Caitlin Doing the Peace Corps

TERMINATION REPORT Selections

2009-11-05T07:50:00.000-08:00

A selection of my final Peace Corps Termination Report...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Santa Cruz El Chol is a small town in the department of Baja Verapaz located 90 kilometers from the capital of Guatemala City. The town has a hot climate and is in a valley surrounded by mountains at about 1,000 meters above sea level. El Chol is mostly non-indigenous and Spanish speaking, with a population of almost 9,000 people in the municipality. The community is very welcoming and excited to share with Peace Corps volunteers and other outsiders. It is a very safe town with almost no violence or delinquency.

As a Municipal Development volunteer, my primary responsibilities were to improve the quality and efficiency of the services provided by the Municipal Planning Office (OMP) and to increase citizen participation in the needs assessment and development process of the communities the OMP serves. Working in the OMP I facilitated monthly inter-institutional meetings with governmental and nongovernmental organizations to coordinate activities, published a Municipal Newsletter to increase communication between citizens and their local government, and strengthened the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE). I also initiated the Municipal Women’s and Youth Office (OMMJ) and assisted in the planning and execution of its activities. Key accomplishments in the OMMJ were the execution of gender-focused participatory community diagnostics, a series of Municipal Women Leaders Workshops, and trainings for rural women’s groups on various topics including self-esteem, leadership, the importance of women in development, the Guatemalan system of Development Councils, small home income generation, and HIV/AIDS.

The municipal workers and community members enjoyed working with and learning from a Peace Corps volunteer. There are several key players in the community that are especially supportive and collaborative, that are essential to know as a volunteer.

In addition to my work in the municipality, I taught community English classes, taught a citizen participation course in the local high school, coordinated a World Map project, and coached an elementary school girls’ soccer team. I acted as the Municipal Development Program representative on the Peace Corps Guatemala Gender and Development Committee. I was responsible for encouraging the inclusion of gender sensitivity in their projects and as Alta/Baja Verapaz Regional representative on the Peace Corps Guatemala HIV/AIDS Prevention and Education Committee.

The volunteer experience working in El Chol had many challenges due to the political situation in the Municipality, lack of resources, and the machismo present in the culture. However, it was a fulfilling experience both personally and professionally. I hope that the Municipal Women’s and Youth Office that I started will continue to function well with the support of the next volunteer and contribute to the development of vulnerable populations for future generations.

A. Site Description:

The town of Santa Cruz El Chol, Baja Verapaz is situated at 1008 meters above sea level about 90 kilometers northeast of Guatemala City in a small valley surrounded by mountains. The town is located about 2 1/2 hours down a dirt road coming from San Juan Sacatepéquez (the more traveled route) or 1 hour from Rabinal, Baja Verapaz. The town center is made up of about 5 intersecting cobblestone streets that are mildly busy with mostly motorcycle traffic. The climate is usually hot and dry with some humidity during the rainy season. During the rainy season it is hot and sunny during the day, but rains most afternoons. The town center has three main bridges, which pass over the two small rivers that run through town. There are some popular swimming holes that the townspeople swim in during the hotter months.

El Chol has a population of 8,769 people, with over 2,000 people living in the town center. The majority of the population is ladino, making Spanish the prominent language spoken. The few indigenous communities that are native to the area speak A’chi and there are several representatives of other indigenous cultures that have relocated to El Chol, many of them during the 36 year armed conflict. Most speak Spanish fluently.

There are 9 aldeas (villages with approximately 50-250 families) and 53 caseríos (settlements with 10-50 families) in the municipality of Santa Cruz El Chol. Most have access via dirt roads that are passable most of the year. A limited number have only foot paths or no access during the rainy season. El Chol is the municipal seat with several barrios (neighborhoods) including El Centro, El Calvario, Tamarindo, El Campamento.

Santa Cruz El Chol is known for its production of corn, black beans, hibiscus flower, and other crops. Socially, it is an extremely tranquil town, with a municipal market and hotel, basic small convenience stores, a bank, a post office, a health center, a justice of the peace, many small elementary schools, several middle schools, two high schools, one university extension, two dirt soccer fields, a gym, and a few small cantinas.

The municipality is located in the town center next to BanRural and across from the park (built about 4 years ago). The mayor, Aníbal Sarmiento Reyes is in his fourth term in office and currently represents the Union Nacional de Esperanza (UNE) Party. He is popular among many people in the surrounding villages and has loyal supporters in the town proper. He is very collaborative with projects and highly esteems Peace Corps volunteers. It is important to get to know the mayor and his wife, who is also a very successful and well-respected leader in the community.

The community is fairly well developed in comparison to other small towns and has a good amount of commerce. The community is well organized and is committed to improving infrastructure. There are several projects that are underway or soon-to-be underway, including rebuilding the elementary schools in the Caserío Trapiche Viejo and in the urban center. The municipality finished improving the soccer field and has plans to build a stadium. The government is also involved in a 5-year project to pave the road from San Juan Sacatepéquez to Rabinal, Baja Verapaz.

There are 28 registered COCODEs (Community Development Council) in Santa Cruz El Chol. Each aldea has a registered COCODE, the barrios of the town center and many caseríos or pairs of caseríos have a registered COCODE as well. There is a functioning COMUDE (Municipal Development Council) that meets the third Thursday of each month. The CODEDE (Departmental Development Council) of Baja Verapaz meets the first Monday of each month, rotating the meeting location among the eight municipalities of the Department.

D. Projects:

My two years working in the Municipality were very different. In my first year I worked only in the OMP and my activities focused on increasing office communication, coordination, planning, and transparency. Specifically, I:
• Facilitated monthly inter-institutional meetings with governmental and nongovernmental organizations to coordinate activities and share experiences of challenges in development work and look for solutions.
• Coordinated the publication of a bi-monthly (every two months) Municipal Newsletter to increase transparency and communication between the Municipal Government and local citizens.
• Assisted with socioeconomic data collection and organization and presentation with spatial analysis using ArcView GIS.
• Conducted SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the OMP and Annual Operating Plan for 2008.
• Assisted self-diagnostic of the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE) to assess strengths and weaknesses and find solutions to strengthen the Council.
• Accompanied the Municipal Women’s and Youth Commission as part of the COMUDE to research and write a Public Policy for a long term Municipal Development Plan for Children and Youth.

My main project was to start and help run a Municipal Women’s and Youth Office, which I focused on almost entirely my second year. I began writing the project profile as soon as I got to site in November, 2007. The Mayor and town council approved the project in May, 2008. In November, 2008 we received permission to start to hiring process. January 15th, 2009 was the new coordinator´s first day of work. In order to start the OMMJ, specifically, I:
• Researched socioeconomic data to assess the need for the office.
• Wrote Project Profile with justifications based on international agreements, Guatemalan national laws and Constitution, and municipal specific needs, regulations and development plans. I also included a chronology budget proposal, goals, objectives, and expected outcomes for the project.
• Presented the project to the Mayor and City Council to get political approval and permission execute the project.
• Was in charge of selection process for the Coordinator of the office. I advertised for the open position, accepted resumes and paperwork, selected viable candidates for interviews, conducted interviews, made final recommendation of selected candidate for Mayor’s approval to hire.

To run the OMMJ, together with the coordinator I:
• Planned annual activities for the Office including month-by-month chronology.
• Wrote vision and mission statements.
• Solicited office equipment from governmental and nongovernmental institutions.
• Planned, coordinated, and executed gender-focused rural community diagnostics in order to assess and prioritize women’s specific community needs.
• Planned, coordinated, and executed a series of Women’s Leadership Workshops for women community leaders where I co-taught trainings on topics of self-esteem, leadership, the importance of women in development, and the Guatemalan system of Development Councils.
• Gave charlas (“chats”) to rural women on various topics related to self-esteem, leadership, the importance of women in development, the Guatemalan system of Development Councils, and small home income generation.
• Gave workshops on HIV/AIDS to rural women´s groups.
• Developed promotional materials related to the office and our work.
• Coordinated governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
• Responded to the public daily.

There is still much that needs to be done to strengthen and continue the work of the OMMJ. There are no organized women´s groups in El Chol, which is one of the reasons why the work of OMMJ is so important. In order to gather women together for a meeting, we would inform the Community Mayor and the teachers of the local school to tell their students to tell their mothers. We were only able to complete the gender-focused rural community diagnostics in communities that were close enough to walk, since we have no other means of transportation. This diagnostic should be completed in the rest of the communities in order to have a complete picture of the situation that women live in and their needs. I would recommend continued visits and charlas to women’s groups on topics of their interest that they suggest, in addition to more work in HIV/AIDS education. We started the series of Women’s Leadership Workshops with the idea of electing a representative for women´s needs for the COMUDE, as allowed by the Development Councils Law. We felt that the women needed more preparation on the topic before having the election, so I would recommend continuing with the workshops and strengthening the organization and confidence of the women, and then proceeding with the election.

As secondary projects I:
• Taught basic and advanced English classes to two community groups.
• Taught a series of classes in the high school related to citizen participation.
• Coached and trained elementary school girls’ soccer team and took them to Departmental and National Tournaments.
• Painted large world map on the basketball court of the local elementary school with my site mate. We solicited local donations for materials from local hardware stores, coordinated with high school students to execute the project, and trained teachers on activities to use with the map for educational purposes.
• Acted as Municipal Development Program representative on the Peace Corps Guatemala Gender and Development Committee. I was responsible for material and resource organization and distribution to fellow Municipal Development Volunteers and trained the participants to encourage the inclusion of gender sensitivity in their projects.
• Acted as Alta/Baja Verapaz Regional representative on the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Education Committee. I was responsible for production of HIV/AIDS educational materials and facilitated large (60-100 participants) regional and national “Training of Trainers” workshops. I taught participatory learning techniques and HIV/AIDS education and prevention to Guatemalan educators and professionals.

E. Women in Development and Community Development

The situation for the development of women in El Chol is not distinct from the rest of Guatemala. In El Chol, the Mayor is male with only one woman actively on the town council. There is some female participation in the COCODEs with 26% of members being women, but only 16% of the leadership positions (President, secretary, treasurer) are women. Women have historically had fewer opportunities for education and have higher illiteracy rates because with limited resources for education in a family, priority has often been given to sons while daughters were expected to help out around the house, care for younger siblings, and look for a husband to take care of her. This situation is improving with current generations, but much discrimination still exists. The machismo culture that places family/home responsibilities heavier on women, and having to ask permission from their husbands to leave the house makes citizen participation more challenging for women. Domestic violence is an acknowledged problem resulting in women having very low self esteem and fearful of speaking out or participating in public decision making processes.

Due to these conditions, the work of the OMMJ is very important. In order to address these challenges, more work needs to be done in with the following:
• Education on laws, rights, decentralization, COCODEs, COMUDE, via community trainings, newsletters, radio, etc.
• General support for women’s groups
• Political and financial support for the OMMJ
• Literacy campaigns
• Involvement in community activities that support girls/women’s development, such as sports teams or other social/cultural activities.
• Seek NGO support
• Family planning/reproduction health/HIV education

F. Personal Thoughts

In the technical work of the volunteer, there are common problems that I faced such as the lack of transportation to the communities, the lack of financial resources in the Municipality and in the communities, the political agenda that dictates municipal development, the difficulty of communication with women in rural communities, the lack of support from male community mayors for women’s activities, and the limited coordination among various NGOs and the Municipality.

These problems will probably always exist in some form, so the volunteer must have much patience and understanding. In order to work around these challenges, a future volunteer might:
• Be creative with transportation out to the rural communities and solicit the use of the Municipal car when possible.
• Make sure that the OMMJ is included in the Municipal Budget with personnel and materials for activities.
• Continue to strongly solicit resources needed to run the OMMJ from the Municipality and other NGOs or governmental organizations with presence in the Municipality.
• Continue to improve communication between the Municipal Council and the municipal employees with meetings and reports.
• Send written invitations for meetings and workshops through community mayors, teachers, or other known persons.
• Sensitize men about the importance of participation of women in all levels of development and the system of development councils.
• Continue monthly inter-institutional meetings, letting participants know the date and time in advance and with reminders.

Since El Chol is a very small town, it is easy to get to know people and form solid friendships. People are eager to get to know you and eager to help you in any situation. However, male/female friendships are limited due to cultural norms. As a 25-year-old woman, it has been a little hard to make girl friends my age, since most are already married with kids and don’t necessarily have the freedom to leave the house to go to the park or come over for dinner, etc. Thus, my friendships here are different than those I had in the US, but no less meaningful or rewarding.

It can be very frustrating working in the Municipality. Guatemalan politics both on the national and local levels are very complicated. Guatemala is not a meritocracy; jobs and benefits are usually given based on who you know and favors owed rather than merit. There is much turn over with municipal employees due to these conditions and also the fact that the pay is low and never on time. (Salaries should be paid monthly, but often 2-4 months pass without payment). It is difficult to create sustainable projects and sad to see lost human resources with such turn over. Politics dictate everything. Despite efforts for transparency and following the spirit or intention of the system of development councils, politics determine which communities are benefited for any project or program. It is important as a Peace Corps volunteer to seek means to increase transparency and more fair distribution of benefits, and when not possible, to distance oneself as much as possible from this drama.

Working directly with rural women has been the most challenging and rewarding aspect of my work as a volunteer. Due to the situation of the culture of machismo which brings discrimination and even abuse against women, Guatemalan females, especially in the rural areas, have limited opportunities and low self esteem. In certain situations, just asking a woman to say her name in public causes her to giggle, hide her face, become extremely embarrassed and incapable of responding. It is very rewarding to see women build confidence in themselves and be able to speak in public.

Religious beliefs, both Catholic and Evangelical, are very strong here and a fatalistic outlook on life on common. For example, when asking a group of women what they wanted their community to be like in ten years, one woman responded that only God knows if we will be alive in ten years so there is no point in bothering to think about it. But for every woman with her attitude, there is perhaps another optimistic woman working hard to bring up her family and her community from their current conditions, taking an active, rather than passive role in what happens in her life. It is important to encourage women and motivate them to see the positive side of life and their role in improving it. I also have learned so much from the women here and they are truly an inspiration for me.

In the end, the volunteer experience is truly rewarding. Oftentimes we may not even know that effect we have had on individuals’ lives. It is important to keep positive and look for the small changes, and focus on relationships with people.

G. Views on Peace Corps’ role

El Chol is surprisingly developed for such a small town that is so secluded from any big city. There is a lot of commerce and building going on, with many family members sending money home from the US. At times, the volunteer can feel like people here do not need as much help as in other places – that although they are still behind in many areas, there are other towns that could use a volunteer much more. However, even though El Chol is more developed than some other places, there are still many poor or disempowered families in town and in the aldeas, and all are in need.

It is important to keep in mind the history of paternalism with development work in Guatemala. In some cases people in the communities do not value knowledge-based development with adult education, but prefer infrastructure projects or programs that give material goods. The volunteer should maintain an awareness of this situation and not continue the paternalism that has been taking place in this country for decades. For this reason, I think that Peace Corps is one of the few organizations that genuinely gets development work right. While no organization is perfect, Peace Corps allows people the time and opportunity to really get to know a community and its people before attempting development projects with them, not for them. As volunteers we serve as a human resource rather than a checkbook, teaching, training, and sharing rather than giving, giving, giving. We have the tools and the support, and it is up to each one of us to do what we can to help the people of Guatemala to the best of our ability.

I believe the role of a Peace Corps volunteer exchange knowledge, experiences, and ideas, learning and teaching simultaneously. It is very difficult to teach people from a culture and community that you know nothing about so it is important to learn the customs, the language, the worldview, and the sensitivities of the people before you begin to teach. I also believe a volunteer should be open to trying new things, making new friendships and slow to judge. A volunteer goes through many different stages of emotion and it is often hard to adapt to a new culture, but it is important to remember that we are guests in this country, in each community, and in each home.

In terms of Peace Corps’ mission, we are supposed to be bridging the gap between the two cultures while doing development work. I have found it very rewarding to tell people here was it is “really” like in the US, since most of their concept of it comes from the media. It has also been special sharing Guatemalan culture with friends and family through pictures, stories, a blog, and their visits there.

Lessons learned:
• It is important to maintain good communication with the Municipal Mayor and Municipal Council through written reports, formal meetings, and informal advisories.
• Annual, monthly, weekly, and daily planning is very important with coworkers.
• Take advantage of the knowledge, resources, advice, contacts, and community organization of the NGOs present.
• Talk a lot with everyone; make professional relationships and many friendships.
• Look for people who want to work with you such as teachers, youth, community leaders, neighbors, etc.
• Always be a good example of an independent professional woman without tolerance for machismo, abuse, discrimination, or disrespect.
• Have patience with everything, but keep fighting the good fight with perseverance and a positive and optimistic attitude!

Good byes and the end.

2009-11-05T07:08:00.002-08:00

I went to the preschool and sixth grade graduation ceremony of the Trapiche Viejo school with one of my friends whose daughter was graduating from sixth grade and whose niece and nephew from preschool. She doesn´t have a camera, so really wanted me to take pictures of the event. Many kids don´t continue studying passed sixth grade (and some don´t even make it that far), so it´s a big deal. It was a really cute ceremony, except that the Mayor was the sponsor of the event and was supposed to give the welcome speech, so they waited two hours to start (one hour is normal waiting time here) and he never showed up. It was really cute watching each kids parents or family member pass to the front to congratulate their kid and take pictures with the teachers and the director. There was one father who went up alone and shook his kid’s hand, (what parent shakes hands with their kid for their graduation?) then paused, then gave him a rough hug pulling the kid’s head to his chest and went he went back to his seat, you could see the dad was crying and the kid was rubbing his eyes and shaking his head like he was crying too. I think the public witnesses the first hug that dad ever gave to his son.

At a woman´s solicitation, we went and did a charla (“chat”) in the very far out aldea of Pacoc. It is technically part of El Chol, but it´s on the other side of the mountains closer to Rabinal and more culturally similar to there, so it is a very forgotten little settlement. A lady that lives there has been participating in our Municipal Womens Leaders conferences and she invited us out there since there´s not much support that goes there. Doña Mari is a super spunky lady that is chatty, smiley, and gets excited about everything while her neighbors that came that were the shyest group of women I have even met here who were too shy to even tell you their name. They also speak shaky Spanish since their mother tongue is A’chí. We had a great time though. Her house is in the middle of nowhere on a precipice, looking out on a gorgeous green valley with view almost all the way around. She has all kinds of plants growing and chicken, dogs, pigs, and little kids under foot. When we showed up, she gave us lemonade (never mind the source of the water) and homemade bread. We did an activity on self-esteem and women’s rights that they accepted very well. By the end they were laughing and enjoying themselves and had gotten over their shyness, slightly. At the end of the activity, Doña Mari served us arroz con leche (rice with milk), a sweetened hot drink made with cinnamon. Her three daughters were adorable taking a hundred photos of me on their cell phone. She also sent us home with cooked guisquil, a green spiny squash. It was such a nice experience it made me wish that we had started going there early on.

We did our last HIV/AIDS workshop together from the Women’s Office in El Amatillo. This is a mostly indigenous rural community with very shy women, mostly illiterate, who are not used to talking about such topics. We started off with about 25 women there, part way through it started to drizzle so a bunch of them left before they thought it might rain harder as the excuse, but really because they didn’t really want to be there learning about HIV. There were about 8 that stayed through the whole thing, and most of them weren’t really paying attention. So naturally I was pretty bummed about the whole thing. However, there were two women who were paying particularly close attention and asking questions. That’s pretty much development work in a nutshell. It’s slow, poco a poco, (little by little), and you have to be satisfied with small results like 2 out of 25 women really grasping an HIV workshop. You have to find the success in that those two people, even though only two, were two people who weren’t informed before, but maybe are more empowered now. That about sums it up. Frustrating as hell, but worth it for the little successes.

I went and saw a fellow volunteer’s project in Granados when she coordinated the construction of additional classrooms for the elementary school out of plastic bottles filled with trash. Really cool way to involve the community, reuse trash, and raise environmental awareness. It was an amazing project and I am so proud of her.

Leaving here is a BIG process of good bye activities with every sector. I had an awesome good bye excursion to a swimming pool in Granados with my little soccer girls and their families and my family that a few soccer moms helped me plan. We all piled into a big truck used for carrying construction supplies, standing up holding onto the iron bars and bouncing our way along the dirt road. I organized all the food, getting tortillas, meat to grill, refried beans, salad, and sodas for almost 50 people. I was greatly pleased when there was plenty of food and everyone said it was delicious. We were there all day long from 10 am til 4:30 there girls ridiculously happy playing in the water and the parents and families enjoying themselves too. It’s not every day they go doing something fun and different like that. I printed out pictures from the Departmental Games tournament and gave each girl a copy. It was a great day and great memories.

I had a good bye lunch in La Ciénega where the ladies killed a chicken in my honor and made a delicious stew. I made them recipe books with a collection of all the recipes we had made together with photos of them and cute graphics of smiling carrots and what not. They were quite pleased. The trek out there was rather exciting since we ran into many cows which we were warned were quite ferocious. We ended up shooing them quite a long ways before we found an escape path to get around them. Since I´m not accustomed to herding cattle, I yelled at them what seemed natural in Spanish, which was “Échense chuchos!” which translates as “get out of here street dogs!” My compañeras just about peed their pants laughing at me yelling that.

There was a good bye/Halloween party with Peace Corps volunteers from the Verapaces region at the cabin in Tactic, the usual site of our regional gatherings. The theme was superheroes and people went all out. I wore a beautiful apron the indigenous women wear as a cape.

I did a ceremony of the giving of diplomas/good bye party for my English students, one for each class. I baked a congratulations cake and we celebrated in my house and they were all very appreciative of the classes and the gesture.
My closest muni girls, being the coordinators of the Womens Office and the Planning Office and the secretary all came over to my house for an intimate little good bye parties with just us. They brought the traditional Guatemalan snack food of sandwiches made with white bread, processed ham, ketchup, and mayo and orange soda to drink. It was quite precious.

The next day we did one with the whole muni in the afternoon after work on my last day. We ate hamburgers and drank hot chocolate and every single person that works in the muni gave words, meaning a little speech about me. And then of course I had to give words. It was a cute formal affair and made me feel all special and fuzzy inside. They gave me a lovely stuffed animal of a pink dog on a red velvet heart and a banner than they all signed.

My host family did a really sweet good bye dinner for me with the whole family. They made their specialty of “Pollo en Pepsi”, chicken in Pepsi, as in the soda. The sauce is actually made with Pepsi soda. Dona Hilda gave a very tearful speech before the meal, telling me that I will always be part of the family, that they love me very much, and that the meal was very simple, but the least she could do. It made me cry too and I had to give a speech, of course, thanking them and giving my most heartfelt sentiments.

My old site mate came back and surprised me! I was so excited and had no idea she was coming, so we got to catch up and she helped me so much in every way in my moving out process.

My last day in El Chol was All Saints Day. I went to the cemetery and saw families there fixing up the graves of their loved ones, laying flowers, pine branches, candles, soda, oranges, and sharing a meal together. There was live marimba music and tons of kids flying kites in the soccer field. It was cool since there were lots of people there I could go around and say good byes, having the same conversation with each one. My last few days were kind of a constant flow of people stopping by my house with good words and gifts. It was very intense and very emotional, but what it needed to be. My feelings about leaving are so mixed up and complex; it’s so complicated.

So now I have left El Chol, sad and happy, I am. Did all the Peace Corps paperwork, signatures, reports, and bureaucratic stuff. Sadly saying good bye to all my closest Peace Corps friends. Heading out on a bus to Honduras, traveling through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, taking a sailboat to Colombia, and traveling through Ecuador and Peru. Flying back to the states from Lima in time for Christmas.
Thank you to everyone for all your support in this crazy adventure I’ve been on. Can’t wait to see you all soon!!!

Independence Day, COS, Dueñas feria, 25th birthday, library, bad bananas, home stretch…

2009-10-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

Independence day on September 15th was well celebrated. The thing is, as most celebrations in Guatemala, it´s not just the day, but the entire week leading up to it. So every afternoon for the preceding week there were school presentations of traditional dances, complete with the burning of the bull and devil where they set off firecrackers that are strapped to some one while they dance around. Pure craziness. Following the presentations is the sale of all the traditional foods from the region that each kid brings. But there isn´t that much quantity, so everyone pushes to get at the good food stands before everything runs out. I enjoyed delicious pinol, atol, ceviche, tostadas, torejas, manjar, etc.

To celebrate our completion of service, almost our entire group, or what´s left of us (we have lost five for various reasons along the way), went to the beach on the Pacific Coast at Monterrico where we have celebrated occasions in the past. It was a delightful time hanging out all together celebrating our service and discussing what comes next for us. The general drift is go back to the states, live with family, look for a job, and for some apply to grad school. It´s tough times for job hunting, despite this awesome experience we now all have. We all cooked meals together, splashed in the ocean, lounged in the pool, played beach volleyball, and danced into the night, soaking in our last time together as a group.

Our beach extravaganza was followed by our official Peace Corps Close of Service Conference. This three day conference in a nice colonial hotel in Antigua with delicious food was super helpful in terms of processing our service, preparing to leave, and looking at next steps. We covered all the PC paperwork and drama of closing bank accounts and getting flights, medical stuff, review of aspiration statements and letters to ourselves that we wrote before service, accomplishments during service, grad school options, job searches and interviews, evaluation of PC Guatemala and our respective programs. It was all rather emotional too with tears because the good byes started, we showed a slideshow of a selection of our photos with each other, and our muni program supervisor is retiring after 27 years working for Peace Corps and we are his final group. Our final night we got all dressed up fancy for dinner and did an activity where we guessed each others´ five year plans that we had each prepared anonymously.

The women´s soccer tournament continues with games every Sunday. Our team is doing well and it´s lots of fun. The only thing is it is ridiculously hot under the heat of the midday sun playing in the dusty dirt field. And we don´t have uniforms so the colors always get confusing. And everyone always arrives late and both teams start playing without full teams, and slowly the teams fill out. Every week. It´s kind of ridiculous, but really fun.

I had to go to the Peace Corps Office to give a training to the new trainees on Gender and Development as part of my committee work. It was good to spend some more time with the trainees who are going to replace us and the training went well. I stayed with a volunteer friend in San Miguel Dueñas, near Antigua, which was celebrating their town fair. That´s sure a town that knows how to celebrate! It was intense. There were firecrackers and bombs going off all night. There was awesome live music, rides, games, and tons of food. We hit up the taco and churro stands multiple times and rode the giant ferris wheel forever since they don´t let you get off until there are more people to get on. We probably spent over 30 minutes up on that rickety, rusty machine, but had a great view of the awesome fireworks shows. The bands played well past 6 am and in the morning there were drunks passed out all over the streets.

