told us stories. She started talking about the kids (my mom and uncles) getting caught in a rainstorm during a May Day celebration and how she just ran them home and threw everything in the drier. “Grandma, what year was that?” She paused, figuring, and said, “oh, about 1954.” I was amazed. My grandparents have had in-home washers and driers since at least 1954 and I live and work with women who have no idea what a washer or drier looks like, nor how it functions. It really is like time traveling. We flew back to Guate on December 1 and spent the night in San Luis with Fletch’s host family. It was nice, going from our state-side family to our Guatemalan family. We spent all of the 2nd in chicken buses trying to make our way home, and still we missed the last bus to our village. We walked the last 40 minutes down the dirt road to our village in the dark. Our host family was pretty happy to see us. They invited us in to eat, even though they’d finished eating already, served us beans and tortillas, and told us the chuj was still hot if we wanted to bathe; we did. We ate around their fire, then hurried back to our house to grab our towels and soap before we ducked into the chuj. As I walked through the corn field, now devoid of corn and full of drying stalks, I thought, it’s so weird how quickly we can move between places. Here we are again, and it feels completely normal.

We’ve never before attempted the trip home in one day, and if we can avoid it, I don’t think we ever will again. It was incredibly exhausting, but we’d promised to be back for an 8am meeting on Dec. 3. As it turned out, we showed up for a meeting that everyone except the nurse had forgotten. At first I was disappointed we’d pushed ourselves to get back if the meeting wasn’t even going to happen, but as we started visiting the leaders who’d failed to show up, I realized it was probably best we’d gotten back promptly or we’d have no chance of organizing a health fair for Monday Dec. 7. People were happy to see we’d returned, and had to comment extensively on this before we could get down to business. When the nurse, Lucia, and I made it to Manuel’s house, he assured us he’d been working on the activities in our absence. Somehow the words he uses to reassure never quite have that effect on me. 😛

Before we left I’d said, during the initial planning of events, that we shouldn’t do a big lunch because this was just a community activity with no invited guests, and it’s always such a big expense and a lot of work for the women who prepare the meal. It also means that the women who work on the meal can’t participate in the activities. Ah, me and my ridiculous sentimentality toward the women…While I was away Manuel had worked extensively to invite all sorts of leaders from in town, and he’d promised them a lunch. He figured there would be about 40 people in attendance at the lunch (including of course himself, the nurses, and the 4 volunteers, since our friends Niko and Katal were coming to help with the activities). He’d invited the woman in charge of the local welfare program, bank representatives, cooperative representatives, police officers, the assistant mayor, school teachers (by far the most reasonable group of people to invite) and the radio station. “The radio needs to be paid though, and I don’t know how we’ll pay them. They say they’ll have to do the broadcast over the phone so they’ll need us to buy them a phone card, because the signal doesn’t reach between here and in town. Do you guys have money to pay the radio station?” I told him I’d talk to Jaime, which was really code for, “We aren’t paying the radio fees out of our own pocket.” I thought the radio would be more of a distraction than anything. And it’s not like we refuse to donate money to the activities. I was donating decorations, buying and making them myself, and we were planning on paying the fees out of our own pockets for the chicken vaccine guy who would be coming the following Wednesday.

Manuel talked my ear off. I think I was at his house for about 2 hours. He told me the leaders had scheduled a community clean-up day for Saturday morning and asked that Jaime and I be there to support the community. He also said he’d invited the community leaders from the surrounding communities to participate in the chicken vaccine campaign set for Dec. 9. Hey, at least he was working and enthusiastic right? This is also when he and his wife so graciously showed me how they’d taken care of our chicken for us in our absence… Ahh to be back in our cozy village again, I thought…Manuel had forgotten that we scheduled a meeting at 8 am so that the nurses could attend. He’d told everyone the meeting was at 4 o’clock. Lucia (the nurse) and I decided I’d go to the afternoon meeting and fill her in the next morning. I went home to tackle some of the pile of to-do tasks until 4 o’clock rolled around. I was tired out by 4 pm. Manuel was supposed to come get us on his way to the school; he showed up at 4:15, and I didn’t even realize it was actually after 4. I had to finish kneading bread and set it to its last rise, so I sent Fletch in my place and I showed up at 4:45… just in time for the meeting to start at 5. It didn’t end until 7:30. Fletch left early to make us dinner, start a fire, and haul bath water. Most of the meeting dealt with things like: where would the firewood come from to cook the meal? How big a pot do the women need to cook 25lbs of chicken? Who has a pot that big? Where were they going to cook the meal? How much money would each woman need to contribute to pay for the meal for our invited guests? Being tired only added to my annoyance that this meeting was so long because Manuel had done exactly what I suggested we NOT do. But they eventually came to suitable conclusions. The men decided they’d be in charge of decorating the altar for the Health Fair, and would get together on Sunday night to put it all together while the women cooked tamales for the next day.

I felt like I’d forgotten how tiring these entmoots can be, and how much work it is to try and do anything outside of the norm here, a health fair being “not the norm”. As the meeting came to a close, I was worried that maybe the whole Health Fair would be a disaster. What would a disaster look like, I wondered? The focus of the fair was to be on education and prevention of HIV/AIDS. International AIDS day was Dec. 1, while we were in an airplane, but the nurses were supportive and enthusiastic about coming up with a celebration anyway, even if a little delayed. So a disaster, I imagined, might be the men and women revolting, or shouting us off the stage when we started talking about intimate body parts and sex. We try to do what the community wants, so if that happened, maybe we’d just go home until the storm blew over? I didn’t know. I walked home in the dark somewhat shell-shocked. Being in the community all the time gets us used to the demands on us and on our time. Having just returned from vacation, we were definitely not back in the groove yet. At the very least, I was relieved to walk in to our warm little house, eat, bathe, and go to bed.

rubyannouncementSM.jpgThe first few days back were nothing but work work work to catch up and get back on track, phone calls, and hours spent on house chores like laundry. On Saturday, we ran around all morning helping with the community clean-up. Hah, at one point Chalio was walking around, not picking up trash, and I said, “Hey, Chali, come over and help me pick up this trash.” He shook his head no, he didn’t want to help. “If you just throw trash here forever and never pick it up, by the time you’re grown up there will be so much trash in these fields you won’t be able to grow your corn!” I said, half jokingly. I went to work cleaning up the field, and a minute later he was by my side, running back and forth from the trash to the bag I was carrying. As the community finished up and made their way back to the school, I gave a short talk on the loudspeaker about the importance of trash management. I congratulated the community on a job well done and gave them suggestions of ways to continue taking care of their trash, rather than just throwing it in the field and river. Since the talk was broadcast over the loud speaker, I got to give it twice–once in the direction of town, and again directed up the road to the last community in the valley. As soon as I was done talking, I had to excuse myself to go get cleaned up and ready to head in to town for the graduation.

livingstonSM.jpgAn RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, from Guatemala 1967-70) was coming to visit us over the weekend. He’d told us about his upcoming visit before we left on vacation; I’d actually forgotten all about it until we got an email from him on Thursday. We agreed to attend a graduation with him at a school in Santa Eulalia on Saturday. We’d thought all the graduations were done, but this was a graduation not for high school, but for teachers who’d just completed their training. They are now certified to be government employees as teachers under the Ministry of Education. So after months of email communications we finally met RPCV Don Livingston of Computers for Guatemala, in person. The graduation started at 1 pm and didn’t end until about 5, which made for a long day after all the trash cleanup we’d done in the early morning sun. To top it off, I was definitely coming down with a gnarly cold and wanted to be home in bed. Even though we were invited to a special dinner with the head of the school, we opted out and got home just before dark. Don said he’d come out to visit us in person on Sunday. He wanted to see our little village after reading these blog posts for so long.

We spent the late morning and much of the afternoon Sunday with Don, showing him the house (a tour that takes about a minute and a half) as well as introducing him to our neighbors. He did interviews with us as well as with some of the neighbor kids, as he’s working on a type of video to help get funding for a local school project. It was fun and interesting to get to talk with him in person, but it made the afternoon disappear, and there were still Health Fair decorations to be made and hung up in the salon. We had an altar to make for our closing prayer session and lots of red ribbons to be cut and taped all over the walls. And we had to make dinner for four, as Niko and Katal were on the way out to the village.

Manuel sent his son over to the house to let us know he was headed to the salon to start decorating. I ran down with my arms full of red construction paper and partially constructed ribbons. As I sat there taping together the ribbons, Manuel began to grumble about all the people who promise they’ll show up and then don’t. He was annoyed that only two men (himself included) of the 6 that had been at the meeting had shown up to make an altar. This was funny to me because I can’t count the times Manuel has blatantly stood us up. But he was there that day. The thing that kills me about this guy is that, even though I find him incredibly difficult to work with, frequently offensive and annoying, I can’t peg him. Sometimes he really comes through. And he usually at least expresses a desire to make things better and to do a good job. Sometimes his actions are contrary to what he says, and sometimes they’re right on. He’d put his reputation on the line by inviting so many people to this event. He and Elias, another committee member, got busy sweeping and cleaning before they went out to cut some fresh pine branches for the altar.

Niko and Katal showed up while I was decorating. Niko came to help me tape up all the red ribbons and Peace Corps AIDS day posters as we gave the guys advice on what we thought would look best. The decorations were simple, but they did make everything look better. As I watched women who’d been busy making tamales all afternoon wander in to talk to the men about the altar and bring flowers to add to the decorations, I thought “Really, this is all I want from this event. I just want the community to come together and have some fun. If someone manages to learn something, well, that’ll be just great.”

With that in mind, I finished up and walked home with Niko to have dinner. Hilariously, people in our village apparently cannot really tell Niko and Fletch apart. Although Niko is taller, darker and bearded, he looks just the same as Jaime. I’m honestly surprised the ladies don’t notice Niko’s lack of blue eyes, since they’ve expressed so much interest in their future children having Jaime’s blue eyes…It’s pretty funny. Shortly after arriving home Fletch asked, “So if this thing turns out to be a disaster, are you going to cry?” Hehe. I told him I was not going to cry and shared with him what I decided while decorating the hall.

IMG_7570SM.jpgMonday came, with great anticipation, and I think we were all more or less ready for it. I was a little sad waiting for things to begin when I saw that there was ONE man in the hall as an audience member with over 100 women and children. There was a group of men loitering outside, though. I asked Fletch if he’d please go invite them in, even if they had no intentions of participating. Niko offered to go with him. Niko has turned into a local celebrity, much more so than either one of us, because he plays Sunday basketball in the center of Santa Eulalia, right in the middle of all the market day hustle and bustle. The guys love it. The joint Jaime/Niko invite was enough to pull twenty-four guys off the basketball court and into the hall. Yay.

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As I mentioned before, I was a little bit worried about the scandal of talking about private body parts and how it would go over in such a big group. It’s something we’ve eased ourselves into during our more intimate weekly health talks with the women, but now there was a crowd of people who were not regular attendees in front of us. Miraculously, no one rioted. We did get a funny funny picture, this little boy’s face is in reaction to showing drawings of a nude man and nude woman. We had the man wearing a traditional cowboy hat and woman wearing the traditional scarf tied in wreath around her head. I think the fact that they were drawings rather than pictures made them less shocking. The nurses and Aurelio, our local counterpart, did most of the explaining in Q’anjob’al with the aid of all Jaime’s hand drawn posters, before we split the 180 adults in attendance into six groups to do 3 different educational activities. I was really pleased with the turnout.

Just before the initial talk was finished we decided how to split up the groups. Fletch said, “I know you’re all about mixing up the men and women, but today I think we should have a men’s only group so that they’re comfortable and can ask questions.” I totally agreed, but the funniest part was when Manuel came over all in a tizzy, unsure of how we were going to break these groups down. We told him we’d already counted the number of people present and decided 180 people would be split into six groups. I wish I could have had a picture of the look of absolute RELIEF on his face when I said that we were putting all the men in one group. I was biting my tongue so as not to laugh.

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We had three activities for each group, but six groups, so we made sure to have three groups in the health center and three groups at the school doing the same activities. Niko and Katal helped us a ton by doing two of the six activity stations. The nurses had studied the Peace Corps HIV/AIDS teaching manual and did an activity each, and Jaime and I covered the other two. Aurelio was supposed to run around making sure everything was running more or less smoothly. It turned out that his job was so easy he mostly just took photos. The small groups were all engaged and asking really great questions, and the time flew by.

IMG_7617SM.jpgAfter the activities, the giant pots of rice and cinnamon atol were brought out for everyone. I mentioned in a previous post that we planned on making announcements before the health fair that everyone was supposed to bring their own cups from home to reinforce our messages about trash management and money savings. The women’s committee seemed ok with this idea. Since we’d just done the community clean up on Saturday, trash was fresh in everyone’s mind, but since they’re not used to bringing their own cups, it led to lots of people scrambling for cups to borrow from nearby houses. I liked it, though. This health fair was a great opportunity to actually practice some of the things we’ve talked about over last 15 months. One of the hardest things about this education stuff is wondering if the information is ever put into practice, so getting the opportunity to reinforce our messages with actions on a large scale, even for just half a day, felt like an accomplishment.

As we approached lunch time and it became apparent to Manuel that most of his invited guests weren’t going to show up, he looked kind of hurt. I’ll admit, I felt a little bad for him. But since so many community leaders, men he hadn’t planned on coming, had come, he asked us if it would be ok to invite them to the lunch. We agreed it was a good idea, and he ran off to tell them. We finished the educational section of the fair by doing a talk on prevention of HIV: abstinence, fidelity in a relationship and condoms. This included a demonstration on how to properly use a condom. All the tittering and laughing would have made you think we were doing this in a middle school, but the room was full of adults. We turned it into a comical, but to the point, display since it was hard for us not to laugh with them.

Once that uncomfortable bit (much more for them than for us) was done we had a prayer session. This was the nurse Lucia’s idea. She stressed to me that this is their culture, and so it should be done. I wanted the planning for this to be collaborative, which means I jumped right on her suggestion. We prayed for those who’ve died of AIDS, those living with the disease, and for the future well-being of the community. Coming back to comfortable territory worked well, and they got in to it. IMG_7640_sm.jpg<SM.jpg  

But the best part of the whole day? The grand finale when we burnt an effigy of the devil, of course! In Guatemala on December 7 it’s tradition for households to make devil effigies out of old clothes. Here they generally stuff the clothes with old cornstalks. The burning of the devil is said to cleanse your house of any bad spirits to make way for Christmas and the coming of Christ. I must admit, it’s actually a pretty fun tradition. They start the fire by setting off fire crackers. It was cool to do as part of the health fair, but it was even cooler at night when the sparklers and whistlers came out in the dark. Our daytime devil had a lot of red on, including a blown up red plastic bag for a head. It was a good ending for the community.

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This year I was thinking about how, last year at this time, I felt kind of bad for not organizing something for International AIDS day. Last year the timing felt wrong. We’d not yet broached any controversial topics in our weekly health talks. I didn’t feel confident enough that people wouldn’t get mad at us for talking about anything to do with the highly taboo topic of sex/sexuality. This year everything went fantastically well. Better to do the job once, and well, than to try and do something half way with people who aren’t ready for it.

Over the lunch Manuel organized, we had the opportunity to debrief a bit, to ask the leaders what they thought of the activities and information. They were positive about the information and about the importance of talking about these things. It was even suggested by some that we talk about this information to the couples in premarital classes in the Catholic church. We told them we’re available any time and we’d love to share the information with whoever wants it. This last suggestion was really interesting to me because it would do well to combat this double standard of rampant Christianity and machismo. Everyone here identifies as Christian, most of them consider themselves devoutly Catholic, but that doesn’t mean they feel a need to be faithful to their wives. Though their religion counsels them otherwise, the cultural norm of men having multiple partners generally wins out in their lives which is why the fastest growing demographic of infected Guatemalans are housewives and their newborn babies. So to me, doing HIV/AIDS education with couples in premarital counseling feels kind of ground breaking.

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Our goal with this educational series is not to force beliefs on the people we work with. They’ve traditionally been silent in regards to sexuality. That’s just always been their way. We don’t want to say, “You have to think THIS about sexuality.” You see this society, once quiet and isolated, just 15 and 20 years ago, is now connected to the world–through television, radio, computers, magazines, immigration to more developed areas of Guatemala and to places like the US. Their children get messages from all of these mediums in regards to sexuality, and those messages aren’t always accurate or positive or in line with familiar and/or religious beliefs. We’re trying to make town leaders and teachers aware that if they choose to talk about sexuality with their children and within their churches rather than remain silent, then they can combat these outside messages by putting sexuality in the context of their local beliefs. The discussion we had over lunch led me to believe that, just maybe, folks here are getting the idea.

Exito means “success”, and that’s what I’ve declared our Feria de Salud, the health fair, to be– a success. And that, to me, is also a great relief.

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Many Random Updates https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/many-random-updates/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/many-random-updates/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:16:46 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2647 Lately, LOTS of things have been going on. Though we both like our posts to be themed, sometimes everything we want to tell you doesn’t fit together in a neat little package, thus today is Random Updates day covering things past, present and future.

casa11SM.jpgNot too long ago we went to visit Maria, the patient with the prolapse that went to the Huehue medical jornada with Fletch. We’ve actually seen her twice, once about a week after her surgery and then again last week while doing house surveys. The first time we went to visit along with the local Health Committee to see how she was doing. It was nearly dusk when we arrived, and the house has no electricity. They brought out stools for all of us to sit on in the room where Maria was resting. Her parents came in with candles and sat with us, and her husband came in and stood by her, adjusting the knit cap on her head. The folks here believe strongly that if your body is trying to heal any ailment you need to keep it hot–not just warm, but HOT–and eat things that warm the body, like chile and hot drinks. We asked her how she was doing. Her husband answered–the same husband who originally told her if she went to have the surgery she should also find him a replacement wife on her way out of town. Except with the response that came out of his mouth and the way he was acting in front of us, I had a hard time believing he could be the same person. He smiled shyly, excitedly, “She’s doing so much better, ” he tugged her cap down carefully, tighter over her ears. “The doctors said it would be best for her to bathe every day so she’s just finished bathing in the chuj. And she’s eating, ” he said excitedly. “She hasn’t eaten in so long. Before she always said it hurt her too much to eat. She’s hungry now and she eats well at every meal.” He was so happy. Maria looked to be resting as comfortably as possible for just having undergone and operation. She smiled slightly and nodded in agreement with what he said.

Readers should understand that couples do not show affection openly in Mayan communities. There is no hand holding, no interlaced arms. There’s definitely no kissing or hugging. It took us months to figure out who was married to who in town because most of the time husbands and wives don’t even stand next to one another in public. When I saw Jose leaning over Maria and carefully adjusting her cap, it felt like one of the most intimate exchanges I’ve ever witnessed here. And it struck me that I had underestimated how paralyzing their fear and lack of education can be. The word impotent came to mind. This man was so incapable of helping his wife himself or understanding how to help her on his own. He was probably immensely frustrated and scared. Suddenly I felt like a bit of a jerk, actually, that I had expected so much of them when they were resistant to let her go for the operation.

I think one of the greatest challenges of this job is trying, really sincerely, to empathize with the people with and for whom we work. Their world view and experience is so drastically different from ours. I was so struck by the misogynist tone of her husband’s initial reaction to the idea of an operation that it kept me from really understanding where he was coming from. I figured fear was a big part of the family’s hesitation, and I addressed that at length both when I talked to her mother-in-law and her father and again when Jose came to visit our house. But I didn’t get it, not all the way. Not until I was sitting in the near dark of their cramped house, kids running around in the next room, smoke billowing out of their kitchen stove, did I understand how much fear they have to overcome to leave here where they understand things in their own way. How much fear they have to overcome to go to the city where they can hardly communicate with anyone, and the fear that perhaps borders terror of letting some foreign doctor cut them open and mess with their body parts.  

Manuel, president of the health committee, asked us if we had anything to say to the family. I thanked them, her parents, her husband and Maria herself for trusting us. I told them I appreciated their courage in doing something that was very difficult for all of them financially and personally, so that Maria could be well. Finally, I requested that they not hesitate to talk to their neighbors, family, and friends about their experience. “I know that people here are not accustomed to seeing doctors or having operations. How could they be when these services have only been available in the recent past? But because you all trusted us and you took Maria to have this operation, you can see how it has improved her well being in just a week, and you’ll continue to see her improvement. Please, share this experience with others who are suffering. Encourage them to seek help. There are illnesses that don’t have any cure, but there are many ailments that can be cured or helped with medicines or small operations. In January there will be another group of doctors coming to do the same health work. If you could do us the favor of telling people about your positive experience if they ask so that they are less afraid to seek help I would appreciate that very much, and again, thank you for trusting us.”

I felt very positive leaving their house in the dark and climbing our way slowly out of the valley and back up to our house. Maria seems to have recuperated very well. Since that visit we’ve had 4 or 5 families come to our door asking for help, most of them with the same problem as Maria. We’ll see who all goes to Huehue in January…

Fletch’s Todos Santos post had my approval before going up, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it. One of our best PCV friends, Anne, decided to use the few days before the feria in Todos Santos to come all the way out to our site to visit us. We had a great time with her here, and as we started to start pack I felt a really torn. I wished we hadn’t committed to going to Todos Santos. I felt like maybe we really should just stay at home and hang out with our host family. But, as I mentioned, we’d already committed to going, so I went, somewhat begrudgingly.

In my head I’d expected very nice weather. Although the rainy season was supposed to have started way back in July, we haven’t had much rain at all. On our climb up the mountain the rain started. Our packs were getting soaked on top of the bus…should’ve stayed home, I thought. But we were already on the way. We lucked out switching buses. We got off at Tres Caminos just as a Todos Santos bus with 4 seats (for five of us, close enough…) approached. We packed ourselves in. The ride was misty and fogged in the whole way down into the valley so we couldn’t see much of anything. Everyone was quiet. We lumbered down the gravel roads. The young Todo Santero sitting next to me fell asleep, and his straw hat rolled off his head and into my lap. He’d said the trip would take about an hour, but it felt like no time at all before we were pulled into town.

We got out of the micro and put on our wet packs, and looked up to see something overwhelming. There were stripes everywhere. Men in striped red pants, with striped white shirts, women with striped blue cortes, everyone wearing straw hats with a blue band striping around their heads. It’s pretty different to be in a place where EVERYONE wears traje. There were infant boys tied to their mother’s backs already wearing the tailored striped shirts and red pants. And all of the sudden I felt like I was on vacation. We headed down the street to meet our PCV host and see our room. I’d forgotten about the weight that comes off when we leave site. Usually it take me until the downslope of the Cuchumatanes into Chiantla to feel like we’re going somewhere so I can relax. Todos Santos is in the cumbre, one of the villages on top of the mountains, so I never hit the downslope. As we walked through the streets more and more gringos appeared. I was excited to see other volunteers!

ninja-annSM.jpgThe thing is, there are a lot of really cool volunteers here, but we all live spread out and far away, so after our initial 3 months spent mostly together, we don’t get to see each other very often. We dropped off our packs in the little concrete room full of beds where six of us were sharing a room, and headed down to the central park. More volunteers! We decided we’d dig into the fair food: french fries, fried chicken, taquitos. I would never have done such thing six months ago, but I think my body has mostly adjusted to the food here. I get sick, I get better. It never seems to matter what I do or don’t do. The only precaution I take is telling the taquito vendors to hold the cabbage–it’s the only thing not exposed to heat and who knows if it was a) washed at all b) washed with clean water c) cut with a clean knife. The whole thing had the pleasant feeling of a cultural vacation with lots of people I already know and like. I was so excited I had to go ride the ferris wheel with my friend Charlotte. We had a good view of the town from up there.  

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Something that never ceases to make me laugh when we volunteers get together is how, after hours spent on buses getting from place to place, we are a little slap happy/somewhat joggled and incoherent, which means that ridiculous things come out of our mouths. My favorite quote of the whole trip had to be when a friend was trying to point someone out in the horse race crowd and said, “Ok, so you see that guy in the red pants?” This picture is of our friend Ann. Can you spot the guy in the red pants? To be fair, the man she was pointing out had a different shade of red on his pants, but when she said it, I looked at a crowd of guys like the one in this picture. I was dying laughing.

The horse race was pretty interesting. We watched almost all day long. It was cool to have sort of an inside outsider view of events. I mean, we (PCVs who work with them) have a lot more experience with Mayans and their culture than the regular tourist, but each linguistic/cultural group has its differences. We talked to a lot of Todo Santeros watching the race, and it was sort of shocking how open they were about deaths in the horse races. Their fatalistic view is something we experience all the time, but we’ve never experienced that fatalism turned into a spectator sport. They were all very nonchalant like, “Yeah, people die here. Sometimes more than one man dies. But it’s good for the crops.” There seemed to be no hint of sadness in their commentary. And this all contrasted sharply with the ending of the race.

We’d heard the stop time was 5pm, and I think most of us thought there would be some sort of official ending. Not so. When the rider who slammed the fence post in front of us was knocked off his horse and unconscious it was a little after 4:30. I’d been eating copious amounts of french fries since we were standing right next to one of the vendors and I felt instantly sick to my stomach. The whole atmosphere in the crowd turned tense and curious and fearful. Had the man died? Was he going to die? It was an astoundingly hard hit. The race officials dragged the unconscious man off the track and blew their whistles up and down the track. Just like that, the race ended. A crowd formed around the man, and we tried to stay out of it, waiting for a space to squeeze past and leave the track area. It was as though no one minded flirting with death all day long. Death could be a nonchalant thing, that is until there was a real possibility of someone dying. I agree with Fletch’s assessment that there was more to the race than drunken absurdity. I did feel like there was some intangible need for them to perform this race. But I was sort of shocked by the change in tone before and after the last rider’s accident of the day. And when we saw that he was up and walking, a crowd walking around him, it seemed everyone was rather relieved to have escaped a death in the end.

The whole thing was a very strange experience, but seeing Todos Santos and the friends who understand our lives the most for the time being, was really good. I’m glad we went. On Monday morning the coaster bus (for 24 people) was packed almost entirely with tourists, including quite a few PCV’s. I didn’t get a good count on the number of people in the bus, especially since the inside was so full of people that quite a few tourists were seated on the luggage rack above the bus. For the first time all weekend it wasn’t raining or foggy. The coasters have huge windows, and being smooshed up against one gave me a great view of the valley. I love the Cumbre. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in Guatemala. While the bus had to unload almost all the passengers 4 times to make it up some of the steeper hills, I was sitting in the far back corner under my hiking pack. I stayed seated and enjoyed the ride, contemplating all the different stories I’ve been told about Todos Santos and how rapidly the area has changed in the last 25-30 years and wondering in what ways it will continue to change.

camposantoSM.jpgSitting on the side of the highway with Katal and Nico, the other two volunteers from our area, it started to rain again. There was hardly any transport on Monday, due to most folks still hanging about the cemeteries with their families, but we did manage to find a not very crowded micro most of the way home, and then paid the guy extra to bring us all the way back to our municipio. It was raining, muddy, and foggy when arrived home, and it stayed that way for the rest of the week. Here is a picture of our local campo santo, which literally translates to “holy field”, decorated for All Saints Day against the almost white-out fog.

I really like the rain here. I like the fog running through the valley and up the mountainside. It’s all very mysterious and beautiful in its own way. Last year, when it rained for the better part of the first six month we were here, I was only annoyed that I couldn’t warm up enough to enjoy the weather. This year we’ve had far less rain until this week, and the presence of our stove makes all the difference. We can go wash dishes and clothes in the rain, then come inside where it’s warm. We can take walks in the rain, and then come inside where it’s warm. Our clothes take about 3 days to dry as opposed to two weeks.

