Saturday, February 23, 2008

Tamales, pigs, and death, Xela, baking adventures, Valentines Day, and laundry

Things are good and normal in El Chol. The mourning of the senor from the family who died (at the age of 93 I confirmed) continued for nine days with a prayer session and food every evening. Thus, every evening there were maybe about 60 people in the house from about 6:00 to 8:00 praying and singing and being fed some sort of snack and warm beverage. Seriously, imagine feeding that many people in your house for nine days straight. Of course it is a huge group effort by all the women in the family, but still it’s tons of work. There isn’t enough room in the house for everyone so plastic chairs are set up outside and lots of people congregate there. So every night last week for me has consisted of sitting with everyone and hanging out and making small talk. It’s been nice, but also one of those things where you’re obligated to do it because everyone is there. Since I have to walk through the area where everyone is to get to the stairs that lead up to my house, it would be rude to just walk past everyone and go hide away in my house. It really is a lovely tradition and everyone brings sugar (by the 20 pound sack), candles, black beans, coffee, and flowers to help out the family. Lots of people have asked me about what the traditions are in the states and are surprised that we don’t do 24 vigils over the body or the nine days of mourning with that include the community.

The ninth day is the day when the most people come and tamales are served (the reason why the most people come). It was a HUGE production. The night before they killed a pig. Right there in the patio of the house, they killed a pig in order to make the tamales. The hung the carcass up by meat hooks inside one of the houses that make up the compound. The head was peacefully sitting on a table outside. The skins were fried to make chicharrones and everyone excitedly gathering around the giant pot of boiling oil to get a few pieces that they put in tortillas with salt and lime. The women were bustling about bringing random pig parts here and there. The next day for lunch I was treated to a stew with all the pig parts. I’m not quite sure what was what, but it consisted of stomach, intestines, snout, feet, lungs, and liver. I was also treated to blood sausage with tortillas. Nothing really tasted that bad, but it was the texture and the thought of what I was eating that just was a bit odd. They definitely use every part of the animal.

Throughout the whole morning of the ninth day, the women were busy with tamale production. They made over 500! They cooked like 40 pounds of corn to make the dough, which filled three gigantic tubs. There were also several giant buckets of tomato sauce. To make the tamale, you put a handful of the cornmeal dough on a banana leaf, dip a piece of meat in the tomato sauce with an extra spoonful of sauce, wrap it all up in a nice little bundle, tie it off, then boil them. It’s a lot of work and they had several production lines going.

They completely redid the altar in the house with more flowy fabric, candles, flowers, etc. in preparation for the final prayers. There was a final mass in the church on the ninth day and I went and attended out of curiosity. That final night it was a double prayer session with the first one at 7:00, with the tamales and coffee served afterwards. Everyone hung out afterwards until the second session started at 10:30, with more coffee and more tamales served again. We went to bed around midnight.

I went to Xela over the weekend two weeks ago to visit some friends. As much as I dearly love El Chol, it’s so nice to get out to other parts of the country sometimes. The weekend was a nice mix of hanging out with American Peace Corps volunteers, other Americans studying Spanish in Xela, and Guatemalan friends. Xela is a bigger city and the people in the city itself are well educated and have broader experiences. We went and hung out at the house of a volunteer who lives just outside the city with two of her awesome Guatemalan friends. We made food and sat on her terrace for hours discussing life and laughing hysterically. That night we went out salsa dancing and hung out in the central park for awhile where people always congregate in the gazebo there. An impromptu guitar jam session with random people ensued. Meanwhile I had a great conversation with a Guatemalan about how much he loved the city of Xela and how much he loved his country. It was so refreshing and warming since a lot of people I have talked to do not have such strong love and respect for their country and would rather just leave it in search of money in the states. It was one of those really good, simple, memorable days.

Transportation getting back in the morning was a bit trying. Lots of the bus companies in the capital have been striking this week due to increases in violence. Every day several bus drivers or their ayudantes are killed in robberies and related violence in the capital. They are demanding more police presence and government actions to quell the unrest. The new president has been in office for exactly a month now and there haven’t been significant changes to security situation in the capital and people are frustrated. So I got up at 5:00 am and waited in the bitter cold at the bus terminal. All the ayudantes were telling me there were no buses to the capital (I take a bus toward the capital, but get off well before). So I found some other people who were in the same predicament and there was nothing else to do but for all of us to hop on a bus for a junction a little ways away that had buses coming in from four directions of the country and a higher likelihood of something coming along. There are other routes that I could have taken, all of which would have resulted in ridiculously long detours around the countryside and wouldn’t have gotten me back on time to where I needed to get the only Sunday bus back to my site. So we waited and waited in the cold (Xela is high in the mountains) and finally a bus came that everybody rushed in earnestness to get a spot. They packed that thing full to the brim and we made our way without any further problems. It was a long four hours squished in amongst everyone not able to move, with one butt cheek on the seat and slipping off around every mountain curve, but I somehow managed to get some sleep. I made it back to San Juan where I catch the bus back to my site in time to do some shopping at the grocery store there and get wheat bread(!) and some vegetables at the market.