I celebrated my 25th birthday here is El Chol with lots of good celebrations. My third birthday in Guatemala! The week before I celebrated with some girlfriends during the feria in Dueñas and they made me a cake. I did a piñata party with my host family on Sunday Oct. 4th where Doña Hilda made chuchitos and I made a funfetti cake and the kids thoroughly enjoyed whacking at the piñata and getting at all the goodies. A couple of the sisters from the house gave me framed photos of their family that were really cute. Then on my birthday I received many hugs and good wishes and many “may that God bless you and that He give you many more years of life.” After work my coworkers from the muni threw me a little party at one of their houses with a little duck/chicken piñata and food a cake and jacks tournament. After that I had my English students over and I baked a pizza, their favorite, and we drank micheladas. All in all, a great day well celebrated.

A little while ago we organized a library improvement committee here in El Chol since the library here, well, sucks. And we´ve been super lucky and got various institutions, both private and public to donate books. We´ve gotten donations of a few hundred books of various types, the most importante being some children´s books that were seriously lacking. Hopefully these efforts continue since we have visions of creating a children´s corner, story hour with activities, study groups for older kids, etc.

With all the problems with malnutrition and no rain and all that, there have been way more food donations and distribution from institutions and the government here. Of course that causes all sorts of problems of how to distribute the goods. Really, there is no good way to do it. They had each community mayor make a list of all the people in their communities, and then separated out all the corn, beans, oil, sugar, etc. that they are giving away into bags and had all the people come to town. But of course there are always problems with people who didn’t make it onto the list, and communities that weren´t accounted for at all due to political reasons. Drama. Also, there was a huge donation of Chiquita bananas, which were intended for the schools. Well, they didn´t get distributed so when they started to rot, they started just giving them away to the municipal employees and people and the street and just whoever in general. The garbage cans in the muni were full of banana peels. Quite disheartening.

Well, I´m coming down the homestretch here! Less than one month to go being in the Peace Corps. I´m trying to get prepared for my departure since there is so much to do between preparing my replacement, organizing materials and documents, cleaning out my house and giving stuff away, getting Peace Corps paperwork in order, assembling thank you cards and parting gifts, and packing. It´s a very complex process on the one hand being so excited to come home and see everyone, and on the other it being so hard to say good bye to everyone here not knowing if/when I´ll see them again.

Brother and Sister visit, muni work, God willing, Departmental Games, drought, new volunteers, Paris Hilton, Lake house, sad news, Esquipulas

2009-09-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Eight clowns and a gringa go to El Chol

2009-07-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

As they do from time to time, the communities in San Juan Sacatepéquez en route to El Chol were protesting, this time against a cement factory that one of the biggest companies in Guatemala wants to put in their town. The company says it will bring jobs, the community says it will only bring pollution. So they blocked the roads and protested several days in the town and in the capital. Consequently, there was no transportation to El Chol for several days. I was coming back from Antigua and was trying to figure out what I would do to get back. My site mate called me and informed me that a group of clowns were coming to El Chol to do an educational act about HIV/AIDS and since they didn’t know how to get here, it worked out perfectly that I would show them the way and they would give me a ride. But as it goes, they left late and then there was a landslide on the route they were taking and they ended up super late so I was waiting in the town of San Lucas for six hours for these clowns. There is only so much coffee you can drink at one café and I think the security guards in the commercial center I was waiting at were a bit sketched out by me wandering around so much for so many hours. I guess it was worth it though since I got a ride and was well entertained the whole time. That is how the amusing thought occurred to me that I, the gringa, was in a van with eight clowns. They clowns were all university students and lots of fun. In El Chol they gave their presentation complete with one of the clowns in a giant condom suit and we played some great pickup basketball and soccer games in the park the two nights they were there.

As part of our work in the Women’s Office we go out to the communities where we are invited to various types of workshops with them. We went to the community of San Francisco to do a self-esteem workshop with the women there. It was a small group but went really nicely. We all sat in a circle and did various types of activities to get conversation going about self-esteem. For example, having them write their name (or draw a picture) on a piece of paper and tear off pieces for situations that they share of things that have happened to them to hurt their self-esteem…then do the reverse and have them put the puzzle back together with examples of situations that have helped their self-esteem not only to increase awareness of the effects on their self worth, but also to recognize the effects of their own actions on the self esteem of others (like the huge problem of gossip in small communities). For these women, to some no one has even mentioned self-esteem to them before and with so many factors going against their feelings of self worth, including poverty and the machismo society they live in, it is an essential topic that forms the base of citizen participation and community development.

Recently I also conducted a training for a group of women in the Trapiche Viejo community on HIV/AIDS. It went really well, considering the challenge of adapting the activities to a group of mostly illiterate women. I used lots of props like to show the three methods of transmission, (blood, mother to baby, and sexual) I constantly referred to a syringe, a baby doll, and a pair of panties that I would hold up and wave around. This elicited lots of laughter, but I hope it was effective to get the ideas across. We also did skits of applicable situations to make the topic seems more real to them. This was actually the second time we had attempted to do the workshop (which had been asked for when we conducted our community diagnostic) but the first time it started raining so hard that you couldn’t hear a word I was saying over the noise the raindrops made on the tin roof of the school. This time it didn’t start raining til near the end, so I almost finished the workshop with them being able to hear me. I think that working with women’s groups on this topic is almost the most challenging because in this society they are the ones with the least amount of control or perceived control over their lives, especially their sexuality. Sexual promiscuity among men is culturally accepted and even promoted, but a wife telling her husband to use a condom may cause many problems in the relationship where women have mentioned that their husbands become very suspicious. It is difficult to answer the questions that arise that have to do with these types of cultural barriers because so much of it has to do with much more basic issues of machismo, self-esteem, trust, and communication skills. It is good to start getting these topics out into the open, especially in the rural areas where women have never received any kind of orientation of any topic relating to sexuality or HIV/AIDS and as we also emphasis, values begin at home so it is up to them as mothers to educate their children on these topics.

The Women’s Office hosted our Second Conference of Women Leaders on June 25th which was another big success. We covered the topic of community development and the System of Development Councils and an invited psychologist talked about women’s rights, and a representative from the Ministry of the Economy gave a motivational presentation on recognizing themselves as businesswomen and promoting small income generation economic activities. The women got into groups and came up with ideas for simple businesses that don’t exist here but could do well, such as a floral shop or a cake shop. The event was a big success and ended with a nice lunch provided by the muni.

In following with our goals of training women in various topics and promoting small income generation projects, we were planning a course to train a group on how to make cheese, given by the national vocational training academy (INTECAP). There are many families that have cows, and in the rainy season there is grass for them to eat, so they give milk, and various women know how to make one kind of fresh cheese. But they only know how to make one kind so the idea was to train women who didn’t know how to make to learn, and for those that already know, to perfect their skills and learn how to make other varieties to sell here. We tried to tell everyone about it, both in the urban and rural areas and we posted signs and information everywhere. The Women’s Office Coordinator and I both had high interest in learning as well, but unfortunately we didn’t get enough people signed up to bring the instructor in from the capital.

We received the opportunity to participate in a project to build houses for single mothers at very low costs, essentially with all the materials provided and they would just have to pay for the labor. So we got 25 women listed as beneficiaries for the project and they had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get all the paperwork done and everything. It has been very difficult to coordinate since the project came from the Women’s Commission from the Departmental Development Council which we as the Women’s Office participate in, but there are many different government institutions involved and various other political players that have made executing the project a mess of politics and red tape.

We continue to work with the Municipal Council of Children and Adolescents (COMUNA), except now on our own without the help of the NGO that had been promoting the project. We got the group together and I helped plan the agenda, did some team building activities, and did a training on the System of Development Councils for the kids. We then created an action plan which they rehearsed, and then presented at the following COMUDE meeting.

In the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE) we reorganized the commissions for the second time with the hope of them sticking. The idea is that the City Council is organized into the same commissions so that each member is responsible for a certain one, and then leads the same one as part of the COMUDE where other NGOs and civil society participate. We did a training with one of the NGOs to orient everyone again on the work of the commissions and elaborate their yearly work plans (June isn’t too late to start, right?)

Municipal newsletter was done for the first time done without me when I was away for Peace Corps activities. I was thrilled to come back and see it actually printed and photocopied and being distributed while I hadn’t been there. It was nice because I have been very involved in the production of every issue since I got here so it’s nice to see that the people I have helped train now do it themselves. There is some hope for sustainability in the muni!

The beginning of July started with the All Volunteer conference which is the only time all year when all Peace Corps Guatemala folks get together first for a professional development conference of networking with NGOs to work more effectively in our sites, and then focusing on life after PC with resume writing, grad school grants, etc. Kelly and I took advantage of the opportunity to pay our host families in Alotenango a visit. It had been awhile, but we were welcomed warmly with open arms as always and made me sad to think that I’ll only have a few more opportunities to visit them before I go. Just great families.

My best friend Jesse came to visit again!!! We had an awesome time hanging out and doing cool stuff. She was there for the annual Peace Corps 4th of July party complete with an American style BBQ and lots of American hip hop played, resulting in a great dance party as we all celebrated our American-ness. Go America.
Then we made the trek out to El Chol again and she accompanied me to the CODEDE meeting, the Departmental Development Council meeting in which all the municipal mayors from the eight municipalities of the department of Baja Verapaz were present in El Chol hosting the event. In sum it was a long boring meeting, but important to be there as our housing project for single mothers was discussed and people put in their two cents about how it shouldn’t be politicized and the governor responded how it wasn’t being. Hmm. They also discussed all the projects that are being executed with funds approved by the Council and how all the 2008 projects are behind schedule and requested more time to finish them, and the 2009 projects haven’t even been started yet. No surprises there. Anyway, it was a rather amusing meeting because there was a scheduled protest by all the people in El Chol with motorcycles who were upset about the new law requiring them to wear a helmet and vest with reflective symbols with the license plate registration. It is a law attempting to reduce the amount of crime that takes place with assaults from motorcycles (mainly in the capital), to allow the police to easily identify people, but many people are against it (especially in the rural areas). So they were expecting a big thing and brought the army in, I’m not exactly sure if it was for that purpose or to keep general calm since it was a meeting of lots of important people, but either way the soldiers were patrolling the perimeter and keeping a good eye on things. It was a generally jovial affair with music playing, tamales given out upon arriving for breakfast, chicken salad sandwiches for a snack time, and seafood stew complete with a whole crab for each person for lunch and beers for the men that wanted to partake. The municipal employees, who haven’t been paid in four months, woefully ate their missing salaries.
Our time in El Chol continued well, Jesse came with me to my English classes and my soccer practice. All the girls remembered her from the previous year and were excited to see her again. In general people (me included) thought that it was pretty cool that she liked El Chol so much that she wanted to come back. People are pretty proud of their town and like that foreigners like it. We participated in a reforestation project that my site mate had organized where students from various schools planted around 2000 trees on lands surrounding town. There is so much deforestation that happens here in consequence of firewood being the main source of cooking fuel, that projects like this are so needed. It was cute cause they did a march through the town before the planting with each kid holding their sapling tree so it was a powerful image with a couple thousand kids parading through the streets holding up banners and carrying the saplings. The day of environment continued with a cultural night in the market with the usual fanfare of loud music and the whole town coming out to see what the excitement was about. The kids did some really clever skits relating to the environment and there was a magician too from Guate who entertained to their delight.
The next day we made the long journey to the town of Lanquin, Alta Verapaz where if you look at a map, it doesn’t look like it´s that far from El Chol, but it took us almost 10 hours to get there from the time we left my house at 5:00 am, including time we stopped to get coffee in Salamá and eat in Cobán and such, but still, a long trip. We went to see the famous bat-filled Caves of Lanquin where the river is born inside the caves. It was a rather physically challenging excursion as we had to shimmy our way up and down through the caves and not fall on the slippery surfaces, including one move where we had to cross this cavern with a full body reach to the slippery rocks on the other side. The caves are used by the Keqchí people for ceremonies and such and there are altars with candles inside. Thankfully I felt my claustrophobia under control and Jesse kept her fear of heights at bay as well. The really cool part was that right at dusk, the millions and millions of bats make their exodus into the night to hunt for food so as we stood in the pitch darkness, there were all these bats flying all around us. Pretty crazy. The next we did the tour of Semuc Champey. We started the day by swinging off a high embankment into the river off a rope swing where we had to swim out quickly to avoid being carried off by the current. We then got inner tubes and went tubing down the river a ways. Then we went in some other caves where we had to wade through water up to our waists and swim in some parts holding candles for light. At some parts we had to climb rope ladders and pass under a waterfall that was there inside. Finally we spent the afternoon swimming and lounging in the teal blue series of pools that are Semuc Champey where a surging river splits and part goes underground, and the rest tranquilly passes over the series of clear pools perfect for wading and swimming. It is a stunning natural beauty. Dinner at the hostel was delicious with good chats with other travelers from all over the world.
The next day we went back to Antigua and stayed at this awesome refuge in a little village above Antigua where our room was in a tree house. That´s right, the structure was built around the bed up in a tree. It was very rustic, but comfortable with the most stunning view of the villages surrounding Antigua in a green valley and the three volcanoes surrounding it all. At night there was a lightning storm between the volcanoes that lit up the sky. All in all it was a great trip with the BFF.

One of our friends, the woman that does the cleaning in the muni, invited my site mate and I over for dinner at her house as a goodbye for her. She is a woman that I admire very much. She is a single mom and works so hard to pay off her Habitat for Humanity house and bring up her three kids who are so well behaved, smart, fun, respectful, and insightful. I love going to her house cause we always have a good time and I love watching their family interactions. That night we played the card game Uno which got quite exciting.

This year I am so much more aware of the seasons and corresponding agricultural activities. The corn is getting tall, everything super green and pretty and looks all tropical-like because of the rains.

Making chili in the campo, getting stuck in a barbed wire fence, medicinal plants, municipal soccer tournament, pork flu…

2009-06-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Reaching “that” point, Todos Santos – Nebaj hike, Women’s Office diagnostic, friends visit

2009-06-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

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.

El Mirador trip for Semana Santa

2009-04-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

Semana Santa, Holy Week before Easter, is a big deal in Guatemala. Bigger than Christmas I would say. Most of the week is given as vacation and everyone takes advantage to visit family and go to the lakes, rivers, oceans, and water parks since it is also the hottest time of year being right before the rainy season starts. The public buses are crazy-crowded and thefts increase dramatically. So this year a group of us Peace Corps volunteers decided to go do a five day hike in the jungle to Mayan ruins of El Mirador in the northernmost part of Guatemala in the department of Petén. Getting up to Flores from El Chol presented some challenges as it’s about a 12 hour trip on five buses from El Chol to Rabinal, to Salamá, to El Rancho (essentially a filthy truck stop where we waited for over an hour for a bus in blazing mid-day heat eating ripe mangos and inhaling only pure black exhaust from all the traffic and observing the prostitutes coming out of the bars as full buses passed and wouldn’t let us on), to Rio Hondo, where we scored seats on a bus coming from El Salvador up to Flores. We stayed at a cute Hostel and left early the next morning for our jungle trek.

So we got a local guide from the community of Carmelita which is an aldea of the municipality of San Andrés, Petén to take us on the hike. We hiked two days in to the ruins, spent a day checking them out, and hiked two days out. We had mules with us that carried our food, water, packs, and supplies. The walk itself was tough but manageable since it is almost entirely flat and shaded most of the way. We walked between 5 and 7 hours a day at a good pace for a total of an estimated 70 miles or 110 km over the five days. (No one was really sure of the mileage, the guide didn’t really know, and the guys we ran into with GPS only took start and end points rather than the path taken).

We slept in tents on the ground with a sheet as bedding and our arms as pillows. We ate a lot of white bread and canned tuna en route but at camp ate lots of eggs and beans and other delicious camping foods such as spaghetti and vegetable stew. Breakfast was a delicious one cup meal of instant coffee, sugar, powdered milk, Nesquick, and cornflakes all mixed together. Snacks were all the fresh fruits in season such as mangos, watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple. Fortunately we avoided the scorpions, pumas, and the deadly poisonous snakes whose bites have no cure. The ticks were another story and I picked off a total of six from my body that were in the process of burrowing in – supposedly there is no Lyme disease here though. We saw lots of monkeys (and heard more of the howler monkeys), cool spiders, geckos, and birds like toucans.

The ruins themselves were cool, but after having been to Tikal which is highly excavated, El Mirador was perhaps cooler in concept than in actual viewing. El Mirador is a whole ancient Mayan city from around the time of Christ which consists of a bunch of “complexes” and different temples and towers but are barely excavated and mostly look like piles of rocks still covered with vegetation. The cool part is that they were “discovered” less than 30 years ago and it is a hotbed of archeological excavation and research. It’s cool to think that you are climbing all over ancient uncovered temples. There were places where we got the guards to lift tarps to uncover newly found original wall carvings. There is scaffolding on various structures and all the stuff of the archeologists. It’s special that we got to go because we imagine that within a couple decades there will be significant excavation and the site will be accessible by vehicle and commercialized like Tikal.

Of the four nights we were out there, I was on top of a tower of a ruin for every single sunset (and one sunrise). It is quite breathtaking sitting atop an ancient temple above the canopy of the jungle taking in the views of the intense greenery and seeing other ruins poking out of the trees in the distance and on the horizon as the light changes and the sun plays with the clouds. You can see all the way to Tikal and other structures scattered about the region. We were there at the ruins on the exact night of the full moon so that was quite impressive so see as well. There was also a buzz about it being a very special night in the Mayan calendar when some stars aligned with the temples like every 12 years or something but never quite got the full story on that, but we were all waiting for something crazy to happen as we watched the moon rise and fill the sky.

So obviously backpacking there is nowhere to bathe yourself, but at the spots where we camped there was a swamp where you can get a bucket of brown water to make an attempt at it. After a long day walking in the jungle heat, I felt it quite necessary to make that attempt to at least remove a a layer of the dirt and salt that had built up on my skin. So I went with a friend and he kept watch in the other direction on the path while I stripped down and was there buck naked in the clearing in the forest splashing water on myself. All of a sudden a single file line of like seven Guatemalan guys appeared from the opposite direction of the forest from a path we hadn’t noticed. It was an awkward moment as I quickly grabbed my towel and stood there with it around me while they passed. Amazingly they said nothing and didn’t bother me in the least bit. We had a good laugh about it.
We talked with our guide and the assistant about the effect of this ecotourism project on their community. They have been receiving trainings from the government about how to interact with tourists, first aid, etc. to improve the project. There is controversy as to whether the park and protected area will stay in the hands of the government, or if it will be privatized. Would the protection of the forest be better and more efficiently enforced with a private entity? Would it take the jobs of the local guides away? The community is also divided between those that work a logging/rubber extraction/tourism cooperative and those that independently have organized themselves into groups that work together to guide the treks. It is interesting that since the ruins are a two day walk from the nearest community, the majority of the people that live there have never been to see the ruins. Driving to get to the community you pass vast deforested areas logged for the timber industry and burned expanses making room for agriculture. Effects on global warming, anyone?

There were 11 of us Peace Corps volunteers in our group along with a couple upper class kids from the capital, a guy from the Basque Country in Spain, and a Canadian guy. It was cool having the time to talk to everyone as I learned all about the autonomy and independence movement in the Basque Country, what it’s like to have body guards and live the rich life in Guatemala. It was also nice to have the chance to talk to fellow volunteers in depth about grad school, research interests, international development critiques, and future career and job possibilities since we are all leaving this year and starting to think about next steps.

Upon getting back to Flores from the trip we bought 50 giant ripe yummy mangos for 45 Quetzales (around 5 bucks) among the 15 of us to celebrate getting back. Eating whole mangos in a bus is a tricky business. You have to take of the peel with your teeth, eat the flesh while juice runs down your chin and arms and then suck the rest of the stringy fruit off the pit which then leaves your front teeth with mangos strings attractively hanging out and requiring flossing. It’s messy but oh-so-worth it. Flores is actually an island town in the middle of a lake, so when we got into town we all jumped into the lake for the most refreshing dip I’ve had in my whole life, since that swamp water rinse didn’t really do the trick.

Traveling back home on Saturday before Easter was a bit tricky since everyone is on vacation, including many bus drivers. We left Flores super early and were trying to get back to El Chol that same day, but it turned out to be impossible and so had to stay a night in Antigua. I was super frustrated, but it actually turned out to be really cool since Antigua is the most famous place in Central America for Semana Santa because of the elaborate processions including thousands of people that take place with impressive “carpets” made on the streets with colored sand, sawdust, and pine branches. Even though we had to pay quadruple to stay at the hostel we always stay at, we were super lucky to find a place to sleep. We got to see a night procession pass through the central park in front of the cathedral that was all lit up. Every person in the massive crowd was holding a candle and the air was thick and hazy with all the incense that was being burned. We watched the statues of Mary and Jesus pass by on giant wooden platforms that sway side to side being carried by gloved people wearing identical hooded purple robes. It is a very impressive display of religious devotion. At the hostel we enjoyed hot showers, ordering Domino’s pizza and applying exfoliating face masks. I spent Easter Sunday en route back to El Chol. The bus driver that I had called to ensure that he was working, evidently changed his mind and didn’t leave so we were facing the prospect of waiting in San Juan for five hours hoping that another bus would leave in the afternoon when luck struck us and a guy that my friend knows from her site drove by and gave us a ride back the 2 ½ hours to my site. Back to work on Monday with tons of stuff to do in the Women’s Office…

Soccer trip and other adventures

2009-04-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Going back a bit, I took 15 girls aged 8 to 12 to the National Games in Soccer for Elementary schools in Chimaltenango, about 5 hours from El Chol. The trip was a huge success! I had two official adult chaperones go with me and a few other parents go as well. It was a wonderful opportunity for the girls since the Ministry of Education paid for the trip and covered transportation, lodging, and food. We slept on the floor of a school there and ate all our meals cafeteria style with the hundreds of kids who were participating. It was actually the first time in all my time in this country that I have seen any food service worker use gloves. It was a trying since most of the time there was no water…so the toilets couldn’t flush and there was no where to wash your hands. There were pilas, but the girls washed their hair there and then the water got nasty. I didn’t bathe myself for the four days of the trip.
Like I said, it was trying. I was responsible for coordinating all the logistics with the driver of the bus, all the paperwork, getting meal tickets, figuring out where we needed to be and when, and everything else. Also for keeping track of the girls, making sure everyone had drinking water, that they brushed their teeth, that they ate (and didn´t eat too many sweets), that they had all the pieces of their uniform, taking them to the bathroom in the middle of the night (and listening to one poor little girl’s bowels explode). This trip was the first time that some of the girls had left the town. We left on a Saturday and along the way we stopped at the Dispensa, which is a chain of low cost grocery stores. They never have the opportunity to go to a grocery store and were all wide-eyed and eager to purchase candies and snacks. On Sunday morning there was a parade in which all the participants put on matching t-shirts and walked through the city and traffic was stopped on the Inter-American highway so that all the kids could cross. The parade started in the central park and ended in the Municipal Stadium where the event was inaugurated with the speeches and the National Anthem.
The girls played three games in total: the first against Sololá which we lost 1-5, the next day against Jutiapa (the national champions from the previous year) which we lost 0-11, and the third and most exciting against Chiquimula which we tied 1-1 and then won in penalty kicks. The moment that they won the last game, all the moms were crying and the girls were jumping up and down and screaming in excitement. I imagine they will almost remember that. I think they forgot that they had lost the other games and felt like they were the national champions. When we got back to El Chol, there were firecrackers set off and juices and cookies given by the mayor.
All in all the event was a great chance for the girls to see other parts of their country and meet other kids from all over, to play and feel special and important. I’d say it was part of my primary project by boosting girls´ self esteem to be confident women citizens and participate in their local government, eh? We still practice one afternoon a week and they keep asking me when we are going to take another trip.
13 of the 15 girls were from El Chol and the other two were from nearby Rabinal. Although Rabinal is only 24 km down the road, it is seen as being totally separate “on the other side of the mountains”. It is very different, ethnically (mostly indigenous), culturally (most women wear “corte” the traditional skirts), and linguistically (many people speak the Mayan language Achi). The people from El Chol often do not speak well of the people from Rabinal and there is much prejudice and discrimination. So when the girls from El Chol found out that two girls from Rabinal were going to play with them, oh how they complained and said they didn´t want to play with them and even worse if they wore corte (which it turned out they did). At first they didn´t mingle at all and the girls from Rabinal were very shy and didn´t talk much but by the end of the trip, they were talking and laughing and at least some of the barriers had been broken down, aided by the fact that they played soccer very well and one of them scored the goal in the first game. Guatemala is a complex country and I had never witnesses such overt racism as I have observed here because in the States it is politically incorrect and covert.

I continue to work with the Peace Corps committee on HIV/AIDS education and prevention. At the beginning of March we had our second National HIV/AIDS prevention workshop with the volunteers and their counterparts in which around 75 people participated in the two-day workshop. We gave them training on participatory education, community penetration such as analyzing attitudes, knowledge, and practices of the community related to the subject, the full four hour HIV/AIDS prevention workshop, and action plans of how to implement the training. According to their evaluations, it was another big success.

I keep in touch with my host family from Alotenango and paid them a visit in March and met the new trainee that they have living with them right now. They are such a wonderful family and wonderful friends of mine and it’s nice to always feel so welcome in their home. I gave them the business card of the restaurant where their nephew is working in Bellevue, WA that he gave me when I was home for Christmas. I also gave them a historical book of Alontenango with an old-time photo of a man and a women who died years ago that they had known that I salvaged from the garbage when we were cleaning out the office space for the Women´s Office in El Chol.

This year we saw many changes in the personnel of the Planning Office. We have a new coordinator, who is a woman (my age) who is finishing up her university studies in civil engineering. It is a positive influence on the office, but has been a bit challenging to get the rest of the guys in the office on board. We have a female secretary now too as the guy who was the secretary is now in a different department. We’re bringing the female power to the muni!

Although the main focus of my work this year has been with the Women´s Office, I continue to do projects with and support the Municipal Planning Office. In February we did a self-diagnostic of the COMUDE, the Municipal Development Council, which in its ideal state would be the space for discussion and solution of municipal topics and problems. We split all the participants from the various communities and institutions into focus groups in which they brainstormed and responded to questions and analyzed the functioning of the Council. Afterwards we put all the responses and suggestions into a document and presented the results. Right now we are awaiting a meeting with the city council to address the needs. One of the most pressing issues is that the COMUDE should be divided into work commissions such as health, education, environment, etc. but as of right now they only exist on paper and there is no actual functioning. We hope to improve this problem this year.