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I’d say the only down side to the rain is all the mud. It’s unbelievable here. The ground is full of clay, so the mud is thick and sticky. Walking anywhere turns into a huge chore, yanking your feet from the mud’s grasp with every step. Our shoes almost double in size with all the mud attached to them. I’ve seen toddlers, well, toddle a few steps in the mud, and with the extra attachment of mud on their shoes, lose their balance and fall over. It’s kind of funny, but then I think of the mothers and sisters and aunts who have to wash all those clothes. I feel like our clothes are muddy enough and we usually make it through the day without falling over. Though yesterday I was trying to carry a bench up a hill, and after I managed not to fall over as I slid a whole 3 feet backward, the next step I took my boot was literally sucked off my foot and my stocking foot landed in the mud. It’s so ridiculous sometimes I have to laugh. But it does get tiring after a while, this feeling of always being dirty. Mud flies up on you not matter how carefully you walk. It streaks your pants it and sometimes flies up on your hands, transfers to your shirt. We change our shoes at the door, but somehow so much mud still makes its way into our tiny clubhouse. It all makes me marvel at the wonders of sidewalks and pavement. I’m not a fan of expansive black top parking lots, but some pavement and strategically located sidewalks are something I don’t think Americans appreciate enough. Look at all this mud! And this doesn’t begin to describe how it feels slogging through it.

toothbrushesSM.jpgAs I mentioned a few posts back, I’ve started working much more closely with the local nurses to give health talks to the women who benefit from a fairly new national wellfare program called Mi Familia Progressa. This week the nurses had three days full of vaccinations for different communities. Lucia, the nurse, asked me to talk about Oral Hygiene. This was, unbeknownst to her, a perfect opportunity for me to fulfill a promise. You see, while on vacation in Tikal with The 4 Witches, we spent the incredibly hot afternoons floating in the hotel pool where we met and talked with various other guests. A couple enjoying the lounge chairs overheard us talking about being Peace Corps Volunteers, and mentioned to us that they’d brought their kids to Guatemala to study Spanish. The kids had come the year before and were struck with the poverty they saw (the mother of the couple is a doctor, the father a lawyer, and the kids have grown up in the states, so it is pretty shocking). During their first and second visit to Guatemala the kids collected things to bring back to Guatemala. I remember the specific mention of soccer balls so that the local kids could have a real ball instead of the cheap plastic balls that are common here. Then the father asked, “Say, could you guys use some toothbrushes?” Hmmm, what did he mean? “We brought a lot of toothbrushes to give to kids here, but we still have a bag full of them and I don’t want to take them back to the states. Could you guys use them?” We said we could figure out a way to use them and he gave us his business card and said, “We just ask for some pictures in return.” This week I gave 3 oral hygiene health talks on why we should brush our teeth and how to do it properly. Each charla ended by singing a silly toothbrush song and those who participated with the most gusto were awarded toothbrushes. Here are the pictures…Thanks for the toothbrushes, guys! 🙂

This week was a crazy busy week all in all. We did 4 health talks, finished house visits, and planned and promoted quite a few upcoming activities. Really only one thing went awry. We attempted to have a leaders’ meeting to figure out the next steps for our SPA project since we’ve finished house visits. This meant that Fletch and I worked for hours to put together all the data we’d collected and then work up a reasonable agenda for the leaders and give them homework to complete while we’re gone. They’d decided on Tuesday they wanted to have a meeting at 4pm on Saturday. So yesterday we cleaned the house, stoked the fire, made a snack for all of them. I had water on to make coffee as soon as everyone had arrived. It was raining so I thought people were just slow in making their way over. No. Three of 12 leaders showed up and then we went and harrassed Manuel until he came over. It was the only time during an intense week I felt very close to losing my cool. “Where is everyone?” we asked. Manuel responded, “It’s Saturday night, everyone’s bathing in the chuj by this time on Saturday night,” as the rest nodded their heads in agreement. “Alright, well, can I ask why you all scheduled a meeting at a time you knew no one would show up?” They all looked at their shoes, someone mumbled a saber, “Who knows…” We couldn’t go through the tons of material we’d planned to talk about without at least a majority of the leaders. I guess everything had been falling in to place so well up to this point, and I was so ready to give the information and be done with it after working on it until 9pm on a Friday night. I felt really disrespected and I had to check myself. I don’t think they mean to be disrespectful, but it was aggravating. We accomplished a few things, but all of it has to repeated at the newly scheduled leaders meeting on Monday at 4. Here’s hoping people show up so things aren’t just left hanging in our absence.

Funny, we planned our upcoming vacation to the states when nothing was happening and nothing was on the calendar. I guess we made ourselves seem scarce and then everybody wanted us and things started happening. Here’s what’s going on:

While we’re away there is an APROFAM medical jornada in Santa Eulalia as a result of the ALAS presentation we did for the local midwives. APROFAM is an organization that offers a variety of health services, but most of them have to do with family planning, so they’ll be in Santa Eulalia offering tubal ligations, vasectomies, IUD’s, and jadelle implants as well gynological exams, health consultations for children and cardiogram tests all at a very affordable price. For example, tubal ligations and vasectomies cost 25 quetzales, so about $3, and the patients can spend the night at home (which is a pretty big deal for these folks; they don’t like to spend much time away from home). Gyno and children consultations will cost 1 quetzal. At first I was a little sad I wouldn’t be here for the day, but then I thought, maybe it’s better this way. They don’t need me to do anything for them. Additionally I figure it’s better for me, as a representative of Peace Corps not to be too visibly involved with family planning services. APROFAM has encountered resistance in communities similar to that encountered by Planned Parenthood in different communities in the US. If Peace Corps Volunteers aren’t present, then people won’t get the wrong idea about what Peace Corps is and what they do. As delicate a subject as family planning can be, we have both had men and women approach us asking for help and ideas. We could only give them ideas and information. Now I’m really happy that families in the area will have an opportunity to help themselves to services we can not and do not provide.

The next big event in the works is a Feria de Salud that will take place just days after we return from vacation. December 1 is World AIDS Day, but we’ll be traveling that day. December 5 marks the two year anniversary of the inauguration of our local health post, but that’s a Saturday when the nurses won’t be here. So on Monday December 7 we’re having a big Health Fair, with AIDS education activities, a community prayer service for those who’ve died of AIDS and those living with the disease. And the best part?! December 7 is the day that everyone burns an effigy of the devil (*i think* as a part of their advent celebrations and making way for Christ even though it sounds like a sort of heathen tradition), so we’re burning the devil in the schoolyard. As a way to reinforce the fact that stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS is the responsibility of men and women alike, not just one or the other, instead of burning one devil we’re burning TWO, a male devil and a female devil. There will be music and snacks after that. But again, to reinforce the talks we’ve given on trash in the community, you only get to enjoy the tasty atol snack if you bring your own non-disposable cup. The leaders have decided that December 1 is community clean-up day so they’ll all be on board with the no-trash plan. The nurses came over to our house to start planning a few simple activities, and the four of us got so excited we just kept adding one thing to another until we had this half day celebration all planned out. It’s a good time for it though, as the kids are out of school and December is generally a very slow month for activities. It’s going to be such a lot of work as far as the educational activities go that we’re calling in reinforcement PCV’s, Katal and Nico, to help for the day. It should be interesting. Look for the report here in a month or so.

Two days after that we have yet another all-day activity. We’ve contacted an employee from the Ministry of Agriculture to come up to our village to talk to two of our local communities about the importance of chicken vaccinations. They will be giving out chicken vaccines out all day as well as teaching the community how to plan, organize and carry out their own vaccination campaigns in the future. In the morning we’ll be doing it in our village, and in the afternoon we’ll be going to the Yulais, our second community. Go food security! A lot of people in both communities have asked us for help in this matter when we’ve taken surveys about what they want from us. So again, it feels good to be accomplishing things the people have asked us for.

Finally, the following day we have a half day activity in a new community where we’ve never worked before. The community leaders saw us talk at a county-wide meeting and asked our counterpart if we could come give a half day seminar on preventing Maternal Mortality. We agreed to it instantly, we were so thrilled they asked for help. December, at least the first two weeks of it, will not be a down month for us. A funny side note to all of this–our local counterpart is supposedly enjoying his annual vacation at the moment, except that we have called him every day, or sometimes three times a day for the last week regarding all the plans in the works for this and other events. I think he’s probably glad we’re going on vacation so that we’ll leave him alone, but he’s been a great sport about it and always supportive.

It seems things have totally turned around from what they were in August and September. I’m pretty happy about that. Tomorrow we begin our long haul to the airport for Thanksgiving trip home. It sounds so cheezy, but seriously, there aren’t words to describe all the things I feel thankful for this year. We’ll be giving lots of presentations to different groups while we’re home; hopefully they’ll get a little taste of what they have to be thankful for as well. To all of you at home, SEE YOU SOON! And to our faithful readers, see in a few weeks. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

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An Interview https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/an-interview/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/an-interview/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:40:24 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2622 This week, in addition to lots of other work, I interviewed the local school director. Fletch and I have been in communication with an RPCV (returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who lived and worked in Huehue in the 70’s. He’s still heavily involved with charities doing work in Guatemala and recently asked me some questions about the educational system to see how some charities could better serve schools. I didn’t know the answers to the questions, but I know someone who does. Minor, the director of our local school, has proven to be supportive and excited about our presence here in the community, so I called him and asked him if I could come into town and ask him some questions. He’s on “summer” break at the moment, but without hesitation he agreed to meet us Saturday at 10 am. Here’s the interview transcript I’ve sent to the RPCV, along with some personal commentary:

1. What school supplies does the government supply?

They give us books on communication, mathematics, and linguistics for kindergarten, 1,2,3 grade and they give the teachers 200 quetzales [that’s about $25 US] each to buy supplies for the year. He notes that this is an improvement from years past. When he first started teaching he said the Ministry of Education could only focus on paying the teachers their salaries. Now, in addition to the 200q stipend for yearly supplies, the M.E. is providing schools with funds for mid-day snacks for the students. He sounded upbeat about the changes.

2. Which schools get the supplies?

All the schools receive the same thing. [I would not deny that this is true in theory*. Read below to see the gaps in the plan.]

3. What grades receive supplies?

Kindergarten and 1-3. Grades 4,5, and 6 share books and look for older books to reuse.

4. Do the supplies last all year?

The materials usually arrive late, almost midway through the year. We usually use the previous year’s books for the first half of the year and then use the new books for the last half. It’s at the beginning of the year that we lack resources, not at the end.

5. Do students not go to school for lack of supplies (pencils/pens, notebooks, shoes, uniforms etc.)?

Yes, there are always students who don’t come for lack of some supplies, but there are fewer problems with that now that Mi Familia Progresa requires student attendance.

6. Is it true that parents will only send each child to first grade because

a) one year of school is enough?

b) parents can’t afford school supplies

c) kids need to stay at home to care for other kids, work, etc.?

d) all of the above

All of the above, or e) the father doesn’t want the child to go or the child no longer wants to go and the parents do not require the child to go.

7. If parents had more school supplies would they send their kids to school in spite of other problems?

Yes.

8. Why are there less kids in 6th grade than in 1st grade?

Lack of interest on the part of parents and a lack of interest on the part of children to learn. Economic resources. Customs and tradition dictate that girls get married around age 12. If they’re going to get married, the parents don’t feel they need to be in school or finish school.

9. Where are the poorest schools in Santa Eulalia located?

The eastern sector of our municipality has the poorest schools, Chujksunil, Quixabaj, out in those areas.

10. What differences exist between urban schools, aldea schools close to the municipio, and aldea schools far from the municipio?

The urban schools and the close-by aldea schools have good structures and separate classrooms, with desks and chairs for the students. The far-out aldea schools, some are made of wood planks and they don’t have proper desks and chairs or separate classrooms. In theory they receive the same supplies as we do, but if they’re only going to receive 5 or 6 books, no one makes the effort to come into town and get them, and no one takes them all the way out to the schools.

1 student materiales for one year

an average of 15 notebooks at 2.50 q/ea.

2-5 pens at 1.50q/ea.

2 pencils at 1.50q/ea.

*The government prohibits a uniform requirement, however in each school the Parents’ Committee can decide whether or not they want to enforce uniforms. In our village, the Parents’ Committee enforces uniforms so that poorer children don’t stand out from wealthier children. “All of the children play better together this way,” Minor says,”There are less problems if all the kids wear uniforms.”

75 q for a pair of pants (boys)

80 q for a white dress shirt (boys)

100 q for a simple black and white corte (girls)

100 q for a simple huipil (girls)

100 q for a sweater (both)

As you can see the girls wear a corte, huipil and sweater so their uniform is more expensive than the boys’. Remember that their father, if he’s a subsistance farmer, will make 30q a day when he can find work… about 3 or 4 days a week. I asked Minor what the poorest families do about the uniform, “They buy second hand or the lowest quality/cheapest version available.” Sometimes girls don’t attend school for this reason, but in our village 70% of the students are female. Minor says that opinions regarding girls attending school have changed considerably in the last few years because he and the teachers have given talks to parents addressing the benefits of educating girls. The Parent committee works to spread these messages. In every school ceremony we’ve ever attended, Minor addresses this issue and reminds parents that the world is changing, that women are as important as men, that girls should be educated and fed the same as the boys. I know he’s not giving us lip service in this regard, because I’ve been there when he’s talked to them, and the enrollment stats speak for themselves.

Today in our village, there are more professional women than men. There is one male doctor and a few nurses among the men. Amongst the women, there is one accountant, at least 2 secretaries, something like 5 teachers, and at least one nurse. Minor says the universities are seeing a greater enrollment of female students than male students. Why? One reason is that many boys and men go to the States. They still see it as a get-rich-quick scheme. It once was, back that when immigration started in the 80’s and 90’s. It hasn’t been quite as good for the last few years, and now with the economic crisis, it’s sometimes just better to stay in Guatemala than risk the journey and the debt to a coyote (human trafficker).

We’ve thought for a very long time that Minor is a pretty cool guy. He works hard with what he’s got, always trying to grow and expand the educational opportunities in our village. He admitted that in 1995 he himself was on the verge of leaving for the states, but he was studying and decided not to go. Now he is the director of the school and also the teacher of 6th grade. He says he spends a lot of time talking to students about why going to the states isn’t a great idea.

As I was listening to him, I began to wonder: do these trends mean there could be some sort of silent (or maybe not so silent?) women’s revolution? Perhaps this is just me fantasizing, but really, education is the key. If women are educated and have a way to earn income, they have the freedom to leave abusive partners in their lives. They have the knowledge and the income to take better care of their children as well as take care not to have more children than they can responsibly care for. The more educated women in the work force, the more women can demand that their rights be enforced. If what Minor has said is true, and it’s happening in pockets all over the country, not just here in our little aldea, and it feels like very good news for Guatemala. Only time will tell. What I do know is that there are larger numbers of Guatemalan children, boys as well as girls, attending school now than ever before, and if we can reach them, Guatemala will be better off for it. It’s nice to have good news once in a while.

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Traje https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/traje/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/traje/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:59:45 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2557 IMG_4481SM.jpgSince we arrived in site some 15 months ago, women around town have asked me, “Where is your corte?” They all understood from the beginning that we’re here both to work and to get to know and understand their culture, so they’ve expected me to participate from time to time by wearing their traditional dress: the corte, the huipil, and the faja. To please the gente during a few festivals, I borrowed one of many trajes (the whole package deal) from the ladies next door. Last year when we surprised everyone in town by dressing up in the traditional dress for the Virgin of Guadalupe celebration, a few older ladies in town actually cried, overwhelmed with happiness. They really like it when we emulate them. And of course, Fletch bought the traditional capishay and has been sporting it for nearly a year on a pretty regular basis, which only made the “Where’s your corte?” a more frequently asked question. Then Fletch joined them in their questioning, “Why don’t you get one?” or, “You should get one like this!” or, “When are you going to buy your corte? You should definitely have one.” I think I put it off for so long because 1) I found all the questions and prodding annoying so I was being stubborn in my refusal and 2) the traje is expensive; not just a little expensive, but really expensive. In fact, the price of a traje is one of the major factors threatening its continued manufacture and use in many parts of Guatemala. Often young girls and women will skip the huipil or blouse, and just wear t-shirts, or cheaply made sweaters with the skirt, the corte. They opt to wear the traditional blouse only on formal occasions.

guadalupeSM.jpgIn spite of feigning disinterest at the whole traje purchase idea, I have been eyeing the regional trajes the entire time we’ve been here. I’ve heard that trajes were assigned by the conquistadores to the all the different ethnic groups in Guatemala, as a way to keep them straight, so the traditional styles and patterns used differ, sometimes greatly, from region to region. In my opinion, their levels of attractiveness also vary greatly. In our municipality the most traditional traje consists of a red skirt with sparse vertical stripes, a little thicker than pinstripes, of blues and greens and a little bit of white. The traditional top is a white shirt that goes down to mid-shin, and the top is billowing with layered stripes on the collar. Fletch says it makes the grandma’s (they’re the only ones who still use the old-style tops) look like big white Christmas trees, and that the collar looks like a stack of crochet doilies. This is a pretty accurate description. I like the traditional corte for its simplicity, but I don’t dig the traditional blouse. I even dislike the more modern version, a short stack of doilies that tucks into the corte so that it looks less like a tent. These pictures are show me in the more modern version of the local dress (the one with Fletch is at the Virgin de Guadalupe dinner). In addition to the changes in the top, the preferred cortes in our area are no longer hand woven on a backstrap loom, rather machine made and full of sparkling threads and tons of colors. The faja, or the belt that holds it all together comes in all sorts of variations: thick, medium, thin; embroidered, beaded, or woven; designs from the mayan calendar, birds, flowers, or geometrics in any and all colors imagineable. And to top it all off, all the different cortes have certain types of ribbons or head dresses for tying up their hair. In our area, the most traditional is a simple read ribbon that ties the hair into a wreath around the head or is woven into two braids (replace the blue ribbon in the photos with a plain red one). In some areas of Guatemala, the headresses are massive affairs with multi-colored pom-poms or thick masses of silver colored beads. Our home sweet home in Guatemala is comparatively very simple.

My favorite huipiles come from a place in southern Huehuetenango known as the Mesilla. They’re hand woven in dark maroon and white verticle stripes, the bottom is lined with twisted tassles from the extra thread, and they embroider brightly colored geometric designs all across the front and back. They’re generally left untucked from the corte because of the decorative tasseling. Unfortunately, as my favorite, I picked one of the most expensive designs available. Just as the cortes are now machine made, so are many of the huipiles, but in the Mesilla the women still weave these beautiful tops on a backstrap loom. The result is a very soft, flowing fabric–and in spite of being short sleeved it’s really warm from all the embroidery. In my opinion it’s much more comfortable than the acrylic lacy tops so popular here.

About a month or so ago, as we lined up speaking engagements for our Thanksgiving trip back to the states, Fletch brought up the traje again. We will be speaking at two different schools, middle school and elementary. “You know, it’d be really cool if you had a traje to wear so you could actually show them what the typical dress here is like.” And he had a point. I imagined being a kid in one of those classes and it seemed it would make the whole thing much more real. Also,in our village the end of the school year was coming up, and we were sure to be asked at the last minute to hand out diplomas in our village (much like being asked at the last minute to judge the Independence Day beauty contest). A traje would be just the gear I needed to fit in. So I started talking to my trusty pal Reyna on Friday, just over a week ago, when she came home from work. “You know, San Rafael is having their feria, so there are all sorts of traje vendors there. Tomorrow is the last day, but we could go try and find you one there.” It felt like a now or never moment. I talked it over with Fletch to see if we had the funds to handle this purchase, and before saying goodnight to her that evening I asked, “So what time should we leave in the morning if we’re going to go buy my traje?” She started laughing–I was fairly certain that when she made the offer to go with me she didn’t think I would take her up on it, which is part of the reason I decided to do so. And we made our date for the lenghty ride to this “neighboring” town to buy a traje.

I had this problem growing up, being the fifth of six girls in my family, where I had a girls telling me what I should like and what I should buy all the time. Being a total tomboy, I was also fairly fashion retarded. This led to many annoying incidences where I would go shopping with a sister or two, listen to what they told me to do, and come home with something I realized I absolutely hated and never wanted to wear. I’ve mostly kicked this habit but for some reason here, I often just listen to what people tell me to do even when their instructions are non-sensical or inefficient or seemingly aburd. I’m just trying to fit in. I know this family, so I know all of my 6 host sisters had conferenced Friday night about what I should buy Saturday morning. I was only going shopping with Reyna, but I was shopping with all of their opinions, and I was determined not to buy something I didn’t like.

I told Reyna we needed to buy the huipil first, because I wanted one I really liked and could potentially wear from time to time at home post-PC. “The corte and the faja should be bought to match the huipil,” I told her. She was down with that plan. The bargaining, we knew, would prove difficult because, being bright white means all vendors assume I have lots and lots of disposable income.

I found a huipil close to the type worn in the Mesilla, but rather than maroon and white stripes the base color was blue. It was still hand woven and brightly embroidered, which made it very soft and comfortable to wear. We left the vendor hanging, and came back after we’d seen all the stalls. Still we only got him down to 450 quetzales. I think a local could’ve gotten it for 250-300. I feel we maybe should have tried the walk away technique one more time before settling on a price, but I was probably too anxious. Bargaining is not just skill; it can be an art.

After the huipil was purchased we moved on to looking at cortes. I wanted one that was simple. I don’t like the machine made brightly colored, sparkly threaded “modern” cortes, but the traditional red with blue, green and white stripes wouldn’t go well with my top. In the corte store we were presented with about 10 different options, most of them being the “modern” cortes. I kept telling them, “I want something simpler. No, not that one. I want something simpler.” Reyna would point out one she liked, the “modern” kind. Little did she know how much I hate, HATE, the color pink when she picked out a predominately grey and pink one for me. My sisters in the states would not consider pointing out anything that resembled a shade of pink. I found a dark blue one, with vertical striping similar to the traditional Eulalense corte, though it’s actually from near the Solola area, and the colors complemented the embroidery in my huipil. One of the challenges is that a traje works in so many different colors it feels like some great secret to me how they decide what looks good with what. Reyna was not a fan of this corte, but I began to feel it was the right choice. A coincidental bonus, it started out about 300 quetzales cheaper than the ones I didn’t like. The cortes, much like a scottish kilt, are yards and yards of fabric, which accounts for the high prices. Reyna really did try to talk me out of it. She said it was too simple, too dark, too plain, too uninteresting. She worked on me, but I wouldn’t budge. Then the vendor, since he had shown me so many cortes, thought I wouldn’t notice if he upped the orginal starting price by a few hundred quetzales. He was wrong. Again, I’m not sure I drove a hard enough bargain for the corte, but I walked out of there with the skirt I wanted and 600 quetzales lighter than I’d started.

For the last piece needed, the faja, I had one stipulation. It had to be a thick belt rather than a thin one. The corte is held up entirely by the faja, which means if you don’t tie the belt tight enough, you’ll loose your skirt. This happened to little Michelle one night at dinner. She stood up to cross the hearth and her corte fell down around her ankles, “Ayy!” she yelped. Everyone laughed hysterically, but this has become a running joke every time I put on a corte. “You don’t want to end up like Michelle,” they say, “Ayyy!” So the faja needs to be tied really tight. If it’s a thin belt tied tight, it’s amazingly uncomfortable. The thick belts distribute the pressure a little better and are therefore less uncomfortable–I wouldn’t say any faja I’ve ever worn could be described as comfortable. We found a belt, practical, colorful, wide, and fairly priced at 35 quetzales. Thankfully we’d finished buying the entire traje before noon. I felt very accomplished.

Add it up. The whole shebang came to 1,085 quetzales, divide that by 8.2 for the price in american dollars. But to give you some perspective, I receive a living stipend of approximately 2300 quetzales a month; nearly half of my monthly stipend. Most women here do not have jobs, and Reyna, a nurses’ assistant, is paid about 2500 quetzales a month. She owns several cortes, but doesn’t usual wear the huipil. Buying the traje is no small investment for these families. Maintaining their cultural heritage comes with a pretty high price tag.

We were exhausted and hungry by the time we made it home, and as luck would have it, much of the family was in town running errands and buying new clothes for the upcoming graduation celebration. I was resting in our house when I heard Reyna yelling across the field, “EMILY! EMILY! COME SHOW THEM YOUR TRAJE!” They’d all come home. Lena, a daughter/sister-in-law of the family had her sewing machine out in the yard already working on the new cortes they’d brought home from the market. I came out and put the huipil on over my t-shirt. They liked it, but then everyone started speaking quickly in Q’anjob’al and Lina looked at me and asked, “Why did you get this huipil instead of one like this?” She held up Gela’s brand new blouse, a lacy, transparent affair with flowers embroidered all around the neck. “Well, that’s pretty, but I probably wouldn’t wear it ever in the states, and this one I will.” Reyna agreed the one I bought looked good with my jeans. All the sisters started taking off their shirts and passing around Gela’s huipil. “Try it on,” they said, pushing it at me. I felt very awkward just taking my t-shirt off in the yard but equally awkward about excusing myself to go inside since they were all changing in front of me. Weird culturual moment, what do I do? I made a joke about them preparing to be blinded (it was very hot and sunny out that Saturday). They laughed and made jokes about how white I was, and Masha made some joke I only half understood about how small chested I am, probably because I haven’t had babies. Nice. They gasped at the sight of the huipil, “It’s so pretty on you! You should have bought one like this! Oh, you should wear this one!” I just smiled in spite of the fact that I was NOT a fan. It really is completely transparent, mesh-like lace. I came over to show it to Fletch, who agreed it was a good thing I didn’t buy it, but then said, “Actually, I do kind of like it. It looks a little like something you’d find in India.” I would never wear a transparent top to a Guatemalan graduation. It’s just not my thing. But since I played along, the ladies finished up criticizing my huipil.

traje1SM.jpg“What’s your corte look like?” I pulled it out of the bag and they erupted into Q’anjob’al–I understood that they weren’t that happy with my choice and they were telling Reyna about it. I understood her to say, “I couldn’t make her buy one she didn’t like!” So I broke in with my Spanish and said, “Don’t regañar her, she tried to get me to buy the other ones, but I like this one. It’s not her fault.” And everyone stopped and laughed–they still forget that I can understand a lot more of their conversations than I used to. So they switched to telling me in Spanish all the reasons that the other kind was prettier. I just smiled. Then, “Do you want us to sew on an extra length of fabric at the bottom. It’ll be shorter once you wash it and it won’t look good.” Ok, so in some regions they sew on the extra length at the bottom and in some regions they don’t. I simply don’t think it looks good, especially because they never line up the two pieces of fabric to make the pattern continues. Maybe I’m just too picky, but that’s just the way I am. I told them to not sew on the extra piece and we’d keep it around in case we really needed after it was washed. They cut the extra length of fabric off, finished the edges, and little Delmy got a corte to match mine. Sadly, we don’t have a picture of that. She’s pretty cute.

