A couple weekends back I made the trip out to Xela again to visit some friends. We went on a great hike to a sacred lake in the community of Chikabal. You aren’t allowed to swim in it due to its sacredness to the indigenous people there. The hike was beautiful, first up a mountain from town on a dirt road, then continuing up through the forest, including a climb of no less than 580 stairs in the intense mid-day heat! On the way we encountered three young boys, maybe like 8-10 years old all carrying huge loads of firewood on their backs. One of the boys was looking delirious, sweating, had bloodshot eyes, was staggering, and obviously severely dehydrated. He stumbled up to us and asked us for water, so we obviously gave it to him and his companions. Since firewood is the main cooking fuel in Guatemala, you often see men, women, and children loaded down with cargo twice their size trekking up and down the mountains. It’s insane what they can carry and many people have only firewood collecting as their livelihood. It’s also a huge contributor to the severe deforestation in Guatemala. When we arrived to the lake it was covered in clouds and as we sat there the clouds lifted and revealed the lake. Magical. We were in a hurry to get back down the mountain to get to a soccer game in time so we flagged down a passing pickup truck. The bed of the truck was filled with sacks, which I assumed to be full of corn or seeds or something. After getting on and clinging to the sacks as we bumped down the mountain, I asked the guy what was in the sacks and he responded, “fertilizante orgánico.” So we rode back to town on top of piles of manure.
That night we went to the professional soccer game of the Xela team, Xelajú ,against the team from the capital, Comunicaciones. We actually watched two games, the first was the backup team on which plays my good friend’s boyfriend. So we sat right behind the goal to catch all the action and yell encouragement at him. Then the main team played after that. It was awesome! Before the game even started there were fireworks, strobe lghts, and fire extinguishers spraying colored foam. The Pepsi girls paraded around in the their blue spandex suits throwing t-shirts into the crowd. The fans sang and shouted throughout the entire game and I learned lots of new colorful words and phrases that shouldn’t be repeated. No alcohol or water is served at the game, only sodas. And when you buy a soda they open the can and dump the contents into a plastic baggie and give you a straw. I think it’s to prevent people from throwing the cans onto the field. But plastic baggies with straws are used often here as drink containers for beverages whether it’s buying a fruit smoothie on the street or being given a fruit juice at an event. Unfortunately they usually end up on the ground and in the rivers.
Back to work….things are going well. It’s a little slow and requires massive amounts of patience, but I've got a few projects going. For the municipal newsletter I went around asking everyone who works in the muni and every other institution here to contribute an article, informe, or anything. We’ll see who comes through for me. The third edition will be coming out in mid-May. One of the NGOs that works here came by for a meeting with me about trying to include financial data from the muni in the newsletter to increase transparency in the muni. This is very challenging since the finances by law are public information, very rarely in practice are they accessible. We’ll see what we can do about that. Right now this muni is in a tight financial situation…there are lots of debts built up from big projects like a new central park and municipal market and hotel from a few years ago. The municipal employees haven´t been paid since January and we usually can’t get money to cover the costs of transportation to visit the rural areas or attend trainings.
The muni has a “library”, but it is very out of date. The room that it is in triples for the muni as library, meeting room, and storage facility so it really can’t function well as a library. When there are municipal meetings, the room is completely full and students couldn’t enter to do their work. There are only two computers, without internet access, and the books are ancient and yellowed. The building itself is old and the roof leaks when it rains. Needless to say, it could use some improvement. So my site mate and I have been talking to community members about getting together a committee to take on the project. We were thinking that it would be really cool if we could incorporate the project into the curriculum of the highschool, in which all the students are studying to become primary school teachers. The committee could be made up partly of the students and it could be an continuing project for future students to give it sustainability. So we´d been chatting with some of the high school teachers about the idea so we set up a meeting to give a PowerPoint presentation to them about a potential foundation that could help us out. We showed up, just thinking it would be a few people, and it turned out that the entire junior and senior class had been invited along with some parents. So we gave the presentation to about 70 people and did some brainstorming about the importance of a library in the community and what needed improvement. It was a bit nerve-wracking. That was the most people I've spoken in front of in Spanish. But it all went well and it seems like there is lots of interest on the part of the students to get this project going.
In the conversations with the teachers about the library and the opportunity for student participation, we decided that it would be beneficial to them to receive some workshops on topics of citizen participation, the decentralization laws, and the structure of the system of development councils in Guatemala. Since this corresponds exactly with the municipal development project, I’ll be going in and giving a series of workshops on these topics. I’m excited to be doing it, since educating the youth is the best way of informing the communities since these are the future teachers and leaders . So far we have a series of three dates set where I’ll go in for 80 minutes each time. Now I've got quite the task to prepare for.
Last week in La Ciénega corn bread was on the curriculum with my women’s group. Another successful trek that resulted in a few dozen sardine cans of perfectly browned tasty bread. They are a fabulous group of women. We get along great, despite the huge difference in life experiences. A few of them have never attended school in their life and don’t even know how to write their own name. When I ask if they are interested in learning, they just sort of shrug and say that they are already too old and have kids and aren’t really interested. It’s hard to hear that since so often here I encounter the attitude of just not caring that much which is frustrating and saddening.
Last week we attended the twice yearly mandatory Peace Corps regional security meeting in Cobán, our regional consolidation point. We went over the emergency action plan and statistics of all the crimes against volunteers in Guatemala. (Mostly petty theft). Peace Corps does a good job at trying to keep us as safe as possible.
The next day the Volunteer Action Committee (like Peace Corps student council) hosted a great Professional Development conference. It’s weird thinking about life after Peace Corps already, it feels so far away (19 months, to be exact). They brought in speakers from the UN, USAID and various other organizations, including some former Peace Corps volunteers, to talk about their work and the path that brought them there. It was good to make some contacts and be informed about options post PC service.
Lots of volunteers were in town from the security meeting and the conference, so we took advantage of having everyone together to welcome the newest group of volunteers that swore in in April. We rented out the cabin in Tactic again and had a merry time. There are eight new volunteers in the Alta and Baja Verapaz region working in programs with ecotourism, environmental education, and healthy school s.
I had a saddening conversation with one of my friends this week. She told me how she has been planning on going to the states illegally. The coyote that was supposed to take her last week bailed, so she ended up not going yet, but it still planning on it. She comes from a poor family from one of the rural areas, her dad isn’t in the picture, her mom is ill and she has three younger brothers and sisters. Her motive for going is that there are few jobs here and she wants to pay for her siblings to go to school. It is very worrisome for me since she knows no one there, would be traveling by herself, doesn’t speak any English, doesn’t know where she would live or where she would work. And if anything were to happen to her, her family would be worse off. The journey to the states is ridiculously dangerous, especially for Central Americans who have to cross through Mexico first, which is more risky than just crossing into the states. All this has become more concrete for me here talking to people about their experiences and also reading a fascinating book that I would highly recommend called Enrique’s Journey. It´s about a boy from Honduras who travels to the states riding on top of trains through Mexico to find his mother in the states. It details the brutality of the corrupt police , immigration agents , gangs, bandits, and hostile neighbors. Most migrants are assaulted and/or robbed and one in six women are raped during their journey. It´s so hard talking to people who want to badly to go to the states. It´s hard to convince them not to go, even talking about all the risks and challenges. It´s hard to understand the desperation that brings people to leave everything that they know and undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey. My friend started tearing up when we were talking about it.