It is delightful, delicious mango season! The last time I went to the community La Ciénega to bake bread we made mango bread. The women were thrilled! You make it exactly like banana bread, except instead of mashed ripe bananas, you use a pulp of ripe mangos. It is absolutely delicious! I decided to do this type of bread with them because in that community there are tons of mango trees and they can´t ever eat all the mangos that they give and many fall to the ground and rot, so better to be taking advantage of local resources and putting them into bread.

In March I had to delight of friends from the States coming to visit, my dear dear friend Allie and her boyfriend Matt. We had a lovely time. I picked them up from the airport and we got directly on a chicken bus and headed to El Chol where we spent a few days. They came with me to my English class and also to my soccer practice where they dove right in and played with the girls. They came with me to the feria in the aldea Los Amates where we watched the coronation of the queen of the feria and went to the community dance afterwards where we all danced exuberantly. We then went to Lake Atitlán and stayed in a beautiful hotel overlooking the lake with gorgeous views. It was super fun to have them visit and like always, such a joy for me to show off El Chol and play tour guide in this beautiful country.

The weather has been super hot in El Chol and so we take advantage on the weekends to go play at the river either with my site mate when we BBQ´d hamburgers or with my family that I live with.

Doña Hilda is so sweet and always giving me food. They other day she gave me a dish of cooked beets and some piece of suspicious meat sticking out with a thick tendon attached. When I thanked her for the food, she asked me if I had enjoyed the pig´s foot and I sheepishly told her that I had not. Then the other day I stuck my head in the kitchen to say “good afternoon” and she waved at me with a pair of bloody pig´s feet and motioned to another pair on the table. Shudders went through me and she laughed.

Women's Office up and running!

2009-03-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

SO! We have the Municipal Women’s and Youth Office!!! As of January 15th, 2009 we started the office, known as the OMMJ for Oficina Municipal de la Mujer y la Juventud. In May of 2008 the project was approved by the city council, in November 2008 we got permission to conduct the interview process (the only formal transparent interview process based on merit that has taken place in this municipality), and in January we hired our coordinator. She is an awesome woman, a Home Economics teacher, very smart, very petite, very punctual. At the same time a recent high school grad (one of my former students from last year) was hired as the Youth and Children’s technician.

We started out with the three of us crowded in the Planning Office, a small space which already had five people working in it with five chairs. Supposedly the Civil Registry was supposed to leave with the new privatized national registry, but that hasn’t happened yet so we were without an office space. After exploring about around the muni, we requested permission to clean out a storage area/garbage pile that was off of the library. This work took us a few days getting dirty removing all the trash that had been there for decades. Water gets in during the rainy season so everything was moist. There were tools, pipes, furniture, papers, a sack of moldy bean seeds, an old scale for weighing crops, rakes to prevent the spread of forest fires, old typewriters and computer equipment, and several unidentifiable objects. There were boxes of old books dating back to the 1930´s piled high that disintegrated when you pulled them down. All the books were wet and moldy and the boxes fell apart. There were registries from the treasury office with payments of 38 cents from the 1950´s. I’m sure historians would have cringed to see all the history being thrown away, but they were really unusable. There were cockroaches, spiders, evidence of rats, and a fossil of a toad that had met an unfortunate fate. Rumor has it that before being a storage/garbage room that is was the municipal jail when there was no presence of the national police force. Finally we got everything cleaned out, got the order for some of the muchachos that work for the muni to paint the space. We had to wait a few more days to get the wiring fixed so we could turn on the light. We salvaged a few rickety chairs from the trash to paint and they looked as good as new (as long as you sit carefully on them). We worked that way for a few weeks and then finally the municipal secretary gave us an old desk from who knows where so we finally had a place to write at least. We put the name of our office and mounted it on construction paper to tape to the door. Each little step we got more and more excited about the space. Even though it has no windows, there are doors on either side so at least there is air that gets in, once the smell of bleach and gasoline cleared out.

Our first task was to get the word out that we existed, to the communities and to the institutions working in the municipality. This included lots of meetings and explaining. In my time here I've accumulated a ton of materials about the laws, rights, citizen participation, etc. and since the two employees had lots to learn, they spent quite a bit of time familiarizing themselves with all that. The coordinator had never used a computer before, so training her on that has also been a big task. She knew how to type on a typewriter, but I've been training her on Windows, Word, and Excel and we’ve set her up with an email account to put her in direct contact with the institutions.

After working since January, in mid-March we finally got her contract finalized after many circles round and round the muni and then at the end of March she got her first pay check! I was so excited that day I was jumping up and down since the municipal employees only get paid once every few months, I had been holding my breath ever since she started working there, afraid somehow that she would never get paid. But she did! Success!

March 26th we had our first big event put on by our office…El Primer Encuentro Municipal de Lideresas (First Municipal Gathering of Women Leaders). We invited all the women who are part of the COCODES (Community Development Councils), as least written down as being part of them on paper at least, to an event in the town. We did workshops on self-esteem, the importance of women in development, and community organization. We facilitated the event and the workshops as the Women’s Office with the help of the Municipal Planning Office and invited facilitators from various NGO’s to participate. The goal of the invent was to promote boost women’s confidence in their participation in the Development Council and empower then to take part in decision making processes, such as prioritizing projects in their communities. The women were so excited to have been invited and that we were taking them into account, since there is so much machismo in this country that women are constantly being overlooked and not invited to things. In fact, we became aware that some of the male community leaders that we had sent the written invitations to didn’t distribute them, and lied to us and told them that they had. There are just so many barriers to including women in these processes it is very frustrating. These are the very women who are supposedly elected by their communities to represent them, and they tell us that they are constantly being excluded from the meeting of the very group that they are a part of. Anyway, so that’s why it was so cool that we did this. It was a great opportunity to debut the Women’s Office and get a start on organizing women’s groups in the rural communities. It was also just so nice for the women to be able to leave their houses for a time and play and laugh and learn and share with other women since they are just stuck in their houses all day long with household chores and taking care of their kids, there are so few opportunities for them to get out and have the spaces to enjoy and learn like that. We decorated the space with balloons and posters of inspirational messages and played lots of games and had all kinds of participatory activities. The municipality covered the costs of providing snacks and lunch for the women (and the inevitable children that are stuck to them). It was a big success and we are already planning the next event. I was so proud of my coordinator for putting so much work and planning into everything and she felt so good for the accomplishment.

So that’s how we’ve started out…little by little. I feel so proud to have accomplished starting this office, since it was one of my major goals in the Peace Corps. There is a good reason why Peace Corps is for two years. It really is in the second year when everything magically comes together and stuff gets done. I have tons of work now and am feeling very fulfilled in what I’m doing in the role of training the coordinator and the technician, guiding the planning process and long term goals, and helping execute special events and trainings. Woo hoo!

Soccer trip, electricity inauguration, economy, Valentines Day...etc.

2009-02-18T10:02:00.000-08:00

As the new year started, I continued to have soccer practice with my group of elementary school girls. One day I received a call from the Departmental coordinator of Physical Education inviting our group to represent the department of Baja Verapaz in the National Physical Education Games in Chimaltenango at the end of February. I guess he was talking one day in the departmental capital to one of the city councilmen and that’s how he found out about my group and got my number. Anyway, it’s a big honor and a really cool opportunity for the girls to go play with kids from all over the country and leave this town, some of them for the first time. The Ministry will be covering the costs of transportation, food, and organizing lodging in a school there, so it makes the trip possible for kids that wouldn’t be able to pay. So in the meantime I've been doing all the logistical organizing to make this trip possible. It hasn’t been easy. Of course the girls were all for it, it’s a matter of convincing the parents to let them go. Getting permission here is tricky, whether it’s a child from a parent or a wife from her husband. So I made official notes with the information and an invitation to a parents meeting and delivered them door to door to twenty houses of girls who had come out to practice with the help of one of the girls in my house. Only about seven parents showed up (I needed 15 girls) so that wasn’t quite enough. I was about to scrap the idea right there and think that I was crazy for even trying, but one of the moms said that she would go around with me and muster up more interest. So I made more house calls another day with her and little by little we got more parents on board. After the fourth meeting and several more house calls to confirm with parents who didn’t come to the meeting, but whose daughters said they got permission. During these meetings we picked the other two responsible adults who will be going with us as chaperones. Then came all paperwork, nagging the girls and their parents to give me copies of their birth certificates, going to their school on several occasions to get a letting from the director for permission and proving that they attended that school, figuring out uniforms, taking their pictures and getting them printed for their ID cards. It was REALLY annoying and I had to keep repeating the mantra in my head of how great of an opportunity this is going to be for them. I was having several conversations a week with the coordinator who had invited us about the logistics and requirement. Well the week that I was going to turn the paperwork, he called for a list of the names and birthdates and informed me that the girls who were born in 1996 couldn’t go because they would turn 13 this year, even though during the event they would be 12 during the event. This was a very important detail that he had failed to mention to me earlier, so I had to have a sad conversation with two of the girls telling them that they couldn’t go anymore. Then I had parents upset with me because their daughters were upset. Then a girl who was cousins with one of them then told me that her mom wouldn’t let her go if her cousin wasn’t going, so I had to make another house call and go in and drink coffee and eat stale bread while I explained the situation. So anyway, the trip is for this weekend....wish us luck!!!

So the other weekend I had the privilege of attending a ceremony to inaugurate the project of introducing electricity in the community where I bake bread. The project was one of the projects done with financing from the System of Development Councils approved at the departmental level. When I first came to El Chol, I had met the super smart female community mayor and she told me that “ya mero” (very soon) they would have the project finished. Well, 14 months later it happened. I had intended to walk there (about an hour) but got lucky and caught a ride in the back of the mayor’s pickup as he was heading out of town and made our way to the rural village and on the bumpy dirt road barely hanging on around the curves. We got there and there was the usual loud music blasting from big speakers from the sound system that had been brought by the local disco company which runs all the events in town. Good thing they finally had electricity to hook them up with. Kids were selling bags of peanuts and acidic unripe mango slice with lime and salt. In the school they did a ceremony where the municipal mayor and community mayor gave words and they did various competitions and games with prizes. The event culminated in a lunch that they gave everyone in attendance, which was quite the crowd with everyone from the 18 family community plus the invited people from town. A common pork dish in orange sauce with rice that had been bubbling all morning in huge caldrons over open fires in the patio of the school was served with tortillas. (I thought about making a joke about where were the electric stoves? But then thought that might not be very appropriate). It was a cool event to participate in because it was a huge deal for this community to have executed the project and ever cooler that it was done by a female leader. There are few opportunities for the people of rural communities to get together and celebrate so it was a unique opportunity for them to get dressed up, leave their houses, and share a meal with each other and people from town and have the honorable presence of the municipal mayor too. They were very proud of themselves and it was a merry event and having electricity will obviously make a huge change in the community.

I am continuing with my English class from last year, now my “intermediate” group and I’ve started with another beginning group with about 15 students all between the ages of 18-25. They are a great group and several of them have either been in the states or have studied English before and know a fair bit. This continues to be an activity that I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to. For Valentine’s Day I did an activity with candy hearts from the States where each student drew a few and had to write love letters in English using the inspiration from the candy heart messages. It was pretty cute and there was lots of giggling.

In January my site mate and I finished our world map project and finally painted the names of all the countries in Spanish, touched up a few areas, and added the acknowledgements. We did a teacher training before the kids started classes and gave the teacher a packet of information with explanations of some of the games that you can play with the map and then we played some of the games with them. For example, we did one where you play music and dance over the map and when the music stops, you have to freeze on the country that you are on and then read the name of the country and state the continent that it’s on. Some of these teachers had a hard time naming the continent they were on, which reinforced for us the importance of this project in the familiarization of geography, not only for the kids.

At the beginning of February my family here in El Chol observed the one year anniversary of the death of the señora’s dad. There were several evenings of prayer sessions followed by the compulsory coffee and tamales and lots of family members and community member in attendance. I continue to be impressioned by the rituals surrounding death here.

Ripples of the bad state of the economy are being felt in rural Guatemala and it is the hot topic of conversation. Lots of people from here who had gone there illegally to work and making their way back since they can’t find work. Most of them were working in construction, and since there isn’t a lot of new house building going on right now, they’re coming back. And those that are staying aren’t able to send back remittances as they used to. This situation has significantly affected the household incomes here that were highly dependent upon that cash flow. Money is tight everywhere, for everyone. People talk about how they have high hopes in Obama to improve the situation since there is a lot of blaming the United States for financial problems here.

There were a few weeks where it actually got pretty cold here at night and the early mornings, even though the days were warm and sunny. The thermometer on my alarm clock registered as low as 57 degrees in my house at night. It was strange to be wearing a fleece and socks to sleep in and still be cold and to wear sleeves to work in the morning. It seems that cold snap has passed and is now more like 70 at night and 85 in the day. Things are dry and dusty since the rains won’t come again til May. Keeping the house clean and dust free is an impossible task and traveling out of town covers you in a thick layer and the joke made every time is how everyone arrives “canche” (light-haired).

Valentine’s Day is hugely celebrated in Guatemala…not just boyfriend/girlfriends, but in any social situation. Families and church groups go the river and have picnics, every level of school does a gift exchange event, text messages and emails are sent to everyone in your address book, offices have celebrations. In the muni we did a gift exchange by drawing names of the person you had to get a gift for and sharing a snack Monday afternoon. It was cute since there are few opportunities when all the employees that work in the muni get together, about 15 of us. We all gathered in one of the offices and each person had the opportunity to give words about what Valentine’s Day (“Día de Cariño” or “Day of Caring”) means to them. This is all taken with utmost seriousness and is not considered cheesy or appropriate for giggles, as I was inclined to stifle. There were lots of hugs and everyone applauded and gave whoops of surprise as one by one we gave our gifts for the intended person. We then drank cantaloupe juice and ate guacamole on large tortilla chip rounds. It was special to be a part of.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day on the actual day, I gathered with some of my Peace Corps girlfriends at the Lake at one of their houses. It was a much needed respite and chance to catch up with the girls. We were hanging out at the dock and met the Guatemalan volunteer firefighters that work in that town who were receiving a training from some firefighters, coincidentally from Lynnwood, WA. While they were learning how to do water rescues, we went for a swim and ended up being practiced on as their “victims” by getting us up onto a board and pulling us into the boat. It was pretty hilarious with the Guatemalan firefighter about half my size who himself couldn’t swim without the bulky lifejacket, hefting two of us onto the board as the American firefighters called out instructions in broken Spanish. But he had a smile ear to ear after completing his feat. There was applause from the boat and from the dock and the rest of my friends where keeled over in laughter. It was a great day and worth the total of 16 hours of chicken bus travel time for 12 hours of waking time during the visit.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

The 2008 El Chol feria was a huge success. This is the event that the entire town looks forward to the whole year. The extended week long celebration was intense, super fun, and tired me out. The feria basically exists of various elements: the religious aspect of which is the reason for celebrating which consists of processions with the Virgin Mary, vigils in the church, people hosting “Ave Marias” at their houses, and the arrival of traveling pilgrims; the commercial aspect of people coming from all over the region to sell their wares; the competitive aspect with many opportunities for participation in athletic competitions; the entertainment aspect with the election of the queen, a rodeo, motocross, and cock fighting; and the community aspect of it all getting people out of their houses and into the streets for shopping, the parade, the four nights of community dances. I participated in many of the competitions that took place such as:

Campeonato de futbol feminino. Women’s soccer tournament. Our El Chol selection made up of mostly middle school and high school girls won first place of the invited teams from Rabinal and Granados! Big trophy.

Triatlon. Triathlon. For my second year participating in this event, I came in second place again of a total of three participants, being the only woman. The guy who won was the same guy who beat me last year. But this year the prizes were better and I won 500 quetzales, the equivalent of my rent for a month or just over 60 bucks. In the days before the race everyone kept asking me if I was ready to compete. Just as last year, the race consisted of a 100 meter swim in the river in waist deep cold water coming off the mountain, a 3 km bike ride all uphill on a dusty dirt road, and a 2 km run on that road arriving into town. I was ahead during the whole bike part and the little van with the loudspeakers was giving the play by play announcing that Katty McKee was leading the race. We were accompanied by plenty of motorcycles and friends cheering us on. In addition to the cash, I won a glass trophy with the emblem of the national beer.

Tiro con honda. Slingshot contest. It was the first time in my life shooting a slingshot. Out of my ten chances, I didn’t hit a single bottle.

Motos empujadas. Pushed motorcycles. A challenging event where in pairs you have to push a motorcycle (turned off) around the perimeter of the soccer field. I did this with my site mate and we thought we would dominate the event, but came in last of the three women’s teams. The winners felt bad and gave us their medals donated by the national beer brand.

Other exciting events that I witnessed included gatos asustados, scaredy cats, where people bring their cats and tie a string around its neck with a metal ring which is attached to a string between two poles. They then set off firecrackers and watch the cats go running, and the first to arrive at the other side wins. Cruel. The cock fighting was also rather disturbing but fascinating to see. It was the first time in my life to see such an event and I didn’t stay very long. The razor blades that they attached to their talons slicing into the other bird and the owners giving the avian equivalent of CPR was just a bit disturbing for me. Jaripeo, the rodeo, was pretty awesome. One crazy thing they did to entertain the crowd during the breaks was the “The most applauded table” where they offered free beers to the first four volunteers who came forward. The contest was to see who could finish the beer first, without getting up from their seat at the table that was set up in the middle. They then released the biggest, meanest bull into the pen and it went trampling over the four guys in the middle. Being stupid and drunk, they didn’t even move and all got trampled. Luckily we didn’t see anyone die or and serious visible wounds, but those scenarios were in high probability. Imagine the lawsuits in the States.

The community dances were incredibly fun and for two of the nights they brought in live Ranchera bands which were pretty good and made for a good atmosphere. In all it was a very enjoyable feria, but sad to think it was my last one here. It’s funny cause the first year in your site, every event and activity is new and exciting and then the second year it’s hard thinking that it will be your last time doing or celebrating each thing.

Right after the feria I went home to the states, which was glorious. Despite the unusual snow storm (record since 1955!) I thoroughly enjoyed my time at home with family and friends. I was reminded of all the things that I missed and had grown accustomed to doing without and it made it even more difficult to say goodbye and think of another year away.

It was nice to come back to friends and “family” and in Guatemala. I spent new years at the beach on the Pacific coast in Monterrico. It was nice catching up with Peace Corps friends, making new friends, and transitioning back into Guatemalan life.

Coming back to El Chol was very nice. I was greeted with a swarm of kids from the family as soon as I stepped off the bus and it was good to have that “coming home” feeling on both ends of my journey. The señora had a tamale ready for me which she had saved, knowing the strangeness that we don’t eat tamales for Christmas in the U.S. and wanting to make sure I had mine. I relished distributing gifts and trinkets to everyone from the states and they were quite thrilled with what I had brought them. Everyone I saw on the street was glad to see me and asked where I had been since they had noticed that I hadn’t been around.

We’re getting back into the swing of things at work. My counterpart, the coordinator of the Municipal Planning Office is no longer working here so we are awaiting the appointment of the new coordinator. While I was gone a técnico for children and youth was hired who will be working with us in the almost formed Municipal Women and Youth Office. (He was actually one of my students last year when I was giving citizen participation workshops in the high school). We started the year off well doing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of our office that I think was good and honest and then moving on to an annual operating plan for 2009. It was a good way to start things off and I hope that we will stick to what we say we will do. 10 months to go…

AIDS, mid-service, legalizing groups, world map, English clausura, Thanksgiving, feria…I´M COMING HOME SOON!!!

2008-12-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

In mid-November our Peace Corps HIV/AIDS committee put on a National HIV/AIDS workshop where various volunteers and their counterparts participated from all over the county in a two-day workshop at the Peace Corps office. The event was a huge success. The idea is to train counterparts not only in up-to-date and accurate information on the subject, but to give them lots of tools and participatory activities that they can use in their communities to replicate the knowledge. I was in a group of rural health workers, so their knowledge was pretty good and we were able to focus on strategies of how to implement the activities in their communities. Since they were from all over, it was a good opportunity for them to discuss their common challenges and share stories as well. Some pretty horrifying things like how in one community there is a microbus full of adolescent boys that leaves every Friday evening for a city where in a certain establishment you can show your student ID and get a discount on the prostitutes that frequent there. There is a long way to go here in HIV/AIDS education. There are lots of cultural barriers that present themselves the complicate the challenge, such as many parents who don’t want any sort of sexual education in the schools and teachers can lose their jobs and be run out of town for touching on these subjects. Or for example as one neighbor put it to me in El Chol, it is the responsibility of the government to make public the list of names of HIV positive people so that everyone else can avoid them and live in peace. As I said, there´s a long way to go. Our committee had a really good productive meeting with the Peace Corps Guatemala Country Director to discuss a future vision for HIV/AIDS work here.

Right after the AIDS workshop my group had our mid-service conference to mark the one year of being in our sites. It was a very productive full day with lots of reflection on the work of the past year and making plans and sharing resources for the upcoming year, which generally seems to be the most productive time in your service. We also had our mid-service medical and dental check-ups which I was relieved to find out that I’m good and healthy and that a sugary diet didn’t leave me with any cavities, and I've somehow managed to avoid or fight off all the bacteria, fungi, parasites, and bugs that one might encounter here.

The other week I had a super busy workweek, definitely the busiest I've had my whole time here. We did the interviews for the Women’s Office coordinator, which I conducted and led with the presence of the two city council members. I was super pleased with two of the women that we interviewed and would be very pleased to have the honor of working with them next year. The only problem now is that I want to have a written contract before the call is made to offer them a job. Work is hard to come by here; there aren’t an abundance of job opportunities. But my coworkers in the muni haven’t been paid in four months and I don’t want to offer someone a salary that is not going to appear. So we are still in negotiations. We also had a meeting with the women’s commission to make advances in the Política Pública that we are creating. And also for our monthly interinstitutional meeting I invited some community leaders to do an analysis of the COMUDE, but there was a bunch of activities happening that day and the mayor was there, with a meeting planned for the same time, so we were having our meeting, when like 15 people showed up in the middle and sort of joined in and there was lots of confusion and then we all crammed into the mayor’s office to meet with him and it was all very stressful and confusing. And I didn’t get the opportunity to hammer out the details of the coordinator of the women’s office, so I have to wait til the next time the City Council meets, which who knows when that will be since we are now in Feria time.

My counterpart called me the other day to tell me that there was a group of women in one of the communities that wanted to organize themselves into a committee and asked me if I would go. So that Sunday afternoon I met up with the woman who had called the meeting and we walk up (and up and up) to the community, which is only accessible on foot. There were about 18 women who showed up, plus all the babies and children in tow. They wanted to legalize a group because only legalized groups can receive projects or benefits. It is a very formal process here in Guatemala to organize and legalize a group…you have to a have a meeting where the representatives are elected, you have to HAND WRITE an official version of the acta (the meeting minutes), in an official book of actas, which everyone has to sign (or put their thumbprint for those who can’t write their name). The official book of actas has to be authorized by the mayor and the municipal secretary, and then the group has to apply to receive an official stamp they have to put on all their documents to make them official. It’s a very exact process. So we went through a voting process, which was difficult because no one wanted to take on an official position and many of them didn’t know how to read and write. Finally we finished the voting process and the COCODE president wrote the acta for us, which took a full hour in which everyone had to linger around for so they could sign their names (or thumbprint) after it had been read. A very interesting experience. So then a few days later the women went to the muni to get their book of actas authorized, at which point it came to attention that the women elected as treasurer couldn’t read or write, which is kind of important for that position, so they couldn’t get authorized yet, and will have to have another meeting to put someone in her place that can read and write.

We are almost finished with our world map project. All the countries and oceans have been painted, now we just need to write the country names and thankyous to the contributors. Having never done a project like this before, we had absolutely no idea how much paint we would need. The hardware stores in town donated everything that we asked for, but we didn’t ask for enough. So we went back and asked for more and were donated a little bit more, but ended up having to front a bunch of the money. The teachers contributed a bit too, but it was still more than we were expecting. It was totally worth it though cause it turned out so cool! Next year when classes start again we are planning on going and teaching some of the games you can play with it. It’s also nice to have done one thing here where you can physically see the results, which is admittedly very satisfying.

I finished up my English class for the year and gave a final test on which everyone did well. We had a clausura (closing ceremony) at my house since they like to do ceremonies for everything. We ate pizza which was for sale for the feria and I baked a cake with homemade chocolate frosting. As is custom, I gave a speech, thanking everyone for their participation and encouraging them to keep studying. As is custom, I gave them each a diploma certifying their participation. They are very into the diplomas here; when you go to apply for a job you have to include with your CV photocopies of all the diplomas you have received for participation in any classes, courses, or trainings and these count significantly towards consideration for hire. I myself have already acquired a neat little stack of them for random one-day trainings and such. As is custom, each person gave some words of thanks to me and to God. It was actually all quite touching and made me feel really good for having taken the time and effort to do the class all year. Being a small group of nine who completed the course, we all got really close. I hope that everyone continues to study next year with me.

Everyone here knows that in the US we celebrate Thanksgiving or “Día de Acción de Gracias” (“Day of Action of Thanks”) and it is interesting to explain the history of the tradition and the irony of it. I made sure to tell the family that I live with that on this day when we pause to give thanks for what we have in our lives, that I include them in my thoughts of thanks. Despite being away from home and missing my family, Thanksgiving Day here was exquisite. We gathered together about 20 of us volunteers and slaughtered a turkey. We really killed a real turkey. One volunteer had purchased it three weeks before Thanksgiving and had been taking care of it. We improvised how to kill it, pluck it, clean it remove all the entrails, and cook it. We had to tie its feet together, pin the wings back, and tie a piece of string around its neck to stretch it out to make sure the machete hit the right spot to cut off the head. The volunteer who bought it was attached, but was also the one to make the fateful hack with the machete to cut off its head. We all screamed at the moment since it was flopping around everywhere and blood was squirting out. Everyone was yelling “Grab it! Grab its legs!” There was quite a bloodstain on the green grass. The headless flapping of the wings eventually ceased, the bleeding from the neck slowed to an occasional drip, and the legs were hacked off with a few more machete swings. We dunked it in a pot of boiling water to open the pores to remove the feathers easier, as we have all witnessed done with chickens in this country. My site mate did most of the organ removal; she was literally up to her elbow in turkey butt. The whole event was all very dramatic and a bit emotionally draining. We all had studied biology/anatomy in high school or college and had a slight idea of what we were doing and some people group had done it the year before and had a bit of experience. We basted it with a delicious basil rub, cooked it to a safe 180 degrees. It turned out delicious and no one got sick! The rest of the food was amazing too. Everyone brought their family´s favorite recipe and went shopping for specialty items in the capital. Someone’s family mailed down a bunch of goods from the States to make the event just like home, including canned cranberry sauce, Stovetop, and Hershey’s chocolates. The boxed wine was not lacking and before eating, we all went around the table and said what we were thankful for, including the two Guatemalans who were present with us. It was a special and memorable Thanksgiving.