I was gathering up all the pieces of my outfit and couldn’t find the faja. “Where’s my belt?” Everyone started looking around. Eventually Masha pulled her shirt up and it turns out, she liked it so much when she tried it on over her faja that she just left it there. She was laughing and red with embarassment.

traje2SM.jpgThe next step was to wash the corte. Most trajes and artesanal products made from trajes are dyed but without the use of fixants, so the colors bleed terribly any time they get wet. Just handling my corte had turned my hands a light shade of blue. Again, it was Reyna who guided me through the process, and it took forever. It’s so much fabric to wash by hand and there was so much excess dye to get out of it. Another reason I’m not a huge fan of the traje is that it takes so much time to wash that corte. By Sunday afternoon it had been washed and dried and the family demanded I try it on for inspection. Though I could wear the huipil outside of my corte because of the decorative tassles, it makes me look like I tent, and the majority of the ladies agreed tucked in was better. This was the family inspection. And just after I put the traje on, they tied Reyna’s little boy, Nasito, on my back so that I could look really authentic.

As predicted, the traje was a huge hit with the community on graduation day, and when the director saw us walk in with our tipico outfits on, he put us in chairs of honor on the stage and had us hand out diplomas. We even helped them kick off the marimba dance with the baile del panuelo, the dance of the handkerchief, where you pull people in to dance with you by wraping a red handkerchief around them, and the marimba players can’t stop the music until the last woman to dance places the kerchief on the marimba. I usually get to end it.

The funniest occurrence didn’t take place in our village though. Nas and Lina’s youngest daughter, Lucia, and their oldest grandchild, Galindo, both graduated from high school on Thursday night. The high school is located in the main town, and the graduation wasn’t set to begin until 7 o’clock, so the family rented a microbus to take us all in and bring us home. The day I bought my corte the family was talking about upcoming events. Reyna looked at me and asked, “Are you two going?” then demanded, “You HAVE to come.” So the decision was made.

The main town here is pretty big compared to our aldea, and most people there don’t know us. We put on our outfits and took off into town with the family. Since we’re rarely out after dark there’s always this twinge of excitement that comes with being in cars at night–it reminds us of home where that stuff is allowed and fairly safe, but it also means that something special or out of the ordinary is happening. It was funny to be in a micro full of our host family, everyone dressed up, lots of cologne and perfume wafting around. To make it still more interesting, one of our closest volunteer friends, Anne, had arrived that night to visit us, and was on her way to the graduation as well. So our family and their three gringos, two in traje, walked into a packed high school with hundreds of Guatemalans, graduates and their families. Everyone’s heads were turning, laughter, smiles, gasps, pointing fingers, rippled through the crowd as we walked through the nearly full room. There were so many people there, if fire codes existed in Guatemala, I’m sure we would have surpassed the permissible limit of people inside.

As the ceremony started, the attention shifted away from us, for the most part. The people sitting all around us wanted to know who we were, why we were there, why we were wearing traje. There were 130 some graduates that night–two from our host family, two from our radio-host friend Lorenzo Mateo’s family, the oldest son of local counterpart from the ministry of health. It was funny to realize how many people in town we do know even though we don’t live there. The ceremony started around 7 and all the diplomas had been handed out by just after midnight. As soon as the diplomas were awarded the crowd shifted to clearing a dance space on the floor so the marimba band could play for all the graduates and their families. In the interim, all three of us were pulled out of the central courtyard and into classrooms to be in pictures of graduates we didn’t even know, surrounded by crying and hugging kids capturing the last moments they’d spend in high school together. Lots of students apparently wanted to record that a group of gringos had come to their high school graduation. Throughout the ceremonies we’d seen numerous video-cameras focus in our direction, no doubt recording our presence for family members in the US who couldn’t be at the graduation. It’s such a funny and weird phenomena, to be this alien star. We were warned about this at staging in D.C. before we even came to Guatemala, and our trainer then said, “You’re going to find it really weird when you come back to the states and you walk into a room where no one stands up for you, no one applauds, no one offers you a seat at the table of honor.” We’ll see about that… The anonymity might be a really nice change. It’s amazing how emotionaly tiring it is to be stared at and videotaped and photographed all night long. But we were there to support our host family, who we love and respect immensely. They were all very happy. And though all the little kids were asleep by the time the marimba started playing, Reyna and Lucia went out to dance and made us come with them, just for one dance, before we loaded in the van to head home. I saw Aurelio, our counterpart, snapping photos of us in the crowd, cameras were going off left and right. And when the marimba set finished people were excitedly trying to get our attention in broken English, “That’s you! Look a photo of you!” They’d caught the gringos dancing marimba in traje. Pretty exciting.

In just one week the traje has served me well. Though my volunteer friend Katy voted me most likely to wear the traje on a regular basis, (or was it wear the traje when we go home?) it’s a fun novelty, but not something I’m into as an every day thing. Between two nights of graduation parties and marimba dancing (Tuesday and Thursday), Anne visiting our site, the trip to Todos Santos over the weekend, and this week’s packed schedule of meetings and health talks, I’ve been totally exhausted. But I’m sleeping well–we’re working hard and making people smile.

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Some Interesting Links https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/some-interesting-links/ Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:12:02 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2471 So yesterday after I published the post on Reading Rainbow, I was flipping through some news online and ran across this op-ed column regarding education. Check it out.

Also, the director of Peace Corps, Aaron Williams, was recently interviewed on the Tavis Smiley show (PBS) and I thought some of you might be interested in hearing what he has to say. Enjoy.

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Ode to Reading Rainbow https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/ode-to-reading-rainbow/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/ode-to-reading-rainbow/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:29:53 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2464 I am a big fan of books, and have been for as long as I can remember. I’m also lucky enough to never have problems reading in a car, airplane, boat, not even on chicken buses racing down the InterAmericana highway, or bumping their way up and over the Cuchumatanes. I love reading, and I hate being bored. As most of you know from our previous posts, any time we need to travel anywhere, to the state capital, to Xela, and especially all the way to Antigua, we’re signed up for hours upon hours in a chicken bus. I like watching the scenery roll by as much as the next guy, but I’ve seen it all a million times. So I carry a book, and I read and read and read the hours away. It’s a good idea in general to carry a book with you for this job. I can’t count the times that we’ve shown up for meetings with various people who arent’ there, and since we’ve traveled far and waited a long time for these meetings, we don’t want to turn around and go home having accomplished nothing. I read a book to pass the time until said person shows up.

In this job I feel like we are resident aliens–as strange as actual martians to the people we live and work with. Everything we do is a source of curiosity for them. It’s pretty normal to sit at home working on the computer (like I’m doing right now) and have children hanging over the dutch door looking in at what I’m doing on the computer (like they are right now). Computers are very strange things, like television screens, but somehow you as the operator can manipulate what’s happening on the screen. It’s crazy. I understand their fascination with computers–they’re pretty dynamic and interesting looking as well. But I find it just plain disturbing that, while I read a book, there are often equally perplexed stares, from adults and children alike, trying to figure out what I’m doing reading a book. “Es la biblia?” they ask–Is it the Bible, since that’s the only book they’re familiar with. Truth be told, I’ve never taken a copy of the Bible with me on a road trip. I tell them I’m reading historias, about different places and different people. They smile politely, and continue to look perplexed. Once I was reading The Audacity of Hope and Chalio saw my book, because he notices just about everything in our house and about our lives. His eyes were big with excited recognition, “Ba-Rack O-BAMa!” he nearly shouted. Indeed that was the man on the cover.

During training Peace Corps gives us an outline of all the things we’re supposed to do, and they also talk a fair amount about all the things we could do, citing examples from past volunteers. One of the things they mentioned as a possible side project was a small community library. At the time I thought it would be so exciting to leave a village with a library as I finished up my service. I can’t describe how profoundly and postively I was affected by my community library. I didn’t grow up in a family with a huge disposable income, but the great thing about a library is you don’t need money–just your card (and a parent willing to drive you). Call me what you will, but my first solo drive was, on a Friday night, to my local library. My mom and dad read to us almost every night before bed when we were little. They are both avid readers as well. We were read to at school after lunch through the fifth grade. We had a school library in addition to the Logansport Community Library. I read book after book after book, thanks to the library. After college I lived two blocks from the Galesburg Community Library and two blocks from the Knox College Library, where I frequented both. Any time I want to know anything I turn first to the internet, and if it’s something I want to learn more about, I find book recommendations, and then make a trip to the library. The library is the basis of how I was taught to learn, and at the risk of sounding cheesy, how to be a life long learner.

In Guatemala there are precious few libraries. To be sure, there are no libraries available to the kids we live and work with. Why is that, might you ask? Until this year the government hadn’t used a computer database to register births and keep track of its 13 million citizens. Why would they have libraries with a simple database to keep track of books? More to the point, the illiteracy rate in Guatemala is nearly 50%, and about 40% of the population speaks a Mayan dialect as a first language. Most Mayan dialects were scantily recorded in written form prior to the civil conflict that ended with the Peace Accords in 1996. Since then, Guatemalans and foreigners alike have been working to record Mayan languages. Still, there are very few books written in these languages outside of text books for schools and, of course, the Bible. The books that are available are usually cost prohibitive, around $20 apiece (that’s about a week’s wages), not quetzales but DOLLARS, because the books are imported. As a volunteer I can’t afford new books either, but PCVs over the years have developed a sizeable library/exchange based at the training center where I load up every trip, and trade with other volunteers in the meantime. Also, lending as a concept doesn’t yet work well here. People tend to take what is lent to them and then not return it since there is no real incentive to do so. This is a bane to library projects, as you might imagine.

curiousgeorge2.jpgAnyway, I thought I’d keep the library project in the back of my mind, just in case it seemed to be something the leaders were interested in. Much time has passed: we can’t get any of our current projects to produce results; and I’d nearly forgotten about the library, but something happened the other day that made me wish, again, that we could do a library project. While my mother in law was visiting she brought us an extra copy of Jorge el Curiouso. She’d bought books for the kids in Fletch’s host family near Antigua, but we’d bought one of the kids that book for Christmas last year, so we left this new copy on our shelf here. And I didn’t think much about it for a long time. Last week the weather turned cold and rainy for a few days in a row. We had the fire going and were generally staying in doors. Kids came by, as they always do, to see what we were doing, and probably with the hope that we’d let them come in and sit by our fire. Yojana, a timid but very nice and polite 12 year old neighbor girl came in and watched me reading. She asked me some questions about what I was reading, and suddenly I remembered the book. I asked her if she wanted to read too (she does go to school here, so I hoped she could make some sense out of a book for young beginning readers). She smiled and said she would like to read a book, so I handed it over and went back to reading my book. I heard her whispering, sounding out the words as she went along, eyes bright looking at the mostly primary color illustrations of Curious George, that funny little monkey that always gets into trouble, and the man with the big yellow hat that constantly gets him out of his messes. I was so moved, and awe-struck by this thing I love and take for granted on a daily basis, books and reading. Johanna left, and a little while later a troop of muddy, damp little boys showed up at the door, six of them to be exact. I asked them if they wanted to come in and read a book with me. As Fletch would tell you, the kids don’t take off their shoes when invited to our house, rather they now jump directly out of their shoes and into our house as quickly as possible. We seated them around the fire, and I started the first public reading of Jorge el Curioso. These usually rowdy guys, known to pinch and poke and elbow their way through visits to our house, sat completely mesmerized through the whole story. Occassionally Chaly would make an observation, such as, “That boat looks like the Titanic!” And he was correct, the big boat that carried Curious George from his home continent to the home continent of the man with big yellow hat did look a lot like a cartoon drawing of the Titanic. I asked Chaly how he knew about the Titanic, “I watch TV” he said smiling. Of course. I was pretty happy by the end of our impromptu reading, and had a couple of bananas that were overly ripe for my eating (which I usually turn into banana bread) so I asked them if they wanted a snack. That’s a very silly question, really. They split 3 bananas between them, happily eating and talking about the book.  

curiousgeorge1.jpgSince then we’ve had kids come back and ask for me to read it aloud, and older kids who’ve asked to come in and read to themselves. It’s a pretty popular book around town. Delvin and Michelle are best buddy cousins, grandkids of Nas Palas. Delvin is older by a year, but Michelle is bossier. They came in one day to hear the book, and Michelle (probably because she is younger) got bored and said, “I’m going, let’s go Delly.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the illustrations as he sighed, “Maj” –I don’t want to. He stayed until the story was done. But we only have one book. I’d say, “Hey, anyone who wants to, send us your favorite book in Spanish. Do it! I’ll start doing a weekly reading and maybe we could leave the books in a corner of the computer center,” but that would end up costing us a fortune with the new import taxes on packages. 🙁 Regardless, we’ve decided that we are bringing Spanish books back when we visit the states for Thanksgiving. The kids might loose interest once they’ve memorized all of Curious George, and I don’t want anyone to lose interest in books. And I also spotted a flaw in waiting until the leaders asked for books–they don’t know the importance of them either. Computers are big, expensive, flashy–they have a perceived value in addition to a real value. Everyone talks about everything you can do with a computer, but books haven’t been publicized to these folks in the same way.  

I keep thinking of one of my favorite PBS programs as a kid, Reading Rainbow, with LaVar Burton (Star Trek). My big brother, also a fan, sent me an NPR news obituary for the show in August. Why, if it was the third longest running show in PBS history next to Sesame Street and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, could it no longer find enough funding to continue? Because PBS tries to direct its programs and their content to the educational needs of its viewers, and their research shows that nowadays in the US the viewers don’t need to know why to read books, but rather, the audience needs first to know how to read a book. So instead of Reading Rainbow they should develop a show that teaches basic phonics and reading skills. This struck me as terribly sad. What are we doing wrong in the US education system, that kids aren’t learning how to read in class? Undoubtedly there’s no simple answer to this question, but I think it’s an important question precisely because it’s difficult to answer. If PBS is going to design a fun, interactive how to read program, they’ve got their work cut out of them. But I think we should ask what should we be doing to improve education so that kids are ready for programs like Reading Rainbow. And then we should DO those things.

I don’t think, contrary to what some folks probably think I think, that television is pure evil. Lots of great things come of television. I believe stations like PBS have proven over and over it is a power that can be used for good. However, there’s so much crap on television. Commercials tell you everything– what you should wear, what you should eat, what kind of tampons you should be wearing (which is something you’ll need to know if you didn’t listen to the commercials about the birth control that will only give you your period every three months), where you should go on vacation, what kind of erectile dysfunction medication you should be on to better enjoy that vacation (but let’s hope your female partner got the right pack of pills so that vacation doesn’t end up producing a kid). Seriously, it’s a total bombardment of the brain. There are packs of people that go to school to study marketing and psychology and later the psychology of marketing, and the more kids sit in front of television the more vulnerable they are to all these carefully crafted manipulations that provide them with very limited and select real information. Chalio’s comment about the Titanic made me think again that maybe the television isn’t an all bad thing here. This kid will have a better idea of what happens in the world outside of his village by watching television. But he’s also subject to all the manipulations of television, and I would argue that he’s even more vulnerable than most kids I know in the states because both of his parents are uneducated and have almost as much trouble sorting through the information as he does. Example: commercials flaunt the purchasing of all kind of junk food, and people who have no nutrition education whatsoever, might think it’s great to buy those junk foods and feed them to their kids. That’s what they do here, which wastes large sums of money and and actually robs the kids of opportunities to consume nutritious foods. Maybe you think this is an overly dramatic example, but I swear I’m not exaggerating anything. Kids all over this country suffer from malnutrition that is exacerbated by the consumption of junk food–bags of chips and cheese puffs, suckers and soda–in place of nutrition rich foods, like fruits, vegetables, and even the real potato french fries sold by street vendors. This is a perfect example of advertising manipulation that people here are moved by, and being illiterate gives them no way to defend themselves, to seek and find alternative information. They are dependent on what they hear on television and radio.

Books (and newspapers even) are a great way to learn with fewer advertisements. But more importantly, I believe books foster an imagination that will later be responsible for creative problem solving and thinking–or any lack thereof. We can talk a lot about the poverty suffered by third world countries, but sometimes I feel like monetary poverty isn’t so stark as the intellectual poverty the people here suffer. Their educational system is based on rote memorization, if they even go to school at all. There is no imagination, no creative thinking, no fantasizing. There are no story books, very few moral tales, so many of the things employed to teach our children in the US. The longer I’m here the more I think people should invest almost exclusively in educational projects for development. These kids are naturally curious, just think what books could do for them! Without books they are limited, and not just kids here or kids there, but people everywhere are limited to the extent that their educational research tools are limited. I would refer you now to the public service announcement/youtube video that Fletch posted yesterday, read a book. READ A BOOK! And if you are a reader that uses our blog as a way to understand possible ways of getting involved in development projects, here’s a pro-book project in Guatemala you can look into: Probigua (Pro Bibliotecas Guatemala–for libraries in Guatemala). They’re US headquarters is in Portland, Oregon–maybe I should work for them after Peace Corps? Seriously, try for a minute and imagine your life without books. Mine would have been a different life entirely. I’m so thankful for all the books in my life, and all the people who brought them to me.

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Flying Sola https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/flying-sola/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/flying-sola/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:23:59 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2443 Just before Fletch left for the medical mission in Huehue, I had hit a new low point in being down. The nurses had informed us of two women who needed gynecological operations, so we were hopeful. Then they informed us that neither of them were willing to go. It was killing me. This would only cost as much as the trip to Huehuetenango and back, and make them healthier and happier in the long run. Yet they refused to go. As Fletch’s Sunday leave date approached and we heard nothing positive, I was getting anxious and upset. So, more out of frustration than anything else, I went to talk to the nurse Lucia on Friday morning. She was in the kitchen of the health center, having cookies and hot chocolate with the school director while the kids were at recess. They invited me to sit and she served me a mug of hot chocolate. I hadn’t realized it until I started talking to her, but I was so frustrated I was nearly in tears. She and Minor, the director, were both understanding and consoling. Minor had to get back to school before recess ended, but Lucia and I continued to talk for a few hours.

We talked about the women that weren’t going to take advantage of the medical mission. We talked about my frustrations with Manuel, and how I felt isolated from the community after not having worked with the women here for two months. She was so understanding and helpful. She has been like that since our first visit here. Together we came to several conclusions.

The first, that we would go talk to the mother-in-law and father of the ailing woman to try one last time to convince them to take Maria to the medical mission.

The second, that we need to start coordinating our work more than we have in the past. I usually give afternoon health talks when she’s already finished her day’s work and gone back to town, where she lives. This means she can’t help me translate. When we first arrived here, she was the sole employee of the health center, so there was no way we could do health talks and she could carry on consults at the same time. Her job was overwhelming as it was. In the last year the Ministry of Health has bulked up on the number of employees at health posts and health centers in the 45 prioritized counties in the country that are participating in a government welfare type program. We are one of those counties, so our little health post has 1 new full time employee, a registered nurse (whereas Lucia is only the equivalent to a nurse’s assistant), and usually one or two other folks who come in cycles as part of their nursing studies. In short, there are more people around to handle the bigger crowds that come to the health center as a requirement for receiving their wellfare check. The nurses generally plan health talks before they begin giving women and children their required vaccines, and their attendance is required. In other words, it would be a great time for me to help with health talks, for which I have a plethora of materials and ideas, and Lucia can translate. That’s how we scheduled two nutrition health talks for Thursday and Friday morning of the following week.

Third, she encouraged me to start the regular health talks again, with or without the support of Manuel. She agreed that I’d given him plenty of time to do something, and that I was wasting my time as long as I let him control the situation. She said she would talk to him beforehand to smooth things over. Suddenly a one-charla week had 4 scheduled, plus a workshop with the town leaders to learn how to properly weigh babies on our new scale, to detect malnourished children. Then we set out to find the mother-in-law and father of the woman we wanted to go to the medical mission.

I started down the road with Lucia in pretty high spirits. As we approached the church we noticed a crowd of people in the yard, all mixing compost (to sell as a church fundraiser, go guys!) and Lucia spotted the two we wanted to talk with. Since it was snack time, the church organizers brought us a sweet bread and rice atol and we stood on the side of the road talking. She began by asking them if they’d thought anymore about taking Maria to Huehue. They looked at their feet, shuffled. Her mother in law is actually the mother of a woman who was taken to the hospital by ambulance for an emergency apendectomy, so she began to talk about how this daughter, since the surgery, has had a miscarriage and she’s sure it’s because of the surgery. It would, of course, have nothing to do with the fact that this girl has a history of uterine and ovarian cysts and has miscarried before. This became her defense against taking her daughter in law to the hospital, because Maria might become infertile. That is surely a tragedy for a woman who’s never had children, but Maria has six children already. Really? Lucia was getting into the conversation. She kept forgetting to translate things for me. I was concentrating, trying to catch as much as possible. Maria’s father didn’t say much; he just kept looking at his shoes, eyes squinting against the sun. They said she was afraid. She wouldn’t go because she was too afraid. I pointed out that if Marcela (apendectomy patient) had been too afraid to go for her surgery and refused, she would be dead today. I tried to tell them that it’s normal to be afraid of what could happen, but that if she didn’t take a chance at all, she’d spend every day in pain for the rest of her life. Lucia talked a while longer, and then the conversation ended itself. We started walking back towards my house. I was so heartbroken. It felt like they just didn’t understand anything, or didn’t care enough to understand. I kept thinking about Maria, and the babies she could continue to have that would only exacerbate an already excruciating problem.

I was so upset, I called my mom and cried. This was one of those days I wished I didn’t care. If I didn’t care, then I wouldn’t be so upset that people constantly refuse to make good decisions for their health and happiness. If I didn’t care, then I wouldn’t imagine what it’s like to be Maria, and in constant pain while doing all the chores of a Guatemalan woman–washing, carrying firewood, hauling corn to the mill and bringing it home to make tortillas–and always in pain. Then I began to think about the bigger picture and realized, Maria’s situation is not unlike Americans who insist nothing is wrong with our healthcare system, who criticize and opt out of finding workable solutions to problems. The questions isn’t, “Is there a problem with our healthcare system?” The questions is, “How can we improve health care in America?” I’m all about criticism, as long as it’s constructive, and I’m generally of the belief that we can always improve. I understand people fear what they don’t know–like what it will be like to have an invasive surgery, or what it will be like to dramatically change a system we’re used to. Both of these things are likely to bring some discomfort, but if done right, there will be a net benefit for everyone (actually, that’s kind of how I felt about Peace Corps–pretty scared to really do this thing, but here I am and, look, it’s pretty uncomfortable at times, but I just hope that things will work out for the best).This is an example of the spiraling thoughts I get sucked into here. Being upset about one thing, leads to being upset about a lot of things. How can we expect this illiterate campesina to make a good informed decision about her health and happiness if so many people in the richest country on earth, inundated with resources and information, can’t even manage such a thing? My faith in people was sliding, on a very slippery downward slope. Naturally, my mom and dad are pretty accustomed to me freaking out. We started talking about my grandparents, my nieces and nephews, general news from home. I even managed a few laughs before we hung up and snapped back to Guatemala. I was done being upset. There’s no way I can help people if they won’t help themselves.

Fletch came home and I told him it looked like he’d be going to the Huehue alone. A few days earlier we’d discussed switching off as translators in the middle of the week so that we both got to have fun meeting Americans and seeing so much cool stuff, while still covering our bases here. Translating for the doctors is tons of work and fantastically rewarding. It’s so fun I wouldn’t mind coming back to Guatemala with a group of doctors long after my Peace Corps days are done. But in examining why I was feeling moody, upset, demoralized–down in the dumps Oscar the Grouch style–I felt like Jaime should probably go alone. I needed to reconnect with people here. I wanted to do the talks I’d set up with Lucia and meet with the ladies in Temux again, and that didnt’ leave any time for going to Huehue. And, honestly, I was thrilled about the prospect of flying sola for a week in our house. Part of the problem when we’re aggravated by things that are happening, or not happening, is that we spend a lot of time stepping on each other’s toes and causing more aggravation. This is pretty unavoidable living in a 14′ x 22′ box, but it’s not the common problem of a Peace Corps volunteer. I think most would complain of too much alone time, whereas we struggle with way too little. Fletch hadn’t been superbly happy lately either. I figured he’d get a lot out of using his Spanish a ton (without me correcting him for a week) and telling stories of our lives here to interested parties (without me interrupting him to add or revise for an entire week). Meanwhile I could schedule when the lights went out, and when I got up and what I did and never feel like someone was looking over my shoulder or taking my attention away from what I was doing at any given moment. In short, we’d devised a plan to maximize our working capacity and improve marital harmony. As soon as that happened, things started getting better.

Late Friday night Manuel showed up with Maria’s husband, José, to ask more questions about how this medical mission worked and how much it would cost, and what the couple would need to do in order to go. We explained everything to him, and there was a lot of feet shuffling and talking back in forth in Q’anjob’al, so we waited. It finally came out that Tuesday was pay day for the government welfare program many families are involved in, so if she was at the hospital she wouldn’t be able to pick up her money. They were also under the impression that if they missed a check pick-up they wouldn’t be allowed to participate in the program anymore. To make it worse, the welfare program hadn’t made it all the way up here last month, so she wouldn’t miss just one month of pay, but two. They wanted to take Maria to Huehue, but on Wednesday after she’d recieved her money. I explained that, while this was a good thought, if they waited until Wednesday the doctors’ operation schedules would likely be full and they wouldn’t be able to do anything for Maria.

Coincidentally, we have the number of the local woman in charge of organizing the program payments, so I called Marianna to ask her if there was anything that could be done. She explained that, if Maria couldn’t pick up her payment, her 600 quetzales would go back into the general program fund. There was no way for her to redeem that money, BUT if she made it home by Friday she could still pick up her money, as the program would still be distributing payments to other communities in our county. At this point I was practically begging José to take Maria on Sunday and try and make it back for the payment, explaining that even if they missed the payments this month, they could still collect their checks starting next month (provided the bursars showed up to pay them). Lucia had mentioned to me earlier in the day that the head nurse had only authorized this month’s payment with the understanding that Maria was going to pursue having an operation, and said that if they neglected to do it then the nurse could refuse to authorize further wellfare payments. So finally I just told him he was much more in danger of losing state assistance by not going than if he were to miss this check and go.

This was a huge deal, a ridiculous, complicated mess. I couldn’t believe the program has no system for redeeming back-payments. Later in the week I went with the nurse to visit a mother who gave birth on Monday night, and though they were worried because she’d had high blood pressure and incredibly swollen legs (two of about 6 major danger signs), she’d come out alright. However, she was in no shape to stand in line for 6 hours to get her money. It was her sixth child. Her house consists of two adobe rooms with dirt floors, smoke billowing from the kitchen door and into the adjacent bedroom door where she was resting with her child. The bedroom was cramped, wall to wall beds, I think 4 in total, made with sticks holding up wood planks and covered with blankets, more clothes, shawls and blankets strung from ropes and beams overhead. Seriously? It’s kind of heartbreaking that the government promises them this money, and yet in extenuating circumstances has no way to deal with getting their money to them. This woman couldn’t postpone her labor, and Maria shouldn’t postpone her chance at an operation. I feel certain people are forced into uncomfortable decisions every time their pay day comes up because of situations like these. But in the end, José said he’d think about everything and get back to us.

That was the last we heard of him until 6 am on Sunday morning. He showed up with Manuel, Don Tomax, and his father-in-law to announce that they wanted to take Maria to Huehue that day. Jaime told them he’d meet them in front of their house at 10. I saw them into town since I had to go the market anyway, but once I got home I was both thrilled that she’d gone, and wary that something would happen and she wouldn’t get the surgery, or something would go wrong and then we’d be to blame. I just hoped everything would turn out alright.

