Since in the Women’s Office we don’t really have our own funds to do projects, we try to get on board and complement the work that other institutions that do have funding are doing. (The muni just paid its employees their salaries only the month of March in the second half of June, still owes April, May, and June). SHARE is an NGO that just came to El Chol this year that is doing programs in the schools. Their first project was “scholarships” for every kid in the municipality in 4th, 5th, or 6th grade where they give them food staples to help the family out to encourage families in poverty to keep their kids in school rather than send them off to work. So every month every family with kids in those grades receives sacks of beans, rice, flour, oil, etc. This is an interesting method because the help is going to the families of every kid in those grades, whether they need it or not. In other municipalities there have been problems with people selling the product. Anyway, since they are receiving quite a bit, people get bored of eating the same thing over and over and the women don’t know very many recipes to vary it up. The beans that they are being given are large red kidney beans, while people here are more accustomed to eating small black beans. I was over at the house of a friend drinking lemonade after a meeting in her community and she gave me some of the dried beans to try and I made Mom’s famous chili with them, with corn and cinnamon and cloves, and it turned out yummy. I brought some for the friend and some for Irma to try, and they both loved it.
So Irma and I are starting to do some food preparation/nutritional workshops to help people take advantage of the “scholarships”. We went and made the chili from the SHARE beans and a soy meat substitute product called Protemás in La Ciénega. The women loved it! They were super excited to try something new, using all ingredients that they are familiar with and can get, and brought home lunch already made for their families.
On our way walking there, on the path in front of a gate we had to go through, there was a whole family of cows with the complete with the mom, two calves, a bull, and the “uncle”, a horse. We are both a little nervous around unknown animals, and didn’t know what to do. We had to go through the gate, but all the animals were blocking it and every time we got closer, they all turned their heads to stare at us in a very threatening way. It was really rather silly, but the last thing we wanted was to get chased by an angry bull or an aggressive cow protecting her young. So we had to climb an embankment and go trudging through the thick underbrush. We came across a barbed wire fence which Irma squeezed through no problem. Irma is also not quite five feet tall and barely 100 pounds. So then she was like, “go on Katty, cross the fence.” But for my size, that was a bit more challenging than it was for her. I got one leg through and was bent in half when my shirt got caught in the wire. So then Irma was telling me to duck more, which I couldn’t. So then we both started laughing hysterically that I was stuck and then my pants got caught. I was hooked on the wire from above, hooked on the wire above and could not stop laughing and she couldn’t do anything to help cause the wire couldn’t be stretched any more. I finally wiggled my way out with only a small tear in my pants but with my stomach muscles hurting from laughing so hard. I made a jumped off a fairly steep part of the embankment to get back to the road, but Irma is so much smaller than me she was afraid to jump so had to keep trekking along to find a more sloping way down. She fell on her bum in the process which sent us into more peals of laughter. All to avoid some cows.
Sometimes we get lucky on the way back from a community and can hitch a ride in a pick up or a tuk tuk that is heading into town. One day we were bumping down the hillsides in the back of a truck with like 6 other women. One of them made a comment about my strange ear piercing and all the rest leaned over to ogle at it. Then an older woman clicked her tongue, shook her head, and announced “that’s just not right…” It made me chuckle. What can you say to that?
The governmental institution for the Protection of Indigenous Women invited us as the Women’s Office with several community leaders to participate in a health forum in Salama, the departmental capital. Even though El Chol is mainly mestizo, it’s nice that the institution takes us into account for their activities. We went to the event and it was really interesting feeling out of place with everyone else in the indigenous clothing, speaking the indigenous language Achi. To commence the event, they did a traditional Mayan religious ceremony with candles, flowers arranged in the four cardinal points, and prayers. It’s really interesting to see the blend of the traditional Mayan and the traditional Catholic practices because their religion is a definite hybrid. They cross themselves and say in the midst of the prayers in Achi, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…” We were the only of only two group of non indigenous women there and afterwards the women from my town commented that they have lived all their lives in Guatemala and had never seen a Mayan ceremony like that. The majority of the workshop was in Achi, but they translated summaries into Spanish. The focus was on the practice of traditional healing use of medicinal plants and several mid-wives were invited to speak. They express themselves better in their mother tongue and the majority of the participants understood better in Achi. I was totally lost since I don’t even know they names of all the local medicinal plants in Spanish, but it was a cool experience to observe anyway. One of the women from El Chol that went with us is a midwife as well and she loved all the information. Despite feeling a bit out of place, the women from El Chol liked the event and were busy scribbling down the information on the plants about which one makes women lactate after giving birth (to be mixed with chocolate and cinnamon and drank), and how to make a bath of avocado leaves to soak before giving birth to make to make the baby come out easier. The Ministry of Health representative was there too, and people took the opportunity to make public their complaints about discriminatory treatment in the public healthcare system that caused tears in various accounts of very inappropriate treatment. The institution provided a delicious lunch of a great piece of chicken in sautéed onion sauce (nice pieces of breast meat are rare here) which we had to take to go and eat on the fly to not miss our microbus back to El Chol.