It’s feria time! In Santa Cruz El Chol, the titular town fair is in honor of the Most Holy Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception from December 1st – 9th. During this time the town completely changes and becomes busting with commercialism, loud music everywhere and firecrackers going off whenever. The days packed full of competitions, soccer tournaments, and cultural events. The streets become blocked off and impassable with so many tents put up selling food and goods. The central park is filled with two Ferris wheels, games, and foosball tables. It’s the time to take advantage to buy new clothes, kitchen utensils, toys, pirated CDs and DVDs, household items, furniture, and knick-knacks. The festivities are kicked off with the election of the queen of the feria, essentially a full on beauty pagent. It is a big formal event where they build a stage in the market and the entire town comes out to watch. It started at 8 pm, and finished at 3:30 am. Seriously. Each of the candidates has her “fantasy outfit” consisting of some sort of glittery bra and mini skirt and large head piece made with cardboard and feathers, then there is the evening gown, a group dance, and a speech. The group dance has very sexually suggestive choreography and the coverage of the skin is minimal. There is lots of whistling and cat calling from the men drooling from the upper levels of the market. It is a very merry event, and no one seems to have any problem with the social messages that are being conveyed. The following day was the inagural parade in which the members of my office were put in charge of decorating one of the pickups that carried the pageant contestants (a carroza). We started working on it several days before with a western theme, complete with a giant horseshoe made out of PVC pipe and wire, paper cactus, and fake bales of hay made out of all those boxes from the care packages you’ve been sending me being put to good use. So after a late night watching the election I got up at the crack of dawn to help my compañeros finish the carroza. The parade was high class with participation of school bands, dances, acrobatics, horses, morocycles and of course the carrozas. The feria was inaugurated in the blazing sun at mid-day with speeches and lots of course firecrackers. For the dances that take place, it is customary to wear new clothes, so I shopped around and found a new top to debut.

So excited to come home! It’s so soon! Can’t wait to see everyone!!!!

Dia de los Santos, elections, kickboxing

2008-11-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

So for All Saints Day, we went to go visit one of my good friends in the town of Todos Santos Cuchumatans in the department of Huehuetenango. It is a very indigenous town in the Western Highlands unique in the fact that everyone that lives there still wears the traditional form of dress, including the men and youth. As a result of the 30 year bloody civil war, lots of people, especially men stopped wearing their traditional clothing. But in Todos Santos it is so cool to see everyone still wearing it. The men wear bright red striped pants and everyone where these small hats with a blue and red band. It’s like the whole town is in uniform. It’s fascinating to see how the youth adapt their clothes by wearing the pants super baggy, ripping the shirts, attaching patches, or wearing Metallica shirts with it. They speak the indigenous language Mam, although most people speak at least a little Spanish it is difficult to communicate. It is SUPER cold there too. It’s clear in the morning and then around noon the clouds roll in and it’s super foggy. Since there is no indoor heating of anything here, you see your breath all day long. You layer many sweaters, and they’re not enough and the water is so cold to wash your hands it burns. November 1st is their feria so there are lots of people that go there for their famous horse riding event, which consists of a bunch of very intoxicated men riding back and forth on the dirt road that goes out of town on a stretch about 200 meters. All day long. Not racing. No winner. Just riding. Every so often one of the guys falls off and there is a big “oohhh” from the crowd. This year the first woman ever participated in the event. She was also intoxicated. The whole event was so interesting. I felt like I was in a whole different country…it’s a different world out there on that side of Guatemala. It was quite the trek to get out there from my site and many uncomfortable hours of chicken bus riding. On the way back, some guy was throwing up on the micro. The driver got really mad and stopped and kicked him out, but demanded that he clean it up first. We were in the in middle of nowhere, so the guy went off into the bushes on the mountainside and collected some yellow wildflowers, which he then used to clean up his own vomit. Priceless.

The elections here were big news! For the days leading up to it, people would greet me with, “who’s gonna win?” and the days following with jubilant comments about how they were pleased with the results. It makes you realize that these elections were not just for our country, but the whole world was really hanging on them. I went to a prayer session the day after for the birthday of one of the señora´s sons who is in the States, and the woman leading it gave a long prayer for Obama that God give me wisdom, courage, and strength so that he would lead our country and the rest of the world in an honorable way. It’s funny to step out of context and think that in some small rural town in Guatemala there are elderly women praying for our soon-to-be president.

My site mate and I are deeply involved with our World Map project now. We are painting a map of the world the size of the entire basketball court in the elementary school in the town. So far we have measured everything out, painted the background all white, and draw the grid lines from which will guide how we draw it all in. We got a bunch of the students from the high school to help us and it looks like its going to turn out really cool!

After meeting with the mayor and a couple members of the City Council again, we finally have begun the process of contracting the coordinator of the new Municipal Women’s and Youth Office to start working in the beginning of January! Yay! A year in waiting and it looks like it’s going to happen! So in order to announce the position, we hand wrote in permanent marker a bunch of posters to put up around town, in the fashion that any important information is disseminated in El Chol. I’ve have lots of women come up to ask me about the job, even one woman came and tracked me down at my house at night while I was washing dishes in my pajamas to ask me about it. Next week we’ll sit down and review the applications and call people in for interviews. I hope this all comes together.

Since the women in my family all have high blood pressure and cholesterol, they are trying to get into working out. So the other day I brought down one of my exercise DVDs that I figured out is dubbed in Spanish and we did a kickboxing workout. It was hilarious! Of course all the kids joined in too. Everyone is extremely uncoordinated but had a great time anyway bopping around and kicking and punching the air at will. Oh I wish I had a video of them to show…

Gifting, gordita, prayer sessions, frustrations of work

2008-10-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

The nature of gifting things in Guatemala is very interesting. People here are very generous, even if they don’t have much themselves. There is a strong custom of gifting things and inviting people to eat, meaning that you will pay for them. I’m getting used to this system, but there are subtleties that take a little while to catch onto since they are different from how we do it in the states. Generally, if someone is wearing something pretty, like a pair of earrings for example, saying that you think it is very pretty is kind of like asking for them to give it to you. In Spanish it is better to say that “those earrings look nice on you” because saying “I like your earrings; they are pretty” means that you want them to give them to you. I learned this awhile back when a girl who is part of the family came to visit and I told her that her earrings were pretty, as is a common compliment that we give in the US. She promptly gave me a pair of identical one of a different color that she had bought, even though I protested she insisted. I get a lot of people commenting on the silver rings that I wear, telling me how pretty they are and asking me to gift one to them, so which I have to refuse because…they are my rings. Another example of generosity, if we’re working in the office, and someone leaves to go buy something at the store, they will generally get something for everyone without asking, just to be nice, even if it’s just a lollypop. We often take turns going to buy chocolate covered frozen bananas. If you’re eating something in front of someone else, you always offer them some, and they will always accept, even if they don’t really want it, just to be nice; whereas in the US, we would probably decline just to be nice, even if we wanted some. This is uncomfortable sometimes, especially when it’s a kid offering you some sort of sticky candy that has half melted in his dirty hand. One time I was waiting for the bus in San Juan with a woman from town who I kind of knew, and she went to buy some roasted corn on the cob that was for sale on the street, and asked me if I wanted some, so I accepted and knew that it would be impolite to offer to pay for it. Oftentimes random fruits and vegetables are gifted to me, like when one lady stopped by my office the other day to give me a pound of green beans, or when my soccer girls give me handfuls of jocote fruits or a giant lime the size of a giant orange. Whenever the women that I live with make something like corn bread or tamales, them always save me one. I’ve adapted to this too and since I bake frequently in my house, I always make sure to make enough to give some to the family. It’s a nice thing.

Along with the having to accept food that is offered to you and food being such a part of social customs, comes the gaining of weight with the cuisine here being carbo-heavy and relying heavily on pig lard, vegetable oil, and salt. It’s not necessarily seen as bad to be overweight here, and definitely not rude to comment about it. Even though I consider myself to be a normal height and weight in the states and maintain an active lifestyle here, I’m much bigger and taller than most people here, including lots of men. But coming from US culture, it still stings when people comment about my size. Last week when two of my coworkers made comments about how Katy was getting “gordita,” - little fatty - (which is not an insult and is often used as a term of endearment), I had to hold myself back from getting really annoyed at them. When the truck that I was riding on one day slid off the side of the road and we had to get towed out, they were calling for the heaviest people of the group to stand on the back bumper to give it weight to give the tire traction. And of course they called the gringa to go stand on it. These instances grate on me and take a lot of internal rationalizing to not let them bother you.

I went to another prayer session recently at the house of some of my friends for the one year anniversary of when their younger sister who had special needs passed away. I rather enjoy going to these events, since they are an opportunity to see lots of people from the community and share in a common purpose and share food together. They are not somber, formal events, but rather relaxed informal gatherings. Everyone is happy to see everyone and despite the reason for the gathering, everyone is in good spirits. People come late and leave early, and younger kids dart around playing between the adults seated on chairs and benches. People bring flowers (usually plastic ones) that are placed on an altar with candles, incense and a picture of the deceased person and sit together for about an hour while some women leads the praying/chanting/singing of which they are all familiar. Afterwards there is always some sort of snack and hot beverage, this particular evening there was chicken salad on tostadas and on rolls with hot chocolate made with cinnamon. It is common for people to take the snacks with them wrapped up to go to eat the next day or give to a family member at home. These events exist usually for birthdays, deaths, anniversaries of deaths. A nice Guatemalan custom.

There is a government institution in Guatemala in charge of upholding human rights. They have been active in El Chol organizing youth groups and promoting that youth know about their rights. So they organized a Fair for the Recognition of Youth Rights here in which they asked the participation of various institutions. So I was in charge of organizing the stand for the municipality on the subject of citizen participation, which is one of the main focuses of my project. I designed the content and the interns in my office helped me to make some posters and some games for the kids to play. On the day there were group of 15 kids that came in six rotations so I gave them a short presentation on participation and the System of Development Councils, then they played some interactive games to which we gave them candy for finishing the puzzles.

Working in Guatemala is frustrating. Working in the muni is frustrating. Here’s a little anecdote that captures pretty well the types of frustrations that are faced here. Days and days can go by without anything really to do. Then all of a sudden, a bunch of things all happen at once. One particular Thursday there were four work-related activities going on that I wanted to participate in. One, the monthly COMUDE meeting which I have never missed one and I don’t like to since you hear about everything that is going on. Two, a training on the GIS ArcView program. Three, one of the city councilwoman and I received an invitation to go to the capital for a two day convention on a Thursday of representatives of the Commission 9 (Family, Women, and Youth) part of the COMUDE, given by one of the NGOs active in El Chol. We were planning on going, but then two days beforehand, on Tuesday, three women representatives from the Presidential Secretary of the Woman (like the National Women’s Office) stopped by my office to tell us about an assembly they were hosting for the same day the other meeting was for in Salamá, the departmental capital of Baja Verapaz (activity number four). This meeting was supposed to be a gathering of ten women leaders from each of the eight municipalities in the department of Baja Verapaz to create a network of female leaders and elect representatives to the CODEDE, the Departmental Development Council. Baja Verapaz has a female governor (politically appointed position, but still cool), and she was gonna be there with representatives from different sectors that support women’s issues. So in talking to the city councilwoman, we decided that it would be more beneficial to go to that meeting, considering these contacts would be good for the women’s office that we are supposedly opening in January of next year. Of course the invitation was dated for ten days earlier and they weren’t able to get them to us til two days before the event, expecting us to get the notes to the ten female community leaders to the different rural communities in next day. It seemed like such a great opportunity that we made the effort. They had left five of the notes with me, and five of them with another community leader to distribute. So I had to coordinate with her but she is very busy and hard to track down and doesn’t really answer the phone. So I found her late Tuesday afternoon and we made the plans to go, put together the list of participants and she said she would arrange the microbus to take our group. It’s a delicate line that you have to tread on since all of these things are very political and personal, in terms of whom to invite, who get along with or doesn’t get along with whom, and all that nit-picky stuff that I know exists all the world over, but I feel is especially heightened here. Right afterwards I made the appropriate phone calls and house calls to invite the women. One I couldn’t get the phone number for so had to track down the microbus that was going out to that community and give the note to a random neighbor for her to pass on. On Wednesday I called the community leader to try to confirm the microbus, and she didn’t pick up the phone all day. I was calling and calling and she didn’t answer. Meanwhile the participants are calling me to confirm that they are coming, so I tell them to be there at 6:00 in the morning on Thursday to leave to be there by 8:30 when the meeting started. I don’t get a hold of her until 7:00 Wednesday night when she finally answered my site mate’s phone call and told her that she wasn’t able to go and that the bus wasn’t working. Well then I freaked out not knowing what to do, with all these women planning on making the effort to come down from their communities to attend this event. So I called the public microbus driver so see if by any chance he could take us and wait for us, but since the roads are so bad right now because of the rain, mud, and landslides, he told be he wouldn’t be leaving until 7:30, which would mean we wouldn’t get to Salamá til 10:00, late. And that to come back, the bus would be leaving at noon, which wouldn’t give us hardly any time at the meeting. So that option was out. I then called the coordinator of the women’s office in Granados, because I knew they were going and had a microbus and would be passing through El Chol. But she told me they only had room for two people and would be passing through at 5:00 am. There were no other options and I had no choice but to call them all and tell them that we wouldn’t be able to go. I was able to get a hold of everyone, except that COCODE president from the community that I go bake bread in. That community doesn’t have electricity, so the charge on her phone had run out. I was calling her all evening, sent a text message and everything but she didn’t get them. I was worried because she is an awesome woman who is super sharp, intelligent, and participatory and I knew that even though it rained all night, that she would still come. I barely slept all night worrying about this and I sent my alarm for 4:30 Thursday morning to try to call her again as she would be leaving her house, but still her phone was dead. So at 6:00 I rolled out of bed and went down to meet her in front of the muni. There she was, waiting there all by herself, dressed in her nicest homemade pink blouse and skirt set, and a thin sweater, soaked from the rain and sweat from the walk into town. I apologized profusely explaining the circumstances to which she was completely understanding. No matter how many times she told me not to worry about it, I just felt so bad, knowing that she had to ask permission from her husband to leave, spent all day the day before grinding extra corn for her absence, getting up before dawn, and walking for an hour in the darkness down the slippery muddy path from her house into town in the rain all alone. So we went to the market and I bought her breakfast of pinol and atol and she charged her phone in the muni before walking back home. I went home to shower and get ready and bought some lollypops for her to take back with her to give to her three year old daughter named Katy also. As far as the other activities were concerned, it turned out that the COMUDE meeting was canceled because the mayor called it off last minute, I couldn’t go to the ArcView training since they were gonna go on a motorcycle (which we aren’t allowed to ride anymore) but then they ended up not even going anyway because the roads are so bad, and it was too late to travel to the capital for the other convention. So there were four events planned for that Thursday that I wanted to go to, and it resulted that I ended up that none of them turned out and I spent a long boring day at the office frustrated, sad, and disappointed, playing some Spider Solitaire and listening to it pour down rain outside. Ugh. The whole day I was in a funk…questioning if I can really do much of anything here.

The rainy season continues...world map...oatmeal scones...

2008-10-03T14:11:00.000-07:00

We gave another AIDS workshop in the department of Sololá. It went really well. It’s interesting to see how different communities react to the topic. For example, this was an indigenous site where some people speak Kachikel, so when we did the activity “Lenguaje de la Calle” (street language) people used some words in Kachikel. We stayed at a volunteer’s house and I got to meet some volunteers that I didn’t know. It’s always fun to share experiences and common frustrations and hear about the situations in people’s various sites. I continue to be impressed by the fascinating people that join the Peace Corps and what they have done in their lives. That weekend there was a group in Panajachel celebrating various occasions, (including my birthday). We went out dancing that night and I think I burned a million calories, but replaced a few with some late night street tacos on the way back to the hostel.

The trip back to my site was long and rainy. The clouds cling to the peaks of the surrounding green hills and settle in the low valleys. Along the sides of the highway run rivers of mud that look like chocolate milk and cut away at the road. The roads are in really bad shape now and covered with giant potholes from all the water running under them. The sights on the side of the road have become commonplace and I don’t much notice them as anything notable anymore…kids carrying loads of firewood bigger than they are, women carrying water on their head from who knows what source, guys carrying 100 pound sacks of corn on their backs with a strap around their forehead, old men sitting on cinderblocks chatting with bottles of illegally manufactured potent liquor, boys playing soccer on the road with goals marked by tree branches, and little girls in brightly colored woven skirts with big brown eyes and dirty faces peering out from tin shacks.

When we were only five km from El Chol, the micro I was on turned to the side of the road to avoid a passing car, and got stuck in the mud on the side of the cliff. I was the only one who yelped, so then everyone laughed at me. So all the passengers had to pile out, careful to not slip in the mud on the steep slope into the rickety barbed wire fence. Then we had to wait in the darkness in the rain for a pickup truck to come from town to pull us out and it made it a nine-hour trip home from the lake. I’m ready for rainy season to end – ready for my clothes to dry, ready for the mold to disappear from my walls, ready for my roof not to leak, ready for the water from my faucet not to be brown.

My site mate and I are starting a project to paint a world map on the basketball court of the elementary school in town. Geography is not a strong point here, it’s not like there are maps and globes in the classrooms, so we think it will be a good way for kids to see the countries of the world and orient themselves within it. And having it on the basketball court you can play those games where you call out a country and everyone has to race to that country, like we always played with the states back in elementary school. It should be fun. We have a template in squares, so you just measure the lines on the court and paint accordingly to the squares. We’re gonna have to get all the kids together to clean the area first and try to pick off the stuck-on gum and get them to participate in the painting as well.

The latest baking adventure in La Ciénega was oatmeal scones, which turned out superbly. The way that the clay oven works is that you put a bunch of firewood in there, let it burn down to coals, and then push them out. The only problem was that since it is the rainy season and has been raining a ton recently, all the firewood was wet, so it took a long time. Then to make the second batch, we had to burn a second pile of firewood and wait for that to become coals to bake the rest. In all we baked 110 scones. I brought the photos that my dad had printed out of the lunch we had when they were visiting and gave them the pictures that they were in. They were thrilled since they have very few family photos. I also showed them the pictures of my family when they went to Lake Quinalt and a bunch of new photos of my niece, which they loved and asked for me to give them some again.

We continue with our monthly inter-institutional meetings to coordinate with the NGOs that work in El Chol. There was little presence at the August meeting, so we came to the conclusion that the development professionals needed to be reminded of the meeting with a text message a couple days before. So I did that for the September meeting and there was more presence, but still not everyone. This is very frustrating. We have also started taking notes at the meetings to keep track of what we talk about and document our agreements and obligations. It was my turn to write the last meeting notes and it’s funny, that to create a five page single-spaced document in Spanish doesn’t even faze me. I still have my counterpart review it before I send it out, but my Spanish is definitely gotten a lot better. I have to say, becoming fluent in Spanish is one of my proudest life accomplishments. So I sent it to all the email addresses that everyone had given me, and about half bounced back. When I asked at the meeting if the rest had received the document, not one had checked their email to open it. Not one! Text messages are definitely to mode of communication here, email is not. And now the signal at the good internet café in town is down “til November” to remodel, whatever that means and the other internet place in town takes about 30 minutes just to open your hotmail account.

COMUNA, work, Independence Day!

2008-09-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

So one of the NGOs that’s active in El Chol has started a project to form a Municipal Council of Youth (Consejo Municipl de la Niñez y la Adolescencia or COMUNA). The idea is to teach kids about citizen participation and civic responsibility by having them go through an election process of electing a Municipal Council made up of kids that mirrors the process that adults take part in. The kids made three political parties with candidates for Mayor and Government Plans and then they have to register to vote, have an election day, and then the elected council will participate in the adult-run COMUDE and make proposals to the City Council. As one of the goals of my project of Municipal Development is increasing citizen participation, I've been getting involved with this process. It’s a huge logistical undertaking for the NGO to coordinate 18 schools that are participating, all the teachers, and over 600 kids. They have brought them all together for general assemblies, in which transportation, snacks, and lunches have to be provided. I facilitated one groups of kids when they were creating their Government Plan to run on. We looked at each of the sectors of health, education, environment, recreation, etc. and discussed the problems and realistic solutions in these areas. This whole project is awesome in theory, but in practice it has been rather difficult as it presents a logistical and organizational challenges. Last Sunday all the kids and teachers got together for a forum to present their Government Plans and respond to questions and next week the voting will take place. After the committee is elected, hopefully the kids will participate in the COMUDE meetings and that their opinions will be taken seriously.

So back in February we created nine committees as part of the COMUDE, which are technically required by law and correspond to the committees that the City Council has. However, none of them really function, or rather, we have a list of names on paper that pertain to each committee, but they never meet and never do anything. Well, I’m part of the committee for the Family, Women, and Children (Comisión IX) and we’ve been getting support from an NGO to create a polÌtica p·blica…kind of like a document of needs and short and long-term goals in the sector of youth. We have monthly meetings where we learn about the legal basis that protects kids and promotes their rights, we broke up into sub-committees to do research on various sectors relating to health, education, recreation, etc. with youth, and hopefully soon we will be using this needs assessment to decide on priorities, wrap it up in a pretty little package of a document, and then get the prioritized projects into the budget, and hopefully coordinate with the kids who are elected to the COMUNA so that they have their say and we come with double force to the City Council. We’ll see…

In July we printed our fourth Municipal Newsletter and in September we printed our fifth. They have been going really well and gotten very positive responses. I created an anonymous questionnaire to get some feedback on them, and handed it out during the COMUDE meeting when we distributed the newsletters. Everybody wrote good things and gave me some suggestions for future topics. Recent topics that I have written about include: Get to know the Municipal Code, What are Municipal Incomes, the Formation of the COMUNA, and the printing of the costs for every project executed by the muni in 2008.

At the end of August my good friend Juan Pablo, the civil engineering intern from the University of San Carlos in Guate in our office who was doing his internship here for six months, finished his time here with us. With took the afternoon off and had a nice traditional going away party for him with chicharrones (fried pig skins complete with bristly hairs on some pieces), tortillas, guacamole, salt, rum and cokes, and durenguense music. He will be missed. But we got another civil engineering intern from the USAC, this time a girl! So I’m not the only girl in the office anymore, which is a relief. She’s a lot of fun and buena onda so it’s been a nice change.
A while ago I was taking a shower in a hotel at Lake Atitlan. I was enjoying the experience as the water was incredibly hot and the bathroom was getting very filled with steam. Then I realized that the steam smelled funny and that I could no longer see through it, as which point it occurred to me that it was smoke, not steam. Well I was all soapy at this point and figured I¥d just try to rinse off real quick, but then all of a sudden flames started shooting out of the calentador, the water-heating device connected directly on top of the spout. I immediately turned off the water and started screaming and ran out of the bathroom all soapy in my tiny travel towel to which my friends found hilarious. Only in Guatemala would a shower actually catch on fire.

The other weekend I rode my bike ride to Granados, the next town over about 10 km away down the mountainous dirt road to visit another volunteer who lives there. We had a nice time catching up and sharing the joys and many frustrations of this strange life we live here and chatting about grad schools, careers, and what might come next. We made two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese that she had gotten from the states and ate them both. Delicious. The next day I left to ride back to El Chol and about half way back the sky opened up and I got caught in the heaviest rain that I've seen since I've been here. I arrived home soaking wet like I’d just gotten out of the shower, except covered with mud too and my family got quite the kick out of it. They just think I’m crazy for the things I do sometimes….as it would never occur to them to ride a bike to Granados, especially if it were raining.

Yesterday I went on a walk with my site mate up the mountain here in El Chol. It had been stormy all day, but wasn´t at the moment. As we were walking back down, a bolt of lightning struck right in front of us! I seriously saw it hit the ground right in front of us. We both screamed and grabbed hands and hurried home. It freaked me out so much. I´ve never been afraid of being struck by lightning, but now that I almost died, I am.

So…INDEPENDENCE DAY! in Guatemala was September 15th, celebrating their liberation from Spain in 1821. It was quite the festivity, as most celebrations in Guatemala generally are. They don¥t just celebrate the actual day, but for days leading up to the lead as well. Different communities have different traditions, but in El Chol there were a series of Civic Moments in which the pre-school, primary school, middle school, high school, and teachers put on performances of traditional dances with traditional costumes in the park and then sold all different kinds of typical foods. Each group had their own day on the days leading up to the 15th. These performances were complete with the burning of devil, being someone dressed up in red with a mask with fireworks strapped to them that shot off in all directions. The food for sale was delicious with dobladas (corn dough stuffed, folded, and fried), chuchitos (corn dough cooked in corn husks), tamales (corn dough cooked in a big green leaf with tomato sauce and a piece of pork), bushboles (corn dough cooked in greens), chepes (corn dough with whole black beans), elotes (corn on the cob), atol (hot sweet beverages, sometimes made out of corn), tostados (toppings on a large round tortilla chip), panza (cow stomach), torejas (sweet bread cooked in eggs and honey), ejotes (green beans), pinol (tortilla soup-esque), frutas en conserva (preserved fruits in syrup), caldo de gallina (chicken soup).

In addition to the civic moments, there is the tradition of the schools going on field trips to run and bring the Torch of Peace, kind of like the bringing of the Olympic Torch. It’s a cool tradition because the kids get to travel around their country and for many kids, it’s the only opportunity they have to experience different places outside their community or department. For example, the middle school kids went to Livingston, the GarÌfuna community on the Caribbean coast and one of the elementary schools went to the Biotopo Quetzal a rainforest nature preserve. I had the honor of going on two trips: one with an elementary school to a water park and another with the high school to Panajachel.