But now it was time to focus on my goals for the week: to reconnect with the ladies here through doing a couple of health talks; to enjoy my time alone; and to start feeling better about what I’m doing. At the beginning of the week I got an email from a former volunteer from Guatemala who reads our blog:

In our Peace Corps group we were warned the day would come when we would be wondering what we were doing in Guatemala. Sure enough, for me the day came, but having been warned it also passed. It wasn’t until many years later when I was talking to a young man in my PC town, who was very young when I was in the PC, and who later became a teacher, that he told me when I was talking to his father, trying to get his father to try new things, he (the young boy now an adult) was listening. And when he became an adult and teacher he tried all the things I was trying to get his father to do.

One of the most difficult parts of Peace Corps and/or development work is the persistence it requires; it gets hard to hold on to the hope or the faith, or whatever you want to call it, that we’re really doing something. Most of the time I believe it. But I’d gotten to the point where I was beginning to wonder if I was just fooling myself, especially when I thought that Maria’s family wasn’t going to take her to the hospital despite of all my (and the nurses’) pleading. But as Maria left for the hospital and I started the week off with a new plan I began to feel much better, and I continued to feel good even as things didn’t quite go as planned. That’s pretty normal.

It’s a good thing I’d had a busy week planned, because the wellfare program payments canceled half the activities before the week was out. The village leaders couldn’t show up to learn how to properly weigh babies because they were all with their wives (because only women can receive the money) in a mile long line in Santa waiting for their payments on Tuesday morning. Similarly, on Wednesday I strolled over to the neighboring community for our regular 3 o’clock talk and felt as though I’d stumbled into a ghost town; the house where we hold the talks was closed and locked. No one remembered to call me and say that Wednesday was their payday and that no one would be there. I had to call the town leaders to make sure they weren’t just all late (which also happens sometimes). And on Friday there was confusion about the dietary talk I was supposed to give, as in, they didn’t tell me I had to go somwhere that wasn’t the health center to give it, so I missed my ride and didn’t arrive there. Life is always exciting in Guatemala. But I did end up giving two talks in the community, starting the long awaited HIV/AIDS education series with the ladies on one day, and talking about a balanced diet the next. It felt really good to be with them again, and both talks went fantastically well. The HIV/AIDS info is pretty complex but their insightful questions led me to believe they were following me pretty well.

The other external challenges for the week included a case of bed bugs. Following local advice, I stuffed a ton of apazote leaves between the sheets and the mattress. I didn’t have time or the energy to wash our blankets (I can not express in words how tiring and time consuming this process is compared to the already tiring and time consuming process of washing the rest of the clothes which I had done the day before). So after adding the leaves and changing my pyjamas I hoped for the best. The number of bites went down considerably. No joke, my left leg had over 100 bites all over my knee and hip bone, ugh. We’ve had bichos in the bed before, but they always preferred to snack on Fletch–perhaps he really is much sweeter than I am–but he wasn’t here so they settled for me.

IMG_3887.jpgIMG_3889.jpg And then there was the announcement that the neighbors were going to remove my roof and build a room next to ours. We’d heard rumor of this for a few weeks, and then wood was purchased and stacked outside of our house. At first we didn’t understand that they were going to put the new room right up against ours rather than make another free-standing box. Even better; they were going to take off part of our roof and make it a continuous roof over the two rooms as well. This was sad for many reasons: 1) Fletch spent months making stone steps that led down to our latrine and the new room was being built over them. Now we’re back to using a slippery, muddy hill to get down there, and we have to run all the way around our house and then back toward the latrine to get there. This is not fun in emergencies. 2) They tore out all the pretty trees and flowers that were growing in the yard. 3) While our house privacy level, on a scale of 1-10, would have previously been about a 2, it’s now down to 1. I think if the neighboring room gets a stereo I’m going to have beg some of you to pitch in and send us noise-canceling headphones or some serious damage will be done to our hearing and overall sanity. So anyway, while Fletch was gone they decided to tear off the roof and do all sorts of construction that led to mountains of sawdust falling into the front half of our house, all over what is the “kitchen and study/work” area of our house. It made me very sad and stressed out while it was happening. I was literally praying they’d get the roof back on before the rain hit–and they did. But now the damage is done, and the only thing we have to figure out is how to secure our house from the dreaded ladrones (in case they really are more than myth) because one can just move a few boards outside and climb in through the roof. And we’ve got to cut down on the very cold drafts that blow through the now open roof. They aren’t planning on putting walls on the new room until all the planks stacked under the roof have dried out, so for a few months at least. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing? As long as there are no walls we will have no neighbors, but it sure is cold.

All in all, I spent the week trying to go with the flow. The roof business was the worst that happened while Fletch was away. Other than that, I had a great time being on my own. I miss my independence (and I would be shocked if Fletch didn’t also) in our current living situation, but we’re doing the best we can. As predicted, and as is evident by his post, he also had a great time translating. Every time I walked over to visit the family they’d ask if I was sad to be alone, and I joked that I loved being single again. Then they’d ask when I was going to get a new boyfriend. But they were happy to hear about his work, and encouraged by the fact that he called me every night (evidence that he probably wasn’t going to up and leave me for some other mujer). One day I told them about the woman who was going to lose her arm, and shockingly Lina said, “Oh my God, she’s better off dead than left with one arm!” I asked, just to be sure, if she really thought that, and she said, “Yeah, can you make tortillas with one arm?” A bit of insight to their world view, but she had a point. Out here I’m not sure a one-armed woman could get a husband, if she can’t make tortillas and she can’t wash clothes–the two biggest jobs for local wives–then what good was she? I was glad to see, in the picture, that the woman looks ladina (she’s not wearing a traje) so hopefully she lives in a city, somewhere she can walk a few doors down from her house and purchase fresh, hot tortillas. At the very least the now one-armed woman can use a tortilla press, a thing our family would never stoop to doing.

We talk a lot about how painfully slow moving things are here, but in the last few weeks I’ve realized that some things have changed considerably since our arrival. I caught myself feeling like things weren’t going smoothly in the patterns I’d established, and then realized I’d better change the patterns, then, shouldn’t I? These changes, like the increased staff at the health posts, mean there’s more work I can do that I haven’t been doing up to this point. There really isn’t a whole lot of time left in our service, so I’d like to make good use of what’s left. Now that, at least for the moment, I have that figured out, adelante!

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Birthdays and Good-byes https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/birthdays-and-good-byes/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/birthdays-and-good-byes/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:59:47 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2391 So it’s been a crazy last few months. I can’t believe we’re already done with September. Once we got back from all the crazy vacationing with the witches I felt like, if my phone didn’t tell me the date every day I’d think we were still in July. I’ve been absent from the blog for quite a while, stewing away over many many things. But now I’m tired of the stewing, so here goes:

All the confusion and misunderstanding between us and the villagers here in August left me feeling pretty confused and really and down. Suddenly I began to worry, and still do a little bit, that there’s always a quiet discontent about what we are doing and how we’re doing things here. I’m sensitive to this sentiment. I don’t want to be doing things people don’t want me to do. The problem here is that people aren’t ever at all, in any way, forthcoming with their opinions. I think I spent a lot of time feeling stupid about what had befallen us, but I also could see no way to have known in advance how to avoid the problems. I am undeniably a brooder. So I brooded, and tried not to let myself fall into homesick traps or wishing my time away, which was (hm, and in reality continues to be) a little difficult. I feel a good way to beat these things is to accept invitations and throw yourself into cultural activities, so I tried it out. It just so happens that our host-family has a very heavy concentration of August of birthdays, sort of like May for my family at home, so we made a lot of birthday cakes. Chalio turned 10, Delvin turned 3 and Delmy hit the big 2. Chalio’s birthday was by far the most low key. Delvin’s mom had spent months fattening up a big, so they killed it and made some tasty tamales for his celebration. His other grandparents came from far away and spent the night after the party. Reyna wanted to do something fun for Delmy and was inspired to have Fletch bring a big piñata back from Soloma. This last party was a pretty big hit for the neighborhood, which consists mostly of relatives both close and distant to the family. Delmy was the least excited of everyone and generally absent from the festivities, go figure.

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These celebrations were a lot of fun, and I’d leave feeling pretty good about things. But somehow I would always end up brooding some more in the quiet of our home. What are doing here? What should we be doing here? What can we do that we haven’t tried already? What would be the best way to make these things happen? I came up with some answers, but hadn’t reached the point of being fully convinced by any of them. It sometimes takes a very long time for me to convince myself of a thing. And then it was time to leave the village again. The witches were coming! So I put my brooding on hold, in search of some adventure.

I think Fletch did a nice job of summarizing what happened on the visit. We had a great time with Ann and the aunties. It was fun getting to know them better, to hear family stories and (for me, I don’t know if Fletch noticed) it was fun to see Ann with the sisters she grew up with instead of with the all the boys she raised. While we were out galavanting around, my August birthday also transpired. I’m sure the host-family was a little sad there was no cake this year, but when we brought the US family up to meet with the Guatemalan host family, Reyna gave me a gift so that I knew they hadn’t forgotten. They’re pretty great.

I must say our two days with family in the village were insane. People never stopped knocking on the door, and Fletch and I did actually manage to do our job in those days, giving a health talk. But it was also a little disorientating because I knew that things with the community hadn’t really reached any conclusion and I still felt on edge. But then we took off again, for the second half of our Witches Adventure. I was ready for it. I was exhausted and a little ill, so arriving to at the Lake felt like a mini sort of salvation. Hello cleanliness! Hello amenities (flush toilets right near the bed and hot showers and delicious food and a breathtaking view)! I think it turned out to be just what the Witches needed at the time too. The problem with all this loveliness was that I was quickly becoming addicted to it while I was simultaneaously trying to ignore everything work related, and I was mostly, but not entirely successful. We went from one the lake to Antigua, landing right back where we’d started in, to wind down the trip. We enjoyed a nice few days of touring the city (The horse and buggy was the way to go! It just felt right in such a historic city, bouncing over the cobblestones), and then it was time for the Witches to get on their broom sticks and head for home.

Fletch kept saying, “We need to get our room with Vera. We need to call her and tell her we need a room. We should call her soon.” Vera’s place is a good place for PCV’s. It costs about $5 a night and there are hot showers, which is usually all we need. But I was kind of ill, again, and he was saying this to me in the loveliest, spacious room WITH A BATHTUB! just off a courtyard with a gurggling fountain and loads of beautiful flowers. The thought of going to Vera’s and sharing a room with the cockroaches again just made me want to cry. Not a little cry, but a dramatic “I can’t handle life!” kind of cry. I begged him to let me stay just a little while longer in our room with a bathtub, and eventually he caved—I think mostly because he was afraid of the big cry. Usually I pride myself on not needing too much and being pretty flexible, so I was a little embarrassed by the feeling of absolute need to stay in this room. Let me tell you, I enjoyed every second. And anyway, all things must come to an end, right? That’s how we found ourselves bouncing along on the Inter-American Highway in a crowded chicken bus once more, feeling all urbanized comforts steadily recede behind us.

I was reading A Mayan Life by the time we arrived home and started to set up shop once more. It was a strange juxtaposition to the goings on, everyone gearing up for the Independence Day Celebrations. On one hand it was comforting knowing that Independence Day meant our full time job that week was purely cultural exchange, on the other hand this opened up a lot of free time and the brooding set in. My brooding was no longer productive, rather it was turning into some sort of full on funk. I promised myself I’d accept all invitations for the week. I needed to keep getting out of the house, but I still had plenty of time to sit and read.

I was reading about the oppression of the Mayan people as the Mayans outside of my window were decorating the Community Center/ School and retrieving their torches from their attics for the big run. The torches in our town are usually old cans nailed atop nicely carved poles, so they look like they’re sitting on the missing leg of an old dining room chair. This is what happens in a town full of carpenters. Talking with other PCV friends last year after the 15th we all wondered what some of these communities were celebrating. The people we live with don’t speak spanish, but they mumble along valiently to the longest national anthem (sung in Spanish) that I’ve ever sat through.Yes, Guatemala is an indepedent nation, but a nation that seems to have quite a lot of difficulty helping out its citizens, especially the poorest of the poor, for many many reasons, so that our villagers aren’t experiencing a lot of freedoms. I still feel this way and it was magnified by the reading I was doing. So much of what the author talks about hasn’t really changed; I was getting depressed. The education they receive is sub-par and still so many kids don’t even finish elementary. They hear promises from the government, local, state and national, (though I have my suspicions that these “promises” begin as wishes and turn into official government promises as they travel through the local gossip train) that aren’t delivered. While Fletch’s mom was here we heard there was a big protest in Santa and the president, Alvaro Colom himself, was going to come. Afterwards people came back disgruntled that he hadn’t bothered to show up. If you read the book, you’ll know what scene this mirrors. This is the second time we’ve heard the president was coming and he’s had the gall to stand everyone up (just for clarity: read sarcasm here).

I was sitting in our sky chair reading a book as it rained outside thinking, Independence Day is sort of a landmark for us. It was the first big festival in which we participated as the local volunteers last year. Weeks before the event we were formally invited to participate as judges for the beauty contest. I was thinking about how, in the middle of a particularly strong downpour, Fletch looked out the window to see a throng of school kids running out of the school yard and down the road towards town. We had no idea what was going on. “I’m going to follow them!” he said as he ran out the door and into the rain storm. That time I chose to stay in the sky chair and continue reading. This year we were both going to run with the kids, but we were not going to be beauty contest judges. Fletch ran out to help gather the kids in the school yard. I stayed behind reading a little while longer, because in the year I’ve been here I learn and re-learn and re-re-learn that there is a significant amount of waiting involved in these sort of events. Almost an hour after Fletch left I walked down the road in the nice quiet, looking out over the valley. The rain had stopped in good time and while things were a little muddy they weren’t dreadful and the sun was pretty dazzling in its fall that day. A van containing most of our host family pulled up to me and yelled that I get in, so I did. They were headed into to town to see Lucia and Galindo run into Santa with their torches before coming all the way home. It was funny to be riding along with all these people I know and like rather than squished in a van full of people I don’t know getting awkwardly much closer than I would like. They dropped me off with the local elementary kids waiting in the next community.

Everyone seemed happy I’d shown up, “Jaime, said you were too lazy to run with us today,” they said laughing. The headmaster announced that there was still a half hour or so before the bus carrying the torch arrived was going to arrive so the kids should go off and play. A group of five or six girls sort of sequestered me and we ran to the next tiny community over to “practice” for a valient run back home. They wanted to see if they could keep up with me, so they’d tell me to go faster, and I’d sprint away and they’d catch up or almost catch up and I’d sprint farther ahead. Then they’d tell me to slow down until they caught their breath and then they’d tell me to go fast again. Our inability to communicate effectively on any significant level with most of the population turns so many of our interactions into games, but it’s kind of fun. They were laughing and enjoying themselves. Suddenly shouts went up. THE BUS WAS SIGHTED! THE ANTORCHA WAS COMING! We ran back to the meeting spot. All the kids filed into line with their torches and parents tipped jugs of diesel into the cans stuffed with rags and the lit the torches for the kids. This would never be done in America, I thought laughing, because what else can you do? A little girl handed me a torch, and we were on the move.

antorcha.jpgLast year I stood waiting at the school for the procession, a long line of light snaking across the mountain. So these pictures are a year old, but they illustrate the going’s on quite well. This year we were right in the thick of it. And we formed a torch arch for everyone to run under on their way in so that we ran into the school yard last rather than first. It was a good time, but when it was over I felt the need to get out of there fast before someone asked us to judge the beauty contest. I had a feeling it might happen. But seeing as how I was all filled with spirit of independence day celebrating I didn’t want to go sit at home either, so we invited ourselves over to the neighbors’ for dinner. Jaime: “Did they invite us?” Me: “No, but Reyna says we should never wait to be invited, and home is depressing me.” Jaime: “Alright then, let’s go.” I had a weird craving for…tortillas. I think I was feeling a little sad that at this time next year we won’t be there. You gotta get your tortillas while they’re hot. So we headed through the milpa and up the hill to sit around their kitchen fire.

As dinner finished up and Nas was relaxing with his barefeet up on the hearth, he started telling us stories. He said when his father started working, he earned 5 cents for a days work. Nas’ mother died when he was very little and he didn’t have a step-mother to replace her right away. He said it was job to go to market on Sunday and buy salt and sugar and whatever food he could get for the family. “There was no road from here to there, then, just little paths. It took me all day to go to Santa and come back.” Apparently there was some coin that was equal to a quarter of a cent. He told us he’d go to market with 2 quetzales and come home with his morrale full of avocados and sugar and salt and maybe some apples or potatos. I asked him what he earned for a days wage when he began working, 20 cents. I asked him if he’d ever gone to the coast to work on the coffee fincas. He said they realized that unless there was absolutely nothing here, no food at all, then it wasn’t worth going because one didn’t make enough extra money for it to be worthwhile. “We went five times maybe?” He looked at Lina to confirm, she nodded in agreement. “We went five times, but only out of necessity. Those were times when there was nothing here. But can you imagine walking from here to Huehuetenango with a morral on your back and a child on top of it? That’s how it was in the days before the highway. We all had to walk. The coffee finca trucks would only come as far as Huehue to pick us up.” Keep in mind we live 4 hours by bus from Huehuetenango, and it involves going up and over the tallest mountain range in Central America to get from here to there. We listened to him telling stories until things started to wind down.

We were tired and sweaty from the run, ready to go home, bathe and go to bed. We started the long process of excusing ourselves just as a school teacher showed up at the door. I was so sad. I knew he’d come for us. “Good evening, excuse me, I have an errand with these two,” he said coming in and putting his arms around our shoulders. So so sad. “Two of our judges didn’t show up for the beauty contest tonight. We were wondering if you two could help us and fill in for them.” Really, unless you want everyone to think you’re the worst person ever there’s no way to get out of an invitation like that, and I would have been breaking my rule “Right now?” Fletch asked. “No, in mm, half an hour or so,” he said. He left. The family laughed at us, since we’d just said we were going to go home and bathe and go to bed. We’d told them we were too tired to go to the dance that night, but now we’d be the ones starting off the dancing. “You should have told them you wouldn’t do it since they only asked you because someone else didn’t show up,” Reyna said laughing. Ha, I wish. Fletch had been blowing off my fear of being asked all night, but I didn’t get much satisfaction out of being right. We ran home to change, stoke up our fire so the house would be warm when we got home, and bring in bath water to warm on the wood stove while we were away. Then we changed and were off to the community room.

I do love their tradition of throwing pine needles all over the floor for a party. The kids had worked hard to make all the blue and white decorations hanging from the ceiling. The “runway” for the contestants was made of all the kids’ tables pushed together and covered in bright colored cortes and more pine needles. Perhaps because I already knew what to expect, this year’s events seemed to go much faster (gracias a dios) than last year’s. That didn’t stop Fletch from falling asleep in the middle of the contest. I hadn’t realized he was so tired. The student acts between the contestant’s showcases were interesting. There was a lipsync rendition of a popular banda song, so the little girls accustomed to wearing their rather conservative cortes donned denim mini-skirts and blue jeans. Their “modern” dance involved a lot of Shakira leg shaking and flipping their long long ponytails in circles over their head. It was pretty goofy, but at the same time, it takes a lot for them to have the courage to get up in front of their whole community and do something like that. I had to wonder, what do their parents make of all this? Is it ok that they’re wearing miniskirts? What do the grandparents out here think about all of this? And then, of course, as Fletch mentioned in an earier post, they played the most inappropriate song ever for the contest, Bloodhound Gangs “Bad Touch”, and it was hard to stop myself from laughing hysterically. The beauty contestants did a nice job. Each one is expected to make a speech on a different topic as their last act. They talked about education, women in politics, respect in the community, and alcoholism. They had to make the speech once in Spanish and once in Q’anjob’al. The oldest girl gave her speech on alcohol last, and as she was talking, the town bolo stood just outside the door yelling drunken slurs. This man drives me crazy. It’s rare that I see him sober. I gave the girl the highest marks, and so did Fletch. She won. Her walk also had a lot of attitude, so it wasn’t just the speech that won it for her.

It’s pretty easy to think these beauty contests are a ridiculous tradition. To us, they seem pretty ridiculous on the surface, but I think, over all it’s a good thing. The contest is run by the school teachers. There’s a lot of emphasis throughout the contest put on the importance of the education and in particular the education of girls. Maybe it’s just that we’ve got a progressive school director, and not all contests are like this? I had the same thought while watching a group of kids practice jumping jacks on the basketball court. They were all completely off time with one another, and I thought, man, my gym teachers had us whipped into way better shape than this. But you have to keep everything in perspective. I think ever little step they make toward more education, better education, and education for girls is probably a step in the right direction. So in the end, I was happy to have come and supported the teachers and students in their one big show of the year.

Once the competition was over, the marimba dancing started. We had the honor, as judges, to start the dancing off for the evening. As we waited for the teachers and students to quickly deconstruct the runway and make room for the dancing, Fletch fell asleep standing. We only made it through two sets of marimba before we HAD to go home for the evening. We were itching from being sweaty and tired beyond belief.

While the 15th is full of activities at the school, we didn’t make an effort to get over there. We slept in and worked around the house until the afternoon when it was time to go into town. We’d been invited to yet another birthday party. The wife of a man who works for the local radio station. She’s a midwife who attends the monthly talks we give, and Lorenzo, her husband, speaks very fluent English after ten years of working as a janitor in Nebraska. Lorenzo told us not to worry, he owns a truck and would bring us home well after public transport had stopped. I was a little afraid that there would be drinking involved in this party and that we’d have to refuse a ride home and be stuck in Santa, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.

I didn’t know until after we arrived that his family is Carismatico, a strict sect of Catholicism that doesn’t allow drinking or lorenzomateo3.jpg dancing or listening to any music that isn’t religious. So there was no drinking. There was, however, some very delicious food. He began to ask us questions about how we lived in the states and how we live here. He’d explained to his wife that men in the states do more work in the house. I told them Fletch has to wash his own pants here. This is always big deal. The women are always aghast to see him working at the pila. I’m sure they think I’m a terrible wife. In fact, as we both worked to do our laundry while Fletch’s mom was here our host mom asked, “Do you think Jaime’s mom would get mad at you if she knew Jaime was over here washing his pants?” I assured her she was the one who’d taught him how to take care of himself, and then I muttered to Jaime, “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like her nearly as much if she got mad at me for that.” He laughed. Lorenzo’s wife was well impressed. She said maybe Lorenzo should start washing his own pants too. “Oh Amelia, but that’s in the United States, not here,” he said laughing. I still don’t know if I was reading to far into it, but she seemed to sigh through her smile.

We talked some about education here, and about how his wife promotes natural medicines. We talked about their cultural traditions. It was a pleasant evening. I realized, or maybe re-realized, that a part of our job is just validating people. The tone of the conversation is one in which they seem to be asking for reassurance. So I reassure them that using natural medicine is a good idea when it’s possible. They like to hear that bilingual education is a good idea because children should learn their Mayan dialect as well as Spanish. I agree with that. Who doesn’t like to hear that they’re doing something right? These interactions form the non-quantifiable parts of our work. If we somehow help the people around is gain confidence from these exchanges I think it can only help. I would say that’s true anywhere.

Unlike many parties we’ve been to, this one wasn’t long and drawn out. We were there for less than 3 hours. We ate dinner, and we ate cake (they had me help cut it; I guess they thought I’d do a particularly good job because they know we like cake in the US), and then they said good-bye to all their guests. When everyone had gone his wife gave us a bag of oranges and 3 plantains to take home, then we all piled into his truck to drive out to our house. The marimba was blaring and the schoolyard was full of people when we left home. We came back to absolute silence and a sky full of stars. It was nice.

The next day was Nas’ birthday, so Fletch woke up early just to set off a special round of firecrackers for him. Reyna was the only one moving about the house as she got ready to go to work, and knowing that her dad was mildly hung over from the events the day before, she thought it was a hilarious idea. We also baked our fanciest cake yet, special for the occasion. Little Delmy is now speaking enough to demand I give her cake any time she sees it, “Lo pastel, Emily!” It’s pretty funny. We had a good dinner of chicken soup and tortillas, again, and handed out cake. Kids took turns bringing him small gifts and then everyone in the family gave him a birthday hug. For once, we hadn’t brought our camera, and everyone seemed a little annoyed about that.

Just as things were winding down, Manuel, who’d come with his wife and oldest son to eat dinner with Nas, stood up to make an announcement. His son Roble, was leaving for the U.S. early the next morning, and he’d come to say good bye to everyone. The speech was very solemn, and then as everything went quiet I heard a sob behind me. Nas was crying, and once he started, everyone let loose. It was a really strange experience. I hadn’t even seen Nas cry when Galindo tried to kill himself. And then Reyna was in tears, another who’d been very stoic with Galindo. Yet here was Roble, alive and well, but his going away was as good as if he’d died. Roble is this tall skinny kid with a squeaky voice. He hardly speaks any spanish and the next day he was on his way to the states? I kept thinking, he’s got to be scared to death, all the while feeling like I was watching people at a funeral. Even Galindo broke down crying when he hugged him goodbye. “We don’t know if he’ll be lucky or unlucky, but he has to test his luck to find out. So let’s all hope he makes it north alright.” So I began to think about A Mayan Life again, and this cycle of having to send your children away so they can make a decent living. At one time, it was very definitely the case, but I do think this has changed very gradually. It used to be that going to the states could make people rich by local standards, but even that seems to happen less and less. Manuel doesn’t send his kids to school, but he could. He could encourage them to study and work here, but he doesn’t. If they worked here they’d probably never be rich by local standards, but they’d contribute to their own society and have a regular source of income. But we know from what he’s told us that he tells them they should go to the states if they want to make a living. It’s kind of like he’s behind the times and hasn’t figured it out yet. The whole thing was both sad and annoying at the same time. Why can’t they see what they’re doing? It feels like they’re just being sheep, following all the people that went before them. Throughout the Independence Day celebrations we had various people tell us they were leaving; they just had to get that one last party in. One was a woman who makes bags for the co-op, another was a woman who translates at the local health talks, another was the bus driver (the only one to go legally), and now Manuel’s son. It’s pretty demoralizing to watch the flight out of town when we’ve invested time in working with each of these people, hoping some day they’d help make a difference in their community. And it was definitely a bummer of a way to finish up the birthday party. Fletch ran back to house for the camera, so the family would have some pictures of Roble when he was gone. And then all of Nas’ children took advantage of the situation to get a picture of with their dad. They wanted us to have a picture with him and Lina also.

Nasbirthday.jpgThe birthday parties have been the bright spots in an otherwise downer couple of months. I haven’t given a health talk since the first week of August here in the community, which makes me feel very out of touch with the women I’d grown accustomed to working with. I feel like I’m twiddling my thumbs. We’ve tried to organize leaders meetings, as a follow up to the, we thought successful, one we had before leaving on vacation, to no avail. We can’t have a meeting because, as Nas told us, “Manuel is too sad to leave his house because of his son’s leaving.” Somehow the guy finds a way to manipulate all situations. It drives me up the wall. Every day that goes by where we’ve done nothing leaves me feeling like there’s no way we’re going to build any infrastructure here. The Projects, as they’re referred to, are turning out be like speaking English; everybody wants projects, everybody wants to speak English, but no one wants to do the work for either those things. Its’ frustrating. As long as I was teaching I felt I could keep the frustration at bay, but now that I’m not doing that either, I’m beginning to feel kind of useless. I experienced a brief reprieve from this with the midwife conference on reproductive risk and family planning that I set up with the help of a few other organizations. It was definitely a success, but then it was over. Now what? I hear going through a mid-service slump is pretty normal, but that doesn’t make it more fun or less difficult for me personally. It’s just part of the job, and one that will come to end sooner rather than later I hope.