The muni has reinitiated a soccer tournament for boys, girls, and women which is cool since the men’s tournament is the biggest excitement that happens in town. Naturally my girls are playing, but they are divided into two teams since there’s a bunch of them. I’m also playing on a women’s team. So now my Sundays are spent all day at the soccer field helping out with the girls in the morning and playing myself in the afternoon. In the first game my team played in, I scored two goals to win the game 3-1, one on a free kick on the other I knocked in from a lovely arcing cross from my teammate.
Last weekend was the finals of the men’s tournament and my site mate and her friend and our fellow volunteers from nearby came to watch the game, which the whole town comes out to see. They have to bring in professional referees from elsewhere so that they are unbiased and not too many fights break out. The police were there, more out of a lack of anything else to do than from any risk. But there were like 6 of them there with their giant guns, as is customary, watching over everything. We celebrated birthdays with a BBQ with carne asada and a Funfetti cake that I made for the occasion from the mix and frosting I scored in Antigua.
I continue my work with the HIV/AIDS prevention committee with Peace Corps and the other weekend we had a meeting in Antigua. It was refreshing to have a “gringo” meeting where everyone is there on time, a tight agenda is adhered to, topics are presented with discussion and resolution following, and in two hours sharp the meeting finishes up with lots accomplished and action points to follow. Imagine a Guatemalan meeting the polar opposite of that. As part of my work in the muni, my life here sometimes feels like a Guatemalan meeting. Some of my fellow volunteer friends were also in Antigua for various reason and we took advantage to celebrate some June birthdays with a night out splurged on Sushi dinner!
The infamous influenza A H1N1 has made its way to this tiny corner of the world. Everyone is talking about it and there’s lots of “May God protect us…” There are also lots of puns and jokes made regarding the “pork flu” such as you know you have it when chicharrones (fried pork skins) come out when you sneeze. I think we are going to suspend some of our meetings with women in the communities for a bit til this dies down since the most recent one we went to, not a single woman showed up and we suspect it was because that was the day they announced there was a case in that very community. Lots of NGOs have cancelled activities that gather lots of people and the Ministry of Health has been putting up posters in lots of places with prevention and symptoms of the infection.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Reaching “that” point, Todos Santos – Nebaj hike, Women’s Office diagnostic, friends visit
At the beginning of May with a great group of volunteers we did one of the coolest hikes in the country from Todos Santos, Huehuetenango to Nebaj, Quiche. I don’t know the correct distance, but I think we did in the vicinity of 15 miles the first day and 10 miles the second day up and across the high Cuchamatans mountain range. The adventures started at 4:00 am when I left my site and arrived at my friend’s site in Todos Santos (the land of the red pants with the crazy horse race for All Saints Day) at 4:30 pm, picking up other friends along the way. We bought supplies and cooked a delicious dinner and headed out at 5:00 am in the dark and the cold the next morning. We took a bus to where we started hiking, with a quick stop along the way for a visit to some latrines with freezing cold cement seats and to buy hot tortillas with melted fresh cheese.
We had a fabulous guide, a Swiss man who came to Guatemala with Doctors without Borders and married an indigenous woman and stayed in Todos Santos 15 years ago. We hiked from 6:30 am to 4:30 pm almost constantly through a few sparsely populated areas of all indigenous Mam’ people that shyly peer out from their huts. It was lots of up and down, looking across a steep valley knowing that first you had to go down, and then all the way back up. We stopped for a respite at the bottom of the valley where a freezing pristine river ran through it and soaked our tired feet and watched two adolescent girls beating piles of clothes against rocks to get them clean. We breakfasted, lunched, and snacked on the food we had brought with us mostly consisting of tortillas, refried black beans out of a bag, hardboiled eggs, avocados, and mangos. The types of terrains we moved through were quite varied from the hot loose sandy inclines, cool pine forests, and the cold mountain ridge that had lots of rocks and very little vegetation and looked like some sort of disaster fallout (kind of reminded me of Mt. St. Helens).
The rain held off all day long until about the last ten minutes when we could already see our shelter for the night and it started to pour down rain so hard that we got as soaked as if it had been steadily raining all day long. We stayed the night in a small cold village settlement on the ridge in a wood house structure that had beds and wools blankets that some NGO had set up to promote ecotourism in the area. Our guide asked around for a family that would give us dinner and hungry and cold as we were, speculating about what they would give us, looking forward to the usual Guatemalan dinner fare of eggs, beans, and tortillas. As this is area lives in extreme poverty, we were given cabbage in water, corn dough wrapped in leaves, and hot sugar water to drink. It was a very humbling experience sitting in the “kitchen” of the house, a dark room with a dirt floor with an open fire built in the middle on the ground and thick smoke filling the air. The girl who served us, maybe about 17 years old, couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and only spoke Quiche and most likely had never been to a day of school in her life. We knew no more than two words in Quiche, matiox (thank you) and utz (good), which can barely get a smile but not much communication, so our group of eight just ate in silence as she reached her hand into the fire to pull out more corn dough wraps. That night we pushed the wood bed frames together and us five girls slept all scrunched together for warmth. Every single person had terrible gas and we all poisoned the air with our rank, all snuggled up together.