I went on one with the elementary school Trapiche Viejo where the mayors wife is the director of the school so she went and the mayor went, in addition to some of the teachers that I know. We met at 2:00 am to get all the kids on the two full school buses that went in addition to a microbus with the rest of us to go to the awesome water park of Xocomil (Sho-co-mill) in the Pacific coastal department of Retalhuleu (Rey-tal-lu-lay-oo). We got there at 10:30 am and played all day on the water slides and wave pool. This place was seriously better than Wild Waves at home. The kids loved every minute of it, even though most of them were too scared to go on the water slides, it was so much fun to enjoy myself in the water (this is the Peace Corps?) and to watch the kids having such a good time. The park being a tourist attraction, there were people from all over Guatemala there and the unwanted attention from guys and adolescent boys for being foreigners walking around in bikinis was a real annoyance. That night we stayed in a dormitory in a multi-sport complex that felt a bit like a homeless shelter with a long room filled with blue metal bunk beds, gross mattresses, dirty bathrooms with no toilet seats (typical because evidently there is a shortage of toilet seats in Guatemala), and tons of women and children laying out towels and sheets to sleep on in the stuffy heat. But it was all part of the experience and we made the best of it. Fell asleep absolutely exhausted at 9:00 pm to get up again at 4:00 am to go to see the ocean. Went to Puerto de Champerico by 6:30 am when it was already super hot. Got coffee and breakfast (eggs and beans, what else?) at a beach hut restaurant in the sand and lazed in a hammock while the kids played in the super dangerous ocean waves. Only one kid had to be rescued from the undertow by some surfer dudes. I was surprised to see how they did no head counts, never set meeting times or places, but somehow everything worked out. They started running with the torch from there, and a number of kids and teachers ran a few kilometers in the mid-day sweltering heat, carrying the Guatemalan flag and sign from their school and blowing whistles the whole time. Everywhere there are walking vendors selling flags of all sizes and these plastic whistles to make sure that every kids in Guatemala is capable making the most noise possible. Now that is patriotism. They got back on the buses, which are also decked out with Flags, and we made our way back to El Chol. We started running again in Granados at about 10:00 at night and both my site mate and I were given the opportunity to carry the torch for a bit. It¥s a funny site with a mob of kids running with matching t-shirts, headbands, all kinds of Guatemala adornments all blowing whistles like crazy and the buses following behind with horns blaring the whole way and crowds cheering everyone on. The kids take turns running and carrying the torch like a relay. We showed up in El Chol with motorcycle and tuk tuk escorts around 11:30 that night to a welcoming crowd and tons of firecrackers and more blaring horns (this is a loud country). We ended at the school where they had speeches, sang the national anthem (I think officially the longest in the world), gave everyone snacks, and then had a marimba dance. I went home to prepare for the next field trip, went to bed around 1:45 am, slept about 45 minutes, and got up to leave for the next trip.

With the high school kids we met at 3:00 am to all leave on one school bus to go to Panajachel on Lake Atitl·n. Even though it was super early in the morning, all of them were so excited to be going they had lots of energy. There was loud pumping music and giddy screaming the whole way, although in my state of exhaustion I slept through most of it. We arrived at the lake later that morning and Hannah and I had a serious need for good coffee, so we went to our favorite cafÈ owned by our South African and New York couple friends. In the mean time, the group left on a ferry to go visit the traditional town of Santiago across the lake, so we had to find a lancha to get us over there to meet back up with them. That evening the kids wanted to go out on the town to go dancing, so we went out and played a semi-chaperone role, even though some of the students are our age. We had a lot of fun dancing with our students and seeing them enjoying themselves outside of small El Chol. The next day (the 14th) we took off around noon and made our way down the inter-American highway towards El Chol. The whole way were other school groups carrying the torch so traffic was completely snarled and every vehicle had Guatemalan flags plastered all over it and it. The kids were actually running on the highway with trucks passing them and everything. Everyone was madly honking in both encouragement and frustration, not a day to be traveling for any reason other than to be carrying a torch. It was the craziest in Chimaltenango, a major town on the highway that you have to pass through no matter where you are going. There were tons of crowds lining the highway and we were crawling along at the pace of the runners. As is the tradition, everyone throws water at the runners and at the buses, we’re talking bags of waters, buckets, and hoses. It was chaos with the mucic, the whistles, the screaming, and the water coming from every person in every direction. The doors and the windows of the bus were open, so we weren’t spared the soaking. The ayudante of the bus kept filling up a bucket and chucking it around inside the bus so everything was soaked, including all of our backpacks. The kids inside the bus were also spraying Coca Cola and orange soda to top it off. Nuts. It was literally like we’d been swimming with our clothes and our shoes on. We made it to San Juan Sacatequez around 5:00 from where they started running. It took seven hours to run the 47 kilometers (28 miles) back to El Chol, going super slow and freezing cold from being wet so long. It was a strange mix of horrible suffering from being tired, wet, cold, bored, and going deaf but also just sheer amazement of the kids energy, patriotism, and excitement and just how cool it was to be witnessing such a unique cultural experience. There were kids running the whole way with the torch. I took my turn and ran for a good 5 km. It was a cool experience running with that energy down the dirt mountain road in pitch darkness with only the light of the moon. Every so often you’d get surprise water thrown at you from the darkness by someone on a hill above or a house behind the trees. As we got closer to El Chol, there were people from there waiting on motorcycles to accompany us back and when we finally arrived in town after midnight, all of us running at the end, the whole town was there to greet us with cheering and more firecrackers. There was a stage set up in the central park and again, speeches (the mentioned the participation of the Peace Corps volunteers) and hoopla. The torch was presented to the mayor and there was a live band, tamales for the whole town, and several drunks stumbling about. People stayed and carried on til 3:00 am, which I could hear all of it from my house nearby.

The next day was Independence Day, the parade of all the schools started at 9:00 am with each group of kids in uniforms or costumes, some behind pickups with large speakers blaring music, others in school bands complete with drums and chimes. After the parade, my coworkers and I handed out 400 copies of the latest municipal newsletter to everyone in the park. After that, we handed out snacks of cookies and juice to the hundreds of kids who had participated in the parade, as it was mid-day and super hot by that point. In the afternoon there was a soccer tournament for men, and one game for women in which I played and we won 3-0 and I scored a goal!

Overall the Independence Day events were lots of fun. It’s so interesting to see how other countries express their pride and patriotism. Kind of like everything in Guatemala, it was long and drawn out, but super interesting and made me feel good to be able to be a part of it all with the community.

ONE YEAR IN GUATEMALA!!!

2008-09-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

So yes, at the end of August I completed one year in this beautiful country. For a multitude of reasons that day was a bad day full of frustration and disappointment, but besides that day everything has been going very well. I still am very happy with my decision to be here and have never taken a serious thought to wanting to come home early. I feel very comfortable and integrated into the community, I've gotten into a routine at work, and enjoy myself with a variety of other activities. I don’t feel like I’m changing the world or making any major institutional changes in the municipality, but there are little things that I have done that I think have helped in their own little way and relationships that I have built with people that I think speak the most.

To celebrate our one year anniversary, my training group all got together at Fuente Georginas, a natural hot springs outside the city of Xela in the western highlands. It was great to see everyone and catch up and spend some time together. The hot springs were awesome…the perfect temperature for the chilly weather at that altitude. It was sprinkling down rain so it made a cool atmosphere with the steam rising out of the pool made with natural rocks, surrounded by lush green forests. We stayed overnight there in cabins complete with the necessary fireplaces, so after it closed to the public in the evening, we had the place to ourselves. We all brought food to BBQ and grilled veggies and sausages and had quite the feast. The whole experience was enchanting!

It’s been awhile since I've had an update, I apologize, but it’s a good thing that I've been busy. Here’s a hodgepodge of what’s been going on in the past couple months…

El Chol was the host of a gathering of preschool teachers in the department of Baja Verapaz. They all got together for workshops and curriculum work and of course, an election of the queen of the events. There was a big community gathering in the market to watch the festivities. They put together a big stage with a giant strawberry as a backdrop and cartoon character hanging down. There was lots of pomp and circumstance with the bringing in of the flag, singing of the national anthem, various speakers giving the welcome, etc. There was a candidate from each of the eight municipalities in Baja Verapaz who paraded themselves about in “fantasy outfits”. There was also a dance done by some of the preschool kids dressed up in traditional garb with these wooden masks that are used for the ceremonial dances. The highlight of the evening was the “burning of the devil” where someone dressed up as the devil dances about with firecrackers strapped to his back shooting off in all directions into the crowd. That’s another one of those things that’s really cool, but would never be allowed in the states. Imagine all the fire codes broken and lawsuits waiting to happen. That’s why I love Guatemala.

The other day I was invited to a friend of mine’s birthday party. As is common here, it was a sort of prayer session, but this was special since there was an invited group that played live marimba music and put on a religious service. It was quite the interesting experience…I sat there in a chair outside for three hours before I had to excuse myself and go home. It was a Catholic service, but seemed Evangelical as there was lots of singing with hands raised in the air, crying about Jesus, and people being cured right there on the spot. Seriously, three hours sitting there feeling out of place, under a tent while it was pouring down rain…I didn’t even stay long enough for coffee and tamales. It’s always nice to be invited to things but sometimes it turns out not quite as expected.

The other day for my English class I brought the movie Juno to watch with them, as an exercise in listening comprehension, of course. I brought bags of popcorn, someone brought soda, and we had a merry time. They thought it was cool that I had the “original” DVD since here originals are almost unheard of since there is such a strong pirating industry. Some of the pirated versions are straight copies of the originals and they are actually pretty good, while other are literally filmed in the movie theaters and are off centered and have babies crying and heads walking across the screen.

In the month of August I had the wonderful visit of Jesse and Nate! We had such a good time it was awesome to show them around this lovely country and share my life here with them. I picked them up at the airport and we spent a few days in Antigua where we climbed the Pacaya Volcano (the one I climbed during training where you can walk out on the lava fields and roast marshmallows), visited a coffee farm and museum, went and saw the Mayan/Catholic saint of Maximon where the bus ride there was so crowded we were literally hanging out of the bus door, enjoyed various typical Guatemalan cuisine, went out dancing, and shopped around in the market. Then we traveled out to my site, enjoying all the forms of transportation that Guatemala has to offer. In El Chol they visited my office, we took a tuk tuk (three wheeled mototaxi) ride to bask at the river, watched the plucking of a turkey and two chickens that were living at my houses (thank goodness I don’t have to wake up to turkey squabbles anymore), watched Jesse suffer as she received chicken heads in TWO meals in one day, went to the school in Los Jobos where the women I live with work and read them some stories and played soccer with them at recess, attended a prayer session at my house for the senor’s birthday, Jesse attended soccer practice with me, they came to my English class with me, watched a community event of traditional dances in the elementary school, and made lunch of peanut sauce stir-fry at my house with coworkers. Then we traveled to Panajachel on Lake Atitilan and went to an awesome cross dressing party at a hostel. On the way back Jesse had her passport stolen on the bus out of her purse, so then we spent our last day at the American Embassy in Guatemala City getting it replaced. That was a strange experience to be at the embassy with all the Guatemalans lined up there trying to gets visas to go to the US and all the American couples getting passports for the Guatemalan children they were adopting. It gave me a funny feeling. But overall the trip was incredible! It was so much fun to get to hang out with them and share everything with them!

I’ve been getting involved with HIV/AIDS education projects. Peace Corps received a grant from USAID to conduct a series of education workshops for teachers so that they can be trained to give it to their students, as HIV/AIDS education is now mandatory in the schools by law, but not very often enforced. I’ve given a few of these workshops now at other volunteers’ sites. The biggest one was in Pachalum, Quiche where almost 120 teachers and youth participated in the event. They are four hour long workshops that are full of participatory and interactive activities complete with a condom practice with plantains. Each community and each group is different, but overall the participants have been very receptive. They ask good questions that sometimes make me chuckle to myself such as when an older woman asked what the purpose of flavored condoms was. Recently I co-taught a workshop with my site mate in the high school in El Chol that went very well. We asked the doctor from the Health Center in town to speak during the workshop, which turned out interestingly. He basically started reinforcing all bad gender stereotypes by essentially celebrating and joking with the guys about how promiscuous they are. When he left this led to a productive conversation about gender roles and stereotypes. The high school kids are a really good and a wonderful group to work with.

I’ve continued going into the high school to give workshops on citizen participation. Most recently we did the cycle of a project and how to do a community diagnostic and project prioritization. I had them break into groups according to the diagnostic we did for El Chol and the projects they prioritized to write a project profile for the hypothetical projects. Hopefully we will have them replicate the process out in the communities.

Now that we’ve been here for one year, the new group of Municipal Development volunteers has arrived. It’s strange that my group now finds itself in the role of the experienced ones who help out with training. The group came to visit me in my site two weeks after arriving in country to get an orientation of the work and life of a volunteer. They had the opportunity to see my office and meet my mayor, counterpart, and coworkers. I shared with them about my work and they visited my house and I showed them some pictures of my experiences here.

I am the new Municipal Development program representative for the Peace Corps Gender and Development Committee. So I helped give a workshop with the trainees at the Peace Corps training center on gender awareness and how it fits into our project. It went well and started lots of good conversations, such as when we did the activity where we brainstorm “As a man/woman in Guatemala/US I can/cannot do….” Machismo and conservative gender roles present such a huge barrier in the work that we do in our communities, it is essentially to be aware and well versed in these issues, as well as prepared with strategies to confront these challenges.

Okay, that’s all for now even though there’s a lot more to update on. Stay posted for the telling of the experience of Independence Day!

Chequenes, Soccer, chicken anatomy, Chiquimula, Los Jobos Feria

2008-07-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

I forgot to write about something crazy: Chequenes. Towards the beginning of the rainy season at the beginning of June, there is this phenomenon that these flying bugs, kind of like large juicy ants with wings, fall from the sky in the wee morning hours. There is all kinds of excitement because people collect them and cook ’em up and eat ’em. So back in the beginning of June, I got a phone call from one of my co-workers around 4:45 in the morning. I grumpily answered thinking he was just messing with me or something, and he told me to come down to the soccer field quickly where the chequenes were falling. Really not wanting to get out of bed, but figuring this may be a once in a lifetime opportunity, I made my way down there. There were various people out in the streets positioned under the streetlights for when the bugs fell they put them in plastic sacks. I met up with my coworkers and helped with the collection. They swirl around the street lights in swarms, and then one by one they just sort of fall and land on the ground where you can pick them up by their wings. We collected enough to fill about one third of a grocery sack (that’s a lot). We got a lady who works at the muni to prepare them for us, removing the wings and legs, cleaning them, and the toasting them with lime and salt. Then we got a bunch of tortillas to pile them onto and snacked on them right there in the office (this was when my cousin was visiting and she got in on it too). They actually taste pretty good once you get over the idea of what you are eating. They have a soft crunch and full salty flavor. I wouldn’t want to eat a ton of them, but the experience was intriguing.

So out of the blue all of a sudden there was an organized women’s soccer tournament in El Chol. There are four teams: two from the middle school, one from the high school, and one of teachers. I asked permission to play with the teachers and last Saturday I played with them for the first time. We won our game 1-0 against one of the middle school teams, and I made the winning goal! It’s not the highest level of competition I've ever played with, but we have a good time and it’s so nice to be playing full field real soccer games where I feel like I fit in. There were lots of people there cheering us on, and cheering me on specifically telling me to score (I was playing right forward the first half, and center forward the second half when I scored). It was cool to see the little girls that I coach there watching the game and getting into it.

It’s cute…the girls at my house ask me everyday if we’re going to have practice that day (we practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays). I think that half the girls show up with at least one article of pink clothing. It takes a ton of energy for me to run these practices. There are like 30 girls now and I have to yell loudly to get their attention on the field. Twice now during our practices, a bull has run onto the field, sending all the girls screaming and running. Two men quickly appear, one on a motorcycle and one on foot with a lasso to try to get control of it. Only in Guatemala…that was something I never had to deal with in when I was coaching with Skyhawks. There is such a huge difference between the boys and the girls…when I watch the boys their age play, I am blown away by how good they are and what a good touch on the ball they have. With the girls right now I’m working on not having them stop the ball with their hands. Obviously there has been a huge difference in the ways the boys and girls are brought up and encouraged.

The summer of visitors continues. Two friends from the states that are volunteering in El Salvador came to El Chol to visit me for a weekend. We had a good time hanging out and catching up. The señora brought us tamales, as she does often, for us to eat. We went on some walks around town, they came to my soccer game, and we ate churrascos (tasty grilled meat) from a cart on the street run by a kind older gentleman.

At work the other day we had a great walk down memory lane together watching YouTube videos of cartoons from the 1980´s that we shared in common in our childhood like Transformers, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers. I love it when you find the little things in common.

So the other day I came home for lunch and the señora at the house was standing at the pila cleaning chicken parts. She often is dealing with chickens, casually carrying them around by the neck, about to be killed or recently killed, like it ain’t no thang. I greeted her and asked her with curiosity about what she was working on. She then proceeded to give me a fascinating lesson on the anatomy of a chicken. Back in high school biology we had dissected cats and the organs of other various animals so I had sort of seen this stuff before, but never so casually. She instructed me on the liver, the kidneys, the heart, the lungs, among other parts. She showed me fully formed egg that hadn’t been laid yet and put it aside to eat. I don’t know why, but it seemed weird to me to eat an egg that hadn’t been laid yet and she joked that it was as fresh as they come, which I suppose is true. There was the canal where the eggs pass down with 6! yolks increasing in size from one about the size of a marble to the fully formed egg. It’s crazy to see how they are formed and to look at such an everyday common object in a different way. The stomach was also really cool, she rinsed out everything that had been inside, full grains of corn and a bunch of pebbles. She scraped the toughness well with a knife, which made a loud rasping sound and told me how they were going to eat it. I guess my fascination with the whole process shows that I didn’t grow up on a farm.

I’m happy with the progress of my English class. Right now I have 12 students which is perfect cause you can still do group activities, but I can give them much more individualized attention. Their pronunciation is getting a lot better and their vocabularies have improved quite a bit. We’re almost half way through the materials that I have.

The other weekend a few of us went to visit a fellow volunteer working out in the eastern part of the country in the department of Chiquimula. It’s a bit of a different world out there. The buses first of all are actually really nice with comfy seats, TVs, and air conditioning! The craziest thing was that the ayudante came around to collect trash, which is rather revolutionary since most people just throw their trash out the window without a second thought. In general the people out east are much less conservative and everyone speaks with rather vulgar words. There are hardly any indigenous people and cowboy boots are common. And it’s really hot. We had a fun time all hanging out together on my friend’s patio all day long doing nothing but eating yummy Indian food that she cooked for us, chatting, and reading People and Newsweek magazines. At night we piled into a pickup and went to some hot springs with some of her friends from town (it’s too hot to go during the day). On the way back home on the usual rickety Chol bus, there was a lady who had a basket full of baby chickens that was covered with a cloth. As we were going along, one of the chicks somehow fell out of the basket and hit a little kid on the head, which I found quite hilarious. I also had the bad luck of sitting in the one seat where the window wouldn’t go up while it was pouring down rain. The water came in in droves and got me quite soaked.

It was the feria in one of the rural communities of El Chol, in the aldea Los Jobos. That is the community where the three teachers that I live with teach in, so there were quite involved with the planning of the event. All week long there were activities such as the crowning of the queen of the feria, soccer games, cattle sales, rifle competitions, etc. On Saturday I went with my site mate for the dance where they brought in a live band. We caught a ride in a pickup truck after waiting forever. The road going the 12 km out there is terrible and there were like 20 of us all crammed in standing up in the back of this truck trying to hold on as we bumped along the horribly potholed dirt road under the starry night sky. The truck kept losing power on the uphills with so much weight in it and everyone would have to get out and walk up the inclines. We made it out there in time to grab some food, walk around and soak in the atmosphere. The dance was lots of fun and typical of community dances here. All the mothers attend with their little kids to keep an eye on their adolescent daughters. So it’s super hot and suffocatingly stuffy, and all the moms and sitting in chairs along the sides. There’s always way more guys than girls and the majority of them are drunk. It makes for quite the interesting ambiance. You wait for a guy to ask you to dance (not that you have to wait long with the favorable ratios), so we danced with a few people that we knew. But we didn’t want to keep telling no to the random drunks, so my site mate and I ended up just dancing together the two of us like we would in the states, but is really weird here. So we usually get started at a lot just for looking different, but dancing together drew way more attention. It was rather amusing.

So my training group has been in country almost a year now and just recently we had our first person go home. He´s a good friend of mine and was just done being here and ready to go back and start grad school. I made a quick trip to get together in Antigua with a group of us to say goodbye. Our training group is really close, so it’s hard and sad to see somebody go home. We’re gonna miss you big guy.

The soccer tournament is going well and really fun, even though we lost our second game 0-1. Everyone kept cheering and asking where my goal was…sadly I couldn’t please them. We played against the high school team and they scored in the last minute.

Last Sunday was 14th David’s birthday, one of the kids related to the family. We had a little party compete with tamales, coffee, and cake. I got him a pirated DVD Ironman, which he was quite happy about.

Mmm…the other day was a typical good day…a beautiful bike ride in the morning sunshine, a tranquil day at work, soccer practice with the girls in the afternoon, chatting and joking with the family when I got home, and a nice quiet evening alone at home making a pineapple curry stir fry with fresh local veggies, baking an apple pie, and drinking warm milk as I finished the second season of Scrubs on DVD. I went to bed quite satisfied and so happy to be where I am.

Parents visit and Fourth of July

2008-07-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

In the last weeks of June I had the grand honor of hosting my parents in Guatemala. I had a great time showing them my life and my work here, and also getting to see some other parts of Guatemala. After meeting them at the airport, we spent a couple days in Antigua soaking in the colonial atmosphere and easing them into Guatemala. We checked out the ruins, churches, and fabulous restaurants. I hired a guy from my town (the señora at my houses brother-in-law) to pick us up in Antigua and take us to my town. En route we stopped for lunch at Pollo Campero, the Guatemalan fried chicken chain that’s gone international. It’s an institution and sooo Guatemalan. It´s a popular spot for families to go for a treat and oftentimes if people have the money they will bring it back to their families in the rural areas after traveling through a large town. Even though there are a few franchises in the US, they say that it doesn’t taste as good cause there are nutrition standards so they can’t use as much grease. Thus, they also say that flights from Guatemala to the US always smell like fried chicken because everyone brings it to their relatives.

The time in my site with them was wonderful…they got to meet my friends, family, and coworkers, soak in the atmosphere of El Chol, and get a taste of the life I’m living. We all stayed in my cozy little house, them taking my bed and me on the couch. They came to my office bringing smoked salmon and Beecher´s Flagship cheese to share with my coworkers. The cheese was a big hit and I almost cried with happiness upon tasting the lusciousness again. It was cool cause my inquisitive Dad had a long conversation with my counterpart, who speaks pretty good English (I didn’t realize how good), asking him all about the work at the muni in regards to water systems, generation of electricity, and all kinds of other questions. The highlight of the time at my site was a lunch that my parents gave to 60 people from town including muni employees, my English students, women and children from La Ciénega (who had to walk three hours there and back), and members of the family that I live with. The mayor’s wife owns a comedor and hosts lots of lunches and various events so we had it there. It was so neat to see everybody come together and meet my parents. Lots of people dressed up for the event and the kids that came down from the rural community that I usually see barefoot and dirty were all fixed up with gelled hair and decent clothes and shoes. Various people brought gifts for my parents, such as typical handbags with El Chol stitched onto them and a pink knitted shirt for my mom that took the woman months to make. Lots of people wanted to take pictures with them too, which was slightly odd, but cool. We spent an entire evening chatting with the family that I live with after giving the kids coloring books and crayons, which they were fascinated with, and the women little footie socks that I wear that they had always said that they wanted. My mom’s Spanish did quite well, but it was still stressful having to do lots of translating. All in all though, it was just so cool to see my two worlds come together and for people to meet my family and for them to see my life here.

After my site we went to Panajachel on Lake Atitlan and stayed in an awesome colonial hotel. The lake is gorgeous – surrounded by three volcanoes and traditional indigenous towns. It was nice to relax and take in the natural beauty.

Next it was off to Tikal, the largest site of Mayan ruins up in the northern jungle region of Petén. We stayed a night inside the park, sleeping under mosquito nets and listening to the sounds of the jungle outside our cabin, including howler monkeys and countless species of birds. We got up while it was still dark to take the “sunrise tour” to the ruins. Trekking through the jungle heat and humidity in the wee morning hours, we climbed Temple IV, the highest one, to watch the sunrise and the series of ruins appear above the trees slowly through the mist. Impressive. Then we spent the next few hours being guided through the various ruins of temples and pyramids and hearing about the history and the myths. That afternoon we headed to Flores, a very small island town in the middle of a lake, despite being the departmental seat. You could walk the perimeter of the tranquil town in about 30 minutes, but the setting was quite lovely. We spent our last night in Guatemala City and they flew out early in the morning. All in all we had a wonderful time, despite the slight stresses on me of organizing everything and translating, it was well worth it for the memorable experience.

I then went to Antigua for the Peace Corps All Volunteer Conference, the one time the whole year when all 170ish volunteers in Guatemala get together. It was awesome to touch base with all my friends and to meet lots of other volunteers. We had some great speakers give information and opinions on topics such as Municipal Empowerment and Immigration. The next day we had a fabulous Fourth of July party in San Lucas put on by our Volunteer Advocacy Council. There was an American style BBQ complete with American flag toothpicks, a volunteer talent show, a singing of the national anthem, soccer and Frisbee, plenty of American music, and a dance party. There were no fireworks, but we tracked down some sparklers and had a patriotic moment in Antigua. It was a great way to spend the Fourth of July if you have to be out of the country, but for the first time I realized how much I really miss the USA the country, not just the people and places in it.

On the way back to my site, I was on a microbus on the dirt road heading to my town, when the camioneta (big school bus) from my town decided to broadside us on purpose. The two vehicles stopped and the drivers yelled at each other for awhile about not respecting the schedule of when each one left. The driver of the big bus was mad at the driver of the little bus for leaving at the same time and supposedly stealing his passengers and subsequently the money they would have paid him. (Which the driver of the little bus had no control over, since he was just doing what his boss ordered him to do). The driver of the big bus got back in, pulled it in front of our microbus, and then proceeded to back up into us on purpose and smash the front of our bus and then speed away. There was a fair bit of damage to the microbus, everyone was rather shaken up, and the driver of our bus was pissed. He called his boss and the police met us in Granados, another town up the way, where they handled everything. Meanwhile we all piled into another microbus to head back to El Chol and didn’t wait around. Only in Guatemala…

When I got home that Saturday afternoon, there was a prayer session being prepared for one of the women’s birthdays. I sat through the usual incense burning, singing, and recitations with the family and enjoyed delicious tamales and hot pineapple punch afterwards.