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A Week of Meetings https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-week-of-meetings/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/a-week-of-meetings/#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:14:29 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2217 This last week has been pretty disheartening in some ways. We’ve heard lots of things that have supposedly come from certain community members we’ve considered our friends, like, “Well, maybe they should just go home.” Though our family assured us that the person who said that was only saying it because she and her friends are sensational gossips. I still felt like I was going to throw up; that comment came from a woman who is one of our best morral makers. I’ve worked with her a lot. Oh and I did, quite coincidentally get sick with giardia. Sunday and Monday were fairly unpleasant days until I was given the go-ahead to take some pills (called the Peace Corps Medical Office), though thankfully no one seemed to take note or start a ruckus over my not feeling well. I usually hide in my house and turn visitors away on those days. A group of girls from the school came over to see us. They’re really interested in doing our dishes; they’ve mentioned it several times. I think that’s a sign that they like us? Also, they’ve already toured the green house and recieved their free cucumber, so they have to find another way to interact with us. They said they’d come back in a few days.

Monday night was a cultural evening in Santa Eulalia for health workers from our municipio as well as 5 or so other surrounding municipios. It was a big deal beauty contest and talent show, but I didn’t feel well enough to go. I sent Jaime on his way, and while I was home alone Lina came by to check on me. She asked me if I was going to have a health talk tomorrow. I told her we’d been advised against it. She agreed it was probably a good idea not to have it. “Just don’t go. That’ll show those ladies that you don’t have to show up and help them. And all the women who are any kind of buena gente will understand why you’re not there. Just don’t go.” I figured I should do as they tell me, so her visit sealed the deal.

Tuesday as the two o’clock hour approached I felt very strange just leaving all the women hanging. I started to focus on how enjoyable it was to stay home for the afternoon downpour and drink tea. Rain battering our tin roof starts to feel like white noise after a while. I know it’s pretty unlikely anyone will come knocking when it’s coming down hard, which brings me a little peace. I really had thought everything would be resolved and that we’d get to do a health talk so I’d announced last week we would be back to normal, but that we’d make an announcement. However, there was no announcement this week. At 2:30 a few young girls came up to ask if we were going to have a talk, “Lots of women are waiting at the health center.” I told them we’d been advised not to have a meeting today, sorry for the confusion. I find myself starting to speak like them, putting the responsibility anywhere but in my hands, “We’ve been advised…” Then 15 minutes later some young adult women came knocking, “Excuse us, xal Emily, is there a talk today?” I told them there would be no talk today.

“But there are lots of women waiting there.” And I stood firm, that I had been advised to give no talk today. The issues from last week were not resolved. They waited for me to change my mind. I didn’t. They waited a little longer before slowly turning to go and heading back to the health center. For a little while we were left alone. I felt bad that morning, knowing I wasn’t going to be working in the afternoon as per usual, so I’d sent Fletch over to Manuel’s house to tell him we still needed to talk to him. He was, of course, busy. I thought, if we can just get this meeting with him out of the way, that’ll be work enough for one day. Manuel has this great way of wanting us to JUMP when he says so, but if we ever ask anything of him he has to stress how busy and important and occupied he is with other things. He just loves to leave us hanging. We get over it by double-booking him so that we don’t waste our time if he just doesn’t show up, which has happened on multiple occasions. He told us he’d be at our house by 3.

Our neighbor Lucas has asked us to show him how to make cookies. He’s thinking of starting up a little business, and his test-selling day is the 15th of September, the local Independence Day–lots of marimba, lots of dancing in circles, lots of fair food being sold outside the community building/school/dance hall. When he arrived we told him we might need to cut the lesson short if Manuel showed up, but it was possible that Manuel wouldn’t come at all. Lucas had shown up at 3; Manuel arrived at 4:30. Lucas’ cousin had dropped by in the middle of his lesson, and for some reason his wife and two women from the health talks ducked into the house behind Manuel. It was a pretty uncomfortable gathering. They literally sat around talking about the weather for 20 minutes, all of us in our 14 x 20′ wooden box. As soon as the big M arrived I’d started feeling shaky and sick to my stomach, but I was trying to figure out how to make the meeting happen by getting the uninvolved parties out of the house so we could just get this talk overwith once and for all. I managed to think of something inoffensive that gave Lucas and his cousin their cue, and finally we shut the door and sat down for business, still unsure of why the women were there.

Sometimes it’s hard to recall what Manuel has actually said by the time he finishes talking and goes on his way. He started everything off and spent an exorbitant amount of time talking philosophically about beehives and queen bees and worker bees and the spiders and the worms that try to get in a hive to eat it, destroying it from inside out. There was something about a bee that body-blocks the entrance so these nastier things can’t come in. I knew he’d do this. I knew there was no way this could be a pithy little exchange, some pats on the back and we’re outta here. He went on and on, gesturing into the air and thumping his chest, yes, again, but less emphatically than last Tuesday, talking about this beehive. I wonder if he sees himself as the keeper of the gate, this body-blocker who is always so self-sacrificing? I have no idea. I was listening to him, but I was always working on controlling my own body’s shaking as well as focusing on what my face looked like. I’m not a bluffer. I’m not a tease. I tend to say and do and think and react honestly to things. Maybe too honestly. I have a really hard time making myself neutral, and since this man has driven me up a few walls and back down again in the 13 months we’ve been here, I no longer have patience for him. I am trying, a this point very hard, to maintain at least a little bit of respect for him. So I had to keep my face from registering my gut reaction of disgust for this epic tale of bees and their hives.

He finished, his arms slowing, his hands alighting on his knees, like a bee to a rose blossom, if you will. Anyway, he wraps up the story by saying, “I’ve heard that you were upset with me. People here talk, there are ears and mouths everywhere. I hear that you’re upset with me, and so I’ve come to ask your pardon, along with a representative from the women’s committee. We’ve come to ask your pardon, even though I know, for my part, that I’ve done nothing wrong. My conscience is clear, but I’ll ask your pardon anyway.” How kind of you?

Fletch and I spent this entire meeting seated directly across from one another exchanging steely glances. We’ve been disgruntled for days. We’ve been trying to communicate with one another, and even that seems to have broken down. I was worried that something would come out of our mouths, his or mine I didn’t know but feared both equally, that we’d both regret. I didn’t know which one of us was supposed to talk first even after all the time we’d spent discussing how we were supposed to act and what we were supposed to say now. I wanted to let him go first if he wanted to. He nodded at me to proceed.

“I think, Manuel, that it’s important you all know why we were offended by what happened on Tuesday. There were many things that happened to make us offended and upset, not just one, and there were things that happened with the women and things that happened with you. First of all, let me say that I’ve always felt very proud of being a volunteer for Temux. We always tell everyone how much we love it here and how wonderful the people are. But last Tuesday, for the first time, I was completely embarrassed by the way this community acted.” We explained to him that, in our culture, being disrespectful to an invited guest was the same as being disrespectful to us as the people who had invited the girls. We were hurt by the fact that, since we cannot speak Q’anjob’al fluently and we depend on the people in this community who can translate for us, they chose to tell us nothing. In fact, they denied that there was a problem at all. We’ve always felt these translators were our friends, that we could trust them, so their refusal to translate was a breech of that trust.

I had to speak slowly, choose my words slowly and deliberately, and try and keep my internal shakes from coming out in my voice. I tried to reiterate how the women attacked the girls before either of them had even said a word, and that we found that absolutely deplorable. Manuel sat here with this serene smile on his face. I can’t even begin to understand what it meant, “You ridiculous gringa…” I have no idea. It made me angry, though. It felt demeaning. So I got to the part about Manuel, because I know if there’s one thing Manuel likes, it’s himself.

“To this point I’ve always felt we were friends, but on Tuesday you treated us like we were your dogs and you the owner, not like our friend. You made it sound like we were hiding plans from you and not sharing things with you. You haven’t been able to come to the charlas for months. That’s fine. You have children to feed. You have a business to run. I understand that. You should take care of those things. But we haven’t hidden anything from you. We’ve been giving these talks in the middle of the town for anyone who wants to come. We’ve invited everyone in this community, you included, to our home at any time. We don’t hide things from anyone. You spent the better part of two months unavailable (at this point I didn’t say, you were DRUNK! I just made the “hang loose” sign with my hands and tipped it up like a bottle so I knew he’d get the picture). In that time we’d arrived at a point where I thought it was a good time to begin HIV and AIDS talks with the women. I have on this paper my notes from when the Organizacion Panamericana de Salud (central american branch of the World Health Organization) came to interview the women. One of the primary questions they asked was if the women knew of HIV or AIDS, had they received any classes on these illnesses?” I turned to the female rep, who was one of the women interviewed that day so she could confirm that I was correct. Her daughter translated what I had said for her. She nodded. “After the OPS meeting, the leaders said we’d get together and discuss what happened. Manuel, that was some 4 months ago and we’ve not had a meeting with community leaders since before that time. This is an illness with a 100% mortality rate. I thought it was important that we go ahead and discuss it with the women because they deserve to know. The women here always act embarrassed when they have to translate, and this talk is confusing the first time someone hears it. I thought I was doing them a favor by inviting the girls from Yulais. You know that Elisea is qualified to give translate this talk. She attended the same Peace Corps sponsored workshop that you and your wife attended. You and your wife could have translated for us, but like I said, I understand that you two have your children to feed and your carpentry business to run. Neither of you have been attending, so I thought it would be a favor to everyone to invite the girls to help us.”

Manuel tried to say something. I wasn’t ready to let him have the floor; he’d taken so much time in the beginning. Fletch had opened his mouth at the same time as Manuel. “Fletch would like to say something now,” and Manuel turned his attention to the opposite side of the room.

Fletch let him know that he felt like Manuel had stabbed him in the back. “I came to your house to explain the situation to you. You said you would come and help me. At this point you had the opportunity to clear up any misunderstanding, but you barged in and stirred up more problems. That’s not how friends work together. I had faith that you would come help me and you didn’t.”

“But I didn’t say anything wrong,” he actually whined, and then spoke quickly to the female representative (aka one of the “angry ladies” from last week). She confirmed through a translator that he hadn’t done anything wrong. “Manuel, I don’t know what was said in Q’anjob’al, but you walked in and spoke in Spanish and said, ‘I have no idea what’s going on here. This meeting does not have my permission to take place. I have no idea what these girls are doing here. They don’t have my permission to be here.'”

He nodded his head, “Yes, yes, I did say that.” Fletch re-explained to Manuel how those words were in fact contradictory to him helping us out. We went back and forth for just a little while longer as Manuel began to fidget and compulsively check his phone and attempt to stand up. Now that we’d made him uncomfortable he suddenly had another meeting to go to. His wife, who’d come in the middle of things, said, “Bueno, we’ve heard your words, Jaime and Emily, and we’ve heard your words, Manuel. Now we’d just like to know if we can continue to do the charlas here in Temux. The girls from Yulais should stay there, and us here, and we’ll just gone on like normal. That’s all we want to know.” I was telling Fletch in English what everyone was saying in Spanish, because he started to look confused. We both agreed that everyone here had kind of missed the point.

You see, the goal of our program is train local Guatemalans to do what we’re doing after we’re gone. We want them to be able to give the health talks to neighboring communities. This was the biggest blow to us, because as long as the communities outright refuse to work with their neighbors, such a thing can never happen. All this time I’ve felt like we’ve been progressing fairly well towards this goal until it came down to, “all we want to know is if we can just continue like this never happened and leave everyone in their separate communities so it doesn’t happen again.” I just wanted to throw my hands up and cry, “WHY IS THIS SO HARD!?” The jealousy here is still so incomprehensible to me. Manuel continued to check his phone and shift around. “Alright, well I have another meeting.” We made it clear to him that things weren’t resolved, that there seemed to be a lot of misunderstanding about what we’re doing here and we thought it best to set up a community meeting and clarify what are job is and who we work for (i.e. we don’t work exclusively for this community, although we participate more fully in this community for living here and by extension of living here do the majority of our work here). As soon as we figured that out, Manuel jumped out of his seat and said, “Alright, I’ve got another meeting to go to. See you tomorrow,” and walked out. The ladies followed slowly behind him. We felt pretty demoralized by the whole thing, but a community meeting seemed the best solution or resolution we could hope for.

Wednesday I was out at the pila washing clothes. The house was nearly abandoned, just the old grandma was sitting inside by the fire. Along came the woman who a few people had accused of saying that Fletch and I should just go home. She stopped a while to chat, commented, pleased, at how I was now capable of doing laundry here, because she knew that in the states it was pura maquina that people used. She asked to have the bra I was washing, “You have to put lots of soap on it like this, see,” as the fabric began to froth. I watched her thick, deft hands go to work, thinking about all the practice she’s had, doing this since she was old enough to stand at a pila and now the mother of 10 children. A common discussion ensued, “How much does this cost?” We talked about my clothes and prices in the states and in Guatemala, but slowly somehow the topic shifted to alcoholism and how her husband in the states never sends any money because he doesn’t have work and he drinks too much. She wanted to know if there were people who drank too much in the states, and if so what happened? I told her about alcoholics anonymous and how it was really hard because the person who drinks has to be the one to decide to stop. We talked about how that would especially hard here since all the men egg each other on. We talked a long time. It was strange, because she never said anything at all resembling any sort of apology, but I just felt like she was saying sorry in the way she was speaking and acting. I could just be making that up, but it really did feel like a very indirect apology. I admittedly suck at indirect communication. I’m not sure how many years of being in Guatemala it would take for me to be decent at it.

Thursday our boss came up to visit us. We talked to him about the issue. It was good to see him and all, but I didn’t feel like things were really resolved at all. I became uncertain, maybe I’m focusing on the wrong things, or that I can no longer tell what’s worthwhile from what isn’t. It was a long day. I started to feel awfully homesick, so did Fletch; we weren’t saying much of anything. In the late afternoon I stood looking out at how the setting sun lit up the green landscape and dark grey storm clouds in the west, not sure if I was wallowing in my own misery or trying to get over it. I started over to the family kitchen. They generally cheer me up there. A visit turned into staying for dinner. They’d bought a chicken that day and I think they fear we don’t eat enough meat (I think we’re fine). We had chicken soup, freshly dug potatoes and tortillas. My taste-buds have adjusted enough that I can tell the difference between the chicken criollo and the industrial chicken here; they’d bought the criollo, much tastier. We all talked and laughed, teased the little kids, talked some more until the fire died down and then we excused ourselves. Walking carefully down the muddy slope we both agreed it was a good idea to have dinner with them; we felt a little less crappy.

Friday afternoon was the long-awaited leaders meeting. They’d decided since there weren’t that many of them we’d just do it in our house. Thank goodness. Just after it started a downpour began blown in by cold winds, rushing up through some of the as yet unsealed cracks between the floor boards. We’d taken measures to stoke a fire up before the leaders arrived. There were 5 men, 3 of whom were starting to nod off by the time they sat down. I’d filled the tea pot before they arrived, so we lit the stove to serve them coffee and tea. We’d posted a big Agenda poster on our kitchen shelves mainly so Fletch and I didn’t forget all we wanted to say, but also to give them something to focus on, other than all the weird stuff we tend to keep on our kitchen shelves.

We talked a little about what happened with the women, but it was far from the focus of the meeting. Our objective was to get them to understand, once again, exactly what our “project” here is—health education, nothing to do with projects of a physical kind–and that we now have 11 months to accomplish anything in the community. We talked about the cultural norms, that women are the ones to attend meetings and yet men, who don’t receive the health information because they don’t come to the talks, make the decisions about who should go to the hospital and when. They said, “Jaime, Emily, we don’t want you to worry. It’s always been like that. We don’t want you to be sad; it’s not you.” This was a good time to explain some important issues to them. They’re very worried about always being un pais de bajo desarollo, an underdeveloped nation. If there is always this disconnect between those who receive an education and those who are supposed to make educated decisions, then there’s a bigger chance this community will remain the same indefinitely. I didn’t dare suggest that they start allowing women to make the decisions–I figured that was entirely too far-fetched and probably threatening–I just suggested that they make sure the men have the same health education. Just because this is the way “things have always been” doesn’t mean this is the way things should always been. Development necessitates change, so maybe they should really work on boosting the mens’ attendance. “Nas and Don Simon, you two know the way things were. It used to be that people thought women should only work in the home raising children and tending the house, but you two have changed that. You’ve sent your daughters to school, and now they work and bring home money that helps your family. This is a good change. If you want the men to start attending meetings you have to work together to get them there, to set a precedent and make yourselves examples. You have to repeat and repeat and repeat yourself some more, and never stop inviting men to come to the meetings. After a while, they might just start to go.” For Manuel’s sake and to put everyone’s reverence to work, I shamelessly invoked Ingeniero Basilio Estrada, our boss whose reputation has reached minor-deity status, “Ingeniero Basilio Estrada said himself, invite them, invite them, invite them. Never stop inviting people, even if you think they’ll never come,” followed by lots of slow, reverent nodding of heads. This gathering touched on lots of things, one thing leading right on to the next, and lots of translating back and forth from Spanish to Q’anjob’al just to make sure everyone was clear.

The leaders asked us questions about whether or not the teachers had approached us to support them at the school by giving sex education talks. They said there was some conflict in the community, some parents and teachers for it, some against it. They have, in fact, asked us for help, and all the teachers have at least feigned interest in what we’re doing. We had them over for one crazy lunch on a sunny day in February, and they’d all pitched in to get us a gift–a blanket for our bed. I felt like they wanted us to help them, but we’ve had some real trouble coordinating schedules since the last disastrous (for us) talk we did at the school. The leaders plunged into a discussion on their cultural beliefs regarding sex, which is that sex is so sacred there are apparently no words for it in their language. Their customs dictate that no one ever speak of what happens between a man and a woman for reasons of sanctity. I told them to what point the women’s talks have covered sex (explaining exactly how a pregnancy occurs). Again, something that could hamper a communities development is continuing not to talk about sex so that 12 and 13 year old girls get pregnant and marry and have 8 children by the time they’re 25, and neither parent has finished school. I also reminded them that talking about sex does not have to strip it of its sanctity, quite the contrary. If they don’t talk about it, their children will take lessons from media that does not treat sex with any sanctity or respect. I’m not a religious person and my views don’t align with most religious views on sexuality, but if I have to make a choice about the community not receiving any education or receiving sexual education framed within the cultural and religious perspectives of the community, I think the latter is a much better option. They understood these things, but I feel so adamantly that they should be repeated out loud to the community leaders. I also reminded them that now there is the danger of their children falling ill with STD’s, HIV included, because of all the international and national migration.

They launched into some pretty passionate conversation amongst themselves in Q’anjob’al. Sometimes I can not understand a word of what they’re saying. But something interesting happened. Nas explained, “We just never talked about these things before. It was too sacred. You know, even Lucia (his 17 year old daughter) has grabbed me by the ear and me regaño, ‘Dad, why haven’t you ever told us any of this?!’ because now they receive sex education classes in their school. It’s just not our custom to talk about these things, I told her. What happens between a man and a woman, only the man and the woman know.” His facial expressions were interesting, smiling in a bewildered, caught but challenged way, as though his face was asking, “What can I do if I’ve never been given the words to do it?”

Don Simon seems genuinely upset on a regular basis about not being able to fully express himself in Spanish, but when he thinks it’s important he tries. He talked to us about how no one has ever talked about sex as being a responsibility, but he knows that it is. He’s an illegitimate child, another thing that seems to plague him regularly. His father was a ladino that came and went and left his mother to care for a child on her own. She had no choice but to return to her parents for their help. Simon told us, “I feel bad, because I never gave my children, my boys, any instruction. Gavino, the oldest, the one in Mexico, he had a family in San Mateo. He married an indigenous Mateana, but he left her there with his children. I never told him that was wrong. And even though I never had a father, my grandmother was always giving me instructions as a child, ‘No toques el maiz mi hijo. No rompes el chilicayote mi hijo,’ (Don’t touch the corn my child. Don’t break the squash my child.)” I wonder if the corn and squash was as close as they get to sexual innuendo? Mayan culture is so high context. It seems, the way he explained it, that he was talking about closely guarded sexual instruction, but I can’t be sure. “My wife and I married when I was 20 and she was 16. We had a plan, you know. We were going to send our children to school. By the time I was 21 I had my first child, a son. Then came another and another and another until there were 8. Who could take care of all these children? It was hard for me to provide for them. There weren’t just 8, there were 11 and 3 of them died. But our plan was to send them to school. How could we do that? And no one ever talked about the responsibility of sex, about touching things they shouldn’t. I never told my children, and I myself touched others (he said otras, female, other women), even though I was married. We should talk about these things. They’re important.” At first I felt guilty, as it had never, at any time, been my intention to extract confessions from these leaders. I think they were just sharing. Then I realized, you know, I’m sure most of these men, if not all of them, have “touched otras“. Why? Because it’s allowed. It’s perfectly acceptable, the idea that men have an unbelievably potent sex drive, where as women do not, and the men need to be satisfied. Also, men have traditionally been the ones to leave home for months or years at a time to earn money. They don’t generally do celibacy. It probably wouldn’t have been ok for Don Simon to tell us, what I felt was pretty personal information, if it wasn’t already acceptable to the other male leaders in the room.

Sometimes, looking at these men’s faces, I am always shocked with how quickly the world around them must seem to have changed. I am here, but I still can’t quite grasp the gravity of all the things they’ve gone through or how heavily these things of the past and the prospects of the future seem to weigh on them. They do not take us or our presence here lightly. I think something Fletch and I didn’t understand was how important it was for us to keep pushing meetings with this specific group of men. In that respect, we have failed these last 5 months. We can’t do that in the remaining 11. There was so much talk about so many different things. We hadn’t even made it to our last and biggest item on the agenda, our hopes for the coming year. Our stomachs were growling, “These guys have got to be dying, is it ok if I serve them some bread and honey just to give them something?” Fletch asked, out of respect, because I’m the bread maker and it takes a lot of time to make it over and over and over every time we give it out to people as something to share with them. We hooked them up with bread and honey and more hot water and apples. They kept right on going. Did I mention the meeting started at 4? By this point that sun had gone down, the wind and raining were blowing outside. We tried to do our best to keep the fire stoked and the conversation moving. Entmoot.

They were most excited and perplexed by the possibility of any sort of projects that we could do. The meeting revolved around their heated debates, from which we were somewhat excluded except on the most pertinent points or the areas of most confusion. It went on for another two hours. I think if there hadn’t been a medical emergency (a women having labor troubles) and the chuj getting cold, the meeting would have gone on until 11. The last thirty minutes had everyone talking on their feet as though they were headed out the door at any moment, but they didn’t quite move until the 3rd family member had come calling for Nas to go chuj, and we were supposed to go after him. “Bueno, I’m going to Huehue in the morning with pregnant woman, so I must go bathe. I think we should have this meeting to clarify things with the women and explain what our plans are, but we should probably have another leaders meeting before then. I won’t be back probably until Wednesday, you will all have gone by then. We’ll do it in September. Get ready to chuj, you two; you’re after me.” Every one hurried to exchange handshakes and they were out the door. It was 9 o’clock. This was the first meeting we’d ever had in our house, but I think we’ll move for that in the future. Even though we were left with a pile of dirty dishes, at least our house was well warmed and we didn’t have to go out in the cold.

After they left I still felt a little frustrated. The end of the meeting had gotten a little hectic. I think it was mostly residual stress, but also this constant uncertainty I’ve felt all week. I am having a lot of trouble feeling like I have a clear purpose to what I’m doing. I’m constantly questioning myself about whether I’m taking the right things to task, or trying to do too much, or possibly doing too little? It’s been one of those weeks were it seems Fletch and I can’t say a full 3 sentences to one another about anything without getting interrupted by something or someone else or having to change subjects to something more pressing. I feel so very scattered and stretched thin. The meeting lasted until 9 last night, and I was beat. At 6:30 this morning there were children outside our house singing, “Gringos, gringos, do you have candy? Gringos, gringos…” We pulled the blankets over our heads and didn’t answer or get up for another 2 hours.

That’s that for now. I’m trying to focus on getting work done for the next few days until take off for our departmental Ministry of Health meeting followed by fun. Yay for family visiting! We’re looking forward to our trip with the Witches (my mother-in-law and 3 of Fletch’s aunts). That will quit us of our homesick and mopey tendencies for a while, I hope.

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Tuesday Special: Lobster https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/tuesday-special-lobster/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/tuesday-special-lobster/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:44:27 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=2171 Tuesday started out a really benign day. We had a busy week last week, getting back into things here and going to town for meetings with the health center staff and the midwives. This weekend and the last two days have been pretty low key. We’ve done quite a bit of gardening and have been giving lots of greenhouse tours. I think people are mostly attracted by the fact that we seem to give out free cucumbers to people who stop by, and the gente like cucumbers. I’ve even been feeling really on top of our charla schedule. I’ve got the next month mapped out for both towns (who are not on the same schedule). Today, as the two o’clock hour approached, I headed over to the health center to start setting up benches and taping up posters, feeling pretty confident.

Last week we started a series of talks that address HIV and AIDS in Guatemala. For those of you who don’t know, it’s actually quite a problem here. Prostitution is legal; mysogny and having partners outside of marriage is pretty common (amongst men more so than women); sex and sexuality are very taboo; health education is pretty inadequate (that’s why we’re here!); and migrant work nationally as well as internationally is almost an institution. All of these things combine to make, well, a big mess. Thankfully, Peace Corps has a very comprehensive series of talks already worked out to explain what HIV/AIDS is, how it’s transfered from person to person, and how we can all avoid getting it. Yay! But it is a lot of information to give people all at once. And explaining the idea of an immune system and it’s subsequent attack and demise, to people who only months ago learned what germs and microbes are, is intense. It takes a lot of explaining, and because everything we say in our talks has to be translated into Q’anjob’al, we’re not the ones who can do the explaining.

Way back in March we took four people from Santa Eulalia to the Peace Corps training center to receive a training on how to teach HIV and AIDS in their community, so I thought PERFECT. We’ll just ask the teenage girls who translate for us in the community next door (one of them was with us in March) to come over to our village and translate for us here. Although Manuel and his wife (who are our neighbors) went with us, they’ve been absent for the last few months of talks. When we asked the girls about helping us, they were positively thrilled. They’re genuinely excited to spend as much time as possible with us and their enthusiasm makes them great, energetic translators. They met me at the health center to go over the information quickly before the charla. I thought, for once all the ladies will be happy that I’m not begging one of them to translate. The women filed in and took their seats, so we started off with a prayer, as they requested we do, and then I introduced the girls to the women of of our village and was just about to start the charla…

One woman from our village spat out something angry sounding in Q’anjob’al; her eyes were fierce. I was clueless. I looked at the girls who were eager a moment ago but now looked very worried. I was confused. Maricela said, “She says we have no business being here because we’re not part of the health committee and you two are the volunteers here. They said they should have been told in advance that we were coming and Manuel (the health committee president) needs to approve of us being here.”

I was missing something, “But you two are just translating. We invited you to help us tell them about this.” And I re-explained why I had invited Elisea and Maricela to our village this afternoon. There was a group of women talking back and forth furtively. I couldn’t understand them, of course. Women often hold their own conversations during the charla. I tried to ignore it and just start things up.