The second day we arose and started hiking early, having gone to sleep exhausted around 7:30pm. We arrived at our destination of the aldea of Acul, Nebaj, Quiche where we had to jump a fence where I ripped beyond repair my favorite hiking pants that I had had since freshman year of high school (1999?) In Acul there is a cheese making hacienda that we lunched on hot tortillas with this artisan cheese and cantaloupe juice and bought whole wheels of cheese, as it is only sold by the wheel, to divide amongst us. We caught a microbus into the actual town of Nebaj, where we transferred buses to make our way to Cunen where the married couple in group lives and had graciously agreed to house and feed us for the night. We had to wait at the crossroads for a microbus into their town when a giant thunderstorm moved in but we finally made it to their house where they spoiled us with homemade Mexican style chicken enchiladas and cold showers since the electricity was out the whole time we were there. It was very merry and jovial all of glad to have survived and to be hanging out together. Very cool hike, all in all one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in Guatemala. After being here for so long, I thought I had seen pretty much everything, but this was definitely new and pretty mind blowing.
I had the realization the other day that I am now doing what I had imagined I would be doing in the Peace Corps after coming out of training. As I have said several times, there is a really good reason that Peace Corps is for two years. I’ve hit “that” point…where Spanish comes without thinking and often easier than English; where I feel genuine community acceptance; I feel needed and valued at work, People seek me out for various types of consultations; I crave tamales, beans and tortillas; a 12 hour chicken bus ride or a giant cockroach in my bed doesn’t even faze me; I’m doing what I’d envisioned doing; and I’m starting to panic about leaving.
My relationship with my counterpart, Irma, the Women’s Office coordinator, is what I feel like the counterpart/volunteer relationship strives to be. We balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well and have both a professional and friendly relationship. She is great with the women out in the rural communities and runs all the activities that I helped her plan. I help her a lot with planning, organization, motivation, institutional strengthening and computer skills and I follow her examples of culturally appropriate ways to do all our work.
The work we are doing together is now fitting into that image that I had coming out from training. I had imagined trekking through picturesque countryside stepping over pigs and chickens to get to women’s groups to do lots of participatory activities. It’s pretty much coming true. As part of our annual operating plan Irma and I are walking an hour each way up and down the mountains surrounding El Chol to complete a community diagnostic in each of the 28 communities that have community development councils (COCODEs) organized. We always meet in the afternoon in the community school. We set the meeting for 2:00 pm, as the women might have a moment of free time in the packed days of domestic responsibilities, but as the concept of time is loose here, we don’t start til well after 3:00 sometimes. We always start by introducing ourselves and explaining the existence of the women’s office. We ask them to go around and say their names, which are pulled out of them after much giggling, feet shuffling, hand wringing, and face hiding.
The diagnostic activity consists of the women completing an individual questionnaire that we read out loud to them as a group with questions both factual and opinionated related to demography, economic activities, health, education, domestic violence, and migration. We will be using the information from the diagnostic to have a better idea of the situation that women are living in the rural areas to assess their needs and then to prioritize the communities and projects we will work with. For example, if lots of women have an interest in learning about reproductive health issues, we can plan an informative discussion about the topic or coordinate with the health center in town to do an activity. The sheet that they have to fill out just has the question number and the letter options that they can choose, so they only need to be able to distinguish their letters a – e. But since most of the women can’t read and write, or can do so at such a basic level, it is a very trying task. When you had the women the sheet of paper they panic and tell you they can’t read and write, even if they can a little bit. I tell them not to worry, that we will help them or to sit next to someone who knows. They are even so afraid to hold a pen or pencil, since they have done it so few times in their lives or feels like they aren’t capable of managing the foreign object. The first few questions always take forever as you explain the concept of drawing a circle around a letter to make a selection. With some women the problem is they don’t understand the concept, others can’t see the letters well, some weren’t listening to the options mentioned, others can’t hold a pen properly, others are too timid to make the bold move of marking a piece of paper. After the first few questions, things start to go smoother as they get the hang of it and start smiling, confidently encircling letters, and responding with their opinions in regard to the questions. Sometimes they just wrinkle their noses at a question, and it generates good discussion. Such as when we ask what topics in health they would like to learn about and HIV/AIDS is one of the options and they say to you, “whatever that is…” and then we mention that there are several confirmed cases of this fatal yet preventative disease and then they perk up and listen. Or a question about participation when we ask them what prevents women from participating in community activities or meetings and one of the answer options is that their husbands don’t give them permission to participate and they all nod their heads vigorously in agreement and chime in with their anecdotes from the experiences in their lives to corroborate the evidence that it is hard to get their husbands to let them leave the house, especially when there are always a bunch of kids to take care of and housework that needs to get done. A woman in her early 20’s who is not married yet because her boyfriend went to the states (and even though he now has a new Honduran girlfriend there) she is waiting for him to get back, was telling me how she is super active in all kinds of groups, involved heavily in her church, is a community health promoter, and always attends any workshop or community meeting…but once her boyfriend supposedly comes back to marry her she will have to stop being involved in all these activities because he will tell her she needs to be in the house. It’s sad because she’s obviously a smart girl, had the luck of finished 9th grade, has lots of potential to be a great community leader and help her small community develop, but once she gets married it’s like that’s just it.
