Field-based training, tortillas, pacas and cake

Field-based training this week was wonderful. We spent a week We got to see a lot more of this beautiful country, spend time with our municipal development training group, learn more about our work, and get tons of ideas for projects.

The day before we left, we had the opportunity to go swimming at a private pool in this country club type place that Kellys family belongs to. It felt so good to be in the water and swim a few laps, even though there was no deep end. We nibbled on tortillas with salt, lime, and chicharrones (fried pork skins). It a pretty populular snack. Coincidentally there happened to be a girls first communion party going on at the same time...so we were treated a youth dance performance of a series of strange themed dances like cowboys or the generic Asian dance. That is a strange thing about here, is that there is no such things as political correctness. They dont have much contact with Asians, so everyone of any Asian descent is known as a "chino" and there is no social limitation on making faces with squinty eyes. Being raised uber-PC it still grates on me.

That night we got together to make pretty posters for the presentation that we were supposed to give to our womens group. Our tech trainer has emphasised the importance of making things pretty when we go to give presentations, so we went all out with construction paper flowers on our agenda. Lucky enough, my mom made an amazing pizza from scratch with ham, red peppers, and onions. Delicioso...I was in heaven.

We left Alotenango early Sunday morning to make our way to Huehuetenango, another department in the Western Highlands. (Sensing a theme with all the places ending with -tenango? It means "place of" in a Mayan language). So there is some serious highway construction going on with long waits and precarious looking piles of dirt and rocks. In fact, at one point we had to dodge some falling rocks and it was a rather close call as we all screamed and leaned away from it, as if that would help. Another close call with an unweary bulldozer coming at us. Road construction here is a bit more chaotic with "flaggers" being random people who wave pieces of fabric at the opposite sides of traffic whenever they feel like it. I made use of the five hour trip to read a manual on the functions of the Municipal Womens Office.

In general, I can't count the number of times a day that I say to myself, "this wouldnt happen in the US." Its pretty funny. But thats why you travel, right?

Our first day in Huehue (for short) we visited the Mayan ruins of Zaculeu. The lighting was magical with late afternoon shadows falling over the stone steps of ancient temples. Its fun climbing and crawling on them. Im realizing that we when learned about the Mayans in school, they were clumped together with the Aztecs and the Incas. They are all very distinct cultures and the way we studied them it was as if they were all dead cultures. The Mayans are still very much a present day vibrant culture with lots of variation among them, including like 22 different languages. Its sad that US schools are teaching about them as if they no longer exist....very much not the case.

Monday morning we went to a pueblo nearby to see the amazing work a volunteer has done creating a municipal womens office in her site. It was quite the accomplishment with her counterparts. Right now only about 60 of the 333 municipalities in Guatemala have womens offices, even though it was put into law five years ago. We had a guest speaker of a recently elected woman who is the first and only sentator for her department (the equivalent of a state in the US). She talked about the role of women in politics and the challenge that its been for her to advance in the male dominated arena. The municipality was kind enough to give us a great snack of tamales and coffee and lunch too. That night while we out eating dinner, the power went out everywhere and we had a romantic dinner with the group by candlelight. Im assuming the pizza was from a wood fire stove, otherwise Im not sure how it came out cooked. Power outages are rather common here.

Tuesday we visited another pueblo in the area to see the work that another volunteer had done with womens groups in her community. We were all supposed to give presentations to these womens groups, but there was a little snafu. The water had been shut off by a group of angry citizens who were generally pissed off, as far as we can tell, because the person they wanted didnt get elected and there's an international mining company that wants to set up shop in their area. Consequently, 20,000 people who have nothing to do with all that have been without water for over and a week and they say that it could be a month more. People are forced to buy jugs of water, stretching already tight budgets, or try to collect rainwater at the end of a drindling rainy season. Tough times, but an effective way to get attention. So basically, the womens groups were in meetings about how to get water which should obviously take priority over our little plans. The other groups gave their presentations to trainees and the couple of women that were there, but since we had already given ours to our womens group in Alotenango, we were off the hook that day, even though we had put in all that work on making the pretty posters. That afternoon we were supposed to go visit another town, but rumblings about a lynching mob prevented us from going to that activity. These little examples show that sort of environment that we're working in Guatemala....unpredicatable.

The next day we visited more volunteers, met their mayors and counterparts and got ideas of some successful projects in their muncipalities. Then we drove to Quetzaltenango, more commonly known as Xela (Shay-la). We were thrilled to go to Hiper-Paiz, the mega-uber-super store (sickenly half owned by Wal-Mart) and get breakfast makings and whatnot and enjoy some tastey fresh Subway for dinner. That night a few of us went out for a free salsa lesson and enojoyable dancing experience.

The next afternoon we took advantage of the bountiful market in another pueblo that we visited to purchase a giant bagful of veggetables to make dinner with the hostel. We threw together a bangin peanut sauce that we put over the mounds of stirfried veggies and rice. Its amazing what you can come up with with a few local ingredients and a splash of creativity. Overall, I think each of us spect the equivalent of like 40 cents on that delicious meal. Its always fun cooking in hostels too where you get to meet people from all over the world and hear about their travels and what not. We met a guatemalan women who is studying to get her masters degree in Municipal Development in the capital. Rather a neat coincidence, and she invited us to visit her classes sometime.

