Rabinal feria, work picking up, collaboration

Last weekend I went to Rabinal, the next town up the road about an hour away, to check out their feria. Yes, I’ve been making quite the rounds of ferias since I’ve been here. What they all have in common are wares for sale, good food, good music, parades, people coming from other places to visit, running into people you know, and a general merry time. Rabinal is famous for its religious brotherhoods that put on dances with elaborate masks that tell stories. I went with a couple other volunteers, so we made French toast and coffee at my house before taking off. To get there you usually take a microbus van, but those leave when they are full so we missed out on the one we’d planned on taking and instead opted for a ride in the back of a pickup (“picop” in Spanish). This pickup, like many, was modified to carry lots of passengers with features like built in benches and bars to hang on to. To get to Rabinal you climb up a mountain and the weather can change really fast so it was freezing cold and raining up at the top, even though it had been sunny and warm when we left El Chol and we were dressed for it.

Like the feria in El Chol, the streets were packed with vendors hawking a variety of household items, clothes, knick knacks, food, sweets, tacky religious paraphernalia, and pirated DVDs and CDs. I took advantage and bought myself some items I’d been needing for awhile such as a wooden spoon and a soccer ball. I got a pirated 3 in 1 DVD of some of the newish movies that are out in the states including “I Am Legend”, “The Golden Compass”, and “Alvin and the Chipmunks” for the equivalent of like $1.25. They are hilariously horrible copies of the movies taped from the movie theaters, complete with heads in the way of the screen, people in the audience talking, and being off-centered with terrible sound quality. But hey, gotta keep up on pop culture stateside. I also got a 2 in 1 DVD of Ice Age and Ice Age 2 for one of the little girls in the family who turns seven this week.

We enjoyed ourselves checking out the dances, which were really cool to see, but it sufficed to watch for a few minutes. It’s funny to see the traditional masks on top of bodies dressed in puma and adidas shirts with nike sneakers. There were a few white tourists sprinkled in the crowd getting their giant camera lenses in for good shots. There was music without much of beat with drumming and a flute type instrument, but they were pretty much drowned out by the ranchera music being blasted from nearby speakers and the other sounds from the crowds. We pretty much just wandered around eating all day long. The list of our gastronomic indulgences includes gringas (quesadillas with yummy marinated meat and a selection of sauces), corn on the cob, fresh fruit smoothies, flan, pinol (a delicious tomato-based tortilla soup-like stew with chicken that Rabinal is famous for), ponche (basically warm egg nog with a splash of liquor), chinese chow mein and fried rice, and churros. Whew.

I made sure to get some exercise after I got home after all that indulging. So I did some exploring to some of the areas around El Chol and went hiking up a mountain I’d never been up before. It was beautiful in the late afternoon with the sun shining low across the corn fields and glinting on the hillsides. From the top I was rewarded with a full 360 degree view of the landscape.

I spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in, washing clothes, baking stuffed red peppers, cleaning my house, going for a run, reading The World is Flat, watching the Sunday soccer games, playing with my new soccer ball, and hanging out.

Work has been picking up in a good way. Monday morning I got up early to go to the departmental capital of Salama for a very productive meeting with the various institutions that are active in El Chol that we set up. I was very pleased with the turn out and the attitudes of everybody. Basically, there are lots of NGOs and governmental organizations that do overlapping work in El Chol, but none of them communicate with each other or very well with the municipality. When they set up meetings in the community, they don’t take into account who else is going that week or what they are doing, so what ends up happening is that people get invited to lots of meetings, they get confused with who is doing what, and they don’t come. So….we’re hopefully going to improve this situation by meeting monthly to share plans and schedules. It was great to hear about the activities of all the institutions and brainstorm about common challenges. We also talked about some of the challenges and strategies for the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE). They are each going to write a blurb about what they do so that we can put them in the next municipal newsletter that I put together to get the information out to the communities. Hopefully we can keep the energy and momentum created at this meeting going throughout the year.