My baking adventures continue. This week I returned by popular demand to the same community where I made banana bread to make cinnamon rolls. I brought all the ingredients including several pounds of flour in my back pack on another motorcycle adventure with my coworker. I went through the process of explaining how yeast works, the tricks for ensuring that bread rises properly, and common mistakes to avoid. They were fascinated by the process and the odor of the yeast. I also like to add more yeast than the recipe calls for, just for extra measure and these were no exception. We made five times as much as the recipe calls for, once again in a giant plastic clothes bucket mixed by hand, and so we had five giant blobs of dough after they rose. I think they got a kick out of playing around in flour and rolling out the dough with a mortar used for grinding corn and then spreading the margarine over the dough with their hands and the “rico” smell of the cinnamon and vanilla. The rolls rose beautifully in the adobe-walled kitchen with the open cooking fire. All around the house are dogs, cats, little pigs with their ribs showing, roosters, and baby chickens running around everywhere that you have to be careful to not step on. The woman who lives there, the COCODE president for her community, has two really cute kids that aren’t in school yet who are always hanging about too that you also have to be careful not to step on. The little girl is about two and is also named Katy (Kah-tee), like me. As Guatemalan protocol requires, coffee was served at 10:30 for all in attendance. After everyone oohed and ahhed at how beautifully they rose we placed them in the overly-heated mud oven and after 5 minutes! we took the rolls rose out, VERY well browned. Everyone insisted they weren’t burned, but 30 more seconds and they would have been. It yielded 83 delicious rolls which we split amongst the six women who attended and everyone went home happy. Of course they insisted on feeding us lunch again, a very tasty chicken stew with rice and tortillas. I’m trying to urge them to sell what they make in town for a little income generation project cause you could make a pretty decent profit off this stuff without a ton of work. Banana bread and cinnamon rolls are something special and well liked with easily obtained ingredients. We’ll see how it goes.

The following week, french bread was on the curriculum. This time we walked to the community since the muni nor my co-worker wanted to pay for the gas for the motorcycle to get there. It’s about an hour walk through lovely countryside, so I didn’t mind, but the intense hills made me show up sweating and panting and made my buns sore the next day. The french bread dough rose ridiculously in the bucket so that it lifted up the towel that was covering it. I squealed in pleased delight when we lifted off the towel to see the progress. We didn’t put as much firewood in the oven this time so it was a more reasonable temperature and cooked slower and more evenly. They are such a fun group of women and I brought the pictures of my niece to show them. They went nuts ohhing and ahhing and saying things like “What a gift from God…God protect her.”

A woman who works for an NGO that was came to meet with me about the women’s office project. She was short on time but full of ideas and gave me some great resources to look through and some great suggestions for how to proceed with presenting the project to the city council and all that. It was crazy because I had never met her or ever talked to her before, she had just heard that I was working on this project through someone else in her organization who had been at the inter-institutional meeting that we’d had a few weeks back. She sought me out on her own accord to give me some information, which was really nice of her.

The next day I went with two of my coworkers on their motorcycles to the departmental capital of Salama for a meeting with the same NGO, but different people and different focus. The ride there was two hours and it was my first time on a motorcycle on a paved highway. Two hours on a motorcycle each way on a mix of dirt and paved roads is a long time! But it’s such a great way to see the Guatemalan countryside – up and down mountains with gorgeous views and changing terrain and vegetation. The meeting was pretty good, dealing with the municipality’s role in local economic development and also with natural disaster risk management. Various people spoke on their experiences of various economic development projects and they gave a presentation on the importance of risk management for disasters. Working with all the communities, we are going to be creating a municipal map of the risk areas to be aware of when planning projects. Things like, don’t build a road in an area that is prone to landslides. It sounds like a no-brainer but you wouldn’t believe the crazy places that things get built here. The meeting was held in a nice hotel in Salama and we got tasty snacks and a yummy lunch too. There were representatives from many of the municipalities from the department of Baja Verapaz so it was nice to meet them and here about the things that they are working on. El Chol was congratuated for being third out of eight munipalities in the department in a ranking for infrastructure development, like water and electricity projects. On the way back from the meeting it started to pour down rain and we got absolutely drenched. Of course I was wearing my helmet which covers the eyes but one of my co-workers wasn’t wearing one so he couldn’t see anything due to the rain. So we stopped and took refuge under a tree and a bus stop for awhile and waited for it to pass. We went on our way again, keeping in the sunshine just ahead of the storm and my soaked jeans eventually dried. We had to stop and drop some paperwork off at some random government offices and we made it back just in time for my English class.

The English classes are going well and I’m really enjoying giving them. I have a group of about 25 students, but attendance is difficult and there are usually about 20 on any given day. Since everyone is doing it as something extra to whatever other work or studies they have, it’s not their priority so they don’t study as much or have as good attendance as I’d like. The learning is slow and tedious, but we have a good time. It’s interesting to see how naturally some people pick up a language and other others struggle so much with it. Some people can hear a word once and repeat it back perfectly, while others I can repeat a word so many times, break down the syllables, write the pronunciation out differently, and they still can’t say it. I just keep telling everybody to have patience and keep working at it and to study their vocab words at home! There is one guy who struggles particularly. He is in his 50s and is one of the COCODE presidents and wants to learn English just because. But he can’t write very well in Spanish so it’s even harder in English and for the life of him he can’t pronounce the words at all. It’s great that he wants to learn, but only comes to about half the classes so I try to help him out as much as I can, but it’s a challenge.

