Of Mice and Meetings

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.

“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.

In 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.

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.

It 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.

All 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.

Things 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.