Chucho

Today I am at home, sick, feeling like a chucho. Chucho is Guatemalan slang-Spanish for “street dog”. Not your ordinary dog that has a home and an owner… that’s a perro. A chucho is a mongrel, usually with mange, underfed, covered with flies. You wouldn’t want to pet or even touch one, and heaven forbid you actually get BIT by one. They are forever hungry, and can be seen in streets of every Guatemalan town*, eating the most revolting trash and dead mice and vomit and other things too horrible to mention. And that is how my intestines feel.

My dad emailed me several days ago to tell me that I needed to slow down or I would get sick. But to stave off any “I told you so”, I must explain. Way back in training (two years ago! wow!), we had a panel of volunteers come in and talk to us about the SPA project process. They all mentioned as a side note that the participating families would be very grateful for the aid, and it would be almost impossible to avoid eating in their homes one or two meals a day for the entire duration of the project. That, of course, means eating in Guatemalan sanitary conditions… if they’d have paid attention during our lectures, they would be boiling their water and taking all the other sanitary precautions. But the reality of it is, some of them forget or didn’t “get it” in the first place. As a result, Emily and I have both been exposed to several dozen opportunities to catch some gastrointestinal illnesses. With odds like that, you can only get lucky for so long.

So here I sit, within running distance of the outhouse, thinking that the “I told you so” actually goes to the volunteers from two years ago, not my Dad. Thankfully, Emily was feeling a little better than me today (last week was the opposite), so she’s supervising today’s pour on one of the pilas.

I want to start off by thanking everyone who responded so positively to the appeal from a few days ago. It’s humbling to see how many people want to help, and to realize how many friends I have. Besides the numerous people that commented, I received several emails directly from others who want to participate. I will be sending out an email to everyone involved sometime before Monday, explaining what the options are. To all of you, thanks.

Onward to the day’s post about apodos, or nicknames. They aren’t really common in the US, except for odd situations like summer camp (Emily and I still call each other by ours to this day, hence the occasional reference to “Fletch” in her posts). In contrast, Guatemalans love them. So much so, that it sometimes makes it hard to know what’s going on in a conversation. My host family during training had a nickname for almost every adult, and they used them interchangeably with given names all the time. The best one belonged to Guillermo, Froilan’s son-in-law. They called him mono rojo, or “red monkey”. Apparently, when he was young, Guillermo went to see Planet of the Apes with his family. Like my brother Dave, he always picks a favorite character in a movie, and upon exiting the theater, he exclaimed “Yo soy el Mono Rojo!” (I am the Red Monkey) and beat his chest like an ape. Nickname unavoidable, for the rest of his life.

Once we got to our site, though, we didn’t come across any more nicknames. Could it be that Mayans aren’t into that sort of thing? Of course not; we just weren’t in their confidence at first, and they were very formal with us. Little by little, though, we started hearing them. Mateo, the village drunk, is called El Burro (the donkey), because he’s very strong and always carries 200 pounds at a time when he’s sober enough to be working. Mario, our friend that drives a microbus, is apparently called Tx’itx (the rabbit). Maybe it’s because he drives fast? Last night, Lina the Younger was visiting, so I asked her about nicknames.

“Oh yes, just about everyone here has one,” she said.

“Really? Interesting,” I replied. “Can you tell me some examples?”

She thought a bit. “Well, you know Lucas down below? They call him Bomba (The Bomb). And Abel, they call him Lustre (shoeshine). And Ixtup, they call him Paj (shoulderbag).”

“Wait, do any women have nicknames?” I asked. She shook her head no. Wow, there is a cultural difference between Ladinos and Mayans. “How about the older guys? Do they get nicknames? What about Don Tomax?”

She shrugged. “He’s Yal Nawal“. That means “little earth spirit”, more or less. The nawales are these semi-divine beings that roam the countryside, causing mischief or doing good, depending on their nature.

“How about Nas Palas?” I asked.

“They call him Tzul,” she said. I have no idea what a tzul is, and neither did Lina, so the next day I want and asked Nas’s wife. She laughed. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There used to be this guy named Nas Tzul that came around, and since the both have the same first name, people started calling our Nas, “Tzul”. Who knows where that guy is nowadays? He could be dead.”

The thing about nicknames is, they almost always have an interesting story. They could be a reminder of a strange or memorable incident that happened long ago, but more often they’re a looking glass into how your friends and neighbors see you, what your place is in the community. A few days ago, we were having lunch with Diego, Ximon, and several other people in Yulais, and we got to talking about the long, long road we all traveled to do the paperwork for the SPA project. Manuel came up, and we were all relieved that Yulais had narrowly avoided the trap of his deceitfulness. He’d told them he was en expert at paperwork, and he would do it all for them. “Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t trust him,” Diego said. “We’d be without a project, just like your village.”

As I was sipping my soup and likely ingesting this thing that is keeping me home right now, my mind drifted to nicknames again. “Speaking of Manuel,” I mused aloud, “does he have a nickname?”

They all chuckled. “Sure. Everyone calls him “The Chucho”.

*Except Antigua. Being a well-organized city that relies heavily on the tourist dollar, Antigua has a special patrol of guys that makes chuchos “disappear” mysteriously in the night.