Valentine’s Day was celebrated pretty seriously here. In the morning I got an array of text messages from the women in the family, families in Alotenango, and various other people. Its funny they like to send pre-written texts for these types of occasions from the phone companies that usually are poetic ramblings and then relate to God somehow. They are well intended and very sweet though. All the tiendas (stores) were stocked with the tackiest gifts imaginable that everybody goes nuts for. Kinda like in the states with cards, flowers, candy, stuffed animals and figurines, but less quality, tackier, and cheaper. In the schools they do gift exchanges among everyone with these trinkets and do activities all day long instead of having classes. I went to the high school’s afternoon activities with some friends to watch. They had the whole place decorated and the disco was playing music, as every community event requires. They did all sorts of activities that required students to do embarrassing things in front of the whole school and everyone got lots of laughs out of the whole thing. They did the gift exchange one by one in front of everyone, which of course took forever. It was really cute though cause everyone had dressed up all nice and its was fun to watch the interactions of all the students. That night, after the prayer/snack session at the house, there was a community dance. As any community dance has, the music was ear-spitting loud, there were more men in attendance than women, and a core group of drunk guys. The music was a great energetic mix and I had a good time. I’m honing my meringue dancing skills and getting better at following. They had a voting for the queen and king of the dance, “Chica Amistad” (Friendship Girl) and “Mister Cupido” (no translation necessary). And….much to my surprise I was voted Chica Amistad and awarded a white satin sash with fabric pain proclaiming my title. Ah yes, what an honor. I wore it home proudly and could hear the music from the dance at my house, which is about four blocks away, so I fell asleep to the pounding bass.

So we’ve been working on filling this database for the muni by compiling data from different institutions in a format given to us by an NGO. Today a guy from Finland representing the NGO came to visit the office. He brought a translator to translate from Spanish to English for him, but when I said I spoke English, the translator figured he wasn’t needed took off and I was left to translate among everyone. The meeting went well, he wanted to see our progress on the database but most wanted to see how it was actually being used in practice since he only knew about it in theory. He wanted to know how helpful it was as a tool, the process for completing it, and how it was going to be used. I did most of the talking since I had done most of the work and was the most familiar with the database since my other co-worker had been dragging his feet on the whole process and my counterpart was out of the office for the day. Basically him and I got to chatting in general about the challenges of development in Guatemala and it was a really interesting meeting.

One of the little things that makes me happy here is this woman who goes around with a giant basket balanced on her head selling snacks. Every day she stops by the muni around 10:00 am and sells tostadas, dobladas, fried plantains, little sandwiches, and always some type of atol which is a hot beverage made with milk and sugar and either rice, plantains, oatmeal. It’s a lovely little respite and all the guys get something and we snack.

One day this week was the mayor’s birthday and he invited everyone that works in the muni over to his place for tamales. At first I didn’t think I was gonna go and ate two tamales at the house that the senora had offered me. When I did end up going after all to the mayor’s, I ate two more tamales there (since you can’t be rude) and had to waddle home with a tummy full of four Guatemalan tamales and a coca cola.

Last weekend I stuck around El Chol. It was a long weekend. I spent about four hours on Saturday attending to my laundry…handwashing all my jeans, bedding, and everything else. Now if you’ve never washing bedding by hand before, it’s quite the experience. The sheets aren’t so bad, it’s really the blankets that get ya. After getting my large blanket wet, I realized I was in quite a pickle when I wasn’t able to pick it up because it was so waterlogged and heavy. I consider myself a fairly strong person and with all my strength I couldn’t lift it up out of my pila. Finally I manage to get it around my shoulders like a python, dripping all over me and soaking into my clothes. I made my way to the clothesline and after a few attempts made a final heave of the blanket over the clothesline, which instantly snapped under the weight. Hmm…so there was my wet blanket on the ground with all the dirt and dust sticking to it. Well perhaps that clothesline was just old and weak and the other one (I had two) might be better. So I gather up the blanket again from the ground, now wet and dirty, and make another few heaves to get it over the second clothesline. So that one instantly snaps too as soon as I manage to fling it over, and there my wet even dirtier blanket sits on the ground once again. Then I spy the fence, which is now glaring at me as the most obvious option for drying a heavy wet blanket and somehow get the thing situated on the fence to dry in the sun. The whole process left the blanket dirtier than when I started and out 30 quetzales for having to buy new clotheslines. I was quite amused with myself over the whole process and really just had to laugh about it. I busied myself the rest of the weekend watching the men’s soccer games, baking coffeecake, going for a bike ride, reading, and chatting with the family.

Friday, February 8, 2008

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

I’m a proud new aunt! My beautiful niece, Hannah Sofia, was born on February 2nd, 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.