Challenges In the Final Countdown

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.

It 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.