My brother and sister came to visit! We spent Friday in Antigua checking out the market and the sites and visiting my host family in Alotenango. Then Saturday I took them on the long dusty chicken bus ride to El Chol. We spent all day Sunday at the soccer field where they got to see the finals of the soccer tournament that my girls´ team played in and also my women’s team that I play with when we won first place. Monday they visited my work and participated in my English class where they ate pinol, the traditional tomato and corn based soup from this area and they showed pictures from home and talked about themselves when my students had the opportunity to ask them questions in English. We impromptively spent an entire afternoon at Norma’s who is an incredibly nice woman with a very kind family and they fed us lunch and my brother enjoyed the homebrewed liquor she insisted we try. We took photos with their adorable family and they gave us souvenirs of typical shirts and a nice woven man-purse bag for my brother. During the time in El Chol we also spent time with my host family and enjoyed paches (potato tamales with pork and a spicy chili) and drank homemade coffee. We spent one more day shopping in Antigua and stayed our final night in a nice hotel in Guatemala City. My brother and I then traveled to Belize! It was absolutely stunningly beautiful, exactly as one sees a quintessential postcard of the Caribbean...white sand beaches, tropical fish, palm trees, locals on bicycles, etc. We spent a day out on a sail boat where we got a couple incredible snorkeling stops and swam with sharks, sting rays, and amazing fish among coral reefs. We visited Caye Caulker, another island, and had a yummy lunch there of stewed jerk chicken with rice and beans, and a lobster burrito. The food in general was incredibly delicious and we ate our fill of fresh seafood with shrimp, lobster, scallops, fish, etc. We spent the next day exploring Ambergris Caye, the island we stayed on, by bicycle and taking in the beaches, the shops, and the best ice cream I’ve ever had. It was super hot and humid but we had a fabulous time relaxing and taking it all in. It was so nice to have my brother and sister come to see me and so special the time that we spend together and that they now know El Chol and my people there.
My two years in the muni in El Chol have been vastly different. My first year I spent being the only woman in a male dominated office and this year I am a woman among women in the two offices that I work in. A nice little tradition that we have amongst ourselves is the 10:00 am coffee hour where we take a break to drink coffee and sometimes buy snacks like sweet bread or tamales or little sandwiches. It’s a nice little moment in the day where we all sit and chat and sometimes buy a newspaper to peruse if the guy shows up to sell them. We were using Styrofoam cups that we would wash out everyday, but then the coordinator of the Planning Office bought us all cute mugs and then wrote all our names on them so we eat have our own mug to use that we store in the office. Very cute.
We’ve been plugging away at our community diagnostic with the Women’s Office. In one of the communities we went to, one lady was upset and said that we were wasting her time with the workshop since we didn’t have anything to give away that day (as most institutions do when the visit communities). We told her that the benefits to the community are not always immediate but that she was free to leave at any time. Well she stayed, but when I posed the question to the women of “what do you want your community to be like in 10 years?” she responded that “there is no point in thinking 10 years in the future since only God knows if we will be alive then.” To which I replied, “yes, only God knows, but God willing we will be so let’s think of the future.” The same type of response follows in many communities to the question “what type of woman do you want to be in the future?” when they respond with “viejitas, si Dios nos presta la vida” (little old ladies, if God allows us life). For people that live their lives according to daily immediate needs with fatalistic beliefs, it’s difficult to get across the concept of futuristic thinking long term planning.
Due to our participation in the National Games, my elementary school girls´ soccer team got invited to the Departmental (State) Games on August 27th. It was great for them to participate again in a big one day tournament against other girls from the area. We got the muni to donate transportation and all piled into the microbus one on top of the other all squished in nice and tight. They played two games and lost but they enjoyed themselves immensely. Besides the fact that there were more girls that wanted to go than space, it all turned out very well. They won a trophy for third place and decided to give it to me for all the support I’ve given them. (Plus this solved the problem that the municipal tournament that they played in and also won a trophy, that one girl took it even though the rest of the girls had voted to give it to me and girls and parents showed up to my house crying about the problem. The appearance of another trophy solved all this.)