I have decided that I don’t like the rainy season. While yes, I am used to lots of rain being from Seattle, the difference here is that it is hot while it rains, the inside of your house is always damp, there are no clothes dryers to dry your clothes, the unpaved streets create massive amounts of mud, the rain falling on the tin roof is so loud you can’t talk on the phone or listen to music, you have to wash the mud off your jeans by hand, lots of roads become impassable, and the umbrella I bought is the cheapest and sorriest excuse for a rain stopping device I've ever seen. Some of my clothes and towels have molded in their inability to dry. Oh yeah, and hurricane risks. The other thing that sucks is that it gets dark at 7:00 pm, while I’m hearing about how great the weather is back home and how late it stays light. I guess the upside is that it stays light til 6:00 here the other half of the year. But in general, I have to say that the rainy season here – May through November – sucks.

chequenes

My Sunday was nice and relaxing…I went for a great bike ride in the pouring rain with a 13 year old kid who is part of my family, watched some of the soccer games, washed clothes, hung out with the fam, and almost finished the seconds season of Scrubs on DVD. I’m also almost finished reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, which makes a good conversation starter on a bus since lots of people are curious about the current politics in the US.

It was back to work on Monday. I updated the work calendar on the white board in our office that everybody references, but nobody upkeeps but me. People don´t really communicate their whereabouts very well, nor communicate when there are meeting, trainings, or workshops. So that´s why I put up the work calendar…at least it helps me out. Things were just as I had left them at the office…there was the familiar smell of cigarette smoke floating from the secretary’s office and the soft rhythmic beat of banda music emanating from my coworkers computers. The ambiance of an all-male office remains the same with their dirty jokes and constant harassing each other about being gay and how ugly one’s shirt is, talk of the latest soccer happenings in Spain, punching each other on the shoulders every two minutes, and seeing who can be the first one to beat this computer game similar to Bejeweled where a frog spits out colored balls and you have to put them in groups of three or more with the same color. Oh and some working too writing project profiles, compiling project studies, and attending to the needs of the public.

I’m finishing up the fourth municipal newsletter to go out next week, updating the database with information I've collected from the different communities relating to water and sanitation, attending various meetings and coordinating with NGOs. There is a big NGO focus on children’s issues so there a fair amount of support for projects relating to youth. One of them is the creation of a Youth Municipal Council in which they will learn about citizen participation by running a political campaign and electing their representatives, just as adults do. Within the COMUDE (Municipal Development Council) there are nine commissions that in theory work on different topics such as health, education, and finances. We are working to strengthen the COMUDE commission on women’s, children’s, and family issues by elaborating a public policy in favor of youth.

Another cool thing that has come together is that I am now coaching a girls soccer team, or at least training a group of girls aged 9-13. I had been observing a group of boys training in the afternoons in the soccer field and thought the participation of girls was lacking. So I talked to the guy who was running it and told him I wanted to train girls. So he told all his boys to tell all their sisters, cousins, and classmates to show up at the field the next day. About 14 girls showed up the first day and we had a good time. We did some dribbling drills, relay races, and scrimmaged. It all went really well and I think we’ll continue training Tuesdays and Thursdays and hopefully play games on Saturdays.

A week with my cousin!

2008-06-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

I had the honor of hosting my first visitor from the States! I had a great time showing my cousin around a selection of places including the good tourist attractions and spots off the beaten path (2 1/2 hours off the beaten path on a dirt road to my site). We started out in Antigua, taking in the colonial architecture, old churches, ruins, yummy food, and a lively nighttime atmosphere. Highlights included a “típico” breakfast of beans, fried plantains, eggs, fresh cheese, cream, tortillas, and coffee and salsa dancing at a hip joint.

We made our way to El Chol, enjoying the greatness of what is the Guatemalan public transportation system. In my town she accompanied me to my English class where she helped me run a game of Jeopardy using vocab words and simple grammatical questions. She reminded me that “quantities” is spelled with a “q” instead of as “cuantities”, as I had written on the board for the category. That is what living in Guatemala for 10 months will do to your English. We made the trek to La Ciénega where we baked an incredibly successful batch of coffee cake that thrilled all in attendance, so much that they all wanted to take more home with them and we were left empty handed. The usual pigs, chickens, turkeys, and dogs were underfoot and the fact that that community hadn’t received water in a month and the electricity project still isn’t finished isn’t keeping them down.

She got a great taste of the local culture during a big town activity that was the election of the queen of the intermediate schools games. The event included the usual parading of young girls in elaborate “fantasy” outfits and their speeches to the public. In addition there were demonstrations of poetry reading, oratory, lip-syncing, singing, and musical groups. It’s a great opportunity to see everyone from town all gathered together in the market in their usual fashion of all the women and children sitting on the ground floor and all the men and adolescent boys leering from above on the second level. Everyone comes dressed to the nines and you can observe all the social interactions and young couples in the making with text messages flying. We had a couple fun sporty afternoons with running, soccer, and basketball with my co-workers and English students and an enjoyable experience of making a pizza from scratch (including the dough and sauce) for a couple of my co-workers that came over for dinner and cards. Everyone loved her and thought how cool it was that she wanted to visit their town and I also received lots of comments on how pretty she is and inquiries on when she would be returning.

After saying good bye to El Chol, we made our way down the construction-infested inter-American highway in a crazy bus that like to pass other buses with oncoming traffic to Lake Atitilán. We had a splendidly tranquila night in the tiny town of Santa Cruz at the awesome lakeside hostel, La Iguana Perdida. We enjoyed running into other Peace Corps volunteers, having an amazing family style dinner with 4! kinds of curry, sleeping in rustic bungalows with no electricity, and doing yoga in the morning on the patio that was open to gorgeous lake views with towering volcanoes. We scored some homemade scones with strawberry jam before catching a boat to the other side of the lake to the hopping tourist town of Panajachel. Another tranquilo day with yummy food, souvenir shopping for awesome jade and coral jewelry, a live local reggae band with good social messages, and a crazy night out dancing to thumping reggaeton music.

We hit up the giant market of Chichicastenango a little ways north of the lake where we did some browsing of the beautiful traditional woven textiles and other artisan goods. Unfortunately I got robbed for the first time after being here for 10 months. I didn’t realize at all when it happened, but when I went to get on the bus as we were leaving, the 250 Quetzales that I had had in the front pocket of my jeans were gone. That’s about 30 bucks, so it’s not that big of a deal, but it is half my rent for the month. The market was super crowded and basically a body pack in some parts, so I guess it would be fairly easy to exact the cash if that’s what you do for a living. I was pretty ticked off though. We made our way back to Antigua for our last night, enjoying a very nice traditional Guatemalan meal with chiles rellenos, pupusas, fried plantains, beans, tortillas, and cheese. All in all we had a great time “paseando” and I loved having the opportunity to share the beauty, quirks, and charm of this country with people back home.

CODEDE, trainees visit, rain

2008-06-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

This month it was El Chol´s turn to host the CODEDE meeting, the Departmental Development Council. So all the mayors from the eight municipalities came to our town, along with representatives from all the ministries of government, NGOs, senators, and representatives from indigenous groups, women, workers, small businesses, etc. It was a super long meeting but also good to be informed as to everything that is going on. The meeting was held in a primary school just outside of town since the muni here doesn´t have a meeting place. So of course, classes were cancelled for the day since it is perfectly acceptable here to cancel class for really any reason. I got there at 6:30 in the morning to help set up and the meeting lasted until 2:30. It was long and draining. They discussed all the infrastructure projects that the Council approved and all the mayors and representatives had chances to talk and discuss, at length. After the meeting, the mayor provided a rather elaborate lunch for all in attendance with options of carne asada, seafood soup, or whole fried fish. I had the opportunity to talk with representatives from the ministries that work directly with women´s groups.

This week the newest group of Peace Corps trainees in the Youth Development Program was in El Chol for the week for their field-based training. It was fun to get to meet the newbies, spend time with them, show them my house, and give them a few tips now that I'm a ripe volunteer with six months in site under my belt. I watched some of the presentations they gave in the middle school and was impressed with their execution. It was really cool because the high school invited the whole group a dinner and dance they were having to celebrate their school´s anniversary. So we all went and ate dinner with them and attended a Guatemalan high school dance. The dancing and intermingling were fun. Good times! The next night we collaborated to put together an intercultural talent show. They did some singing, folk dances, and lip syncing. We had some people sing “Yellow Submarine” (with my guitar), do a hilarious skit, and we did our own traditional folk dance of the “Electric Slide” and then taught it to them. They all whooped and hollered as we demonstrated the dance and had a little bit of a tough time learning but there was lots of laughing throughout the whole experience. It was quite amusing and good times were had by all.

So there were a bunch of tropical storms that passed over Central America. We didn´t get hit by them, but it rained a ton and the temperature finally dropped a little. In town the streets turn to rivers and the roads leading into town become pure mud. There just isn´t the infrastructure and drainage to handle the amount of water. I washed a bunch of clothes on Saturday and they didn´t really dry til Thursday cause the air is so humid.

Half Marathon, IST, winter, Contradictions

2008-05-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

I ran the half marathon in Cobán! (All 13.1 miles or 21 km – the second time in my life). It was super fun because there were SO MANY spectators! I've never participated in a race with such great support from the crowd. Cobán is a fairly good-sized city and the whole way all the Guatemalans were shouting at us “Ánimo! Ánimo!” and handing out water and juice and hard candies not from the official water stations, but just cause they wanted to. It makes such a huge difference to have such great support from the spectators in a race like that. Km 11-17 were pretty brutal since before the race I hadn´t trained more than 10 km, but then getting toward the end and hearing all the people, it was just one foot in front of the other, knowing that I was going to make it. The whole city was like a big carnival with a parade, food stands, and everything imaginable for sale as vendors take advantage of the influx of people. The night before they put on a pasta dinner for all the race participants and really anyone in the community who wanted to come in and eat. The pushing and shoving to get in the door to the free food was unreal. Once inside there was a gigantic table piled high with Styrofoam plates piled six high with cold pasta. Pretty impressive. There was a marimba band (like in any social celebration in Guatemala) and it made for a generally festive atmosphere. That night there was a great live band in the central park.

The one weird thing about big public events here, is that no matter how many people are gathered, there are never places to go to the bathroom. Even at the pasta dinner, which was held in a convent, there were no restrooms available. I had been drinking lots of water all day, trying to hydrate myself for the race, so I really had to pee. Sometimes stores or other places will rent out their bathroom for one or two quetzales, so I found a “hotel” right off the park that was renting out theirs. I paid the woman, and she directed me down below. When I entered the hallway, it because apparent this was not an overnight type hotel but rather an hourly hotel with row upon row of tiny little numbered red doors. It was a creepy experience and I was relieved in more ways that one to get out of there.

Recently we had our Peace Corps In-Service Training where all of us from the Municipal Development Program got together with our counterparts for three days in the PC office in Santa Lucia. My counterpart had to go to Honduras for another training that week so I brought another coworker from the office with me. It was funny with the dynamic between all the volunteers and their counterparts. We were all together during the day listening to hours of PowerPoint presentations, but didn’t hang out together in Antigua at night. As always it was great to see all my friends and here about what’s going on in their sites in such various parts of the country.

The workshops in the high school have been going well. It’s nice to feel like I’m accomplishing something tangible and directly related to my program goals. The last time we talked about different ways citizens can get involved in their government. I gave them scenarios of hypothetical problems in the community that they had to make skits of to solve using one of the manners of citizen participation. It went really well, but I told them 5 minutes max for their skits and some groups took 20 minutes because Guatemalans have an amazing ability to talk forever.

The municipal newsletter that I put together has been going really well. We get lots of positive responses from it. Last issue covered what is the COMUDE, the interscholastic games, convocatory of teachers positions, an informe about one of the NGOs, a new systems the treasury’s office is using to increase financial transparency, among other notices.

Every month we gather all the institutions and NGOs that work in El Chol for an interinstitutional meeting. This month my counterpart couldn’t be there, so I had to run the meeting. Now that I've been here long enough, I've figured out the protocols of running a meeting in Guatemala. It went really well and we got a lot accomplished.

Well, “winter” here has started…meaning the rainy season. It will rain many afternoons and the streets turn to rivers for lack of good drainage. The dirt roads turn to mud and traveling around become more difficult. The water pours off my tin roof in great quantities. Talking on the phone in my house is impossible due to the noise it makes. A giant frog the size of a kitten lives behind my pila. You have to strategically wash clothes in the morning so they dry before the afternoon. Everyone at the office was fascinated by my red Marmot rain jacket. I broke down and bought an umbrella.

So I love living here, but of course I have my bad days when I just hate everything about this place too. It’s funny because the aspects that I love about Guatemala are also the things I can’t stand about it. It’s really a big contradiction for me. For instance…

· I love how family oriented they are here, but I can’t stand how they can’t be independent and how mothers will do their sons´ cooking and laundry til they get married, no matter how old that is.

· I love how people are so generous with their money and belongings, but I hate how they are so irresponsible with it too.

· I love how people don’t focus on accomplishments and getting things done and they enjoy their time leisurely, but I hate how nothing ever gets done and takes forever.

· I love how in a small town everyone greets you in the street, but I hate how people are always in your business and gossiping.

· I love that they use lots of natural remedies for their health, but I hate all the untrue superstitions like how pregnant women shouldn´t drink too much water.

· I love that everyone watches out for you, but I hate how you feel like you can’t do anything without everyone knowing about it.

· I love all the rich cultural traditions, but I hate how everyone is afraid of change and taking risks.

Women´s Office Approval and other happenings

2008-05-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

So we have approval for the Municipal Women’s Office! I sat through a four and a half hour City Council meeting. I was given the opportunity to speak at the beginning as the first order of business. It was a really hot day, so I was sitting there sweating buckets attributed to the heat and my nervousness. I was very nervous, since it was jut me and the City Council in a small office. They had all received copies of the project profile beforehand, so I explained the project and why it was important, they asked some questions to which I responded, and then they all said it was good idea and gave their support. I’m waiting to read the official written declaration before I get over-excited about it. I've been waiting for this for months, so I am quite happy and ready to get started on this new project. While tiring, it was interesting sitting through the rest of the meeting and observing how things went, the topics that were discussed, how decisions were made, and hearing financial information of the muni. We snacked on fried chicken, white bread and Super Cola (I couldn’t have come up a more unhealthy combination). It was good to get to know the Council members and have their support.
I accompanied the mayor to the Departmental Development Council (CODEDE) meeting. Typical for here, I had been told that the meeting would be here in El Chol, so I showed up to work early to get prepared for it. When I arrived, people vaguely told me that it was actually in Rabinal. So I asked the mayor to take me with him to the meeting so the two of us hopped in his pickup and made the hour´s journey up and over the mountain on the dirt road to the next town over. There I sat through a couple hours of talk about projects, reorganization of the working commissions, etc. But when it was over I made good contacts with the women who now work as delegates in the department of Baja Verapaz for the national women’s office and office of social works of the wife of the president. We planned a meeting with them and the coordinators of the women’s offices in the department.
The day of the meeting came. I was sitting in the microbus waiting to leave for the meeting in Salamá (two hours away), I had talked to the coordinator of another women’s office and she was going to meet me in El Chol and we were going to go together. When the bus was about to leave and she hadn´t showed up yet, I gave her a call and she told me that the meeting had been postponed. So I almost had spent four hours traveling (on my own dime since the muni has temporarily stopped giving money for work-related transportation), for nothing. Such is the way things go here…

This week was the first big rain of “winter”. It had been unbearably hot all day long, and in the afternoon it started to cloud over. While I was in the middle of teaching my English class, the rain started pounding on the tin roof so that I found myself screaming to be heard over the din. The lightning and thunder was impressive as well. When class was over, we all waited in the doorway for the rain to calm down and when it seemed that it wouldn’t, I decided to make a run for it. I rolled up my jeans and went dashing out across the community soccer field, which had turned into a lake, while all my students watched incredulously and laughed at how weird I was. I made it the two blocks back to my house dripping wet and laughing. I couldn’t even have a conversation with the family the rain was so loud. I drank a cup of coffee with them but no one was talking since it wasn’t worth trying.

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting at the Peace Corps office of the volunteer-run “Gender and Development Committee.” The committee produces materials and advises on how to incorporate issues of gender into our development projects since there is so much gender inequality and machismo in Guatemala. They are heavily involved in HIV/AIDS education and also sponsor leadership camps for adolescent girls. I hope to get more involved with their activities.

So I when I got off the bus in front of my house coming back from the meeting, I was greeted by a plague of insects that had arrived. The air was full with little four winged insects that didn’t bite, but swarmed and invaded the houses. Supposedly they signal the coming of “winter”, known to us as the rainy season. Usually all the doors to the family’s house are open during the day, but that day they were all shut. To get in their house I opened and shut the door super quick to avoid letting too many in. But still they were all over the floor, half of them dead and swarming around the lights. Up at my house they covered the outer walls of my house and a great number of them had succumbed in my pila water. I’m still picking their little wings off of everything. Gross.

I gave my first workshop in the high school on the Decentralization Law and the System of Development Councils. One of the goals of the Muni Development program is to improve and increase citizen participation, which starts with education on how the government works. I did a PowerPoint presentation on what is the State, how the government is organized, the Decentralization law, and then an activity on the Development Councils. They I broke them up into group and gave each group a section of the law that they had to read, summarize, and present to the group. They I gave them homework where they have to go interview the Community Mayor/COCODE president of the community that they live in. All things considered, it went pretty well. They were well behaved and participated. I didn’t have any moments of serious Spanish lapses. At the end they asked some good questions, which makes me think they were at least paying attention and analyzing the information. It was a huge relief cause I had put a ton of planning time in and had been pretty nervous about it. I´ll go back next week for another workshop with them.

The latest baking adventure was Guicoy bread. The guicoy (We-coy) is a vegetable identical in flavor and texture to the zucchini, but instead of being zucchini shaped, it is a little spherical squash, about the size of a mini pumpkin. They were surprised that I didn’t peel the guicoy first, and were interested to learn that the most of the nutrients of fruits and vegetables are in the skin. The women were thrilled with this new idea and thought I was brilliant, but I told them that no, it was my grandma’s recipe, so she was the brilliant one.

The director of my program, Municipal Development, came for his routine visit to El Chol to see how things are going with my work. We had a good meeting with my counterpart and the mayor to discuss various projects.

It´s been ridiculously hot here again recently. One of the things that makes it bearable, is that sometimes someone from the office will go to the house next door and buy for everyone chocolate covered frozen bananas with peanuts, called “chocobananos” in Spanish. They are delicious and sell for one quetzal, or about twelve cents.

It was Melany´s 9^th birthday last week and we had a party for her. Instead of a piñata we celebrated with “dinámicas” or interactive games, such as blowing up a balloon and popping in between two peoples tummies. There were a bunch of kids there and it was an all around merry affair. There was the usual snack provided with chicken salad sandwiches on white bread and cake and punch. It´s crazy being here long enough to watch these kids grow up. Already I've noticed how they’ve grown taller and how the little ones speak better. I've watched Gaby learn how to read starting with learning her letters and now she can sounds out just about any word. I feel so proud!

There is always some reason for the schools to cancel classes and celebrate – be it mother’s day, interscholastic games, or the anniversary of the school. (All of which happenened in the past month). The anniversaries are reason for cancellation of classes, various athletic and cultural activities, and of course, the election of the “queen”. I watched the election of the queen for both the middle school and the high school. Both events had a “talent” component, which was lip-synching to popular songs. The middle school girls had a “fantasy” outfit component where they dressed up in elaborate colorful costumes with feathers, glitter, and sequins, with most of their bodies exposed. As they parade themselves about, all the men in the crowd whistle and holler. It’s a fun to go to community events since the whole town comes out to watch, but the young girls dressed as such and dancing as such just doesn’t quite sit right with me. It’s behavior that is encouraged and further cements the stereotypes and rigid gender roles here.

One of the interesting things about living in a small town where it’s hard to find things that you want to buy, is that selling door to door is quite popular. People come from other areas of the country making a living with these kinds of sales. The other night I came home from my English class and a man was selling clothes, towels, socks, and underwear at the house. All the women were excited about the stuff he had and bought a bunch of it. Other people come around selling herbs, cheese, pots and pans, and other randomness.

I contracted a local carpenter to build me a bookshelf for my house. I went over to his shop, chatted with him for awhile about how he had been in the States, drew him the design of what I wanted, and he made it exactly how I asked. It´s made out of pine wood with four shelves, one foot deep and three feet wide. He had it done in a week and only charged me 250 quetzales or like 30 dollars for it. To get it from the workshop to my house, I called a tuk-tuk, one of the little three wheeled moto-taxis. Now I have all my books, DVDs, and materials are organized. I got a nice little typical woven fabric piece to lay on top.

The half marathon in Coban is this weekend! I've been training to some degree…I run about 3 miles every morning and have gone 6 – 8 miles a few other times. We´ll see how the 13.1 miles treats me this Sunday.

A few comments on the ways Guatemala has changed me so far:

-I have developed a fairly good sense of time without a wearing a watch.

-I wake up early without an alarm.

-I have acquired massive amounts of PATIENCE.

-I focus less on accomplishments and “getting things done”, but on enjoying time and people leisurely.

-I have learned appreciate and enjoy time being alone.

-I am not picky about fruits and vegetables to be found in the market.

-I have developed a strong appreciation and admiration for the USA and American institutions.

-I am better read with free time that I have to read.

Manure truck, professional soccer game, muni finances, library project, corn bread, PC meetings, immigrating friends

2008-04-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Musings on Culture…and a few other updates

2008-04-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ideas brought to the New World

At Reconnect we discussed differences in culture between Latin America and the United States in order to make some sense of the common frustrations we’d been experiencing in our work and living in our communities. Before I delve into cultural generalizations, I give the disclaimer that these are of course generalizations, I’m not trying to stereotype, and of course there are exceptions. While generalizations may not be true of every individual in the group, they serve as a framework for understanding. It is helpful while living in this total cultural immersion at times bewildered as to WHY people act in ways that make no sense to me to be able to analyze these differences.

We discussed the ideas from the book Views of Latin America based on the differences between values brought the New World by Spain/Portugal and England. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese had the goal of recreating or transplanting their systems from Europe to the New World. On the other had the British were trying to break away from the old order in Europe had the goal of creating a whole new system. This resulted in stark differences between Latin American and North American cultures and below is a summary of SOME of the differences.

Latin America

Economy: feudal, land-based, mercantilist, monopolistic, state-influenced

Society: rigid two class immobile society

Education: rote memorization, deductive, unscientific reasoning

Religion: pattern of absolutism and orthodoxy

Politics: authoritarian regimes, conservative reactionary right with revolutionary left

North America

Economy: capitalistic, individualistic

Society: mobile middle class

Education: non-conforming, questioning, inductive, scientific reasoning

Religion: freedom and pluralism

Politics: supportive of representative democracy; free speech, press, assembly

Factors to keep in mind that influence Guatemala today:

-The high percentage of indigenous people and being a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual nation

-Machismo – apparent in discrimination in the workplace and public sphere, whistling/cat calls/inappropriate remarks on the street, domestic violence, women having to ask permission from their husbands to leave the house

-The history and repercussions of the 30 year civil conflict

-Corruption in politics, police, and an ineffective justice system

-Violence, delinquency, organized crime, narcotrafficking

-High levels of poverty being second highest in level of unequal distribution of wealth in the Western hemisphere, behind Haiti, according to UNDP

-The relationship to the United States economically, socially, geographically, historically

-Immigration: social effects of such a huge portion of the population living abroad and economic effects of remittances

-Influence of (or dependence on) NGOs/international development aid

Culture Matters

I might have mentioned some of the following ideas during training, I can’t remember, but after being in country for seven months now, they resonate stronger. Below are some of the difference between North American and other cultures. These ideas are taken from the book published by Peace Corps Culture Matters.

Individualism vs. collectivism. Self-explanatory.

Universalism vs. particularism. The idea that rules should apply to everyone equally or whether rules apply differently to different people, depending on how much money or influence you have.

Monochronistic vs. polichronistic. Concept that time is objective and punctuality and completion of tasks is valued vs. subjective concept of time that is more fluid and where punctuality and timely completion of tasks are not as important.

Low power distance vs. high power distance. Society is less hierarchical and it is acceptable for those in positions of power to associate with those who have less vs. rigid social hierarchies with stricter rules about interacting with superiors.

Achieved vs. ascribed status. Staus is achieved through hard work and education vs. who you know or who your family is.

Interal vs. external control. Life is what I make it vs. life is what happens to me.

How culture is reflected by language (or how culture is shaped by language?)

Obviously language is culture. The longer I live here and the better my Spanish gets, the more I see how intertwined they are. It is interesting to compare how

Gender. Latin American culture is machista. Every noun has a gender and every adjective has to agree in gender. Linguistic rules regarding gender are rigid; societal rules regarding gender roles are rigid. The word for wife, esposa, is the same word for handcuffs. Hmm…what is that saying?

Relationship to nature. In English we say We’ve had a lot of rain. In Spanish you say Ha habido mucha lluvia (There has had a lot of rain). To whom does the rain belong? English speakers want to own and control everything, including rain, whereas Spanish speakers don’t treat nature as belonging to anyone.

Responsibility/blame/fatalism. In English the passive voice is rarely used and taught to be avoided. In Spanish it is a common and acceptable construction. In English we say I broke the window and claim responsibility for the action. In Spanish they say Se me quebró la ventana (the window was broken to me), which in the passive voice avoids blame for the action as if it were out of control of the speaker.

Okay back to what else has been going on…

April has been a crazy month of birthdays for the family that I live with. Birthdays here go something like this. Around 5 am they light off firecrackers to wake the whole neighborhood. Sometimes there is loud music in accompaniment. They don´t go to school or work that day, because it´s their birthday (or their parents don´t go to work in order to prepare the celebration). The whole morning is spent preparing a lunch and baking a cake that will be shared with the family members and perhaps some close neighbors and friends. With all the hours it takes to prepare the lunch, it is scarffed up in no time. For kids there is a piñata in the afternoon where all their little cousins are invited. Every kid has a chance to swat at the piñata and there is a mad rush for all the candy that erupts out. Then there is singing of Happy Birthday (in English oddly enough), cutting of cake, serving of snacks – usually sandwiches with chicken salad on white bread. The whole affair is festive and fun. This week it was Luisito who turned seven. He is seriously the cutest kid ever and his chubbly little cheeks were glowing with delight the whole day. I gave a him a snappy red toy car that he was quite excited about.

