Hospitality

Aaaah, site visit. How well I remember our first week in Santa Eulalia, two years ago… the cold, clammy hotel with the brown, grease-streaked bed… the bathroom overflowing with sewage… the days spent wandering around the streets with nothing to do as people stared at us… the bland, not-so-sanitary food eaten in dingy comedores that ended in amoebic dysentery for Emily. Those were the days!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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