With my counterparts we´ve been continuing to conduct HIV workshops in El Chol with largely illiterate women’s groups. They have gone really well and I really enjoy this work. Presenting a topic such as HIV/AIDS to a group of women many of whom never went to school has its challenges. I have to look for alternative strategies to get the information across. Due to this experience as part of my work with the PC HIV Committee I volunteered to make a document about how to adapt the basic four hour participatory workshop into a two hour one for illiterate groups so that’s been keeping me busy.
Our Peace Corps HIV Prevention and Education Committee continues our work to train volunteers, counterparts, and make available materials. We had another productive meeting with PC admin keep them in the loop of our activities and to do some long term strategy planning. We also had our Gender and Development Committee (GAD) meeting and got a lot accomplished. I have now found replacements for my position on both of these committees so now I have to organize all my binders of materials to be able to pass along all the info.
Peace Corps holds periodic Project Design Management (PDM) workshops for volunteer counterparts so I took my Women’s Office Coordinator with me to the Peace Corps Office to participate in the training. It was fun to travel with her from El Chol and to take her and other counterparts around Antigua since they don’t know it very well. She felt cool getting to go spend the night in Antigua and be in the Peace Corps Office and all that. The workshop was really valuable for her and she has already implemented some of the techniques that they learned there.
The new Peace Corps trainees came to visit El Chol! This is the new group of Municipal Development volunteers who will be replacing us. Crazy. It was really cool to meet them and to be able to show them my town and explain all about our work with my coworkers. I think they really enjoyed the visit since they told me so and told me I was a “superstar” volunteer which was really sweet. They seem like a great group and I’m excited to get to know who my replacement will be and get her on board with everything. It makes it real that I’m leaving knowing that the person that will continue in my place is already here. Crazy!
The rainy season this year is conspicuously lacking rain. Everyone is very worried about drought, crop loss, elevated food prices, and hunger. I remember last year it rained hard all the time, like every afternoon and this year it goes weeks at a time without raining during the rainy season. The corn crops that started out green ended up all brown with huge losses for subsistence farmers. The real big worry is that there will be massive water shortages during the dry summer months when the crisis will really hit. There have been various articles in the newspaper and on T.V. about the problem and the American ambassador went to the department of Jalapa to observe the situation where he met with some of my fellow volunteer friends who work there.
Big news…Paris Hilton came to Guatemala! She was actually in Antigua one weekend when I was there but I didn’t see her and didn’t find out til afterwards. Then she went to Lake Atitlan to see some project or something or other, but all the photos were in the newspaper, even though a lot of people here have no idea who she is.
I spent a few days in Antigua to do my Close Of Service (COS) medical appointments where Peace Corps pokes and prods you to make sure you are healthy finishing your service to go home. Thankfully everything turned out well and the biggest relief is that I don’t have TB which some volunteers get (the inactive kind) and have to take medication for almost a year.
To celebrate our two year anniversary of being in country and a couple birthdays, our group rented out a beautiful house on Lake Atitlan for the weekend. It is owned by some former Peace Corps volunteers and they gave a great deal on such a fantastic home. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house with such a stunning view of a crystal lake surrounded by volcanoes from the toilet. We spent the weekend relaxing, swimming off the private dock, and visiting lake towns to do last chance souvenir shopping. We cooked big family style meals with spaghetti and meatballs made by the Italian in our group and chicken masala from the Indian in our group. It was my last chance at the lake and when the moment came to leave, hard to tear myself away from the clear water and volcano views.
Last week there was some sad news. A woman (my age) who had worked in the Women’s Office in another municipality in our department and we had been to several trainings, workshops, and meetings with her, committed suicide. Apparently she got pregnant by a married man and he rejected her as did her family and so she drank agricultural pesticides and killed herself and her baby. This is incredibly sad and it is not altogether that uncommon. Societal pressures here on women are so strong and resources so few for women that find themselves in difficult situations with no one to turn to. In other sad news, the brother of one of my coworkers was killed in Guatemala City the same week. He was a just graduated policeman (21 years old) who was killed in a shootout with one of the gangs there. The violence in this country is shocking. There was an article in the paper awhile back about how Guatemala signed the Peace Accords to end their 36 year civil war in 1996, but more people die each year from violence than people that were killed in the massacres in the civil war and so Guatemala is living in a violent “Time of Peace” without peace. Government corruption, poverty, drug cartels, extortions, and gangs continue to feed the violence.