Maricela looked at me and said, “No. I don’t think we can translate. Maybe one of your translators from here can do most of the work and if she needs help we’ll just help her.” Maricela is incredibly sweet, and she was really trying to help get things going. The whole thing seemed so absurd to me; I think this is what it feels like to have an elephant in the room. I asked the jabbering women in the corner if there was a problem. The rest of the room just stared blankly at us.

“No, there’s no problem,” they said and went back to angrily discussing something.

It’s really annoying and unbelievably frustrating when you know there’s a problem but everyone tells you there isn’t and you can’t understand a word of what they’re saying! I looked at the girls for help.

“They’re saying that you two are here to work for this village and not for other communities, that we’re not part of the health committee here and that we don’t have any right to be here. They say Manuel should be here.” So there’s this thing that happens here where people emit strands of words which, as individual words, I understand completely, but, as a whole sentence, I can not comprehend the larger meaning of what they’re trying to say. The first claim struck me as outrageous, the second as downright rude, and the third thing, about Manuel, completely superfluous. WHAT WAS THE BIG DEAL?

So I asked the angry ladies AGAIN, “Can you please explain to me what the problem is?”

“There’s no problem. It’s fine. They should just translate. Let’s begin the charla.” But, you see, things were not fine. There were some very unsettled people in the room, including the translators I had invited, and no one was talking to us about what was actually going on. I just wanted to start the friggin’ talk! The girls were refusing to translate. The angry ladies continued to say plenty of things they wouldn’t translate into Spanish. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. In any sort of conflict situation I immediatly assume I’ve done something wrong. I think I’ve interpreted something incorrectly, or made a bad joke or committed some social faux pas–I am the guest here, and they’re just acting according to their norms. I felt trapped when Fletch jumped in to tell me he thought the community just wanted to know that the girls were legit, and if he could run and tell Manuel what the problem was, or seemed to be, then Manuel could come explain to the community that these girls knew the material well and were just here to help translate. In the last few months, I’ve lost faith in Manuel. While he was really instrumental to our work in the beginning, he’s been completely unreliable and often intoxicated since late April, early May. But Fletch is always trying to counter my cynicism when it pops up, and sometimes he’s right. So I told him to go he thought it would help.

The feeling of entrapment just intensified in his absence. The girls were clearly upset and not about to proceed translating. Angry ladies continued to be angry and full of commentary they weren’t letting me in on. The rest of the room continued to stare blankly, until one woman stood up and said, “Can we just start the charla. There’s a meeting in the school after this that we all have to go to.” So I thought, ok, I’m taking directions from the people; she’s telling me what to do. Let’s just push forward. I started the opening of the health talk. The girls wouldn’t budge. I looked at the only one of the angry ladies who could speak both Spanish and Q’anjob’al and said, “Look, there’s a problem here. I have NO CLUE what’s going on. Could someone please tell me what the problem is? All I’ve done is ask for these girls to come help me translate this material because it’s new to all of you and they’ve already gone through classes on this subject.” Nothing. No one said anything. I just stared at them all, waiting.

Finally, a woman who is incredibly kind to Fletch and me at all times said, “Emily, I think everyone misunderstood. They thought the girls were here to give us their opinions about this subject. They didn’t understand that the girls are only here to translate.” I don’t understand why the girl’s opinions about something would cause such a hullabaloo either, but I explained in Q’anjob’al yet AGAIN exactly why I had asked the girls to come translate–yes, translate, as in regurgitate what I say so that it makes sense to people who don’t speak the language I’m speaking. Fletch came running back in. “Manuel will be here in a minute.”

Whereas before no one would talk to me, suddenly Fletch was telling me all that had transpired with Manuel, in English, Maricela was trying to tell me why she thought they shouldn’t translate, in Spanish, and one of the angry ladies was telling me that everything was just fine we should start the talk, in Spanish, as other angry ladies jabbered on in Q’anjob’al. I thought my head would explode. I cut Fletch off and let Maricela finish, then cut back to Fletch, then let the angry lady repeat herself. So we figured out, the ladies just didn’t want these young girls coming in and telling them what to do without being informed beforehand there would be outsiders at the charla, and Manuel understood what the problem seemed to be and was on his way to come straighten everything out in a minute…I thought?

Fletch and I, in one last, futile attempt, tried to explain that the girls were only here because we asked them to come, INVITED them in fact, and that they weren’t going to tell anyone what to do; they were only going to translate what he and I had to say. Was that ok? Fine. Could we begin the charla? Fine. Could we please now welcome our guests who were going to help us through today’s charla with a little applause (the folks here really like applause and I quite ignorantly thought it might change the mood to something a little more positive)? There was applause right as Manuel strolled into the health center.

“You’re all applauding me for being late?” he joked. Sometimes Manuel tries to be funny in ways I find amazingly irritating. So just as I thought we might finally start the talk (about 40 minutes had passed at this point), Manuel took center stage. “I have no idea what’s going on here. I can’t sanction this talk. We made a plan. I have everything written down in a notebook in my house. I was going to bring it, because that’s the way I am. I have it written down, but I left it at home. It’s somewhere. The plan said we were going to do these talks months ago, that I would be here, the nurse Lucia would be here, that the technician Aurelio would be here and that all the village leaders would be here. I have no idea what’s happening right now. They (he points to the girls) can’t just come in here without talking to me first. You can’t just do this. You haven’t told me for months what’s going on here.” He just kept talking, gathering steam. And, for the record, for months he has refused to show up for the health talks. Everything we’ve been doing has been plain to anyone who bothers to show up or who comes to our house to talk to us. He’s done neither. “I’m the president of the health committee. We have committees to make decisions here. We didn’t decide that these girls should come here today…” From across the room Fletch looked at me, dumbfounded, and said in English, “We just got sandbagged.” To which I responded, “And this is why I didn’t want him coming.”

Manuel is a master of theatrics. We used to appreciate how he could make people enthusiastic and excited. This time we didn’t much appreciate it. His hands were flying, his words were emphatic. Fletch had worked his way across the room and whispered, “It’s pretty clear to me that this talk isn’t going to happen today.” I couldn’t have agreed more, so I interrupted Manuel as he was doing a wonderful job repeating himself, making himself out to be a victim of exclusion, making us out to be people who were trying to step on his toes or somehow threaten him. I apologized, to everyone, for wasting so much of their time. I told them that there was clearly a problem that I did not understand and that this problem would not be solved today and for that reason we’d just start the health talks next week at the regular time once everything was cleared up. I asked for their pardon and told them they were all free to go to the meeting that was beginning at the school, and I gathered up my things to go.

Manuel took off again. He was speaking in Q’anjob’al, pointing at the girls, pointing at the air, thumping his heart. Fletch and I stood there waiting for a second, thinking he was going to wrap things up. He was off another diatribe regarding all the work he’d done to bring in these volunteers from Peace Corps, and how this meeting did not have his permission to take place and these girls were not invited. “Let’s go,” Fletch said. Manuel was being manipulative and insulting. I honestly felt he was treating us like pet dogs. We interrupted him to excuse ourselves and say good-bye, and then we walked out. We left him to his theatrics. I was shaking I was so upset, and I was so embarrassed about what had just happened even though exactly what had happened was not clear to me. I was about to cry when a group of women, all of whom had followed me out, came to shake my hand and say good-bye as they do at the end every health talk. “Good-bye Emily. Please don’t be sad. There was a misunderstanding in there. Not everyone is upset. Don’t be sad or you’ll make yourself sick. We’re very sorry about what happened. Please don’t get sick.”

Fletch interrupted, “The girls are still in there, what should we do?”

“Go get them out.” I told the women thanks as they continued to apologize and warn me that, if I got too upset, I would get sick. They were all in agreement that getting upset was very bad for my health I said my goodbyes and went back to the house. I walked in as Fletch was making tea for the girls who were both in tears. I sat down and started apologizing to them because I felt, surely somehow this was all my fault. I mean, I did invite them to come help me.

Now that the girls weren’t in front of the women, little by litte they started to tell us in detail what people had said to them. And once we were away from the pressure situation, we began to understand a mess of things. Just then Lina, our host mom, came knocking. She was with her daughter who’d been at the health talks and had left just before we walked out. “Masha told me they were abusing two girls down at the health center. Are you all ok? What happened?” The girls explained the situation, since they obviously had a much better handle on what’d gone down. Lina listened to them, and in the end she apologized on behalf of the community. She said the women who started the problem are women who are known around town to start problems, and that the woman who first insulted them is known to be Manuel’s girlfriend (I thought, my that’s a nice little catty touch), so they were obviously in cahoots about this mess.

We really love our host family. They’re such quiet but adament supporters of us and our work. Lina showed up at just the right time to say just the right thing. I’d apologized to the girls for so unwittingly dragging them into a trap, but I think it helped tremendously for them to hear from a female adult community member. She was of the opinion that what had happened to them was an embarrassment. She added, “And I’m going to go tell them that it’s all THEIR fault if any of you get sick. If any of you become ill it’s on their heads for causing all these problems.” Briefly I thought, you know my body has a tendency not to work properly in this country; I wonder what kind of madness would ensue were I to suddenly have the flu? The timing would be comic, but I’m not sure I want to witness that…apparently sadness/stress as well as the cold will make you ill in these parts.

Lina left and we finished talking things over with the girls. We pulled out the last bit of a pie to give them, basically trying to cheer them up anyway we could think. Most of our friends and neighbors love to try anything we cook up. The pie and tea and all our talk eventually coaxed some smiles out of them. We offered to walk them home, because we honestly weren’t sure if someone would insult them yet again if they were walking out of town alone.

Apparently being here a year doesn’t mean we’ve got anything figured out. Talking as we walked ourselves home, we realized that everything that transpired at the charla came out of things that had been bothering us for a while. For one, Manuel has become increasingly unreliable over the the last few months. However, he’d managed, without us really noticing, to appoint himself “Keeper of the Gringos”. It was to the point that we hadn’t really communicated with any other town leaders in quite a while.

We need to change this, so our next task is to set up a leaders’ meeting to inform them that we now have less than a year left, 11 months and counting. We will outline what things we hope to accomplish and try and garner their support for projects and ideas. Whatever they decide not to support will not be pursued. If we can’t get the computer center set up, we’ll hand the computers off to another volunteer who’s had more success and can use them in his project. If the town doesn’t want to work for a health infrastructure project, we won’t try and push it. If they do want these things, then we’ll figure out which leaders are going to help us achieve our goals.

But why were the girls attacked? How did that all come about? Manuel’s feeling of entitlement as our keeper and recipient of our charity is apparently a shared sentiment amongst at least a small portion of people from our community. While Fletch was working with the health committee here to organize and complete the paperwork for a Small Project Assistance grant from USAID, there were some strange comments made to him. Apparently people from our village had heard that the neighboring community, where we also give weekly talks, was going to do a project with us as well. This irked them. Someone somewhere along the line had (MISTAKENLY!) informed them that because we live here, this community is the only community that will benefit from any projects we might have to offer. Fletch addressed this issue. At the time the women weren’t pleased with his answer. I was not at the meeting, and some of them moved that I be called in to explain to Fletch what the problem was, because he was obviously not capable of understanding them. I guess they were right; he didn’t understand them. But I couldn’t have helped him any, as their complaints were so strange to us that neither of us understood what the problem was.

It seems they think we are keepers of a magic box of money, and if the neighboring community gets to have a project it’s only because we’ve taken part of the money, that they feel is rightfully theirs, and given it up to the neighbors. This is not the case at all. We don’t have any money! USAID does. The amount of money our village would receive does not change. If they receive a grant, they get X amount of dollars regardless of whether their neighbors get to do a project or not. End of story. But since we have not been able to explain this to them in a way they understand it, they think we’re cheating them. But they like us, or at least they have to be nice to us if we have a big box of money, right? So the girls, who were from the community that was stealing this communities money, got to feel the wrath of some bitter ladies.

We were talking through all of this, walking home and it reminded us of a visitor we’d had this past weekend. Last Thursday we got a call from a woman named Eulalia, who works with a man named Don Livingston, and she wanted to know if she could come see the latrine we’d built with Don Marcos. Don Livingston is an RPCV (returned peace corps volunteer) who worked in Huehue in the 70’s. He’s still involved with lots of work going on in Guatemala, and he wanted to know more about this latrine. When Eulalia showed up, she brought with her a man named Rafael and his sister Maria. I was expecting a couple of ladinos, but it turns out Rafael and Maria are from Santa Eulalia and they both speak Q’anjob’al. Maria has lived in New York City for the last 22 years, sending home money so that her brothers and sisters could go to school. Eulalia is from the town Don Livingston worked in as a volunteer. We spent much of Sunday afternoon talking with Eulalia, Rafael, and Maria. Eulalia and Rafael were excited to meet more volunteers, as Don had made a very positive impact on their lives. Rafael holds something like 2 1/2 university degrees, the most recent one he’s working on is in Political Science, and he directed the conversation towards development and Guatemala.

He asked us, “Have you heard the joke about the Japanese lobsters and the Guatemalan lobsters?” We had not. “A chef wanted to prepare some lobsters and he had some Japanese lobsters and some Guatemalan lobsters. He put the Japanese lobsters in a pot, put the lid on it, and weighted it down with sacks of grain. He knew that the Japanese were tricky enough that they would all work together and could escape from the pot if he didn’t weigh the lid down. Then he threw the Guatemalan lobsters in a different pot, but he knew he didn’t even need to put a lid on it at all because the Guatemalan lobsters would just keep pulling oneanother back down into the pot, so none of them would escape.” This “joke” struck us pretty fuerte, potentially very offensive. I would have felt bad about listening to such a joke if it hadn’t been a Guatemalan who told it. But in examining what had transpired at the health talk, this seemed to describe the situation perfectly. Heaven forbid a single family here raise itself out of poverty above the others. There is such a strange contrast in this culture, between lending your neighbors a hand when they’re in need but using that same hand to drag them down if you perceive they’re getting ahead of you.

Two weeks ago on our way home from Antigua, the bus stopped in Soloma along the busiest street in town on market day. There was a family announcing something over a loudspeaker to the passing crowd. I couldn’t understand most of what was said, but it was something about a young man and being stuck in the U.S. or maybe he was killed in the U.S. and they were taking up a collection for his family? I was concentrating hard on picking out the words I could recognize and staring absently mindedly out the window as a crippled, middle-aged man was bobbing along down the street. He had some sort of leg and foot deformity. He didn’t so much walk as thrust himself up and forward then catch his weight on his better foot and propel himself forward again. So he really did seem to bob as he moved along. He was wearing two unmatched black shoes, neither shoe had laces, and the sole of the shoe on his bad foot was peeled back and bent under the rest of his shoe as he moved along. His pants were worn out and torn and he had on 4 layers of ratty sweaters and a tattered cowboy hat. He was concentrating on something in front of him. I watched him walk by the family calling for a collection. He bobbed right on past them three or four steps, then stopped. He turned around, bobbed two steps back, dug deep into his pockets, and with a smile that turned up all the wrinkles on his tanned face, he handed them two twenty-five cent coins. Then he turned and continued on his way. I was crying before I knew what happened. I thought, this is beautiful Guatemala. I felt somehow privileged to have witnessed such a humbling scene.

But then, in my own community, people I considered to be our friends insulted and tore down two teenage girls who I’d invited to help us out. It’s true that I’m generally really proud of this community, but for the first time since we arrived, I felt embarrassed by them. Eulalia talked to us on Sunday about reverse racism and sexism. That is, if I were to go with her into a remote community where neither of us were known but they knew we were medical personnel, everyone would take my arm first and say, “Welcome, doctor,” even though I only have a degree in Spanish Literature and she really IS a doctor. She’s a local, so if one of us is superior to the other, it’s obviously me (this has happened to me in real life except I was with male Guatemalans). Likewise, if she were to go into the town with another a man whether or not he was Guatemalan, it would always be assumed that the man was the doctor. Racism and sexism are so engrained here that those who would be regulary victimized by it use the same concepts to degrade or victimize still more people. The last time we brought in guests to help with our health talk, they didn’t insult them and run them out of the community. No, they threw a party for Robin and Elena. How do we even begin to combat such attitudes?

Rafael’s sister, Maria, was only here on a month-long visit from the states. She’d brought her 3 children: 12, 7, and 3 years old. She wants them to know where she comes from and to see how she grew up and to know that people are still here living in poverty. She said, “I want them to see how lucky they are that I can give them money and we can go to Toys R Us on the weekend.” She told me she spent $300 on luggage fees to bring all of her children’s old clothes and toys to Guatemala. She says she does this every time she comes, and she gives things out on her visit as she sees people in need. At one point during our conversation she said, “It used to be, I don’t know if it’s still like this, but it used to be that when someone died, the families were too poor to have a funeral, but their neighbors and extended family and friends would come to the house, each one with a handful of corn or firewood or leaves for tamales, and together everyone would make the funeral. Is it still like that here?” And from the funerals we’ve witnessed so far, that does seem to the be case. There is a term in Q’anjob’al, jilq’ab, which means to lend a hand, to offer work or help to someone in need. It’s so much part of their culture that it’s written into their language. Later in the afternoon I cringed as she began to hand out one quetzal bills to the curious kids who came peeking into our house. I kept thinking about it as I was making dinner and they were all long gone. I don’t think it’s the same thing, her handing out one quetzal bills and me, if I were to do it, handing money out to the kids. She’s from here. These are her people. She speaks the language. She’s like a benevolent aunt that comes visiting and lets the kids buy sweets with her money. She understands poverty in a way I do not. I think it’s different. Would the kids see it as all the same? I don’t know. She’s just lending a hand to everyone she meets on her way.

Maybe I should ask Pedro, our teacher, what the Q’anjob’al word for envidia is? Envidia refers to a destructive kind of jealousy. The word is Spanish, and I don’t know if there is an equivalent in Q’anjob’al. I never thought about it until now. I felt certain that what happened with the girls was a manifestation of this envidia. Nas Palas’s visit in the evening confirmed this. Fletch and I were trying to do some yoga and enjoy some privacy for the rest of the evening. It was getting dark out, we were tired of everything. We both had stress headaches. We were underwhelmed by the knocking at the door, and pretty relieved to find Nas and Reina on the other side. He apologized for not having come sooner; he’d been occupied with a family meeting. He said Lina had told him something had happened and he wanted us to tell him the story. We took turns explaining things. He sat listening, patient and intent, pausing for a moment in silence when we finished our story.

Then he started in, “I don’t have the exact words to express in Spanish what I’m thinking. I’ll try, but you know I’m not that good with Spanish. I just want to apologize for what happend today. It’s just that, well, this is the way our people are sometimes. This is why we’re an underdeveloped country and we’ll always be an underdeveloped country. People just don’t understand. I hope that you two will not be too upset or sad about what happened.” He also expressed his concern about our health, were we to get very upset. “I want you to know that Manuel is nothing. He can not do anything on his own in this town. Who does he think he is, an ambassador? He didn’t do all the work to bring you here. He didn’t put up any money for your arrival. If there is one person who worked to get you two to this town it was Don Simon.” Jaime and I looked at each other; we love Don Simon. This piece of information wasn’t surprising, but it was somehow reassuring. “Manuel has all sorts of family problems, and he had no right to say the things he did. I am going to go talk to him. I want him to tell me his story, and then I’m going to regañar him (that word literally means ‘to correct’, but when Nas said it, taking into account the look on his face, I translated it to something like ‘rip him a new one’). No one in this town can accomplish anything alone. I think you are both right, and we need to have a meeting with all the leaders. We will work this out. Manuel has this idea, this list of people who are going to receive projects, only the people who come to the charlas, and he’s going to the leave the rest of the town behind. He wants things for himself. This committee he made just wants things for themselves. I’ve talked to Don Simon about this, and I know we haven’t had time to come talk to you two, but we think that this list isn’t right. We can’t just give projects to some and leave the rest of the people behind, and we definitely can’t take something for ourselves first.” Whether it’s lifting people up or tearing people down, I think the great focus here is that everyone remain equal.

Fletch said to me quickly in English, “I just figured out starting about ten minutes ago, why Nas won’t sit down and talk to me about building the latrine here.” We’ve been trying to talk to Nas about adding a composting latrine to our (his) home since we finished Marcos’ latrine. Every time we bring it up he says, “Mañana, mañana, hombre. No hay prisa.” (Tomorrow, tomorrow, man. There’s no hurry.) There actually is prisa, as far as we’re concerned, because we feel the clock ticking. But Nas does everything slow and steady. He’s not going to let us build a latrine here, even if it’s for our personal use so we’re not contaminating the river, until other people in town have seen some material benefits from our presence first. He doesn’t want anyone to accuse him of using our presence for his own personal gain. After all, someone already poisoned 4 of his sheep in the middle of the night after we moved into part of their family compound. [note from Jaime: I wrote that post a year ago, but somehow it never got published. So I just published it today; sorry.] It was an afternoon and evening of lightbulbs binging on over our heads, or like someone was in the background singing PeeWee Herman’s “Connect the dots LA-LA-LA!”

I find that hope and despair are common bed-fellows. I wanted to end that sentence with here, but it’s really not just here. I think sometimes my focus is short-sighted from working in such a small area. It’s probably that way everywhere, good and bad intentions constantly butting up against one another. There are people who only want to help themselves; and there are people who want to help anyone they can; and there are people who fall all over in between those two camps. I don’t know what it all means. How much good are we really able to do? How much are we really helping anyone? Or are we just sort of fighting to keep things neutral?

Nas confirmed Fletch’s suspicions and continued, “I just want you to know that the women who started these problems have a reputation in town for being troublemakers. They and Manuel are leaders, but they’re bad leaders, constantly stirring up the people and keeping them agitated. They aren’t the majority here. There are a lot of people who want you here. We’re glad you’re here and we’re sorry this happened. You two just rest. Just rest, and we’ll talk tomorrow.” And with that he excused himself.

  

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Intro to Articles https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/intro-to-articles-2/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/intro-to-articles-2/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:44:27 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=1912 While we were visiting the states in January we gave a presentation on Peace Corps and our work here to the Logansport Rotary Club. We were also interviewed by a columnist from the local paper. The editor of my hometown newspaper, The Pharos-Tribune, was at this presentation and saw the write-up. He checked out our blog and then asked if I would be interested in writing a monthly guest column for the Pharos, to continue to share our stories with friends from home. I accepted the invitation and have been writing articles since February. Besides, it came with the interesting challenge that I had to limit my word count. Our faithful readers know that this, for me, is definitely a fun little challenge.

A few friends who are not from Logansport knew about the articles and asked if I could put them on the blog too, because they don’t get the paper. Right when that happened, our blog started experiencing massive hits in a few days- almost all from adoptive parents of Guatemalan children who are trying to learn about the country and its culture. I think/hope the information in the articles is really pertinent to this latter group, especially since some have expressed their interest in helping Guatemala in some form or another.

The articles operate under the same disclaimer as the blog. They do not represent the Peace Corps, rather they are based on our personal experience and observation. I’ve always felt that keeping the blog was a lot of responsibility, but even more so now that large numbers of people we do not know personally are reading it for cultural insight. On one hand, this makes me really happy. One of our personal goals here is to share as much as we can with those who are interested. Not everyone can spend two years in a foreign, remote area living like we do. But everyone is capable of doing something to aid in development. I hope to make people more aware of development issues. Perhaps we can create a dialogue about these issues, and discuss possible approaches or methods? On the other hand, I would like add to the disclaimer: WE ARE NOT EXPERTS ON ANYTHING. We read things that are available to us and we live with the Q’anjob’al people teaching preventive health and learning about their customs and culture. Please keep in mind that you are not reading an official report or expert opinions here. That said, I hope you all continue to enjoy the blog, pictures, and articles.

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Gross https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/gross/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/gross/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:40:53 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=1853 IMG_3421.jpgLast night we were chilling in the house after we returned from the chuj, when I realized I had a bunch of yuck coming out of my left eye. I looked in the mirror and it was noticeably irritated, so I took my contacts out. Within 20 minutes it had swelled and was oozing more. Hmm, this happened to me once during training. That time things started just the same and within a few hours my eye had swelled and was oozing so much I couldn’t see through the yellow film.

I wasn’t really looking forward to that, again. So I called the nurse and asked her what I should do. It was nighttime. Obviously I couldn’t get to a convenient 24 hr pharmacy, and since this followed my last experience to the T, I wasn’t looking forward to what was to come. But I didn’t know what I should do to best care for it between then and when I could get to a pharmacy.

Apparently black tea is supposed to be good for your eye. She instructed me to steep a tea bag, pull it out of the water then use it as a hot compress on my eye, and call her in the morning. It might have actually worked because as lovely as this picture is, it was definitely worse last time. I went to bed after using the tea bag compress because in addition to the oozing eye I had a headache that was making me nauseous it was throbbing so bad. I woke up with my eye sealed shut, just as I figured I would, but the swelling had gone down.

Following instructions, I called the nurse again to find out what kind of medicine I should go get, then I had to catch a micro to town. Boo. Today would’ve been a totally chill day at home except for that. Then once I got there all the pharmacies told me they didn’t have the medicine. The last place I stopped was run by a couple of girls who couldn’t have been more than 14 years old, and they hardly spoke Spanish; they told me they didn’t have it, either. I don’t know if they even understood me. Luckily, with my one good eye I spotted an eye dropper that listed the medicine I was looking for as the main ingredient. I called the nurse to make sure that’s what I wanted. Confirmed. Whew. I would have been even less excited about having to go the next town over to try and find it. I did happened to find the post office open, and we got a care package/Fletch got a birthday box filled with delectable treats. I also bought myself a pity ice-cream cone; I figured it’d make me feel a little better.

Now my eye is dry, itching and aching, but no longer oozing. And I have to wear my glasses for a week. Sometimes I wonder if my pre-Peace Corps decision, the one where I had to choose between corrective eye surgery or a month long vacation to Argentina, was the right one? Argentina was a pretty fun trip… My eye doctor hooked me up with a really thorough cleaning solution before leaving the country, so I’m not sure if it’s that. There’s just so much dust and grime floating around, and I seem to be susceptible to a fair amount of it. Bleh. I just hate the psychosymatic effect of always feeling tired when I wear glasses because I usually only wear them at night and in the early morning. But, things could be worse, right?

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Welcome to My Marathon Life https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/welcome-to-my-marathon-life/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/welcome-to-my-marathon-life/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:53:21 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=1843 IMG_3399.jpg

The days go by and somehow I rarely find time to write here. I promised myself a long time ago that I would always write first in my journal where I could be most open, honest, critical, political, annoyed and overjoyed. So you always get at least the second telling, and sometimes it takes a lot of energy for me to do it, again. But also, the last few weeks have been really busy and really interesting, and so over-stimulating that I find myself hiding in books during any free time. Sometimes, actually a lot of times, I find myself standing at our one little window staring out over the growing corn and down into the valley thinking about all the things that have happened and wondering how I will tell them to you. More recently I’ve begun to fear that the stories aren’t really making sense to the audience, that somehow I’ve managed to wade deep enough into what’s happening here that I now suffer a cultural disconnect coming and going. But I’ll do my best to be honest anyway, and from there I just hope you’ll kind of get it. So here was last week:

Monday:

Mondays are generally planning/in-home work days but last week we had an evening community meeting regarding the Emergency Action Plan. The leaders are still trying to figure out the best way to fund this plan, and they like for us to be present at these meetings and to give little speeches as though to say, “Look, the gringos support it, so we should do this!” And we’re cool with that role. We are not, however, no matter how long we are in Guatemala, particularly cool with the way they draw these meetings out for hours on end. I’m currently re-reading the Lord of the Rings series; it’s been about a decade since the first time I read them, and I never watched the movies so I’d forgotten most of the story. But I have this habit of always comparing my life to what I’m reading, and I think I might have just found the perfect term for the meetings: Entmoot. You know, the tree creatures, whose language is unbelievably long so that their meetings going on for days. That’s about about what it feels like. In order to keep us from going crazy, we’ve recently decided to ro-sham-bo (rock, paper, scissors) to see which one of us has to attend the entmoot each time. That means one of us gets to stay home, fix dinner, prepare bath water, and do work or fun things while the other stands in for both of us at the meeting. We’re pretty happy with this system, and everyone here understands that we have to have someone “looking after the house” because, you know, there are ladrones about, and even the Guatemalans want to have dinner ready when they get home from these entmoots. Monday night I lost the ro-sho-bo, and went to the meeting.