After the questionnaire activity we do a community mapping exercise where we give the women the chance to draw on big paper their community. In color blue the things that are already present and services that they have, and in color red the way they want to see their community and themselves within ten years. After a few giggles about how they will all be “viejitas” (little old ladies) in ten years they get into the activity. It’s cool cause they have so few opportunities to get out of their usual routine of doing work in the house and relax for a bit, see their neighbors, and do something novel like drawing. At first it seems weird to them to be talking about so far in the future, since they live subsistence day-to-day lives. But as I try to explain to them, drawing what they want doesn’t mean that we have a magic wand to make it so, but that we have to be futuristic thinking if we ever want to develop and improve the quality of our lives. If we only think of today, today, and maybe tomorrow, then things will always stay the same. It sounds cheesy, but you have to dream it first to make it reality, so we try to get them to think in that mode.
Visiting all the communities in the municipality has been really interesting because they vary a lot from each other. Some are highly indigenously, some are more timid than others, some propose things, others take it all in silently and hardly participate. It’s given me a good chance to really get to know all the rural roads and pathways since the muni doesn’t have any money right now to give us transportation, and even if they did it is extremely difficult and complicated to make that happen; so we walk. We sweat. A lot. But it also gives you a new appreciation for your surroundings noticing with greater detail this year’s corn sprouts which are just coming up, the gecko scurrying across your path, and the pungent smell of fermenting mangos which have fallen from the huge mango trees which shade the road at some parts. It gives you the opportunity to properly greet people that you pass with the appropriate literal “Good afternoon. May that you go well.” It gives Irma and I lots of time to discuss what went well in the meeting, what we could change, life, and the differences and similarities in the realities in our lives.
Rainy season is back in full force. It started early this year and it’s looking like it will be a rough one. Walking back from the rural communities in the afternoons, we get soaked and muddy. But it’s still suffocating hot and muggy at mid-day when we have to walk up the mountains to get there, and then it pours in the afternoons as we slide our way down on the slippery “roads”.
At my urging from awhile back to some of the NGO’s, there has been organized a coordination among the women’s offices in the department of Baja Verapaz. We’ve had a couple opportunities to all get together and have a sharing of experiences, since most of the offices are quite new. Irma and I were invited to give the feature presentation at one of these workshops, where we focused on writing of a vision and mission statement, creating an annual operating plan, and shared our experience of organizing the Municipal Forum of Women Leaders. It went really well and felt good to be an example to the other offices in the department because we all face many of the same challenges in the work that we do. We had gotten a ride from the mayor that morning and our activity finished at 1:00 and we called him to which he said he would be ready to go at 2:00. He came and picked us up, and then we waited in the car and in the street for the next six hours for him to finish a meeting with one of the departmental representatives to Congress. Got home late, really annoying, but totally normal for here. This is why I now have more patience than I know what to do with.
There are continuing perpetual financial problems in the muni, employees haven’t been paid in three months, still no money to buy us a computer or to give us reliable transportation to meetings, workshops, and community activities. On a positive note, Guatemala passed a national law guaranteeing access to public information that requires any institution receiving public funds to make public all their documents and records by means of an information office, and gives jail time and stiff financial penalties for noncompliance. They are working hard to increase transparency and reduce corruption in this country. They have a long way to go still.
I have lots of coworkers in the muni and no one really tells other people when it’s their birthday, til it comes up later since they don’t really make a very big deal of birthdays for adults here. Since Irma’s birthday passed and she didn’t tell me til a month later and she is the person that I spend the most hours of my day with, I decided to make a nice cake for her and all my other coworkers and celebrate everyone all at once. (Plus it’s expensive to be baking a cake for someone every couple weeks). So I make a yummy chocolate cake out of a box with rich chocolate butter cream frosting from scratch to celebrate. My mom had sent me some seasonal cake decorating supplies so I put those to good use and make it really pretty. I brought it to the muni and surprised everyone and made them all sing to each other. It was a festive occasion and we took pictures to remember it by.