One of the NGOs active in El Chol is starting a project for a Youth Council project. It will involve 4^th through 8^th graders in a process of learning about citizen participation through elections, creating an agenda of needs, and executing projects that they come up with. So the NGO took a group of people from El Chol and Rabinal that included teachers, city council members, and other involved people to the town of Los Amates in the department of Izabal in the eastern part of the country. There we met with some youth who had been active in the Council in their towns and their adult mentors and they shared their experiences. It was a great meeting and we learned a lot that we will hopefully be able to implement here in El Chol. We were near the East Coast, so it was ridiculously hot. We bought ice cream and couldn´t eat it fast enough to keep it from melting all over the place. We took advantage of being in that region of the country to visit the Mayan ruins of Quiriguá in the afternoon. After driving for awhile through endless banana plantations, there are huge monoliths with carvings. There is also part of the city which is still being excavated where you can see the stadium and perfectly carved steps. It was a fun day all around, despite getting up at 2:30 am to leave by 3 and getting home at 9:30 at night. It was cool to hang out with the teachers and city council members.

I've been trying to take advantage of the knowledge of the people who work for the NGO´s and to tag along when they make visits out to the communities around here since the muni itself does not have any transportation. I went again with a Licenciado (term for someone with a Bachelor’s degree) who works for an NGO that gives workshops on citizen participation and the development councils system to the aldea of Los Jobos. It’s great to observe his presentations and it´s a wonderful opportunity to meet people from the communities and introduce myself. I chatted with the COCODE president there and he asked me to give a short presentation to the middle schoolers there who were going to help him fill out the agua and sanitation questionnaire that I designed for our Municipal Database. So I flew by the seat of my pants and entered a crowded classroom full of about 50 curious middle schoolers and explained to them the questionnaire. Talk about intimidating. The workshop with the Licenciado ended up started an hour and a half late because another NGO had planned a personal hygiene presentation for the same time, so we had to wait til he was finished. I was once again surprised by the number of people who didn´t even know how to write their own names and had to use a fingerprint as their signature on the sign in sheet. In all about 40 people attended the workshop and participated well. These workshops almost always include a snack and a meal provided by the NGO, which stretches the budget. On the way back into town we stopped at a friend of the Licenciado´s family’s house in another community. They were very kind and gave us pure sugarcane juice, a strong, sweet, brown beverage and dinner of tortillas, beans, and eggs.

The next morning I observed another workshop that the Licenciado put on, a training for trainers. This is a program where community leaders are elected to be trained to train other community members in a program about the System of Development Councils using prerecorded CDs and workbooks. Once again it was good to get to know more community members and learn more about the programs.

Last weekend I went with my site mate to the small rural community of Chilascó, about three hours north of El Chol. We visited the ecotourism volunteer who lives there and works with the community association that manages the park with the tallest waterfall in Central America. The town itself is quite small and has limited services, but after asking around with found a woman put together some plates of beans with hot dogs and tortillas to take with us to eat to complement the other tienda snacks we found. It´s a beautiful place that with cool fresh air and totally green. We camped out in the cloud forest, aptly named because you are literally walking through clouds. It´s like a tropical jungle, but not hot. The hike in is a bit strenuous, but totally worth it to be in the thick of such a peaceful forest. Our attempt to make a fire had limited success so while we did get some small sticks to catch on fire, we were never able to get any big flames that stayed. We slept on the ground with a mosquito net in a covered area with a thatched roof. It was nice falling asleep with the sound of crashing water. In the morning we hiked the rest of the way in to get right up next to the waterfall, although it was so foggy we couldn´t see a thing and all the pictures are of grayness. It was an awesome trip though and I felt like my soul was revived after spending some good quality time with nature.

There was a 5 on 5 soccer tournament planned in which the employees in my office organized a team. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to play since there was to be a men’s league and supposedly a women’s league. Except that they couldn’t get enough women together to play, so I couldn’t play.

One of the very frustrating things about work here is that meetings get cancelled often, with short notice, or no notice. Several times it’s been planned to meet with the city council to get our Women’s Office project approved, but the meetings have been canceled. We also had a meeting planned this week with our office, an NGO, and the mayor to discuss the situation of the COCODEs, but it was canceled. Then the monthly COMUDE meeting was canceled also this week because the mayor had to go out of town. I had several orders of business to attend to during this meeting, but it was unfortunately postponed for the following week when I have a mandatory Peace Corps security meeting out of town. So I’ll have to wait til the May meeting. The difficult thing is also that so many people are involved in the monthly municipal development council meetings that it’s hard to inform everyone. So several people who’d had to travel significant distances came into our office that hadn’t gotten the message that it had been canceled. Sad when the Planning Office can’t plan.

It´s mango season! There are delicious, delicious mangos abounding everywhere. You can buy them on the street conveniently cut up in bite-sized pieces. Or buy them large, whole, and juicy for a good price. I've made mango curry a couple times too after I bought too many mangos too eat and they got super ripe so I had to mash them up and put them to another use. It turned out to very a very yummy alternative use of mangos. I love that all the special fruits that are expensive in the states abound here….fresh pineapple, avocados, papaya, mangos, etc.

Reconnect

2008-04-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

The first week in April we had “Reconnect” with Peace Corps – an opportunity to get back together with everyone in our training group at the Peace Corps office after being in our sites for four months. It was a nice opportunity to check in and hear how things are going in everybody’s site, share accomplishments, commiserate with common frustrations, receive technical training, and have Spanish classes. We had some interesting sessions on cultural adjustment too where we talked about our frustrations and strategies to combat them.

We stayed in Antigua all week so despite the fact that we were in classes or trainings all day long, it was like a mini-vacation. We stayed most of us together at a hostel that despite the dirty shared bathrooms, had a great terrace for hanging out on in the evenings. We ate really yummy Antigua food and went out salsa dancing. I got a chance to stock up on needed items like peanut butter and shampoo and internet time. It was really interesting to hear the projects that other people are working on from trash collection to opening libraries. Some people have very challenging sites and their biggest accomplishment was “I’m still here” which is a big accomplishment because we still have all 33 in our group that we started with back in Washington DC in August. Most groups lose at least a couple people by this point. Way to go guys!

It was hard to say goodbye to my fellow volunteer friends not knowing when the next time I’ll see them will be but it was nice to come back to El Chol after being gone for a week. Everyone greeted me warmly and told me they had missed me, which was nice to hear. I didn’t miss much around the office while I was gone. Everything was normal when I came back…the mayor is never in the office because he’s studying criminology in the capital, the secretary is smoking in his office and listening to marimba music, (like a xylophone) while he handwrites documents into big dusty books, and my coworkers are all glued to their computers, some working intently and others playing solitaire. They have been busy putting together project profiles and preliminary engineering studies for all the infrastructure projects planned for next year, which doesn’t have a lot to do with me. Right now they are still finishing up projects from 2006 and 2007, haven’t started the 2008 projects yet and are already planning for 2009. That’s how it goes.

I went to La Cienega this week, walking an hour each way, with the intention of making corn bread, but when I got there it turned out there was meeting planned at the same time to form the school committee. You never really know what’s going to happen when you show up to a community. The women felt really bad but I told them that it was much more important that they go to that meeting than make bread so I went along to the meeting with them. Basically, in order to receive any kind of additional funding, there has to be an official organized group of parents and teachers with a president, secretary, treasurer, etc. in order to receive funds. So they formed the group and are hoping to get funding to fix the broken windows, paint the school, and participate in the Glass of Milk program to get milk donated to the kids. It’s a very formal process with an official book of “actas” which are like meeting notes, but written in a very formal way. Everyone present has to sign and those who can’t write their name put their fingerprint. It was good to meet the teachers and more people from the community and I played soccer with the kids (all of 15 of them that attend the school) for awhile.

My English class is going well. We didn’t have class for two weeks this month, first for Semana Santa and then for Reconnect so we’ve had to do a lot of review. This week I wrote out the lyrics to Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams and we used it as a listening comprehension exercise. By the end they were all singing along and it was really cute.

The heat this week has been almost unbearable. We used to have the luxury of air conditioning at the office but it broke and now we all just sit there sweating without moving. In the middle of the day my house turns into an over as the tin roof heats everything up. Supposedly it will only last like this for a few more weeks and then the rains will start. It’s been raining occasionally at night so loud on the tin roof that you can’t hear yourself think. Yesterday it rained really hard in the afternoon for the first time and there was a double rainbow perfectly framing the church in the central park. The heat is the main topic of conversation with anyone. When you go buy something at the store, you talk about the heat. When you greet anyone in the street, you talk about the street. When you talk to anyone, at work or at home, you start off by talking about the heat. Every conversation goes something like this:

“Good morning!”
“Good morning! A pleasure to greet you.”
“What heat!”
“Yes, what heat!”
“Too much…”
“Yes, too much.”
“It looked like it wanted to rain”
“Yes, it looked like it wanted to rain.”
“Only God knows when the heat will subside.”
“Yes, that’s how it is.”

Semana Santa

2008-03-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

I know I’m not changing the world here or even going to make any huge drastic changes to El Chol, but hopefully I will help a few people make their lives a little better or a little easier. My baking adventures continue. The press has been writing about how the prices of basic goods, including bread, have drastically increased in recent months while salaries remain stagnant and low. The women have been practicing the recipes that I taught them at home for their families, which makes me happy. The other day we made cake out of a box, which they didn’t know existed and they thought was the coolest thing ever. We made chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla cakes and corresponding flavors of frosting. Like usual, we baked them in sardine cans and they turned out beautifully. I showed the women the most recent pictures of my beautiful baby niece and they oohed and ahhed over her again. Here this is an interesting custom of gifting things, including pictures. So the women asked to have a picture of her, which struck my as slightly odd, but I obliged and gave them some of the extra pictures that I had and wrote her name and birthday on the back. They were absolutely thrilled and put the picture up on the wall right along with all the other family snapshots. It was cute. I had walked there by myself and it was a very tranquil walk in the early morning with fog still covering the corn fields. The walk home in the heat of the mid-day was a bit tiring, but I broke my rule and brought my ipod out of my house for the first time since I’ve been here and enjoyed listening to Michael Franti/Spearhead and Manu Chau as I sauntered back to the pueblo.

The prayer sessions returned to the house to honor the senora’s father who died. There are nine days of prayer sessions with food after a person dies, and another nine days 40 days after the death, and another nine after one year. So once again there were lots of people, but not quite as many as before, in the house each evening praying, socializing, and enjoying food provided by the family. One night I help dish out steaming hot cups of hot chocolate with rice and distribute them to everyone in attendance. It was nicely complimented with tostadas with tomato sauce and crumbled campo cheese. I took advantage of the opportunity of everyone gathered to again show off pictures of my rolly-polly adorable niece and everyone went nuts over her and couldn’t stop talking about how “preciosa” and delightfully plump she is.

While my Monday and Wednesday evening are occupied by English classes, Tuesdays and Thursdays are now filled with soccer games after work with co-workers. We play on the basketball court in the central park, so it’s a small, quick-paced game, with lots of spectators. The middle school is right behind it, which is in session from 2:00 pm to 7:00 (but for some reason they never seem to be in classes), so all the middle school students are out there watching us and cheering. The adolescent boys yell at me “canche! canche! [another word for a light-haired person] come here!” When I go up to talk to them, they get all embarrassed and don’t say anything and just giggle. It’s cute, but annoying. I’m the only girl playing with all these guys, plus I’m canche, so it makes it all the more a spectacle. The games are good and competitive and I keep up pretty well with everyone.

Like I’ve mentioned, there is a fair amount of support from international NGOs in El Chol. One of them is working with COCODEs and workshops on citizen responsibility. I asked to tag along to one of these workshops to observe in one of the rural communities. It was a great experience, just seeing how different the aldeas are from the town in interesting. I got stung by a giant bee “from the mountain” right in the middle of my cheek as soon as we arrived. It didn’t swell too much, gracias a dios. Everyone at first stares at me with that “what in the world is she doing here” look, which I am well familiar with. Throughout the meeting people unabashedly stare at me the whole time. But when I left they were all super nice and very gracious and thanked me immensely for coming, even though I didn’t do anything. When making a list of the people in attendance, the facilitator would ask them if they knew how to write in order to sign next to their name. If they didn’t (about half the women), they would put their fingerprint down instead. The meeting dealt with discussing what services the community had, how they got those services, what services were needed, and discussing making commissions to address what was lacking. The citizen responsibility part plays a huge role because of the emphasis on decentralization of the central government, the government isn’t going to come in and do projects. Instead, the responsibility lies in the community to organize itself to solicit funding to get the materials for the services they need, and then put in the manual labor to make them happen.

It’s interesting looking at this system coming from a country when I never questioned that where I lived had running water, electricity, sanitation, schools, stoves, and roads. Here, if a community lacks these services, it is their responsibility to organize themselves, petition the municipality or an NGO, wait, pester, wait, pester some more, and then put in the manual labor to execute the project. Taking into consideration that all this work they have to do in the free time outside their normal working hours in mostly subsistence agriculture. Thus, it’s impressive when projects get completed, and understandable when they don’t get organized or fall through. I wrote a little while back about that word “colaborar”, to collaborate, which I continue to hear all kinds of contexts, but especially with respect to the responsibility for the community to collaborate to get projects done. I suppose the same process happens in the states, like for example if a certain community decides they really need a stoplight at a certain dangerous intersection and the city hasn’t put one there yet, they may organize themselves and go petition the city for that stoplight. But it’s hard to imagine telling a community in the US that it is their responsibility to organize themselves, petition, and put in the labor to get running water. There, it is seen as a right and responsibility of the government to provide these “basic” services, whereas here it is seen as development and the responsibility of the citizens to make the government or an NGO provide. Such is development here. The role of international institutions is huge. There is immense reliance on these NGOs to pick up the slack where the government leaves off.

I was invited to have a birthday lunch with the family of one of my friends the other day. It was nice to relax for the afternoon among friends, several of which are in my English class. It’s cute because the tradition is to sing the Happy Birthday song in English here. The cake was a yummy but strange concoction made by dipping white bread in pineapple flavored gelatin mix before it solidifies and putting a cooked pineapple spread between the layers. It is eaten chilled with cream on top. Very tasty, but an interesting method.

Easter is a much bigger deal here than it is in the states and the whole week, Semana Santa (Holy Week), is vacation. The whole thing is bigger than Christmas and there are lots of family and social events. I took advantage of the days off to go travel along the Rio Dulce to the Caribbean coastal town of Livingston. The Rio Dulce is what flows from Lago Izabal, the largest lake in Guatemala. I made my way on six different vehicles of three different types. (Pickup truck, microbus, microbus, microbus, pullman (nicer big bus), microbus). I enjoyed the views along the way as I watched the landscape of the country completely change. Baja Verapaz is a mix of green and brown but as you travel east, the brown disappears and turns itself over to pure greenery. It gets hotter and muggier. You start to see lots of banana tree plantations and Del Monte, Dole, and Chiquita banana semi trucks making their way to the eastern port with their goods for the world market. You can catch glimpses of people outside their houses lounging in hammocks, shirtless men drinking beers in the morning, and kids playing in the dirt. The pace of life is relaxed in all of Guatemala, but it seems to slow down even more as the temperature rises in eastern part of the country.

After seven hours of travel from El Chol, I arrived in the town of Rio Dulce where we stayed for a couple nights. It is a hectic excuse for a human settlement, basically just a crossroads for Peten (the whole northern part of Guatemala), Guatemala City, and the Caribbean coast. It is super hot and muggy, there is tons of fresh tropical fruit for sale, and most people just get there and hop on another bus and leave. But it makes a good jumping off point to enjoy the lake and has lots of good seafood restaurants and inexpensive simple lakeside hotels. We found a cheap cabana and they had a boat to come pick us up to take us across the 50 yards of water to the place. (It’s so close they just yell to get a boat). So we got there and settled into the basic cabana on stilts in the water that creaked when you walked on them. We sampled the swimability of the water and found it quite pleasant and warm like bathwater. Getting hungry and venturing out for dinner, we realized that we were actually on an island only accessible by boat. Hmm….they hadn’t mentioned that to us. There’s just one guy to runs the little dingy back and forth and he was nowhere to be seen. So we ended up talking to this guy in the restaurant there and told us that he was headed in his private yacht to another hotel/restaurant owned by some Swiss guys only accessible by boat for a fabulous all-you-can-eat BBQ feast. That seemed like a wonderful idea and he invited us along. He was a crazy cool wealthy old dude with some interesting political views (loved Pinochet and thinks that dictators are the only way to achieve long-term economic success). We got along great and had engaging conversation. The meal turned out to be well worth it (the equivalent of like 7 dollars) with grilled chicken, beef, pork, shishkabobs, roasted veggies and corn on the cob and endless other amounts of yumminess. I’ve pretty much been eating vegetarian here since I don’t like to buy meat to cook at home, so I had been lacking good meatiness and thoroughly relished being a carnivore once again. After the scrumptious meal we zipped across the lake in his yacht to a disco. We passed the night dancing with all the foreign backpackers and hip kids from Guatemala City on vacation and watching our married friend flirt with the owner of the hotel we were staying at.

The next day took a hot and bumpy camioneta ride through the green steamy countryside to check out Finca El Paraiso, a crazy phenomena of naturally hot water cascading over rocks into cool river water that mixes together to make a delightful temperature for bathing. You can stand right underneath where the water falls over the rocks and its just like a hot shower, with a sulfur odor. It’s a good place to be wowed (again) by the ingenuity of nature and meditate on life for a bit. The day of swimming around was just what we needed to beat the jungle heat and relax after a long day of travel. It was cool because we went on a Sunday, which is the day when all the Guatemalan families go and spend the day swimming and picnicking. We munched on the best mangos I’ve ever tasted in my life and some moist banana bread off the street.

The other main attraction to see at Rio Dulce is Castillo San Felipe, this old castle built a few centuries ago by the Spanish to prevent pirate attacks and control access to the sea. It was restored back in the 50’s and makes an interesting little jaunt. Thinking we were cool, we decided to walk the three kilometers to the place in the blazing heat of the day and arrived sweating buckets. It was nifty to see the canons and small stone walkways and doors and take a little bite of history. We opted to find a microbus back into town.

The next day we hopped on a boat to cruise down the river to Livingston on the coast. The boat ride was gorgeous through a lush canyon with sheer cliffs covered in greenery. Saw lots of birds, collections of lillypads with pretty flowers, some other hot springs and caves with bats along the way. Luckily we had to no trouble en route, considering that two days before four Belgian tourists had been kidnapped by some community members there angry over some guy being thrown in jail. But the tourists had been released that morning after negotiations and our passing was tranquil, gracias a dios.

We reached Livingston, the smallish town on the Caribbean coast near the Belize border, reachable only by boat, where the Guatemalan Garifuna culture is concentrated. The Garifunas are a mixture of descendents from black slaves influenced by Guatemalan, African, Caribbean, and American cultures. They have unique music, dancing, and language that is a mix of English, Spanish, and something else I can’t remember. Livingston is a unique mix of Guatemalan, Garifuna, and foreign tourist cultures are mushing together. Both Spanish and English is spoken and it hard because you never know which language to use with people. The town itself consists of two main streets with hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops. There is fresh fruit, coconut bread, knick-knacks, and jewelry for sale on all sides. It is situated on a peninsula so you can walk from the beach across town a few blocks and get to the beach on the other side. You might be greeted on the street with “what’s up man?” or “buenos dias senor”. You might hear Reggaeton, American hip hop, Ranchera, or Punta (Garifuna) music. And then there are the tourists – domestic ones vacationing from Guatemala City with their stylish clothes and swanky walk; foreign older couples walking around wide-eyed with sweat-stained shirts, wide-brimmed hats, Teva sandals, and big digital cameras taking it all in (I think they came off the cruise ships maybe); foreign younger hippie backpacker-types trying to play it cool; and the occasional Peace Corps volunteer taking vacation feeling smug about themselves that they speak Spanish while listening to the other tourists struggling, and enjoying drinking a cold beer out of their site. It’s strange because it you were dropped into this town, it would be very difficult to figure out where in the world you were. It feels like a mix of the southern United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and I don’t know what else.

The beaches around town aren’t very pretty so we took a day trip outside the city to a place called siete altares (the seven altars) where the river flows through seven different pools of smoothed rocks. You can swim in the deeper ones and jump off the ledges that don’t look very high from above, but are scary once you’re peering over the edge. After that we went to playa blanca (white beach) fittingly named for the white sand. Now that place was the postcard image of Caribbean beaches that is fixed in our minds. Swaying palms trees with hammocks strung between them, gentle warm waves washing over fine white sand, and a warm breeze bringing fresh salty sea air. The water is heavenly except that you can walk out super far and it still only comes up to your waist. Very different than the brutal crashing waves on the Pacific side. We laid around reading and dozing in the shade of the palm trees, trying to avoid skin cancer, but putting ourselves in danger in instant coconut-falling-on-your-head death.

In town we enjoyed the typical food of the town, tapado, a creamy coconut soup with every kind of seafood in it. It was deliciously sweet, rich, and savory and required a fair bit of work to eat as we pulled out a whole crab, a whole fish (with head), various octopus tentacles, shrimp with all their legs and eyes and various other unidentifiable sea creatures in their shells.

Thursday morning of Holy Week we got up early to get the first boat to Puerto Barrios, the main eastern port of the country. From there we caught several buses and microbuses back to Rabinal in Baja Verapaz, the town just an hour north of me. When we got to the terminal, we were informed that there were no microbuses running to El Chol that day so we had to go look for a pickup truck ride. When a truck stopped it asked where we were going and I said “El Chol” and he told me that’s where they were going too so we hopped in. Only a little way down the road he stopped at a place called “Los Chorros” and told us this was as far as he was going. Confused, we figured out that he had misheard me and thought that we wanted to go to Los Chorros instead of El Chol. So, we had to wait there. Coincidentally there was a family of eight waiting there too for a ride to El Chol…they had been waiting five hours already for a ride. So we waited for awhile debating what to do, munching on some knock-off Fruit Loops cereal to take care of our hunger. Randomly this middle-aged white guy come down the road huffing and puffing on a bike. We said good afternoon and started at each other and I asked him what he was doing there. He said he could ask us the same thing and we chuckled since we were out in the middle of no where on this dirt road. He was from Belgium and had ridden his bike from Cancun, Mexico to there and was headed for Peten in Northern Guatemala. He had been told that the road was paved and hadn’t been told that it was over some mountains. We chatted for a bit and he told us how he has done this sort of thing all over the world. Crazy awesome guy. By this point it was late afternoon so I called my family back in El Chol and the senor came to pick us and the whole other family up in his truck. It was like a two hour round trip for him so we paid him for gas but wouldn’t take any extra money. Very kind and definitely saved us.

I was so happy to be back in El Chol to see the Holy Week activities. It’s cool to see other places, but really cool to get to participate in stuff with people that you know. Thursday night there was a reenactment of the Last Supper in the central park, complete with costumes, lights, and sets. It was very serious and very well done. Holy Week here is famous for the “alfombras” or carpets that the people make in the streets to prepare for the elaborate processions with Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In El Chol various families and the schools each get a section of the street to do so we got up super early Friday morning to help the family with their section. First you spread fine sawdust all over, and then with cardboard stencils you decorate with dyed sawdust to create these elaborate patterns in the streets that really look like carpets. We spent several hours on these works of art and everyone down to the kids pitches in (colaborar :-) to help. Then when they are all finished preparing the route around town leading to the church, the processions make their way along the carpets and instantly ruin them. Jesus and the Virgin Mary are paraded through the streets while men hold them up like pallbearers. The procession stops at various houses and the priest gives a sermon at each stop with his portable microphone. I followed along for awhile, but it went on for awhile and the sun got really strong. Following the procession the family invited us to eat the typical Holy Week lunch with them consisting of re-hydrated dried fish and various breaded and fried starches and vegetables all smothered in a red sauce and the obligatory tortillas on the side. It was accompanied by fresh squeezed tamarind juice. Good to try, but I missed glazed ham, cheesy potatoes and green beans.

It is also Holy Week tradition for families and friends to go picnicking by the river. So Friday afternoon I went camping at the Rio Montagua, the longest river in Guatemala, with a bunch of the same people that I had gone camping with on the mountain last December. We got our provisions and all piled into a pickup truck for the hour’s super bumpy journey to the riverside. We collected a bunch of firewood and made a fire and everybody contributes food so there’s all kinds of tortillas and chicken and beans being cooked up and shared. I brought my ipod and my ipod speakers that I scored down here for like 6 dollars. They had fun going through my music and it’s always surprising what people pick out and know. They really like Blink 182, Coldplay, Metallica, Nirvana, Aerosmith, and Guns n’ Roses. Its funny. The night was made rather merry with cusha, homebrewed alcohol that we mixed with Super Cola. The following day we hung out by the river, went swimming (in the two feet of water – it’s the dry season), and grilled meat. It was a great relaxing day hanging out with a bunch of cool Guatemalans.

Saturday night there was a big community dance in the central park with a live Meringue band. It was lots of fun and there was lots of couples dancing, but as usual there were more people watching – parents keeping an eye on their daughters, adolescent boys too shy to ask a girl to dance, girls waiting to be asked, and the curious onlookers observing it all.

Ironically Easter Sunday was the most tranquil day of the week with few activities going on except for mass. While buying food in the market, I ran into one of the women from my women’s group in La Cienega. She is one of the coolest ladies ever…super smart, very motivated and a great leader. I met her husband for the first time, which just made me so sad, since he was drunk and blabbering and asking me for a visa to the states. She was obviously embarrassed and I just hate seeing such great women with such crappy husbands.
Monday it was back to work and the usual. Tuesday we had a good monthly meeting with all the institutions that work in El Chol. We scheduled a meeting with the mayor to reorganize and evaluate how the COCODEs are working and planned out how we are going to support reorganizing the working commissions of the COMUDE. Hopefully things will keep moving forward.

P.S. Here's an article about the war in relation to the community where I was waiting on the side of the road between Rabinal and El Chol for a ride back home.

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog-entry/2008/03/24/american-genocide.html#

Cobán, Los Amates Feria, comunicación pública, community meetings, heat, schooling, etc.

2008-03-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

I have been officially welcomed as a volunteer to the region of the Verapaces. Every time a new group of volunteers comes in, there is a celebration gathering of the volunteers in the region to welcome the newcomers. Last weekend there was a big party with all the volunteers from the departments of Alta and Baja Verapaz and from other areas of the country. I traveled with some fellow Baja Verapaz-ers on Friday to spend the night in the city of Coban. We had quite an interesting journey. At one point the microbus that we were on stopped behind a long line of cars and told us that it wasn’t going any further because there was a roadblock. Frustrating since we were only half way there and had already paid full fair. Obviously the driver knew about it beforehand, but of course failed to mention it to us. We were told that no transportation was getting through, but that you could walk across. So we got out and walked to the front of the line of cars and climbed under some branches that were (symbolically) blocking the road. It was funny since there were people selling cold drinks and frozen chocolate bananas and there was a relaxed atmosphere. This was the first of two blockages so we went on foot for a ways walking with our backpacks in the sun with a bunch of other people and a nice family that we met who was also going to Coban. Eventually a pickup came along offering us a ride and we hopped in the back and it took us to the second blockage. This one was a bit more intense and the people had set the branches on fire and were adding tires to the blaze. There were lots more people on this side and I ran into some people from my town and got the scoop of the situation. They told me that the town was mad because the police had lynched some people but that everyone was calm and it was safe to cross. So we stepped around the burning tires and made our way across and found another microbus on the other side that took us to our final destination. If I had been in that situation my first week in Guatemala I would have been nervous about the whole thing, but now that I’ve been here for over six months, it just seemed like a normal day and was no big deal. We talked to locals and scoped it out and it wasn’t a problem. Roadblocks are quite common here and more of a nuisance than anything else.

