Auntie! Carnivale, Superbowl, database, banana bread, death

I’m a proud new aunt! My beautiful niece, Hannah Sofia, was born on February 2^nd, 2008 at 11:58 pm. After almost 30 hours of labor, my sister had a c-section that resulted in a 9 pound, 8 ounce bundle of chubby joy. I couldn’t be happier for them, but the hardest part of being in Guatemala is not being able to be there right now with them. I got to hear her cry the other night over the phone and I’ve seen a picture over the internet, but it’s soooo hard to be missing out. Even in my absence though, I’m still the proudest auntie on earth!

February started off with the celebrations of Carnivale. Before lent the kids in the schools dress up in elaborate costumes and masks and have processions and contests and the whole community comes out to watch. Essentially, Halloween in February. On Friday the event was in the primary school and one of the little girls from the family was the crowned princess of the event and her little cousins were her escorts. They were adorably dressed up in fancy dressed and a little suit and tie and “presided” over the ceremony. One by one the kids come out in their costumes that often take weeks and weeks for prepare. There is blasting music and a professional announcer (who does all the community events) who introduces each kid. There was Dora the Explorer, a bumblebee, various cartoon characters, a strawberry, and an assortment of clowns and chickens. They parade around for awhile to the applause of the parents and everyone else and then eventually hand out prizes. The “greatest” part about this tradition is the throwing of “pica pica”. Little tiny pieces of colored paper that are packed in hollowed out painted egg shells and then cracked on people heads to cover them with confetti. The stuff litters the floor and I’ve been finding it everywhere for days. Saturday night was the middle schoolers and some of them dressed up as people from the community and acted out events of things that had happened the previous year. Highly entertaining and very creative. Tuesday was for the pre-schoolers and it doesn’t really get any cuter than 4-6 year olds waddling about in giant paper mache masks with little duck/chicken/penguin feet.

After plenty of cultural immersion, I was pretty excited to go bask in Americanness and watch the Superbowl in Antigua with a ton of other volunteers. Even though the commentary was in Spanish and we didn’t get to see the American commercials, it was still a fantastic time and a nice cultural escape. Pretty exciting upset, eh?

Right now at work we are working to put together a database of statistics about the municipality, community by community. There are nine “aldeas” and 53 “casarios”….so a lot of little communities. It includes everything from education, health, demographics, water, sanitation practices, EVERYTHING. It is being urged by one of the NGOs that is active in El Chol and is a great project, but very difficult since our data is missing, incomplete, and transportation is so difficult to get out to the communities to do any sort of proper census. We are doing the best we can with the data from the Health Center, Ministry of Education, etc. but it really makes me look at data in a whole new way. Like when you hear those statistics about “such and such percentage of children in the world lack access to clean drinking water” and the like. The process of collecting data about all those children drinking unsanitary water is SUCH a task and SUCH an estimation. What frustrates me is that one of my co-workers has had the thing for awhile and none of the rest of us really knew anything about it. So when the NGO came to check up on it to see how it was going it was like....uh. And the director of the NGO is coming from Finland supposedly to see it finished sometime this month. Interesting.

So I had an excellent adventure back to one of the rural community where I met with a group of women to make banana bread, as they had requested that I teach them. So two of my male co-workers and I hopped on motorcycles and made the trek out there. They are a really fun group of women and they were really excited to be learning how to bake. We multiplied the recipe by twelve so that everyone could take some home to their families. Now just imagine a giant bucket used for washing clothes filled with banana bread batter with 32 bananas and 7 pounds of flour being mixed by hand. It was delightful! We filled 35 sardine tins full of batter to bake them in. The oven is a giant mud construction that is heated with firewood. Sounds weird, but it baked the best bread ever. Everybody swears how the firewood gives baked goods an extra special flavor and its true. Also, in a conventional oven in takes about an hour to bake. These were done in 15 minutes flat and came out puffy and golden brown. The women were really excited to take them home to their families. The woman whose house we baked at made sure to feed us lunch before the guys and I headed back to town. Tortillas, beans, and eggs, of course - simple but delicious.

So far I have witnessed birthdays, weddings, prayer sessions, baby showers, and this week I experienced witnessing the death rituals. The old man who lived below me who was the father of the matriarch of the house passed away last week. He was in his late 80s and was pretty much deaf. I had been around him a fair bit but it was impossible to have a conversation with him. He used a cane and would walk aimlessly around town and he took a bad spill. He was taken to the capital for an operation on his broken hip (or leg?) and didn’t pull through. I came downstairs in the morning for my run and his daughter (who is in her 60s) started crying and telling me what had happened. It was an incredibly awkward moment, as you can imagine and I just put my arm on around her shoulder and started rattling off everything that came to mind about God in Spanish. Things I would never say in English, but were appropriate for the occasion. Once a death occurs, everyone springs into action for the preparation of the velorio, the 24 vigil over the body. The whole community comes over and lots of people stay the whole night praying and singing and are fed lots of food and coffee. The strange part to me is that while of course it is sad, it doesn{t have a melancholy tone to it. It is a time when people come together who may not have seen each other for awhile (since family members come from all over) and is an opportunity to hang out and catch up and talk about normal things too. There is lots of preparation to be done. Boxes and boxes of bread, veggies, and other food supplies to be purchased. The room for the body to be prepared with an alter and the floor of the entire house and patio spread with pine branches (as is the custom for any event). The muni provides a big tent to set up outside as well. Oh yes, and the flowers and funeral wreaths. I didn{t go to work that afternoon and stayed from noon to midnight helping out and hanging out. It was around 11 that night when they brought the body back from the capital in the casket. It was a very intense moment when it was brought in with a few women wailing and fainting. Everyone stayed throughout the next day and were fed every meal. Then they brought the casket to the church for a mass, and then everyone participated in a procession to the cemetery where he was buried. The whole experience was very intense and fascinating to see how this culture deals with death as a community. In the states death is so much more private and taboo and depressing. Here, while absolutely no less sad and troubling, it is treated with more of a healthy outlook with the support of the entire community.