Working in a country with such ties to the US through all the immigration that takes place adds a strange facet to the Peace Corps experience. I get constant inquiries from people if I can help them get a visa or people asking me I know so-and-so who lives in New Jersey. I hear lots of stories about the dangerous crossing from people who have come back. I feel sick to my stomach when I hear of people that I know getting ready to the attempt. This week a woman I am close with from a very poor family from one of the rural communities informed me that her son who just turned 19 is leaving in a few days. As is customary for people who don’t have the money to pay the huge coyote fees, the family had to turn over the titles to their land and house as a guarantee that the debt gets paid back. But who knows if he will actually make it? If he makes it, it will be a huge help to the family to help his siblings go to school and to pay for other important things. And if not, that leaves his parents and all his little brothers and sisters homeless without land to even plant the corn that sustains them. It’s a big gamble. I imagine this kid, who speaks not a word of English and has lived a very limited experience thus far in his life consisting of working the little patch of land that his family has, first making the dangerous desert crossing lasting days without food, water, or sleep, being beat up by the gangs that control the territory, and then walking the wide paved streets with traffic lights in the States. And the anxiety of his mother going weeks without hearing word from him. There’s really nothing you can even say to her other than “May that he go well with God.”
Another visit with good friends from college! We had a fabulous time hanging out, catching up, and getting to show off this beautiful country that I have the opportunity to live in. Seeing their reactions to everything makes me realize how accustomed to things I have become and how it all seems so normal to me now. They kept saying to me, “Caitlin, you’ve been here too long. You’ve got your Guatemala goggles on.” We went to Antigua first and explored around churches and ruins and walked up to the hill with a giant cross that overlooks the whole town with a direct view of Volcan de Agua (Water Volcano). We climbed the Pacaya Volcano (for my third time) but every time it’s different and this might have been the best lava flows I had seen. We went out dancing and I felt like a “real person” as we say in the Peace Corps when we do things that are familiar from home. Then we made the crazy trek up to El Chol and I think they barely made it on the long, hot, bumpy bus ride and they asked me “How do you live like this?” I guess you just get used to it. The time in my site was super fun and relaxed. They came with me to my English classes and my soccer practice and loved the group of little girls that I have. We went to the river in a tuk tuk (motorized three wheeled rickshaw) but evidently we were a lot of weight for the smaller motor and I had to get out on the inclines otherwise it wouldn’t make it up the hills. We got the priest in town to take us into the underpart of the church where bats live and supposedly people were buried before El Chol had a cemetery. My friends were super helpful in my office too because they helped me set up the Excel spreadsheet and formulas to tabulate the results from the Community Diagnostic for the Women’s Office. Since they got here right at the start of rainy season, supposedly the chequenes (big flying edible ants) were supposed to come out. My coworker called me at 4:00 am to go out and hunt for them, so we all got up and waited patiently in the soccer field for awhile, but alas, sadly they never showed up so they never got to try them fried up with lime and salt. I don’t know if they actually would have tried them though, since the whole time they freaked out about my bug-infested house, which really isn’t that bad, it’s just that when you live in the countryside in an unsealed house, you are a part of the living environment and living things get in. Either way, there was lots of concern over spiders which I guess I’ve just learned to live with. After my site we took another chicken bus adventure to Lake Atitlan and stayed at the beautiful Casa del Mundo hotel that is built into the hillside and it feels like you’re floating over the volcano surrounded lake. Cool. We relaxed in the hotel and they got all their souvenir shopping done in Panajachel. Since my friends knew I had been to the lake a bunch of time, they told me to pick something for us to do that I had never done. So, we went and did these awesome zip lines in the lake town of Santa Clara which were sweet! There were two actually, the first one was short and you held on to a pulley as you swept across the lush green valley. Then you walk up for a bit and then do a longer one when we got strapped on from our backs so you soar like an eagle across the valley. On that we were up higher and the clouds had rolled in so we flew through a cloud without being able to see the other side which was disorienting and exhilarating. One of the coolest things ever. I want to go back and do it again on a clear day since supposedly there are great views of the lake as you soar across, but I kind of liked the cloud effect. I have been missing my friends from home the whole time I’ve been here, but seeing them again made me really realize how much I missed them and it got me getting excited to come home.
We had a fabulous guide, a Swiss man who came to Guatemala with Doctors without Borders and married an indigenous woman and stayed in Todos Santos 15 years ago. We hiked from 6:30 am to 4:30 pm almost constantly through a few sparsely populated areas of all indigenous Mam’ people that shyly peer out from their huts. It was lots of up and down, looking across a steep valley knowing that first you had to go down, and then all the way back up. We stopped for a respite at the bottom of the valley where a freezing pristine river ran through it and soaked our tired feet and watched two adolescent girls beating piles of clothes against rocks to get them clean. We breakfasted, lunched, and snacked on the food we had brought with us mostly consisting of tortillas, refried black beans out of a bag, hardboiled eggs, avocados, and mangos. The types of terrains we moved through were quite varied from the hot loose sandy inclines, cool pine forests, and the cold mountain ridge that had lots of rocks and very little vegetation and looked like some sort of disaster fallout (kind of reminded me of Mt. St. Helens).
