Aguacatán

We’re back on the road, on one of our last big trips of our Peace Corps service. Next week we have several days of Close of Service conference at headquarters near Antigua, then a few more days of exit medical exams, then shortly after that we have to give a presentation at the departmental meeting between our boss, all Peace Corps health volunteers in Huehue, and the Ministry of Health’s chief doctor/ executive for Huehue. Since all of these things are a full day’s chicken bus ride from our village, we scheduled the flexible items amongst the fixed ones, to waste as little time and money in travel as possible.

Although this trip is unavoidable, it comes at a bad time: we are only about a quarter finished with our SPA construction, and a two week break will really interrupt up the tempo of the work. The good news, though, is that these two weeks are an opportunity for the village leaders in Yulias to show us how well they’ve mastered what we’ve taught them so far. Can they successfully order materials, get the appropriate legalized receipts prepared, withdraw money from the bank, pay the bill, arrange a delivery schedule, and organize the villagers to carry all the materials to the respective houses? We’ll know at the end of the month. If they did it right, we’ll start building the water tanks the day after we get back. I have a lot of faith in them; for the floor project, they anticipated a lot of the problems before they happened and prepared accordingly. And when dealing with the materials supplier, Ximon and Don Diego took over in rapid-fire Q’anjob’al once I’d explained what were trying to do. Here is a picture of them with Paricio, the owner of the building supply store, as they received their change for paying the balance of the bill for the floors: Q7,999. No, that wasn’t a tweaked price. It actually came out to that.

But today I want to talk about Aguacatán. A few weeks ago, our friend and coworker Lucia was over to our house for lunch, and she invited us to attend her son’s first communion. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but I like to attend the occasional Catholic mass every now and then, just for the pomp and circumstance. They have such cool architecture, and incense, and candles, and golden altars, and pretty robes… it’s like The Discovery Channel, except I’m inside the action. This aside, we agreed immediately, because Lucia’s really supported us throughout all of our work and it’s nice to return favors like that. Our personal interactions with their family, as well as Nas Palas’s’ family, have given us some of the best memories of our service.

“One thing, though,” she said. “It’s going to be in Aguacatán. That’s about five hours away, and we’re going to hire a private microbus and leave at about 3:30 am so we can get there in time for mass.”

Goodness gracious! I’m getting pretty tired of getting up at 3am to travel. Emily fished for more information: why weren’t they having it at the church in Santa Eulalia? The cost of the microbus alone is going to be over Q500.

“The priest here says that I’m not active enough in our church, so they won’t do it. The priest in Aguacatán is an old friend of ours, in fact he was the priest here a long time ago, and he said he’d be happy to help us.” Wow, if that doesn’t speak to the state of religion in these parts. Lucia didn’t say it, but we know why she doesn’t have time to volunteer the extra required hours at the church: she is responsible for seeing to the medical needs of several THOUSAND Mayans in this region singlehandedly: manning the health post for general consultations, as well as hiking for miles into the hills with a cooler to vaccinate their children. And on the weekend, she gets stuck filling out all the paperwork. She goes about this task cheerfully every day, and receives little thanks from anyone. Not even from the church, apparently.

We thanked Lucia as she left our house to return to work, and I turned to Emily. “Where do I know that name from, Aguacatán?”

“Maggie lives there,” she said. Emily remembers everything.

I like Maggie. She’s the only volunteer in our training group that is older than I am; I’ve got about ten years on everyone else, and she’s got about ten on me. She’s cheerful, energetic, levelheaded… and a total Tae Kwon Do devotee. As a side project, she has been teaching self defense classes to teenage girls in her region since shortly into her service. I’ve wanted to visit her for quite a while, but could never find a convenient excuse.

“Sweet!” I replied. The Sunday in question was only a few days ahead of our big business trip, so we could use this chance to avoid a lot of chicken bus time, too.

In the two weeks between the invitation and the trip, Pedro called to invite us as well. He had decided to split most of the associated expenses with Lucia (including the cost of the live turkey they were taking the priest as a gift) so he could get his two young children baptized as well. Even more reason to go! “Can you take pictures?” he asked me. Ha! We told him that we were already planning to, and we’d be happy to share them all when we got back. Everyone wants us to be their staff photographers, a job that gets annoying after a while, but we love to do it for friends.

The appointed day finally came, trailing a few hour behind the finishing touches on the last concrete floor. We arrived at the central park of Aguacatán during the first mass, so we waited in the church plaza until the intermission. Maggie showed up a few minutes after we did, and smiling introductions were made all around.

A few minutes later, the family was lead into the parish to do the baptism and first communion paperwork. While the church secretary diligently processed the forms, we got to meet the priest himself. Padre Juan David is a friendly, outgoing guy who erupted with a cheery “watx’ mi hek’ul?” when he saw Lucia and Pedro. Yep, he definitely worked in Santa Eulalia at some point. They exchanged pleasantries, then introduced Emily and me as well. He was pleased to meet us, and knew all about the Peace Corps in general, as well as Maggie specifically. She later told us that she’d met him when she was first setting up her martial arts classes, and needed a meeting place. The catholic school’s community room was the last place she checked, having been turned down elsewhere. When she told him of her plan, he said, “It’s for the youngsters? Do it!” and waved his hand, making it so.

As we were talking, the priest mentioned that he’d been to the US before, working on a catholic committee attending to the specific needs of Mayan immigrant groups. Then he asked where Emily and I are from.

“Emily is from Logansport, a small town outside of Chicago,” I replied.

His eyebrows shot up. “Logansport! I worked there several times,” he answered excitedly. We both said the next sentence at the same time: “About 200 Cuatanecos live there.” We all had a good laugh about that. It turns out that the last time he was there, Emily was still in high school. They could have even seen each other. The world is indeed a small place.

The mass itself was relatively routine, performed in much the same way they have been for centuries. “It’s best if the mothers hold the babies,” the priest said before he started slinging around the holy water. “They will cry less.” He gave a pretty good homily on the virtues of peace and reconciliation, especially between different ethnic groups and cultures. It’s an appropriate theme; Aguacatán is home to three different Mayan groups as well as a Ladino population. A few years ago, a dispute over what constitutes an “official” Mayan language exploded into bloodshed in Aguacatán, killing over 20 people… ironically, about the same number of words difference between the two tongues in question. Maggie is a Youth Development volunteer, and works in high schools instead of health posts like we do. She teaches in four different high schools, each of which speaks a different language.

“I’d also like to recognize one of our community members, as well as her two companions from Santa Eulalia,” the priest sad at the end of his sermon. He asked us to stand, and the congregation clapped and smiled. “They are in the Peace Corps, and work for peace in our communities as well.”