Friday we went to the university in Xela to use their computer labs for a ArcView GIS training which was really fun. I think I could look at maps all day long. That afternoon we met with the governor of the department of Quetzaltenango with all pomp and circumstance. We arrived to the meeting room with the welcoming of a live marimba band - seven guys dressed up in suits playing two giant marimbas that were 75 years old. The marimba is basically a giant wooden xylophone played with 2-3 mallets a person. The marimba is one of their patriotic symbols and this music is heard everywhere in Guatemala...including on the camionetas, in tiendas, at parties and throughout the neighborhoods through thin walls from houses. After the marimba playing, the governor spoke for a while, thanking Peace Corps for the work that they have done. A few other people spoke, mostly consisting of thanking other people for other things. Generally wherever you go, there is lots of formalities for meeting with the welcomes, thank yous, and closings. Men can speak at length about really any topic, without really saying anything sometimes. Generally it starts out with "Very good welcome to our lovely town. We hope that you like it and feel at home here. I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to thank...." and then ends with "The doors are always open here and you are welcome at any time. If you should need anything, we are at your service. Gracias....gracias...gracias..." Its all very nice to hear and Im sure its well meant, but sometimes I wish we could just cut out some of the fluff in every meeting that is had. Men in general speak much more than women and women are expected to wait for their turn to speak. This is evident both in formal situations and at the dinner table in various families. After all the talking and thanking, which was very nice but seemed to go on for hours, we were fed a nice meal consisting of corn in various forms. (Savory tamales, sweet tamales). For our last night in Xela we went out and had a good fun rowdy time filled with salsa and reggaeton.

Saturday we were supposed to go to these cool hotsprings on our way home, but due to heavy rains and landslides around the country, the road there was blocked and alas, we couldnt make it.

Now we're back in Alotenango with less than a month left in training. I cant believe that the time has gone so fast. We find out our sites in like two weeks and we're all getting very anxious to know our fate for the next two years.

A couple other random things...One day we went to the "Pacas", the giant sale of used clothes in Antigua. Its basically appears to me to be all the reject clothes from Goodwills in the states. Prices are ridiculously cheap and there are tons of American brands. One particular table we were searching through seemed to be straight from Texas since most of the t-shirts had some sort of Texas team or some relation to it. I found a great American Eagle t-shrit of the exact same size and style of one that I had at home that was one of my favorites and bought it for about 50 cents. Most of the hanging clothes are on Old Navy hangers, which makes sense with the fact that Old Navy makes a new hanger for every clothing item that it sells and doesn't recycle them in their stores, so I suppose Guatemala makes a good market for getting rid of them. Its so weird to see all those American clothes and people walking around with no idea what their t-shirts are saying. For example, a young girl sporting a nice piece of apparel that stated, "I've got game." It makes you think about all the crazy connections in this world and how when you drop your clothes off at Goodwill, you never think about them again and don't think that some random Guatemalan will be wearing your hand-me-downs. I keep waiting to find one of my old soccer shirts with "McKee" pasted on the back.

We've had the opportunity to do some interesting cultural activities in Erica's house. One day, her host mom taught us how to make tortillas (literally the verb is tortear, meaning "to tortilla.) We went through the whole process of putting the corn in the grinding machine, forming it into a ball of dough, then slapping little balls of it between our hand repeatedly to attempt to form round circles. The pancake like pieces are put onto a comal, a heated piece of clay over an open fire. Many people cook with open fires in closed in areas, which results in lots of lung problems for the women who are in the kitchen with the trapped smoke all day long. Lung disease and early death from years kitchen fire smoke exposure are unfortunately common. Its a lot harder than it looks to make a good tortilla and ours definitely weren't as rico as the Guatemalan experts. The family handed us a few ripe avacadoes and some salt to enough the fruits of our effort with.

Another thing we did at Erica's house was participate in the cake baking class put on by a local NGO that works with skils training for women. They have these cooking and sewing classes in her house several times a week for income generation projects and we've seen them working during our Spanish classes. Now that our Spanish classes are over since Peace Corps says that we have a high enough level of Spanish, we have some time for "self-study" for language, cultural, and technical things. So today we participated in a cake-baking class where we make pastel de almendras - Almond Cake. It was absolutely divine with a creme filling and merrangue topping and if any of you know how much I like almond extract you can imagine how pleased I was. It was a cool opportunity to hang out with the group of about 25 women (plus babies on backs) and see the working of the organization.

Something scary that I just found out in an email from a friend from the states who came down here to study abroad...after being in Guatemala for like 3 days and on their way back from visiting Tikal to the capital, her microbus van was stopped by a group of men with guns, they were forced into a pickup, taken into the forest, tied up, had all their valuables stolen, and then the guys took off. Other than being very emotionally shaken, everyone was okay and they made it back to the capital. Very scary stuff. The security situation here is very frightening, but the bright side is that if you do get robbed and you willingly give up your stuff, usually they dont hurt you. Gotta keep it positive.

In general things are going very well and its crazy how fast you get used to things and how I dont even think twice about most things that struck me as odd at first. There was this house in Alotenango that Ive walked by many times, and I just noticed that walls are made of corn husks and the fence around it is made of the side panels of an old school bus. Ive been running and doing yoga and trying to stay in shape. Im very comfortable with my spanish now and my host mom commented to me this morning how how much it has improved just in this time. The rainy season is supposedly coming to an end, but its making a good show before finishing up. Its been three days and my washed clothes still arent dry. Several times a week my host family asks if Im coming back for Christmas. Id like to, but Ill have to see how far out in the boonies my site is.