The rain held off all day long until about the last ten minutes when we could already see our shelter for the night and it started to pour down rain so hard that we got as soaked as if it had been steadily raining all day long. We stayed the night in a small cold village settlement on the ridge in a wood house structure that had beds and wools blankets that some NGO had set up to promote ecotourism in the area. Our guide asked around for a family that would give us dinner and hungry and cold as we were, speculating about what they would give us, looking forward to the usual Guatemalan dinner fare of eggs, beans, and tortillas. As this is area lives in extreme poverty, we were given cabbage in water, corn dough wrapped in leaves, and hot sugar water to drink. It was a very humbling experience sitting in the “kitchen” of the house, a dark room with a dirt floor with an open fire built in the middle on the ground and thick smoke filling the air. The girl who served us, maybe about 17 years old, couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and only spoke Quiche and most likely had never been to a day of school in her life. We knew no more than two words in Quiche, matiox (thank you) and utz (good), which can barely get a smile but not much communication, so our group of eight just ate in silence as she reached her hand into the fire to pull out more corn dough wraps. That night we pushed the wood bed frames together and us five girls slept all scrunched together for warmth. Every single person had terrible gas and we all poisoned the air with our rank, all snuggled up together.
The second day we arose and started hiking early, having gone to sleep exhausted around 7:30pm. We arrived at our destination of the aldea of Acul, Nebaj, Quiche where we had to jump a fence where I ripped beyond repair my favorite hiking pants that I had had since freshman year of high school (1999?) In Acul there is a cheese making hacienda that we lunched on hot tortillas with this artisan cheese and cantaloupe juice and bought whole wheels of cheese, as it is only sold by the wheel, to divide amongst us. We caught a microbus into the actual town of Nebaj, where we transferred buses to make our way to Cunen where the married couple in group lives and had graciously agreed to house and feed us for the night. We had to wait at the crossroads for a microbus into their town when a giant thunderstorm moved in but we finally made it to their house where they spoiled us with homemade Mexican style chicken enchiladas and cold showers since the electricity was out the whole time we were there. It was very merry and jovial all of glad to have survived and to be hanging out together. Very cool hike, all in all one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in Guatemala. After being here for so long, I thought I had seen pretty much everything, but this was definitely new and pretty mind blowing.
I had the realization the other day that I am now doing what I had imagined I would be doing in the Peace Corps after coming out of training. As I have said several times, there is a really good reason that Peace Corps is for two years. I’ve hit “that” point…where Spanish comes without thinking and often easier than English; where I feel genuine community acceptance; I feel needed and valued at work, People seek me out for various types of consultations; I crave tamales, beans and tortillas; a 12 hour chicken bus ride or a giant cockroach in my bed doesn’t even faze me; I’m doing what I’d envisioned doing; and I’m starting to panic about leaving.
My relationship with my counterpart, Irma, the Women’s Office coordinator, is what I feel like the counterpart/volunteer relationship strives to be. We balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well and have both a professional and friendly relationship. She is great with the women out in the rural communities and runs all the activities that I helped her plan. I help her a lot with planning, organization, motivation, institutional strengthening and computer skills and I follow her examples of culturally appropriate ways to do all our work.
The work we are doing together is now fitting into that image that I had coming out from training. I had imagined trekking through picturesque countryside stepping over pigs and chickens to get to women’s groups to do lots of participatory activities. It’s pretty much coming true. As part of our annual operating plan Irma and I are walking an hour each way up and down the mountains surrounding El Chol to complete a community diagnostic in each of the 28 communities that have community development councils (COCODEs) organized. We always meet in the afternoon in the community school. We set the meeting for 2:00 pm, as the women might have a moment of free time in the packed days of domestic responsibilities, but as the concept of time is loose here, we don’t start til well after 3:00 sometimes. We always start by introducing ourselves and explaining the existence of the women’s office. We ask them to go around and say their names, which are pulled out of them after much giggling, feet shuffling, hand wringing, and face hiding.