A brief story about knitting and bubble gum.

I’ve gotten in the habit of taking my knitting with me, because not only does the meeting take forever, but there is generally an hour or more of sitting about waiting for the thing to start. Luckily, my knitting guru and I outrageously overcalculated the amount of yarn needed for me to knit Fletch’s lopi sweater, so I’ve got balls of warm, soft llama yarn to knit up. I knit myself some fingerless mittens (the light colored one shown below, dark for the Jaimster), and Fletch lost his favorite warm hat so I knit him a new one. Now he wants fingerless mitten as well. The ladies in town never tire of watching me knit, as though it’s some kind of magic. Much like Fletch whipping out his sketchbook and drawing whatever is in the room, it usually turns out to be a good conversation piece. So I sit down in the front of the salon and start knitting, waiting for the entmoot to start. A couple of pre-teen girls across the room make the shhhht noise and hand gesture that means, “Come here,” so I pick up my knitting and go sit with them.

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IMG_3369.jpgThey ask me about knitting, and we compare it to the much more common crochet they do here. The girls ask lots of questions like, “How do you read this pattern? What does this say right here?” as though the pattern would tell them something important. But it doesn’t, and it’s not that it’s in English, it’s that even an English speaker can’t read the pattern unless he or she knows all the super-secret knitter abbreviations. So then they move on, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” Thing is, finally, here in Guatemala, 7 siblings is a very reasonable number, after I spent much of my life feeling like my family was absurdly huge. “What are their names? How do you say those names in Spanish? How do you say them in English?” They repeat each name as I say it, in Spanish, and then they try out the English pronunciation. And then they ask me where Jaime is, “He’s working at home and he has to fix dinner.” Very weird, a guy fixing dinner, but something even more curious, “What do you eat?” asked in a way that implies they hadn’t really realized we do eat at all until the very moment the question occurs to them. Tonight we are having veggie burgers, which is a tricky thing to explain. I just tell them beans, and vegetables, “ahh.” That was an acceptable answer. The rain started at the beginning of this interview, and now it’s so loud on the tin roof we’re nearly shouting. It starts hailing, and they teach me how to say hail in Q’anjob’al, saq bat, literally shouting over the din. They ask about weather where I live, and we talk about snow some. Then we have to go back and review this kid thing, which will always come up in every conversation no matter how long we live childless in this community… “Is it really true that you don’t have any kids?” Yes. Pretty weird to them. “How old are you?” So I tell them I’m 25, pretty much ancient for childbearing. I should have at least 5 kids by now, if not more. “How long have you been married?” (for almost 3 years) which then leads to, “So why don’t you have kids if you’ve been married that long?” The standard answer to this question is, “Kids are a lot of work! First I had to finish my studies and then I always wanted to work with Peace Corps. If I get pregnant now they send me home, so maybe we’ll have kids in a few years.” They spend some time calculating this answer, heads nodding as though silently saying, “hmmm, interesting…” but they’re still not sure they understand this answer; local logic does not agree with the words that have come out of my mouth. But in the midst of all the previous questions one of the girls has disappeared, and as I answer this last one thinking, “Reasons to wait 101, for pre-teen girls” she reappears. She shyly places a something in my hand, a big pink knock off of bubble-yum. And now I feel like I’ve passed the test and made it into their secret, gum-chomping girls’ club, or maybe posse would be the better word.

I really enjoy the gum. In the moment there is something humbling about the hospitality of this town, how it’s not just the adults who will always make sure we get something to eat and drink, but even these young girls who will spare 25 centavos between them to get me a piece of gum too. The gum is the kind that fills up your mouth and makes you salivate ridiculously. As a kid I really liked trying to eat all 5 pieces of bubblicious gum at once, and thinking about that, I absentmindedly begin to blow-bubbles, which sends a ripple of giggles through the crowd of older women, most of whom are also chomping gum, sitting around the room watching this interaction they can’t have with me because only their daughters know enough Spanish to put together this never-ending string of questions. A bubble exploded on my face, and remembering the sanitary condition of my hands, or rather lack of, I decide it best to not blow bubbles that require me to pull the gum off my face. But now the women in the crowd are blowing competing bubbles and smiling, and, well, that’s just funny, because they’re 40 and 50 and 60 year old indigenous ladies in traje blowing big pink bubbles. Sometimes I wish I had a spy camera attached to headband so I could take instant funny pictures. Alas, I do not.

Just then, one of the town leaders comes up to shake my hand and sit next to me. The meeting starts, and I’m the first one up to speak, just to let the people know this Emergency Action Plan is a great idea. I do my job to the satisfaction of the town leaders, chomping gum the whole way. I think that probably would’ve made my mother crazy, and it definitely goes against all rules of public speaking I was ever taught, but everyone does it here, so I fit right in. I accidentally chewed until my jaw ached, and I finally spit it out when I snuck out to go to the bathroom.

The End of Knitting and Bubble Gum.

The entmoot went on for hours. I knit as the rain and hail stopped, the sun came out, then the sun set, and men and women kept talking. Apparently the next morning the town was going to have a bit of excitement. According to the Health Committee President, a Swiss aid commission was going to visit town and there was the possibility that the town would get money or projects or equipment or maybe all of the above! There seemed to be a lot of speculation going on. No one knew why they were coming, or how many were coming. They only knew that about 8:30 or so there would be some outsiders visiting the people and they wanted to talk to 12 women, mothers of young children. The town was very suspicious of this singling people out, so they decided together it would be best if everyone came to the health center to see what these people were about and to make sure there wasn’t some miscommunication. They probably wanted to talk to the whole village, and just didn’t know it yet. This was all very funny to me. I had NO CLUE what was going on. I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. I wondered briefly why our local supervisor at the health center in town hadn’t bothered to call and tell us any of this, and then realized, he often doesn’t call when I think it would be a good idea, oh well. So I decided to call him and try and get some information. But he didn’t answer. Thus, I remained just as clueless as everyone else. And since the town thought there was a possibility of getting things from these foreigners, someone proposed that there should be a meal prepared for the visitors, as a symbol of appreciation from the people. That led to a great debate amongst the women and the men regarding what food would be fixed. Obviously it would be a variation of chicken soup, but would it be criollo or granja chicken, local or industrial chicken? Should they just buy the food already prepared from the nearest little restaurant about 20 minutes from the village? Which way would be easier, less expensive, a more poignant symbol of the towns appreciation, the better quality meal? So many questions and opinions.

It was dark and cold, and I was hours beyond ready to be home, as most the folks filed out of the hall, but I was stuck with the women still trying to decide whether the chicken should be a local grain fed bird or of the industrial sort, and who had time to get the chicken? I put forth a crazy proposition: that the guys who were on patrol that evening (since all they do is walk around anyway) go pick up the chicken and keep it at one of their houses till the morning when the women would prepare it. “The men will be out anyway, so it makes sense for them to go get it. Then the women won’t have to get up even earlier tomorrow morning since they’ve all got to fix breakfast before they can start making the chicken soup.” The women were puzzled, maybe a little amused by this suggestion. To this Manuel asked, somewhat jokingly, somewhat not, “Emily, why are you always defending the women?” To which I replied, “I’m not defending anyone. We’re talking about collaborating to make a meal. The women are doing all the cooking, and the guys are going to be out anyway. It just seems to me a good way to collaborate, ya know, work together.” He kind of shook his head and went on to other things. I wasn’t sure what was decided in the end, but I figured I’d better get up early because it wouldn’t surprise me if someone came by and wanted me to go with them to pick up a chicken. End of entmoot, finally I got to go home.

Tuesday:

Thankfully, I got up early and no one came to get me for chicken buying. I guess they figured it out on their own. They’d said the visitors would arrive around 8:30, but usually there are lots of announcements over the loud speakers accompanied by siren noises. This morning was no different. The announcements are a sign that everyone is up and going. We still don’t usually understand most of what goes out over the community. I keep thinking if someone here had a sense of humor they would announce directly to our house, “Emily and Jaime come on over, the meetings are starting!” So far, no one has done that. Instead someone whose voice I didn’t recognize, called us asking if we were up and awake and if we could please come to the health center because the European Commision was going to arrive in 20 minutes. Of course we were up and awake and dressed and ready, so we went.

We could see the fancy four by four truck winding up the road toward us. When it stopped, the first person to step out of the vehicle was our supervisor from in town, who we’d been told was not coming. Then two ladina (non-Mayan Guatemalans) ladies stepped out of the truck. This was no Swiss Commision at all. They came into the health center where numerous people from our village had assembled and jumped a mile high with fright when all the fireworks were lit off outside in honor of their arrival. Since this has all happened to us here before, it was really funny to watch someone else who also didn’t have a clue go through the whole routine. The unpleasant looks on their face almost made me laugh, but I had to stifle it so as not to interrupt the welcome speeches.

The women announced that they worked for the Organizacion Panamericana de la Salud, or the OPS, which is a Latin affiliate of the World Health Organization. I kept wondering, where on earth did they get the idea this was a Swiss/European Commission that was coming to give them money and/or gifts? In general, the WHO doesn’t do crazy gift giving, so I didn’t figure the OPS did either. I was right. There were two women. One asked to speak with a group of 12 mothers of young children, the other woman wanted to speak with the newly formed Emergency Action Plan Committee (this wasn’t even planned–I’m so proud of our little community for putting the EAP together just in the knick of time to have it evaluated, totally coincidental). One very soft spoken town leader stood up and asked, “Are you sure you just want to speak to 12 women? We do things together in this community and for that reason all of us have come here this morning to talk to you, as our guests. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to the whole community?” The woman then explained to the best of her ability what a focus group was (for statistition/survey purposes) and that indeed she could only speak to 12 women, though she was impressed that so much of the community came out to meet her and her partner. The town decided that those who were not in the focus groups would sit in the health center and wait for a report of what happened when the groups finished their interviews. Fletch and I decided I would go with the women and he’d go with the EAP committee to see what was this was all about.

IMG_3344.jpgFar from coming to see the community and shower them with gifts, these two committees were formed as focus groups that the OPS interviewed as a way to evaluate health services and health education in the community. There were neither gifts nor money offered to the community. In the women’s group the OPS rep encouraged all the women to talk and participate (as I thought, good luck with that Ma’am; participating isn’t really their thing here). She set up her tapes to record the entire interview and began asking them questions. I did not say a word for the hour and half we were in our little interview room. Well, I did say some words, but only to our supervisor, who was there to translate. These ladies seemed to be in a big hurry, and I was certain no one thought to tell them in advance that a meal was being prepared in their honor. I decided Aurelio needed to be aware of this so he didn’t end the interviews and usher them out and miss the food. When I told him, he looked surprised, and worrried. “I’ll go tell the ladies to hurry! We have to get to another community two hours away after we finish here. Hijole!” This last expression means, “crap!” He ran away and then came back to start translating. These are some questions she asked:

What are the most common illnesses here in you community? She had to ask this question about five different times, rephrasing and re-rephrasing it because the women wanted to talk about pregnancy complications, which is a health issue but not classified as an illness. The answer this woman was looking for was acute respiratory infections and diarrhea. What I found amusing in a way that was comforting, like I’m not the only one frustrated by this, was at one point during this very first of a series of questions she looked at our supervisor who’d come in to act as translator and said, very flustered, “They’re not answering the question?!” All I could think was, “Welcome to my every day life.” Thankfully, for everyone’s sake, they caught on to answering the questions appropriately.

What have the health staff done for the community so your children don’t continue to suffer illness? What institutions other than the Ministry of Health work in your Community? What is their job? What changes have you seen since they began? What was the health situation like in your community years ago?

I was really proud of the ladies here because they jumped right in, excitedly talking about us. “Emily and Jaime work here… They teach us about keeping our houses cleaner, about personal hygiene, hand washing, about better nutrition. They work for…Peace Corps?..Yes, Peace Corps, and they’ve been here almost one year, but they’ll be here for 2 years before they go home… They came here to give us health talks to teach us how to improve our lives… Now we feed our children better because we know we shouldn’t give them just any kind of food you can buy on the street…(at this point, I was thinking, Go, Ladies, GO!)… The difference in the health situation now is that we get the charlas, but some people still don’t change their habits so the illnesses continue, and sometimes mothers don’t come to the health center for advice; children are born malnourished and they keep getting sick because of this malnourishment.”

So the conclusion we’ve reached is that illneses continue because people don’t use the health services or follow the health talk advice, is that right? This was my favorite question ever! All the ladies nodded their heads saying, “Kay tu, kay tu“, which means “That’s it. Yes.”

The woman also asked a series of questions about abuse. I was really interested in hearing what the ladies had to say based on my last post on that very subject. Are there cases of abuse? Does abuse happen here, and if so is there support for the health staff? Is it because of alcohol? Because of drugs? What do you do when women suffer abuse here? What do you do to help that woman?

And the ladies responded, “We’ve heard rumor of cases of abuse.” They all sat, solemnly nodding their heads as the OPS rep asked again But does it happen here? “Yes, it happens here…Alcohol causes abuse, especially to pregnant women, we’ve heard…The nurses help us. They say that we can bring our husbands in for a talk…But they can’t really offer us any kind of support…If we see abuse here, we just try to get the children away from it…If a woman suffers, we can’t really help her, well, we just say we’re sorry…Yes, we tell her we’re sorry she has to suffer this.”

There were more questions, about whether they’d been taught about Sexually Transmitted Diseases, specificaly HIV/AIDS. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’re on our way. We’re doing STDs and HIV/AIDS after we’ve gotten through family planning: why it might be a good idea; how the reproductive system works to make a baby; what methods are free and available; how those methods work in the reproductive system. And the interview ended asking detailed questions about the health centers hours of operation here and in town: what they do when their kids get sick outside of these hours; about the Emergency Action Plan and how it works; about whether or not they recieve support from the Municipality. One women responded to this last question saying, “I don’t think they know about our health needs, but I think they’d help us if they knew.” Another women, a little older, a little less starry eyed, said, “They make us all kinds of promises during their election campaigns, but they’ve never fulfilled even one of their promises.”

In this meeting I found that for a family to pay for transport to Huehuetenango, to the closest fully equipped hospital, the cost is 700 Quetazales one way, and 2000 Quetzales if the family wants the transport to wait and take them home. This is astronomical for families who make 30Q/day about 3 or 4 days a week, and have to feed their families to boot. Most transports demand up-front payment. This is the main job of the Emergency Action Plan, to have funds ready and available for an emergency. Our municipality has been waiting on the new ambulance to arrive for over a month now. The ambulance would be free to all, but when it arrives, there will be one ambulance for approx. 47,000 people. The trip to Huehue takes about 3 hours from town center to town center. I guess in those six hours we just hope no one else needs emergency transport?

The set-up, funding, organization, and management of the Ministry of Health is really a marvel to me. It is so astoundingly far behind even the most mediocre services offered in the U.S. But I can say with utmost confidence that they’re working on it. We’ve been so fortunate to meet and work with very dedicated, conscientious healthcare providers who constantly do the best with what little they’ve got. It seems that most stall-outs and delays happen due to funding coming from a national level. This is the acute challenge, I imagine, for most third world countries. How do you make what little money you’ve got stretch to all corners of need? This is a challenge for the United States as well (more and more these days), but we’ve got so much more to work with that the problem is largely masked by the infrastructure available to us. When I take the time to sit back and think about these things I’m generally dumbstruck. It is at once overwhelming and one is tempted to ask, “How will they ever overcome this problem?” But I just mentioned the health workers. This is where overwhelming problems need to be broken down to manageable parts. The individual health workers hold this system up, and where the workers are less dedicated and conscientious that’s where the system truly fails. So, in a way, this dilemma really highlights the power of the individual.

Between the interview and lunch, our health committee president came to ask some advice of myself and Jaime. He gathered us around with a few other town leaders and an old woman who’d been sitting in the health center. Then he explained that this woman’s daughter had been hit in the face by the old woman’s grandson and her face was very swollen. Manuel wanted to know if we should transport her to town for a doctor exam. We said we thought that would be a good idea since facial swelling, especially around the eye, can cause blindness if it’s bad enough and not treated. He seemed happy with this response and translated it to the grandma. She looked and him and said, “I already took her to town. They say she’ll be fine.” Manuel looked surprised, “Oh, then we’re done here, ok.” I said, “Wait, wait, wait. Who is the guy that hit her? Is it the woman’s son or her nephew, and why did he hit her?” Manuel looked at me, annoyed with the hold-up, “We don’t know; that doesn’t really matter.” I was not going to let this drop, “If you’re consulting us for health advice, and we’re here to practice PREVENTIVE health, then we need to address this. We need to find out who this guy is. If they leaders want to do something to help this situation, two or three will go talk to this guy and tell him that hitting people just because he feels like it is not acceptable in this community. It’s a matter of health and safety for everyone if we let this continue.” Kuddos to Jaime he totally backed me up on this one in front of Manuel after the big M responded, “We can’t do that. He wouldn’t listen to us anyway.” Jaime told him he thought my suggestion was probably a good idea, or they’d just have to figure out how to transport someone else later for the same problem. “Well, we can’t do that. She’s seen the doctor. We’re done here,” and Manuel literally clapped his hands together and walked away. I didn’t think my suggestion was so unreasonable seeing as how this town has its own citizen patrol and would punish anyone they decided deserved it through vigilante justice. Why, then, is it not acceptable to establish rules against physical abuse in our community? Sometimes I wonder if, when we’re done here and we go home, the guys here will be sort of glad we came, but also a little regretful they ever asked me questions and had to listen to my responses.

We had the opportunity to share a meal with the OPS reps. and talk with them a while. They were really happy about our program and what we’re trying to do. It’s nice to get outside encouragment, but I enjoyed their visit immensely because it finally added legitimacy to something I’ve been trying to get across to these women since I arrived. I always tell them, “You’re thoughts and opinions, your questions and ideas are important! We need to share these out loud in a group. If we work together then we can begin to solve some of our problems and in that way we can enjoy happier, healthier lives.” An international aid organization came, and they wanted to talk to the women, not the whole town, not the town leaders, who are men. They spoke to the women. It was great. After our delicious meal of chicken soup (they went all out for the local, grain fed chicken) and tortillas. We went home to rest for an hour before we had to come back for the women’s charla.

IMG_5868.jpgThat afternoon’s talk was “How Pregnancy Happens”. It was one of the best talks we’ve EVER done here. Fletch had drawn two posters of the female reproductive system, one inside of a body for scale, and a separate close-up diagram. The whole point of the talk was to explain to them what their reproductive system looked like and how it functioned. This is stuff I started learning in fourth grade at 9 years old. Most of the women in the room, some mothers of ten and twelve kids, up to this point didn’t know anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. So they knew menstruation blood, and pregnancy, and some know what births look like. We did a review on why family planning might be a good idea for young, middle age, and older women. Fletch and I talked about our own decisions regarding family planning and why we don’t have kids yet. Then I told them if they want to begin to try planning their families they needed to know how they get pregnant in the first place. I walked them through the journey of the egg from the ovary through the next menstruation, talking about how blood builds up, like a lot of pillows on a comfy bed, to make a safe place for a child to grow. Then if the egg doesn’t meet up with the man’s seed (literal translation from Spanish), we have a period. I showed them where the baby grows, in the womb, and where their vagina is, and how the man’s penis does not reach into the womb. Their eyes were HUGE. I had everyone’s attention, in a way that pretty much never happens here. I explained a non-pregant cycle, then I went back and explained a pregnancy. When I finished I asked them if they understood it, or if they wanted to see it again. One fiery, little lady (mother of 12) who cracks us up on a regular basis making light of the charlas said in the most serious of tones, “Explain it again, because this is interesting, and it’s not a sin to talk about this.” Go, Matál! So I explained the whole cycle again, without the pregnancy, and then with the pregnancy. I watched their eyes light with comprehension. This was the first time they’d ever seen a thing like this, and suddenly a whole knew world of understanding openend up. I was so excited for them.

I asked them if they had any questions. One woman said, “It’s just that we’re a little embarrassed to talk about this.” I told them that was just fine and normal, but if they had enough confidence to ask their questions in a group rather than one by one later, everyone would end up learning more. We then said, “If you want, if it would make your more comfortable, Jaime can leave and we can ask questions just amongst women.” I loved their response to this! They all agreed, “No, no, no, we like Jaime. He’s good. And it’s cold outside, so he should stay here with us.” 🙂 With that the barage of questions began. How is it then, if only one egg comes out, that sometimes women have twins? Why do some women lose their babies before the baby is fully grown and ready to come out? Why is that the woman only releases one egg and the man releases many? What’s fun to me, maybe for the novelty, is that teaching reproduction to a group of Mayans who basically worship corn means that you can draw reproduction analogies for almost everything from how they plant and cultivate corn. To this last question I said, “If the mother earth is one part of growing corn, we’ll say the woman’s part in making a baby, how many corn seeds to you put in one mound? Just one?” To this they said, “Six or seven seeds.” Exactly, if you put more than one seed in a mound then it’s more likely you’ll get one healthy corn stalk growing out of that mound.” Likewise Family Planning analogies also come from the milpa, or corn plot. “When you grow corn, do you put the mounds very tight and close together, or do you space the mounds out?” They space them out, because if they were tight together the corn stalks would not grow healthy corn, and the earth would be sapped of energy to produce corn. That’s how it works with women and baby-making too! The women really seem to understand these analogies. They stayed in the health center asking questions, for once ignoring their whining, restless kids (the kids were whining and restless with good reason; we’d been there FOREVER, entmoot-style) to ask more questions and get more answers. I answered them until they were all out of inquiries. The talk lasted for some 3 hours, and it was designed as one of the shortest talks we’d ever given. Fletch left early to start preparing dinner while I stayed on.

When I finally came home I was bone-tired. My back hurt for standing so long, my throat hurt from talking so much. It was a satifying day, all in all, but so exhausting. For the last few weeks, after every charla, once the general questions are done, women have begun to usher me into private corners of the health center and ask their personal questions about family planning, so I’ve kind of become a birth control counselor. I really like that. I think it’s immensely rewarding. One of the trickiest things about family planning is that its such an individual decision. Some women have terrible physical problems due to the birth control they use, which scares other women out of trying it at all. Some women don’t have any problems at all and are terrified it’s secretly tearing apart their insides. They want to be comforted, and validated. And in a society like this one, where everyone strives, at least outwardly, for a great deal of equality, encouraging individual-based decision making is a really new concept. But if this, or any, community is going to have success with family planning they need to know their options, and know that it’s ok to use something other than what their neighbor/sister/best-friend is using. Personally the job is challenging because the most popular form of birth control in use here is the shot, depo-provera which women get every 3 months. I, personally, think it’s one of the harshest, most damaging forms of birth control available world-wide, for short and long-term effects on women. But I feel it would be irresponsible to go into reasons why in front of these women, because for many of them it’s the perfect answer. Often they can’t choose what kind of family planning to use as a mutual decision with their spouse. The shot is something completely hidden and incredibly low maintenance with a staggeringly low fail-rate. For lots of them it’s a good choice. Should I bother to tell them about bone density depletion, lack of libido, severe weight fluctuations, and depression that are common side-effects to this method? In other words, should I scare them out of using the injection so they have as many pregnancies as possible, try to raise 10 or 12 kids in abject poverty and die early from illnesses complicated with malnutrition? I think that is unwise. I tell them that some women have bad side-effects from “medicinal” birth controls, and for that reason they need to come to the health center and talk to the nurses about the side effects and what can be done to minimize them or change methods. But that’s all I say. In the states if someone asked me about the shot, I would likely go on a rampage about how I think it should NEVER be used by an independant woman who has so many choices at hand. So in my exhaustion, I was thinking through all of this stuff, and then gave up. I read for a little while about the adventures of hobbits and went to bed because the next day we had two health talks scheduled.

Wednesday:

We’ve been discussing for quite some time the idea of starting the health talks in the school. I’d planned them for the week before this and then had to cancel them to go judge another school-sponsored beauty contest at the big Catholic school in town. The school was celebrating it’s 45th anniversary. It was the first major educational center in the municipality, started by North American priests and nuns. In short, the beauty contest was a bigger deal than teaching kids about health on that particular day, according to our supervisor who was also judging…soo we rescheduled our talk for Wednesday morning. The intro talk we do is, ideally, really fun and interactive. We were looking forward to working with kids because they’re usually tons of fun. Also, we fancy ourselves as being really good with kids, so this was going to be an easy, fun and fast little venture.

HAH! The joke was on us. We went in happy, with lots of energy, and we fell flat on our faces. The warm-up game went alright for first times. Then we did the little skit with participating volunteers. No one laughed. No one seemed to have any reaction at all really. Just a room full of 50 blank stares. But the worst part was yet to come: the review questions. Not a single student would (if they could?) answer one question. We joked, we laughed, we gently teased, we prodded for responses, and there was NOTHING BUT DEAD SILENCE. I broke out into nervous sweats, and Fletch stood back and let me try and keep going as two of us working to get answers from them felt like we were being overbearing. I thought, “Hey, I’ll ask the teacher a simple question to show the kids how it’s done.” The teacher, who participated in the little skit, could not answer a simple review question correctly. The question was something like, “Teacher, since you were a worker like all the other workers, and you earned 30 quetzales a day, why did you have so little money at the end of the week?” The teacher’s character got really bad diarrhea and couldn’t go to work and had to spend money on medicine. The teacher acted that out in the skit, but the teacher couldn’t answer the question?! We made more jokes, tried to cover up our disappointment, attempted to approach the questions differently, passed around a lime and the person who had it was supposed to share his thoughts on the skit. Something as simple as, “It was funny,” or “It was dumb,” would have sufficed. NOTHING WORKED. NO ONE SAID A WORD. NOT ONE SINGLE WORD! I wanted to burrow into the ground and never come out again. We ended up asking the questions and answering for them. Then we gave our closing remarks and left. I felt like I had been pummelled. I can’t adequately describe the my feelings of defeat. And this was something I thought I was good at? I was sweating and shaking and I wanted to lock myself in our house for the rest of the day. It was about noon. We were supposed to come back to the school for another talk the next day at 11.

We had another talk scheduled that day in the neighboring community at 3pm. I tried to read and distract myself entirely until we had to prepare things to go. The charla there was another, ideally, simple and fun talk. It was a scavenger hunt charla where the audience ends up presenting health pros and cons for each item they have to find. It’s a review talk since, at this point, we’d done some 4 months of health talks with them on a wide range of topics. Also, this group has proven itself to be really fun, and participatory, so there was no reason this talk should make me miserable. We started gathering up the materials we needed, and putting on our hiking boots to go. Here I was in the very middle of the week, and I will be completely honest here and you can judge me as you will: I broke down. I literally started bawling uncontrollably. I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to face another crowd. I felt exhausted and awful at my job and like I just couldn’t stand another two hour session of trying to teach wondering the whole time if they really “got it” or not.