Tuesday afternoon I went out to an aldea (rural community) to visit the community development council (COCODE) there. I have been chatting with the council president, who is a woman, at the COMUDE meetings in El Chol and expressed an interest in getting out to the communities more and she was delighted that I wanted to come. So I coordinated with one of my coworkers who has a motorcycle to get out there (since the muni doesn’t really have transportation). It’s only about 4 km away, but it took us over an hour to get there because the road is so bad. Some parts of just completely loose sand and others are just giant rocks. And this is the dry season. The rainy season it will basically be impassable. I kept having to get off and walk while he tried to get up and down the hills. The whole experience of getting there and back was hilarious and I had a great time and enjoyed the lovely landscape that we passed through. Rural Guatemala is beautiful with dusty paths dappled with animal droppings leading into the trees, mountains of green, corn fields, random cows, dogs, and chickens, silence, streams and fresh water springs, and curious quiet farmers that stare at you.

We arrived at the primary school in the community seven minutes after the appointed meeting time and were the first ones there. One by one they came trickling in and we made small talk about the illegal cutting of trees in the area and about their excitement of receiving electricity the previous week. We started “on time” about 45 minutes after the appointed time. About 15 people showed up, which was a good turnout for a community of 18 families. The cool thing was that the majority of them were women and a few were outspoken and chatty. We chatted about their experiences working with various institutions and the community’s interest in receiving trainings on various topics. I’m going to try to coordinate some trainings on the three big legal documents of the Law of Decentralization, the Municipal Code, and the Constitution. I may also do one on the roles of the COCODE positions. Then it came up that the price of bread has gone up and its hard to get to places to buy bread and the women wanted to learn how to make it themselves. So, it turns out I will be heading back there next week to bake banana bread with them in a clay oven.

In general it was a really good experience, although a bit awkward of course. They were really nice and gave us juice-like drink when we got there and a rice drink before we left. Everyone sat on the ground outside the school for the meeting since it was hot inside and there was a breeze outside, but they made sure to bring us desks from inside for us to sit on even though I protested that I really didn’t mind sitting on the ground. In general I’ve noticed that whenever you enter a room anywhere, people are very eager to offer you a seat and are uncomfortable if you remain standing. So even if you really would rather stand (or sit on the ground), you have to accept. One of the woman also gave me a warm bag of a “snack” as a thanks for coming out there. On the way back to El Chol my coworker and I stopped at a spring to take a break and let the motorcycle cool off and I pulled out the snack baggie of something wrapped in a leaf and he informed me that they were cow livers. I tried them and despite the foul smell, they actually didn’t taste bad and was basically tasted like beef with a weird texture. I gifted them to him though since he really likes them and the thought of eating liver just didn’t quite sit right with me. He got a good laugh out of it.

I’ve noticed the word “colaborar” coming up a lot living in Guatemala. As it sounds, it means “to collaborate” and its frequent use coincides with a culture that highly values community and communal efforts. It was mentioned when the women in the community I visited were discussing getting the ingredients for banana bread together and talking about “collaborating” to gather enough bananas. It was mentioned in the preparations for the feria in organizing each community development council to “collaborate” to take a turn in the security patrols. It was mentioned during the municipal development council (COMUDE) meeting asking community members to “collaborate” with police to report people illegally cutting down trees for firewood. The very function of the community development councils is to collaborate the efforts of the community to take control of their own development as they see fit. Of the course the system has lots of flaws and doesn’t always work in that idealistic way, but the intention is there and there are lots of people working hard (community members, Peace Corps volunteers, and countless other institutions), to strive to reach that ideal. Many other times I’ve heard the word come up. It conveys a sense that everyone is invested in everyone else’s interests and the interests of the community. It wasn’t, “okay, so everybody bring your bananas next week” or “okay, so everybody watch your back during the feria” or “watch your property for people cutting down trees.” It was used to coordinate the collaboration of everyone who had a common interest to work together to bring about the desired results.