The diagnostic activity consists of the women completing an individual questionnaire that we read out loud to them as a group with questions both factual and opinionated related to demography, economic activities, health, education, domestic violence, and migration. We will be using the information from the diagnostic to have a better idea of the situation that women are living in the rural areas to assess their needs and then to prioritize the communities and projects we will work with. For example, if lots of women have an interest in learning about reproductive health issues, we can plan an informative discussion about the topic or coordinate with the health center in town to do an activity. The sheet that they have to fill out just has the question number and the letter options that they can choose, so they only need to be able to distinguish their letters a – e. But since most of the women can’t read and write, or can do so at such a basic level, it is a very trying task. When you had the women the sheet of paper they panic and tell you they can’t read and write, even if they can a little bit. I tell them not to worry, that we will help them or to sit next to someone who knows. They are even so afraid to hold a pen or pencil, since they have done it so few times in their lives or feels like they aren’t capable of managing the foreign object. The first few questions always take forever as you explain the concept of drawing a circle around a letter to make a selection. With some women the problem is they don’t understand the concept, others can’t see the letters well, some weren’t listening to the options mentioned, others can’t hold a pen properly, others are too timid to make the bold move of marking a piece of paper. After the first few questions, things start to go smoother as they get the hang of it and start smiling, confidently encircling letters, and responding with their opinions in regard to the questions. Sometimes they just wrinkle their noses at a question, and it generates good discussion. Such as when we ask what topics in health they would like to learn about and HIV/AIDS is one of the options and they say to you, “whatever that is…” and then we mention that there are several confirmed cases of this fatal yet preventative disease and then they perk up and listen. Or a question about participation when we ask them what prevents women from participating in community activities or meetings and one of the answer options is that their husbands don’t give them permission to participate and they all nod their heads vigorously in agreement and chime in with their anecdotes from the experiences in their lives to corroborate the evidence that it is hard to get their husbands to let them leave the house, especially when there are always a bunch of kids to take care of and housework that needs to get done. A woman in her early 20’s who is not married yet because her boyfriend went to the states (and even though he now has a new Honduran girlfriend there) she is waiting for him to get back, was telling me how she is super active in all kinds of groups, involved heavily in her church, is a community health promoter, and always attends any workshop or community meeting…but once her boyfriend supposedly comes back to marry her she will have to stop being involved in all these activities because he will tell her she needs to be in the house. It’s sad because she’s obviously a smart girl, had the luck of finished 9th grade, has lots of potential to be a great community leader and help her small community develop, but once she gets married it’s like that’s just it.
After the questionnaire activity we do a community mapping exercise where we give the women the chance to draw on big paper their community. In color blue the things that are already present and services that they have, and in color red the way they want to see their community and themselves within ten years. After a few giggles about how they will all be “viejitas” (little old ladies) in ten years they get into the activity. It’s cool cause they have so few opportunities to get out of their usual routine of doing work in the house and relax for a bit, see their neighbors, and do something novel like drawing. At first it seems weird to them to be talking about so far in the future, since they live subsistence day-to-day lives. But as I try to explain to them, drawing what they want doesn’t mean that we have a magic wand to make it so, but that we have to be futuristic thinking if we ever want to develop and improve the quality of our lives. If we only think of today, today, and maybe tomorrow, then things will always stay the same. It sounds cheesy, but you have to dream it first to make it reality, so we try to get them to think in that mode.
Visiting all the communities in the municipality has been really interesting because they vary a lot from each other. Some are highly indigenously, some are more timid than others, some propose things, others take it all in silently and hardly participate. It’s given me a good chance to really get to know all the rural roads and pathways since the muni doesn’t have any money right now to give us transportation, and even if they did it is extremely difficult and complicated to make that happen; so we walk. We sweat. A lot. But it also gives you a new appreciation for your surroundings noticing with greater detail this year’s corn sprouts which are just coming up, the gecko scurrying across your path, and the pungent smell of fermenting mangos which have fallen from the huge mango trees which shade the road at some parts. It gives you the opportunity to properly greet people that you pass with the appropriate literal “Good afternoon. May that you go well.” It gives Irma and I lots of time to discuss what went well in the meeting, what we could change, life, and the differences and similarities in the realities in our lives.
Rainy season is back in full force. It started early this year and it’s looking like it will be a rough one. Walking back from the rural communities in the afternoons, we get soaked and muddy. But it’s still suffocating hot and muggy at mid-day when we have to walk up the mountains to get there, and then it pours in the afternoons as we slide our way down on the slippery “roads”.
At my urging from awhile back to some of the NGO’s, there has been organized a coordination among the women’s offices in the department of Baja Verapaz. We’ve had a couple opportunities to all get together and have a sharing of experiences, since most of the offices are quite new. Irma and I were invited to give the feature presentation at one of these workshops, where we focused on writing of a vision and mission statement, creating an annual operating plan, and shared our experience of organizing the Municipal Forum of Women Leaders. It went really well and felt good to be an example to the other offices in the department because we all face many of the same challenges in the work that we do. We had gotten a ride from the mayor that morning and our activity finished at 1:00 and we called him to which he said he would be ready to go at 2:00. He came and picked us up, and then we waited in the car and in the street for the next six hours for him to finish a meeting with one of the departmental representatives to Congress. Got home late, really annoying, but totally normal for here. This is why I now have more patience than I know what to do with.
There are continuing perpetual financial problems in the muni, employees haven’t been paid in three months, still no money to buy us a computer or to give us reliable transportation to meetings, workshops, and community activities. On a positive note, Guatemala passed a national law guaranteeing access to public information that requires any institution receiving public funds to make public all their documents and records by means of an information office, and gives jail time and stiff financial penalties for noncompliance. They are working hard to increase transparency and reduce corruption in this country. They have a long way to go still.