Luckily, we work pretty well as a team. It usually happens that when one of us is really, truely upset about a thing, the other person remains calm and supportive. I was curled up on the bed crying, and Fletch was very matter of fact. “Just stay here and do what you need to do, or don’t do anything. I’ll go give the talk. Just call them and make sure they’re all going to show up before I walk over there, and I’ll go do it on my own, ok?” I stopped crying long enough to make the call, and Fletch set off to give the talk. I felt miserable, thinking about kids who couldn’t answer simple questions, and boys who hit their mothers and aunts and wives, and how this job feels so freaking impossible sometimes. We were scheduled to go to dinner at the house of one of the community leaders that night, at 6, so I knew I had a few hours of sanctuary before I really did have to leave the house again. I fixed a cup of coffee, wrote feverishly in my journal for a few hours, crying off and on. I began to plan a route of escape, a reason to leave town. Sometimes I feel like being here is like holding your breath underwater, and I have to come up for air eventually, i.e. get the hell out of Dodge, or Temux as it were. We were out of money, and pay day was the end of the week, and I thought I could just go all the way to Huehue, instead of the just two hours to the “local” bank. In Huehue I could meet up with some volunteer friends for the best chocolate cake in Guatemala right off the central park, and that might cheer me up some. I let this plan simmer in the back of my mind, quietly debating whether I should come up for air or just try and stick this one out, as my hours of sanctuary came to a close.

Fletch came home from the talk to report that it was indeed a load of fun. I was glad it went well, and though I regretted not having gone, I was mostly relieved that I stayed home. We had to get to Don Simon’s house pronto, as we were already about 20 minutes late–pretty much no big deal to them, though they did tease us about being a little late.

Don Simon, or Cham Ximon as he’s called around here, is definitely one of our favorite town leaders. He so quiet and reserved, but when he speaks, no one in town says a word. They listen. His house is one of the best equipped houses in town, though it’s only one story *gasp* rather than two or three stories high. He welcomed us into his kitchen saying, “My wife and I have talked about having you two over for dinner since you arrived, and we could never decide when to do it. But now that Luis is visiting from the US and you said you wanted to meet him, I think it’s a good time to finally invite you to our home.” I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about when I say this man has sparkly eyes. He has the most tranquil looking face of anyone I’ve met here, yet his eyes glitter as if to indicate some constant, quiet activity, thorough consideration of the matters at hand. At the same time, it seems like no matter the outcome, he’s already at peace with everything that will be decided. We really like being around Ximon. As per our customs, we brought them something as a gift to the hosts, a pan of banana bread that almost didn’t make it to their house. Apparently if one walks the main road with food in hand, they’re trying to sell it. We had a lot of people ask us what we were selling, pretty eager to buy. I guess we know what to do if we need some extra quetzales in the future (just joking…that’s totally against PC regulations 🙂 .

Simon and Anna married when he was 20 and she was 16; together they have 8 children. Neither of them have ever attended a day of school in their life, and while Simon speaks a little bit of Spanish, Anna speaks none at all. They raised their children on the little bit of money they were able to make working on the coffee fincas during harvest, and farming here in the mountains for the other 9 months of the year. Simon said that the coffee finca is where he got his education. The supervisors and bosses liked his work ethic so he got a position as a lower-level supervisor and through that position over the years he learned all the Spanish he knows. He made sure to tell us, “I understand what I hear, just about everything I hear, only I can’t speak it very well. I can only speak a little…For us here, life is hard. There’s a lot of suffering. Anna and I talked and we wanted our children to study because we never studied.” The two share a very deep belief that people must be invested in the betterment of all, within their families and within their communites, and they have spent their married lives working to instill this idea in all their children.

Their son, Luis, would get the prize for World’s Best Immigrant, if such a prize existed. I would nominate him personally. His story is so ideal. Luis lives and works just outside of Portland, Oregon; he works there legally now. He’s had his papers for several years and is waiting for official citizenship in the US before he comes back to Guatemala for good (and yet will always have the option to go back if things go bad again). Luis went to the United States in 1988, when he was 16. Then times were bad, but the worst years of the conflict had passed. He left with a group of Cuotanecos from across the valley, and learned how to speak Chuj so he had someone to talk to in the US. He says he’s worked all 21 years in and around Portland, which is unusual. Most men seem to migrate all over the country following work leads for 5 or 6 year stretches. He arrived in the US and started working. I asked him if he has a home outside the city and he looked at me and said, very matter of fact, “I board with a Mexican family there. I don’t have a home. I send all my money back here. This is my home.” Luis sent so much money back that he was able to send all of his 7 siblings to school. There are two secretaries in the bunch, two school teachers, a doctor, a nurse, and a health technician. The money he sent home also built the comfortable house the family currently lives in. Luis has no degree or official title to go with all his work, but all his siblings do. “Do you think going to the US was kind of like going to school for you, though? Have you learned a lot there?” He agreed that sounded accurate. He’s had quite a few experiences most people in his family can’t even imagine. He’s suffered loneliness and homsickness that trumps us any day. Just like his dad said, “We suffer here. Life is hard.” But Luis was determined that his family have something, and he’s very content with the fact that their accomplishments are his too. “My brother is a doctor. He had to fight for that. I don’t know if you know, but there is a lot of racism here. We’re Mayan, and we have to fight for what we have.” Luis’ demeanor is so similar to Don Simon’s, when they say “fight” it sounds pacifist in nature. They are such gracious but proud people.

After all his siblings finished school and the house was built, with the money he was earning he bought and stocked a rather large store in the center of the main town 40 minutes from here. The store is located right on the square where all public transport picks up passengers, so it sees plenty of business. Luis doesn’t want to stay in the US. He’s never bought a house or a car. He doesn’t have an American wife or girlfriend. He married a girl from here and has a 7 year old son and 1 month old daughter (his last visit was about 10 months ago, go figure). ” There’s no work there now, so I came home to visit. The food tastes better here, and things are less expensive…I’m not going to be in the US much longer, but I’ll stay until I get my citizenship, so I know I can go back if I ever need. Then I’ll move back here. It should take another 2 or 3 years. I want to live in Guatemala. This is my home.”

I think there are so many disastrous immigrant stories, it’s nice to hear of one that was so successful. He managed to improve the quality of life for every single member of his family. And he’s not abandoning them to live a life of comparative luxury in the states; he’s determined to come home. This family in general is pretty cool. In spite of everything they have, Simon and Anna are still involved in all the community events, trying to improve things for everyone else still, because that’s just the way they believe they should live. Simon added at the end of the evening, “I think you two must have good parents too, if they taught you to help people, and here you are with us. We thank you very much for coming here to share in our poverty, to learn about our culture and our lives.” By this time it was almost 9 o’clock. Anna was falling asleep in her chair by the fire. We made some small talk, said our good-byes, then walked back down the road in the dark, quiet of little Temux Grande. It was a happier ending to a difficult, tiring day.

Thursday:

Here I will admit, we were supposed to go back to the school. We busied ourselves with small tasks all morning to not think about it. The thing is, I set these talks up with the director, and he was myseteriously absent the day before. The Asst. Director didn’t seem to understand what was going on in the first place, which made me think, maybe we should just wait until the director is back and I’ll talk to him? Really, I was trying to find every excuse in the world not to go back as I cleaned the house after days of neglect. Then, as happens so frequently, someone unexpectedly stopped by just as we were supposed to be leaving. I took it as a sign. So I admit, I’m no Super-Volunteer. I ditched the school, feeling I had adequete culturally appropriate excuses for not showing up and asking their pardon and starting on a day I was better prepared for the difficulty of the job that is working with kids here. Even after the ridiculously pleasant dinner with Anna, Simon and family, I was experiencing some drowning sensations and considering my plans for escape. Should I stay or should I go?

Then we had a second un-expected visitor (some days they come one after another, like there is a hidden line somewhere, and as one visitor exits the house another visitor comes slowly, smiling up the path to our house). Don Marcos came to announce, much to our surprise, that all his materials were in order, the last bit of sand he was waiting for had arrived, and he was ready to start building his latrine. When could we start? “Tomorrow, of course!” answered Jaime.

At this point I decided I should go to the “local” bank the following day, and be around for the weekend of construction. I wanted to know how the whole thing goes together so I’m clued in when we build our own composting latrine. I just had to hold my breath a little longer and be ok with that. It helped that the week was calming down on it’s own.

Friday:

Running errands here means an entire day of running around, waiting on buses, lugging the food and goods we purchase. You’ve gotta be friendly to everyone you meet, make lots of small talk, suck it up if the micro-bus driver cheats you out of 5 or 10Q for hauling lots of things. I had a relaxing morning and tried to enter my Zen state before leaving the house. Things went relatively smoothly. The sun was shining bright all day. The bus rides were hot. But I got our dinero and food and even found a few rare items like bacon and mozarrella cheese for Friday night pizza and Saturday morning breakfast. yum. I went alone to save some money and so Fletch could work with Don Marcos to lay the concrete for the base of the latrine. By 3 pm we were both home and worn out. Though he told me working with Don Marcos was one of the most tranquila experiences he’s ever had working in Guatemala. “It was amazing. We had all the supplies we needed. When he didn’t have a tool, he took two minutes to run and borrow one from the neighbor. We had all sorts of interesting conversations, but we just worked steady all day. It was great. I think you’ll like it if you come tomorrow.”

Saturday:

And so I found myself, shortly after our tasty, greaseball breakfast of bacon and fried potatos, walking down the road to Don Marcos’ house. We were going to lay the concrete blocks that make the composter boxes. Fletch had informed me this would be a half day job. I’m sure if it had been Fletch and I working alone, it would have been. But it turned out well enough.

I didn’t realize this until we were working but Don Marcos, in his very even-keel manner, was totally stoked to be laying these blocks, “I’ve never had the chance to do this before. No one ever showed me. This is pretty easy,” he said, but you could sense he was excited and pleased. And Fletch was right, the guy is a completely stress free steady working kind of guy. The guys squared off and layed the first layer of block, at which point I had to tell Fletch he needed to make room for me to work also, or I had to go home so I wasn’t bored out of my mind. He let me in to work, and just as things started flying Don Marcos said, “Ok, let’s take a break, we need some atol.” Atol is Mayan energy drink. [I like to think of it as a “corn smoothie”. Yuk. -fletch] They drink it mid-morning and mid-afternoon. It can be made of any number of things, rice with sugar and cinamon, toasted and ground wheat with or without sugar–with cocoa powder if one wants to get really fancy–, but most commonly it’s made of corn, sometimes sweet, sometimes not, sometimes with fermented corn. For the record, I hate the fermented corn atol, I enjoy the rice with sugar and cinnamon, and I’ve only heard rumor of the wheat cocoa atol, never had the chance to try it. Fletch and I gave each other a pleading look that said, “But we just got started!” before we made peace with the fact that, we’re working on Guatemala time, baby. So we washed our hands and followed Don Marcos into a shady little room with a table and three chairs. His wife and daughter served us all our atol and a little muffin, and then we sat talking for an hour before going back to work.

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Talking with Don Marcos is great, because he likes to talk about absolutely everything that comes to mind, and examine it thoroughly. So while it might have been nice to do a half-day of hard work and then go home, that’s not the way it went down. We had a long atol break full of interesting conversation. Then we worked for another two hours, in such a good groove that we had one more layer of bricks to lay when he announced, “Let’s take a break. It’s time for lunch.” So we washed up again, and went to the same room with a table and three chairs to enjoy an hour long lunch and more lively conversation. We finished up the last layer of block, cleaned up the work area and headed home about 3pm. It was a good day. The weather was perfect for working, cool, but not cold; sunny, but not too hot. There was a tree shading the side I worked on all morning. I was glad I’d stayed around for the weekend after all. But I was once again worn out.

Sunday:

We decided to make it, as God decreed, a day of rest. Sort of. We washed clothes in the morning because there was so much dirty clothing it was spilling out of the bag and all over the floor. We were out of bread, so I made some more. Even days of rest come with a fair amount of work here. But I did some knitting, and reading and catching up on news and coffee drinking, and we went for a run in the afternoon.

The weeks here disappear. I’m always so shocked when we wake up to Friday again. I’ve been absolutely exhausted the last few weeks. This was just a sample of our work. The week before was filled with beauty contests, parties for the health center, the regularly scheduled health talks, drop-in visits. This week was charlas, tons of drop-ins, a birthday party, co-op meeting for the morrales. I wake up tired and go to bed tired, and I sleep like I’m dead inbetween. Lately I started taking vitamin C pills because everyone around is coming down with colds and I’m afraid I have no defenses left being this freaking tired. I think the exhaustion feeds my emotional swings, like the bawling incident after the talk in the school. I need a break. Fortunately, one is on the way. Next week we leave home for a while to meet the new trainees for Rural Home Preventive Health and talk to them about our jobs. Afterwards we’re going to visit the site of some friends, another couple we’ve wanted to visit for months. We will be coming up for air, shortly. Then there’s only one week left before I go home for my little brothers wedding. Yippee! I am exhausted, but overall things are going well. Fletch is his hyperactive self. I don’t know what it would take to beat the guy down, short of a very hard stick. He’s awesome, and it helps, usually, that he’s so energetic.

That, my friends, is life. And once again, it’s Friday.

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Mothers’ Day https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/mothers-day/ https://www.jfanjoy.com/blog/mothers-day/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 20:22:38 +0000 http://www.JFanjoy.com/blog/?p=1780 For most of you Mothers’ Day probably passed rather quietly, perhaps even pleasantly. Mothers’ Day was one was the first weekends we spent with our host families last May in the south, and it consisted of a fun Sunday meal at my host-grandma’s house. But this was in the ladino south, and I was curious to see how it would be celebrated here in Temux. It struck me as interesting that a culture sometimes notorious for mysogyny was celebrating a day of women, and I was curious to see how it would go down here. Truth be told, there was a get-together for all Huehue volunteers this weekend I probably would have chosen to go to rather than stay home, but our health comittee president had requested over a month ago that we be in Temux to celebrate Mothers’ Day with everyone. We like to be supportive, so we agreed to this.

A week or so before the big day Manuel told us he was going to gather money to create a “historical moment” in Temux. He invited the director of the school, the health center nurse, myself and Jaime, the three oldest chikays (grandmas) in town, and the town leaders all to a shared meal in the health center. He was so excited about this historical moment; “it’s about our sentiments, to show how we really feel about mothers, and to celebrate health and education on mothers day.” I was terribly impressed with his enthusiasm and how well he seemed to grasp the big picture of what’s important on this day, to him personally as well as to the town. He asked us if we could contribute to the meal and we told him sure. We told him our friend was coming for the weekend, and he said we had to convince her to stay and take part in the meal with us. He could hardly contain his excitement over the whole thing.

Sometimes I’m so surprised by our little village. In some ways it seems so unlike the Guatemala we heard about during training. Although I’ve mentioned before that the women seem to have been trained to be non-participatory and to not voice their opinions, I have never seen physical signs of abuse or heard horror stories of that nature in Temux. There is a definite gender divide with some obvious inequalities, but while working to encourage confidence in these women, I just kept thinking, “You know, it’s really not that bad, all things considered.” Ironically, Mothers’ Day, with its wordy plaudits to Virgin Mary and images of caucasian mothers with their white babies plastered in red hearts hanging from the ceiling as decorations, was quite the eye-opener.

Our friend Emily came in on Friday, and was welcomed by the town leaders who were in a meeting trying to set up our Emergency Action Plan. She was the subject of three impromptu applauses within 15 minutes. On Saturday we decided to show her the paisaje and go for hike, where we were intercepted by what seemed like half the town, but we had one particularly interesting interaction. One of the town leaders stopped us to ask us, on behalf of his wife, a little question that he had. It took him nearly 10 minutes to spit out this question, on behalf of his wife. It turns out they have a son in the US who was arrested for statutory rape and sentenced to 35 years in an Arizona prison, but in the last 3 months no one has been able to contact him, and he’s stopped writing letters. They’re concerned about where he is and if he’s ok. The question from this mother, “Is there anything you could do to help us find out if my son is ok?” I just happen to have a cousin who is an immigration lawyer. I told them if they gave me his name and information I could contact my cousin to see what we could do, but I could make no promises. They told me they had two other sons working illegally in the US and they’d have one call me to tell me the whole story if I wanted them to. I left my number with the family to pass along to their sons.

We continued on our walk talking about the case. Supposedly the guy was 21 and his girlfriend/mother of his child was 15. Her parents did not press charges, but they told the guy he had to be responsible for his child and take the girl to her medical appointments, but somehow the case was found out and the guy was arrested anyway. This seemed a really unfortunate, because that’s a fairly standard relationship here. So this boy gets to the US, and is acting under what he views as pretty “normal” circumstances, and he lands in an American prison for 35 years? That sentence seems incredibly harsh, so we wonder is this a typical story here where some detail we’d deem very important was just left out? Who knows… But we do know that the way things work here, boys don’t have a lot of responsibilities. I feel because of this they’re generally very immature. In my opinion/experience, a 21 year old rural Guatemalan male does not have the maturity or life experience of a 21 year old American guy, and we tend to view 21 year old guys in the US as pretty immature in their own right. On the other hand, a Guatemalan girl is handed a mountain of responsibilities as soon as she’s old enough to start participating, about the age of 6 or 7. By the time the girls here turn 12 they can run a household nearly as well as their own mothers can, which I guess is good since they often end up becoming mothers themselves in the next year or two. So if you look at this statutory rape case from the US through the Guatemalan cultural lense it seems unfair that he was ever charged for anything.

Please DO NOT mistake this as me supporting teenage pregnancy; I would rather it not happen anywhere, and we do teach the health risks of such early pregnancies in our health talks. But the fact is that in many countries around the world teenage pregnancy is the norm, not the exception. I’ve read some essays and critiques that charge American culture with inventing “adolescence”, a time of learning and experiencing life without the burdens of having a spouse or children to take care of. Thus in Guatemala and many other countries teenage pregnancy is not treated as a problem to be eradicated like we treat in the US because the innocence of adolescence we’re trying to protect doesn’t always exist in other cultures. Turns out the missing piece of information was that the girl was 12 year old, and the case was reported by the clinic she went to for prenatal care. Twelve was a lot harder for me to stomach, but still falls into the bounds of normalcy here. In this story we have one mother suffering because she doesn’t know where her son is or if he’s alright, and another much younger mother who’s left alone to raise her child as the babies father is in jail. We are trying to locate the guy with the help of my cousin, just to see if he’s alright, to give the family some peace of mind. Happy Mothers’ Day?

Enter Sunday, the BIG DAY. Bombas began to go off as early as 4 am, huge jarring explosions and marimba music was broadcast over the loud speakers in the center of the village. Happy Mothers’ Day! I am glad on, so many occasions, that I sleep in ear-plugs. By 8 in the morning we watched from our window, a bustling school yard, kids in their school uniforms on a Sunday, everyone scrubbed clean and dressed in their nicest clothes. The teachers, most of whom live in town, had come out to the village to lead the ceremonies, children presenting little skits of thanks and celebrations to their mothers. It appeared to be a very happy affair from our little window. Generally on big celebration days like this we stay away all morning to have to some personal time and gear up for a long afternoon and evening of cultural exchange. That’s how we played it on this Sunday morning, even more so because Emily was visiting us. We spent the morning debating whether she’d go home or stay for the party as had been requested, and finally we talked her in to staying one more night. I called Manuel around noon to make sure the plans were all in order for the party/ meal in the health center we’d heard would start at 3. His wife answered the phone, which is always awkward for me because she doesn’t speak Spanish very well, and I don’t speak Q’anjob’al very well, but eventually I got her to pass the phone to him. He was slurring drunk. When I asked about the meal he said, “Oh, we’re not doing that today, all the leaders are drunk.” So much for historical moments, and expressions of profound sentiments. Happy Mothers’ Day.

We decided we’d run into the Sunday market since Emily was staying an extra day and we were no longer having food provided for us in the afternoon. When we got back we had all the ingredients to make a cake for all the mothers in our host family, except sugar. I ran down to the store, and found it filled with cigarette smoke. Manuel was buying beers as his wife stood by his side, like she was shielding him from people, making sure he didn’t do or say anything too regrettable. I glanced in the back corner and saw that most of the male school teachers as well as a few local guys, squinty-eyed,leaning on one another and the stacks of soda crates for support as they downed drinks together. This store is located right across the road from the school. Kids were running in and out all day. I couldn’t help but think what wonderful examples they were setting for the kids. I returned to hide in my house and bake a cake to share with our favorite local mothers.

We’d purchased a little gift for Lina, Nas’ wife, to present along with the cake, and around dinner time we went over to the house to share with them. Thankfully, as is usually the case, Nas was completely sober and had spent the day relaxing with the family as did some of our other favorite town leaders. I told the Lina, Reina, Gela, Masha and Lena that, being the moms, they got to decide if they wanted to eat the whole cake themselves, or if they wanted to share with their kids. They laughed, very amused. That would be so unlike them here. EVERYTHING in that house is always divided into fair parts for sharing, and the mothers last of anyone would ever imagine keeping bigger pieces for themselves, but they played along laughing and said they’d eat it all themselves, to the protests of the kids who wanted in on the cake. Then we split it into 20 some pieces and dished it out to everyone as custom dictates. Earlier in the week we’d told the whole community that we’d come out to dance the marimba with them and dress in the traje, so the family began dressing the Emilys after we finished the cake, and off we went to the marimba.

Dressing up and dancing with them is such a little thing to us, but people get so excited to see us out and dressed. Their excitement has become our biggest reason for doing it. They feel like we respect and support their culture, and they always tell us that we’re so good at dancing to the marimba! Sometimes I wonder if we’ve fooled them into thinking we like the marimba as much as they do. But I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to like marimba as much as they do. Their unwavering devotion to marimba is something else. But we danced and danced 4 or 5 sets. The little girls danced with Fletch while a few local guys asked me to dance (and the rule we’ve devised is that Jaime “doesn’t allow” me to dance with anyone who is drunk), and Emily took turns with various women and guys. Drunk men stumbled in and around the circle, falling down and coming up covered in dust. Emily is a photographer and told us that once she asked if she could photograph a dance in her town. The town leaders told her she could, but only if she came early in the day, because at night people started dancing with all sorts of partners and if she took incriminating pictures that made it back to the US, then there could be problems. Have we mentioned that this dance involves standing side by side, men keep their hands clasped behind their back, and the women keep their hands straight down at their sides. What kind of incriminating photos could be taken of this dance?! If that doesn’t speak to the conservatism of this culture, I don’t know what does. That is also the reason that lots of women end up dancing with their sisters or sisters-in-laws or no one at all. In the case of all our host sisters, whose husbands are all in the US, they come to the dance simply to watch since they can’t safely dance with anyone without starting rumors. So they and lots of mothers sat along the walls watching on, as we danced set after set in circles, and maybe they had the easier lot since the women whose husbands are here spent much of the evening taking care of the inebriated spouses. Happy Mothers’ Day.

I was glad when we finally came home to settle in for the evening. I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing, but relieved that it was over. Turns out it wasn’t. Monday morning after Emily left I went to visit the kitchen and chit chat with everyone. When I walked in a man I didn’t recognize was passed out on the floor. They’d thrown a blanket on top of him. Everyone seemed to be largely ignoring his odd presence there, stepping over and around him. The grandma came in to take her seat in the corner by the fire as he began to wake up and thrash his legs about. Mind you, she’s nearly blind and walks with a cane, but even so it took two other people to guide her around his thrashing legs and help her to her seat as she squealed, “Ay!Ay!Ay!” Annoyingly, he saw me and tried to begin speaking English, and then I tried to ignore him like everyone else did. As he came to, I took leave of the house, but he was there all day. Every time I went over to get water or to wash dishes, he was ranting and raving, kicking the dogs around, scaring the kids.

Reina told me later that he was a cousin and they kept him at their house because he’d end up beating his wife he went home. “He keeps telling my dad he wants more kids”. I asked her how many kids he has. “Mmm, I think he has 8 or so. The worst part is that his oldest son had to drop out of school when he was deported from the U.S., and he only had half a year to go before he finished nursing school. So me and Rigo (her brother) and my dad are all paying for him, it’s a loan he’ll pay back, to finish school so he can at least find a job. And here his dad is completely drunk. He beats his wife if he thinks she’s not getting pregnant fast enough, and he tells her he’ll leave her if she doesn’t keep having babies, but he can’t even pay for the ones he has.” I felt slightly ill. We finished up talking and I went home.

Later in the afternoon Fletch and I were working in the greenhouse when Masha came by to check out what we were doing. Michelle was strapped to her back, she told me, because she was scared of the bolo (drunk guy) at the house and didn’t want to be without her mother. But she wanted to inform us there was a muerto, someone had just died. She doesn’t speak much Spanish, so we didn’t get the story from her. Reina stopped by about 15 minutes later to tell us the same thing, and I asked her what happened. “It’s a guy who hung himself. Did you see him stumbling around this morning? I saw him down on the road. He just got sent back from the U.S. by his dad who said he was drinking too much. He’s had problems since he got back. They said he was using cocaine in the states. Last night he was so drunk he started hitting his wife and trying to strangle her, but his uncle stepped in to defend her. Then he started hitting his uncle. They don’t live here, so when morning came his wife took their baby and went back to their home town. He was staying at his grandma’s house, and they had someone watching him all morning. He told the guy watching him that he was going to sleep so the guy left. When he was alone, he hung himself with a cord.” This guy was only 19 years old, so who knows how young and terrified his wife was. So at this point I was wondering, would this awful saga of Mothers’ Day ever end!?

The mother of the deceased had come to get the body and the town leaders convinced her not to take it out of town, rather to bury him here. Apparently if they moved the body from here to his home town there would be an investigation of his death and no one wanted to mess with that. That meant we listened to two days of funeral music coming from his grandma’s house up the hill until they finally buried him on Wednesday. And believe it or not, I was privy to even worse stories of abuse in the interim, as though this death brought up a bunch of dirty secrets everyone needed to whisper to get off their shoulders. I was disturbed and depressed.

You know, it’s not that these thing don’t happen in the U.S. They do, and it’s just as disgusting and awful that they happen there. But we have recourse for perpetrators of such violence. We have safe houses for abused women. We have laws and police officers who enforce them. That doesn’t mean that all bad-deeds are punished. But it does mean that such violence and abuse aren’t accepted as common place and/or due course for domestic disputes. Mothers’ Day and the week following shook my faith in the possibility of progress here. A community, a state, a nation, a world, CANNOT develop if they subject half their citizens, to inferior status. The men here are given so little responsibility, and yet they’re given responsibility for everything, without being held accountable to anyone. What is incentive for them to change? It’s a problem that affects everything we’re trying to do here. I find it even more troubling how this is the case in a community where religion is used to explain everything. Where in their religion do they find justification for acting this way? I find myself losing more and more respect for religion here. But at the same time, I think if there’s anything males here will respond to it is the Church. So I began to wish there was some way these churches could begin educational campaigns to teach men how to be responsible fathers/husbands/members of society in general. I don’t know what we could do to foster that, but I keep thinking about it. This problem is just so huge. It’s taken me a while to digest all this information and in turn to be able to write about it.

Thankfully, the end of this awful week coincided with our first weekend out of site in almost a month. I was ready to run away for awhile. It helped to have a weekend to talk to people who understood where I was coming from, to put some perspective and distance between myself and these events. And I didn’t run away for good. Here we are back at work again, and there is plenty of work to do.

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