I had the privilege of going on a trip to Esquipulus with my family and about 60 people from El Chol. Esquipulas is the site of the most important Catholic shrine and largest pilgrimage in Central America, a town in the Eastern part of Guatemala in the department of Chiquimula that has a beautiful church that turns 250 years old this year. The motive for Catholics making a pilgrimage there is the famous crucifix of a carving of the Black Christ, The Lord of Esquipulas which is inside the church. So our town rented out one of the buses that goes to El Chol, a bright red and green old school bus from the states, and we made the seven hour road trip pilgrimage. It was the epitome of cultural experiences, to say the least.
We gathered at 3 am, the appointed leaving time, and finally pulled out of El Chol at 4am which for Guatemala is very on time. In the big bus it took 2 and a half hours to go 14 miles to get to Rabinal. The road up the mountain there is pretty bad right now. A few minutes of that time included a “bathroom stop” where the stopped and everyone piled off, peed on the side of the road wherever they found convenient. The kid in front of me got sick and was throwing up out the window and droplets of it flew back into the bus and landed of me. Gross. After much bouncing along the bad roads, hours of bouncy music, and a stop in El Rancho for a bit to eat breakfast food we had brought along, we made it to Esquipulas by 11 am. The last half hour of the journey everyone on the bus was chanting and singing hymns. We found a hotel amongst the plethora of cheap options there and got everyone settled in. The family had brought food with them to eat during the trip so we heated up tortillas and beans in the parking area of the hotel in a barrel cut in half long ways with firewood inside. For some reason it didn’t matter that we brought meat, cheese, beans, etc. and didn’t have a fridge and it was sweltering hot. And that was how we ate for two days.
First on the agenda was to stand in line to go see the dark wood carved statue of Christ. We were lucky and came on a rather slow day, but the next day we saw the line wind all the way around the park and people often wait several hours for their moment to see it. I watched the members of my family cry, pray, and kiss the glass when they saw it. Some people make their way on their knees and then everyone has to walk backwards out of the viewing area. Outside the blinding white church I watched people approach on their knees in sacrifice. Outside you are swarmed with souvenir and religious relic hawkers. For several blocks around the church are stalls with very aggressive vendors selling candles, framed images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, statues, clay incense burners, keychains, goofy hats, rosaries, typical sweets and candies, and everything else you can imagine. We spent a couple hours going around buying all kinds of the stuff. That evening we relaxed at the hotel and I played soccer, cards, and an improvised Catch Phrase in Spanish with the kids.
We went to mass twice the following day, once at 6 am, and then at 11 am after the rest of the hundreds of pilgrims from Baja Verapaz showed up and entered the church singing hymns. The church was packed with I couldn’t even estimate how many thousands of people all packed in the center aisle and along the sides and sitting on the wooden part of the pews where you kneel. Despite the sweltering heat and pack of sweaty bodies, it was pretty powerful to listen to all those people chanting and singing together with the echo of the old church. All of the people from the eight municipalities of Baja Verapaz had on matching t-shirts (including me) with a giant image of Jesus on the front and on the back the words “Baja Verapaz” and “for me Christ is life.” It was really cool to see such an array of Guatemalans from rich people from the Capital to the very, very poor. On colorful display were the traditional woven clothes from the indigenous people all over the country. Women used any kind of cloth to cover their heads including bandanas, handkerchiefs, and beach towels with any silly print on them like an American 100 dollar bill or an American flag. After the mass people lines up outside on painted lines to have the priests come by and sprinkle holy water on their heads and on all the souvenirs they bought to have it blessed. We also passed through the candle burning area where people go in and light candles of certain colors for certain prayers. I watched Dona Hilda pass the candle over various members of the family and herself while chanting before going in to light them.
On the way home, the same kid was throwing up in front of me, except this time onto the floor since someone told him to not throw up out the window, and instead into a bag. So I had to gingerly keep my flip flops in one place to avoid getting my bare feet in the vomit, even though the bottom of my flip flops got stuck in it. Despite all the physical discomforts and frustrations of the trip, it was amazing to see the customs and traditions in action. I know how important it is to them, especially to Dona Hilda who never leaves the house in El Chol and I could count the number of times she has ever left. She even brought her 89 year old mother who is now practically blind, deaf, in diapers, and can hardly walk. That’s dedication. These are good memories to have with my family.