I have lots of coworkers in the muni and no one really tells other people when it’s their birthday, til it comes up later since they don’t really make a very big deal of birthdays for adults here. Since Irma’s birthday passed and she didn’t tell me til a month later and she is the person that I spend the most hours of my day with, I decided to make a nice cake for her and all my other coworkers and celebrate everyone all at once. (Plus it’s expensive to be baking a cake for someone every couple weeks). So I make a yummy chocolate cake out of a box with rich chocolate butter cream frosting from scratch to celebrate. My mom had sent me some seasonal cake decorating supplies so I put those to good use and make it really pretty. I brought it to the muni and surprised everyone and made them all sing to each other. It was a festive occasion and we took pictures to remember it by.
Working in a country with such ties to the US through all the immigration that takes place adds a strange facet to the Peace Corps experience. I get constant inquiries from people if I can help them get a visa or people asking me I know so-and-so who lives in New Jersey. I hear lots of stories about the dangerous crossing from people who have come back. I feel sick to my stomach when I hear of people that I know getting ready to the attempt. This week a woman I am close with from a very poor family from one of the rural communities informed me that her son who just turned 19 is leaving in a few days. As is customary for people who don’t have the money to pay the huge coyote fees, the family had to turn over the titles to their land and house as a guarantee that the debt gets paid back. But who knows if he will actually make it? If he makes it, it will be a huge help to the family to help his siblings go to school and to pay for other important things. And if not, that leaves his parents and all his little brothers and sisters homeless without land to even plant the corn that sustains them. It’s a big gamble. I imagine this kid, who speaks not a word of English and has lived a very limited experience thus far in his life consisting of working the little patch of land that his family has, first making the dangerous desert crossing lasting days without food, water, or sleep, being beat up by the gangs that control the territory, and then walking the wide paved streets with traffic lights in the States. And the anxiety of his mother going weeks without hearing word from him. There’s really nothing you can even say to her other than “May that he go well with God.”
Another visit with good friends from college! We had a fabulous time hanging out, catching up, and getting to show off this beautiful country that I have the opportunity to live in. Seeing their reactions to everything makes me realize how accustomed to things I have become and how it all seems so normal to me now. They kept saying to me, “Caitlin, you’ve been here too long. You’ve got your Guatemala goggles on.” We went to Antigua first and explored around churches and ruins and walked up to the hill with a giant cross that overlooks the whole town with a direct view of Volcan de Agua (Water Volcano). We climbed the Pacaya Volcano (for my third time) but every time it’s different and this might have been the best lava flows I had seen. We went out dancing and I felt like a “real person” as we say in the Peace Corps when we do things that are familiar from home. Then we made the crazy trek up to El Chol and I think they barely made it on the long, hot, bumpy bus ride and they asked me “How do you live like this?” I guess you just get used to it. The time in my site was super fun and relaxed. They came with me to my English classes and my soccer practice and loved the group of little girls that I have. We went to the river in a tuk tuk (motorized three wheeled rickshaw) but evidently we were a lot of weight for the smaller motor and I had to get out on the inclines otherwise it wouldn’t make it up the hills. We got the priest in town to take us into the underpart of the church where bats live and supposedly people were buried before El Chol had a cemetery. My friends were super helpful in my office too because they helped me set up the Excel spreadsheet and formulas to tabulate the results from the Community Diagnostic for the Women’s Office. Since they got here right at the start of rainy season, supposedly the chequenes (big flying edible ants) were supposed to come out. My coworker called me at 4:00 am to go out and hunt for them, so we all got up and waited patiently in the soccer field for awhile, but alas, sadly they never showed up so they never got to try them fried up with lime and salt. I don’t know if they actually would have tried them though, since the whole time they freaked out about my bug-infested house, which really isn’t that bad, it’s just that when you live in the countryside in an unsealed house, you are a part of the living environment and living things get in. Either way, there was lots of concern over spiders which I guess I’ve just learned to live with. After my site we took another chicken bus adventure to Lake Atitlan and stayed at the beautiful Casa del Mundo hotel that is built into the hillside and it feels like you’re floating over the volcano surrounded lake. Cool. We relaxed in the hotel and they got all their souvenir shopping done in Panajachel. Since my friends knew I had been to the lake a bunch of time, they told me to pick something for us to do that I had never done. So, we went and did these awesome zip lines in the lake town of Santa Clara which were sweet! There were two actually, the first one was short and you held on to a pulley as you swept across the lush green valley. Then you walk up for a bit and then do a longer one when we got strapped on from our backs so you soar like an eagle across the valley. On that we were up higher and the clouds had rolled in so we flew through a cloud without being able to see the other side which was disorienting and exhilarating. One of the coolest things ever. I want to go back and do it again on a clear day since supposedly there are great views of the lake as you soar across, but I kind of liked the cloud effect. I have been missing my friends from home the whole time I’ve been here, but seeing them again made me really realize how much I missed them and it got me getting excited to come home.
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