I had a funny conversation with the microbus driver on the way. I sat in the front seat crowded in and squished against him. He told me all about the processing plant that he worked in in New Jersey and the story of how he got deported and all that. It was crazy listening to his experiences, especially since there is practically a daily article in the papers with pictures of the planes landing in Guatemala bringing back all the deported.

Coban is a typical largish Guatemalan city surrounded by deep green almost tropical hills. It’s the hub of the central northern part of the country and is famous for being a coffee growing region and for its artisan wares. We got off the microbus in front of McDonald’s and we couldn’t resist but eat dinner there. My quarter-pounder and Oreo McFlurry sure hit the spot and I think I’ve eaten more McDonald’s in Guatemala that I’d eaten my whole life before. I eat enough tortillas, eggs, and beans and its nice to treat yourself once in awhile. We stayed a relatively cheap but very comfortable and hospitable hotel and had a yummy breakfast and delicious coffee in the morning.

Saturday we walked around town through the central park and the market (Guatemalan markets cease to amaze and intrigue me). We made an excursion to these sweet waterfalls a little ways out of town. I enjoyed the ride through the beautiful landscape and we got off the microbus on the side of the highway where the park is. There was a shirtless guy standing there taking entrance fees – 10 quetzales, like a dollar and some change. He had to convince us that he was legit since it seemed like some scam that someone would do where they would take your money and then you’d get in and have to pay the real person. But no, it was fine and we made our way into the hardly developed park. We took a winding steep path through warm lush green forest and arrived at a large beautiful bright teal pool with a giant waterfall cascading into it. The water looked like the postcards you see of the Caribbean. Bright and clear. Since most of us hadn’t thought to bring swimsuits, we stripped down to our underthings and dove into the deliciously refreshing cool water. We frolicked and swam about and floated on our backs looking up at the greenery on all sides. The current is fairly strong where the falls hits the water, but by clinging to the rocks on the side you can get behind the falls to where there is a cave. We sat in the cave behind the falls on the water-smoothed rocks for awhile taking the impressive beauty of the place. Floating on my back looking up at all the green was another one of those “I’m so happy I’m in Guatemala” moments.

That afternoon we made our way to the cabin where we were having the party a little ways outside of Coban in the town of Tactic. Randomness has it that it sits near a chicken farm with over 60,000 chickens reside. Go figure. We grilled all sorts of meats and veggies and made a giant grocery sack full of pasta salad (lack any other serving dish). I met lots of other volunteers and hung out with lots of good pals from my training group. The evening included a dance party. Good, good times.

This week I went to another training in Salama with the NGO Promudel. This one had to do with public communication and how to increase transparency and citizen participation with different media communication. Thus, I went with the guy who is runs the loudspeaker off his jeep who I found out is the “Public Relations” guy for the muni. That was news to me that the muni even had a “Public Relations” guy. Basically his job is to go around town in his jeep blasting music and announcing municipal, school, cultural, and sporting events. It was a great workshop and we got a lot out of it. We are going to write a plan of public communication for the muni that includes the newsletter, an end-of-the-year magazine, the loudspeaker jeep, bulletin boards, and possibly a radio station.

Last Saturday was the election of the queen of the feria in an aldea of El Chol called Los Amates. The rural community is about 7 km up a terrible dirt road from El Chol that few vehicles can take on. You think El Chol is in the middle of no where, then you go to the aldeas and really feel like you’re lost. I got a ride in the loudspeaker jeep and we bumped and jostled our way up the mountainside. When we got there we were invited to eat dinner with the guests of honor like with my counterpart and his wife, the judges of the contest, and the announcer of the event. This election was a bit more tame than the one in El Chol, less slutty dancing and less revealing clothing by the 15 year old girls in the contest. Like most community events that I attend, they always give a little mention of me being present and I wave to the crowd. After the election of the little girl and the big girl queens there was a community dance in the little school. In a double classroom they put the giant speakers and lights and fog machine and packed everyone in so it was good and hot and sweaty and foggy. Of course they only play one type of music which sounds like one continuous song for the entire time with the same bouncy beat. What is interesting about these community dances is that there are so few women present because either they have to be home taking care of children or they don’t get permission to leave the house from their parents or their husbands. So there is always an excess of men and boys who have to just stand in little groups watching since there aren’t enough girls to dance with. Needless to say, you can’t walk through there being a girl without being swept up. Overall it was a funky small community celebration that was lots of fun. It reminds me how lucky I am to get glimpses in the lives of others while living here. They get a kick out of me being here. I get asked daily how I like El Chol, and how I feel living here, and they respond with how good it is that I am here, and that I like it here, and then they tell me that I probably won’t ever leave. To which I give a polite chuckle and then tell them that no, I will be leaving in two years. To which they respond with at least I will take my Guatemalan husband with me to the states. To which I respond with another chuckle and a shake of my head.

We continue to trudge ahead with database at work. I finally got the data from the Ministry of Education and spent several hours adding up over 100 columns of data for 13 schools, (which is just the beginning). I also created a questionnaire to distribute to the COCODE presidents to hopefully get complete, accurate data on the status of water and sanitation in the communities. It is important to have accurate data for the municipality to be able to inform decision making, but man it’s tedious.

My English class is still going well and I am enjoying it, despite various frustrations. I have about 18 consistent students now which is a perfect number. Monday I gave them their second test and they did alright. Some did very well of course (there are a few very smart cookies who I feel bad about hold back with the rest), and others did terribly (which I feel bad about since no matter how many ways I explain it, they just don’t get it). I’m finding myself having to teach learning habits and study skills as well since they seriously lack them. This test included an oral component when I took each student outside and they had to answer three questions that I asked them, all of which we had practiced in class. Before we started I told them that I wasn’t going to be in the room, so I expected them to act like adults and be respectful and not talk during the test. Well, that didn’t work and they were all talking and sharing answers and it really pissed me off. There is just a lack of respect in general here in classrooms, meetings, anything and it is really frustrating. It’s adults too – talking on their cell phones or to their neighbor during workshops or meetings or whatever. I got really stern with my students and told them I was very disappointed and explained that I was giving this class outside work hours, for no pay, and that they needed to pay me with respect. And I told them that anybody missing two classes without clearing it with me or making it up is going to be out of the class. Oh man, I was so frustrated. Usually I’m super chipper and jolly in class and try to have a good time, but hopefully with the fresh stern words they got the picture.

This week pan dulce (sweet bread) was on the curriculum for my women’s group in La Cienega. I trudged up on foot carting all the pounds of flour and sugar for the lesson. A friend of mine accompanied me this time since my co-workers couldn’t go and my friend didn’t want me to go alone and she wanted to get to know that community. On the way there in the strong sunshine we passed a man puffing his way up the hill with a heavy load of sugarcane on his back. As we passed my friend said “que rico!” and turned around and told us to each take a stalk as a gift. That was very sweet (no pun intended) of him. Gotta love the randomness of walking the middle of nowhere in Guatemala, being given sugarcane out of the blue, and walking along with a tall stalk of it in your hand as a walking stick, like it’s perfectly natural. I had never had fresh sugarcane before so when we got to the community we cut part of it, peeled it, shared it with the women and their kids, and sucked out the juice from the cane. It’s yummy! The bread turned out well, like usual. They fed us lunch, like usual. They asked when I was coming back, like usual.

There is a civil engineering intern from the university in the capital who will be working in the office for the next six months. He is working on a project with some co-workers to measure all the municipal owned in the municipality. Basically these are “community lands” that individuals “rent” for 10 quetzales – like a dollar and some change – for the year. They can either grow crops on them or maintain them as forestlands. Back when this system was set up, the measurements were made very approximately and what is written down may not correspond to what’s on paper. The muni will be going around measuring these lands and updating the registries since many are inaccurate, belong to deceased people, etc. So rumor went around that the muni was going to be kicking people off these lands or taking parts of them or selling them or whatever else. So to clarify this misunderstanding and keep everyone from getting all ruffled we set up meetings in various communities and went around clarifying the information. We spent all day driving around the dirt roads to these rural hard to reach places meeting with community members and explaining the purpose of the measurements and that we weren’t taking any land away from them, just trying to organize and update the registries. There were some tense moments and people got heated with their questions but overall it went well and I think everyone understood in the end. We were in the direct sun all day, usually meeting outside schools where there is nowhere to sit and no shade and I sort of fried myself. I had a good time getting to visit communities I’d never been to and observing the dynamics of it all. Things are so different out in the aldeas than they are in town. The men all dress identical with work jeans, boots, a button up shirt with the sleeves rolled up or a ratty t-shirt with English writing, a white hard material cowboy style hat, a woven man-purse, and a machete in a leather sheath. Oh yeah, and every single one has a mustache.

One of the things that bugs me about the men who I don’t know who come into the office for one piece of business or another is that they always give a firm handshake to my male co-workers, but to me, they either barely lightly touch my hand in a bad imitation of a handshake, or don’t offer it at all. Or they pull you in for a kiss on the cheek instead. I know it’s a cultural difference, but coming from where a firm handshake for everyone is valued, it gets to me.

It was a bad week for accidents. A bus veered off a mountain in another department and killed 55 people. A couple in their 40’s from an aldea here ran off the road which killed them and left their 11 children orphaned. A 22-year-old woman from here tried to commit suicide by driving her car off a cliff. She’s in an unhappy marriage with a drunken cheating husband and has one kid. She was taken by helicopter to the capital, which was of course the talk of the town because it is so expensive. She is still in intensive care.

The days are getting really hot here. Maybe in the 90’s I would guess. I die when I go home at mid-day and make lunch because the tin roof cooks the insides of the house like an oven. There is always a crackling noise as the metal adjusts in the heat, making it sounds like its raining. The evenings are spectacularly wonderful though. Once the sun goes down there is a refreshing cool breeze but still comfortably warm. I relish being in a t-shirt or tank top at 8:00 in the evening. Sometimes I go down and sit in the central park with people and chat in the dusk hours. There really isn’t anything to do here but sit in the park in the evenings, so you run into lots of people and just sit around. It’s pleasant.

One of the funny things about being a foreigner in a small town is you feel like you live in a fish bowl. People notice all lots of details about me that wouldn’t think. If I put on mascara, grow out my fingernails, wear different shoes, get a sunburn, wear my glasses, whatever it may be, people notice and comment on it. Everyone also seems to know where I was, even if I didn’t see them they’ll be like, oh yeah I saw you over by such-and-such. It’s strange.

My friend who worked for the family I live with left and now her aunt works there in her place washing dishes and clothes, doing household chores, and taking care of the senora’s ancient mother. The woman’s daughter’s name is also Katy, which is funny. The other night she and Katy came up to my house for a visit, actually just assuming I had a TV and wanting to watch it (even though the family has two). She was surprised disappointed when I told her that I didn’t have a TV and that I like to read books instead. She sat down and we chatted for awhile. It was an awkward situation (of which I now have lots of experience with). She is 24 and from one of the aldeas, had her first kid when she was 15, and has a first-grade education and tried to pass second grade, but after three years unable to pass, she dropped out. Her husband left with another woman and she works in the house here. She was looking at my travel guide to Guatemala and didn’t know how to orient the book to look at the words or the map of Guatemala. I pointed out El Chol, Rabinal (the only other town she has ever been to) and the capital on the map. Everything I told her she was surprised about. She started pestering me about why I wasn’t married yet and that I was getting old and needed to start having children right away. The whole exchange was quite interesting.

Two of the kids I live with are in first grade and learning to read. It’s so cute how they get out their notebooks in the evenings and show me what they’ve learned. I sit with them as they read to me and its super adorable. It’s nice how Spanish has consistent pronunciation and rules – it makes it a lot easier on kids to learn how to read and write. There just isn’t a culture of reading for fun here though, which makes me sad. They have their books that they learn how to read with, but I have really never seen any fun kids picture books that make a kid want to practice. The adults don’t really read for fun either and the three teachers that I live with were all surprised that I like to read for pleasure.

One of the interesting things about the education system here is that in primary school they teach the kids some English and some Achi, which is the indigenous language around here. Its funny though cause the teachers don’t speak it or know how to pronounce the words, but they give them lists of vocabulary words to memorize anyway. So they really don’t learn anything worthwhile or of substance, but at least they have some exposure to the languages. However, talking to some of the parents and kids of ladino (non-indigenous) families, they don’t like that they are “wasting” time learning an indigenous language. El Chol is almost 100% ladino and very few people actually speak Achi. It is commonly spoken around Rabinal, which is the next town about an hour north of here. Many parents want their kids to learn English since it is much more useful in the job market and don’t see the importance of learning an indigenous language since although everyone here is mixed, they don’t associate their identity with being indigenous. It is an interesting dilemma.

Racism here is very strong in an overt, but non-malicious way, if that makes any sense. People will be made fun of for having darker skin, speaking an indigenous language, and telling someone they are acting like an “indio” is an insult for doing something stupid. It’s not taboo to say these kinds of things and oftentimes they aren’t really meant to hurt someone’s feelings, but more in a joking around kind of way. Yet it creates an atmosphere of perceived inferiority that permeates all areas of society.

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

2008-02-23T07:56:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2008-02-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rabinal feria, work picking up, collaboration

2008-01-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Rabinal, the next town up the road about an hour away, to check out their feria. Yes, I’ve been making quite the rounds of ferias since I’ve been here. What they all have in common are wares for sale, good food, good music, parades, people coming from other places to visit, running into people you know, and a general merry time. Rabinal is famous for its religious brotherhoods that put on dances with elaborate masks that tell stories. I went with a couple other volunteers, so we made French toast and coffee at my house before taking off. To get there you usually take a microbus van, but those leave when they are full so we missed out on the one we’d planned on taking and instead opted for a ride in the back of a pickup (“picop” in Spanish). This pickup, like many, was modified to carry lots of passengers with features like built in benches and bars to hang on to. To get to Rabinal you climb up a mountain and the weather can change really fast so it was freezing cold and raining up at the top, even though it had been sunny and warm when we left El Chol and we were dressed for it.

Like the feria in El Chol, the streets were packed with vendors hawking a variety of household items, clothes, knick knacks, food, sweets, tacky religious paraphernalia, and pirated DVDs and CDs. I took advantage and bought myself some items I’d been needing for awhile such as a wooden spoon and a soccer ball. I got a pirated 3 in 1 DVD of some of the newish movies that are out in the states including “I Am Legend”, “The Golden Compass”, and “Alvin and the Chipmunks” for the equivalent of like $1.25. They are hilariously horrible copies of the movies taped from the movie theaters, complete with heads in the way of the screen, people in the audience talking, and being off-centered with terrible sound quality. But hey, gotta keep up on pop culture stateside. I also got a 2 in 1 DVD of Ice Age and Ice Age 2 for one of the little girls in the family who turns seven this week.

We enjoyed ourselves checking out the dances, which were really cool to see, but it sufficed to watch for a few minutes. It’s funny to see the traditional masks on top of bodies dressed in puma and adidas shirts with nike sneakers. There were a few white tourists sprinkled in the crowd getting their giant camera lenses in for good shots. There was music without much of beat with drumming and a flute type instrument, but they were pretty much drowned out by the ranchera music being blasted from nearby speakers and the other sounds from the crowds. We pretty much just wandered around eating all day long. The list of our gastronomic indulgences includes gringas (quesadillas with yummy marinated meat and a selection of sauces), corn on the cob, fresh fruit smoothies, flan, pinol (a delicious tomato-based tortilla soup-like stew with chicken that Rabinal is famous for), ponche (basically warm egg nog with a splash of liquor), chinese chow mein and fried rice, and churros. Whew.

I made sure to get some exercise after I got home after all that indulging. So I did some exploring to some of the areas around El Chol and went hiking up a mountain I’d never been up before. It was beautiful in the late afternoon with the sun shining low across the corn fields and glinting on the hillsides. From the top I was rewarded with a full 360 degree view of the landscape.

I spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in, washing clothes, baking stuffed red peppers, cleaning my house, going for a run, reading The World is Flat, watching the Sunday soccer games, playing with my new soccer ball, and hanging out.

Work has been picking up in a good way. Monday morning I got up early to go to the departmental capital of Salama for a very productive meeting with the various institutions that are active in El Chol that we set up. I was very pleased with the turn out and the attitudes of everybody. Basically, there are lots of NGOs and governmental organizations that do overlapping work in El Chol, but none of them communicate with each other or very well with the municipality. When they set up meetings in the community, they don’t take into account who else is going that week or what they are doing, so what ends up happening is that people get invited to lots of meetings, they get confused with who is doing what, and they don’t come. So….we’re hopefully going to improve this situation by meeting monthly to share plans and schedules. It was great to hear about the activities of all the institutions and brainstorm about common challenges. We also talked about some of the challenges and strategies for the Municipal Development Council (COMUDE). They are each going to write a blurb about what they do so that we can put them in the next municipal newsletter that I put together to get the information out to the communities. Hopefully we can keep the energy and momentum created at this meeting going throughout the year.

Tuesday afternoon I went out to an aldea (rural community) to visit the community development council (COCODE) there. I have been chatting with the council president, who is a woman, at the COMUDE meetings in El Chol and expressed an interest in getting out to the communities more and she was delighted that I wanted to come. So I coordinated with one of my coworkers who has a motorcycle to get out there (since the muni doesn’t really have transportation). It’s only about 4 km away, but it took us over an hour to get there because the road is so bad. Some parts of just completely loose sand and others are just giant rocks. And this is the dry season. The rainy season it will basically be impassable. I kept having to get off and walk while he tried to get up and down the hills. The whole experience of getting there and back was hilarious and I had a great time and enjoyed the lovely landscape that we passed through. Rural Guatemala is beautiful with dusty paths dappled with animal droppings leading into the trees, mountains of green, corn fields, random cows, dogs, and chickens, silence, streams and fresh water springs, and curious quiet farmers that stare at you.

We arrived at the primary school in the community seven minutes after the appointed meeting time and were the first ones there. One by one they came trickling in and we made small talk about the illegal cutting of trees in the area and about their excitement of receiving electricity the previous week. We started “on time” about 45 minutes after the appointed time. About 15 people showed up, which was a good turnout for a community of 18 families. The cool thing was that the majority of them were women and a few were outspoken and chatty. We chatted about their experiences working with various institutions and the community’s interest in receiving trainings on various topics. I’m going to try to coordinate some trainings on the three big legal documents of the Law of Decentralization, the Municipal Code, and the Constitution. I may also do one on the roles of the COCODE positions. Then it came up that the price of bread has gone up and its hard to get to places to buy bread and the women wanted to learn how to make it themselves. So, it turns out I will be heading back there next week to bake banana bread with them in a clay oven.

In general it was a really good experience, although a bit awkward of course. They were really nice and gave us juice-like drink when we got there and a rice drink before we left. Everyone sat on the ground outside the school for the meeting since it was hot inside and there was a breeze outside, but they made sure to bring us desks from inside for us to sit on even though I protested that I really didn’t mind sitting on the ground. In general I’ve noticed that whenever you enter a room anywhere, people are very eager to offer you a seat and are uncomfortable if you remain standing. So even if you really would rather stand (or sit on the ground), you have to accept. One of the woman also gave me a warm bag of a “snack” as a thanks for coming out there. On the way back to El Chol my coworker and I stopped at a spring to take a break and let the motorcycle cool off and I pulled out the snack baggie of something wrapped in a leaf and he informed me that they were cow livers. I tried them and despite the foul smell, they actually didn’t taste bad and was basically tasted like beef with a weird texture. I gifted them to him though since he really likes them and the thought of eating liver just didn’t quite sit right with me. He got a good laugh out of it.

I’ve noticed the word “colaborar” coming up a lot living in Guatemala. As it sounds, it means “to collaborate” and its frequent use coincides with a culture that highly values community and communal efforts. It was mentioned when the women in the community I visited were discussing getting the ingredients for banana bread together and talking about “collaborating” to gather enough bananas. It was mentioned in the preparations for the feria in organizing each community development council to “collaborate” to take a turn in the security patrols. It was mentioned during the municipal development council (COMUDE) meeting asking community members to “collaborate” with police to report people illegally cutting down trees for firewood. The very function of the community development councils is to collaborate the efforts of the community to take control of their own development as they see fit. Of the course the system has lots of flaws and doesn’t always work in that idealistic way, but the intention is there and there are lots of people working hard (community members, Peace Corps volunteers, and countless other institutions), to strive to reach that ideal. Many other times I’ve heard the word come up. It conveys a sense that everyone is invested in everyone else’s interests and the interests of the community. It wasn’t, “okay, so everybody bring your bananas next week” or “okay, so everybody watch your back during the feria” or “watch your property for people cutting down trees.” It was used to coordinate the collaboration of everyone who had a common interest to work together to bring about the desired results.

Mumbles and Jumbles

2008-01-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

Its funny how your perceptions, expectations, and the things that you get excited about change. For example, this morning I put my 5 gallon empty water container out to get a refill from the water truck that comes through once a week. In past weeks it has been replaced in the morning, but by the time I left for work today it hadn’t come yet so I assumed that it wouldn’t be coming today and made a mental note to boil some drinking water this evening. But when I came home for lunch, the filled container was sitting outside my door and I got really excited! The thought of being in the states and getting a moment of joy about how I had water to drink for the week gave me a chuckle.

Similarly, as I was browsing through the Sunday market last weekend, I was overjoyed to have my attention drawn by shouts of “Queso! Queso!” to the glittering squares of a type of fresh, crumbly, salty homemade cheese for sale. I told the senora selling it, as she wrapped me up a piece in a large green leaf, how happy I was and asked how she knew what I was lacking. Usually you have to wait for a different woman who goes around selling this cheese from a basket door to door, but if you’re not home you miss out. Now it’s no Beecher’s Flagship that’s for sure, but I needless to say I was happy nonetheless. It’s pretty good to eat with black beans on tortillas with a bit of chile sauce.

Ah yes, black beans. The equal staple of the diet here along with tortillas. I can’t remember if I recounted my first attempt to cook black beans here. Well, basically I made an attempt but didn’t add enough water and left my house, knowing it takes several hours to cook them, only to come back to a scorched pot and a kitchen full of smoke. The townsfolk got quite the kick out of it. Anyway, this week I made another effort and successfully cooked a pot full of yummy black beans that I’ve been eating off all week. I was quite pleased with myself. It’s the simple things that give you joy.

I experimented with making rice krispie treats. I used the odd margarine, multicolored marshmallows, and choco-krispies since that’s all that was available. The pink, blue, and yellow marshmallows melted into an interesting and not-so-appealing brown mush, but once you mix it with brown krispies it doesn’t matter so much. They turned out pretty good and were a big hit when I shared them with the family and everyone asked for the recipe.

I’ve started teaching English classes to adults two evenings a week after work. The turnout has been excellent with a total of 39 people who attended at least one class and a solid group of about 25 who attend consistantly. Its challenging since it is a large group and I’ve never really taught before, besides soccer camps to kids with is a really not comparable at all. But everyone has a really good attitude and is excited to learn and appreciative of my efforts. It is a bit strange to “discipline” adults and try to get them to be quiet and listen. Also getting Guatemalans to show up at an appointed time is very challenging. If you tell them 5:00, they think it’s still cool to saunter in at 5:30. Here when someone enters a room they still give a loud greeting and everyone acknowledges them, whereas in the states if someone is late they try to sneak in the back and not be noticed. So I’ve told that since the class is free, they need to pay me with punctuality. We’ll see if it gets better. I made a list of useful greetings and phrases and we went over the list with pronunciations and situations to use them. Then I had everyone get into pairs and create conversations from the phrases on the list and then share them with the group. I want the emphasis of the class to be on conversation and how people actually speak since I felt like that was lacking so much when I learned Spanish. Its still slightly nerve-wracking for me to be speaking Spanish in front of a group of almost 30 people, but as I told them it serves as an example that you just have to lose all your inhibitions of speaking, knowing that you will make mistakes, and just TALK since a lot of people (especially the women) are really timid to speak up. So far I really enjoy it.

Last weekend I taught the one of the women in the family how to make cinnamon rolls at the urging of her 6 year old son who had tried them in Pollo Campero. It was her first time to cook with yeast and no one in the familiy had baked with it before so it was fun explaining how it works. Of course it was quite the spectacle again with eveyone interested in the process and checking on the progress while they were rising. They turned out great and everybody really liked them. She tried to make them again on her own later that afternoon, but had used boiling water to activate the yeast which I think killed it, since they didn’t rise. I told her my theory and so she tried again the next day and they turned out beautifully. Her son also wants me to teach his mom how to make pizza so we might do that this weekend if she has time to go to the capital to buy mozzarella cheese.

I’ve gotten out and played some pick up sports this week too which has been really nice. I played basketball in the central park with a group of people, even though I’m terrible we were all about the same level so it was still fun. I also went to kick around a soccer ball with two other girls around my age at the community field. We had to share space with all the boys who were playing and when they organized a game, it was hard to watch and not be included. It’s strange how much separation there is between genders here. It was nice just to get out there and get a touch on the ball since I hadn’t played since I’ve been here. We kicked the ball around and watched the sunset over the hills until it was too dark to see.

While I’m thousands of miles outside the states, I try to keep up as best I can with current issues. I’ve been following the presidential campaign through Newsweek (which Peace Corps imparts to us), the New York Times online, and the Prensa Libre (the national newspaper). It is very interesting to see how one of the hottest election issues, immigration, plays out down here. Probably about 30% of this town is or has been in the states, most illegally. That’s just the fact. And so many people that you talk to want to go. It’s crazy to see so many families split up and to see the direct results of the remittances that get sent back. So much of the economy here is made up of remittances evident in nice motorcycles, houses, computers, etc. that you see about. Every single person you talk to has some family member in the states. When I ask people how many children they have, I then ask how many are in the states. It’s really hard to discuss immigration. People ask me questions, like “why do people in the United States discriminate against Latinos?” when they see the articles in the paper every week about all the deported Guatemalans being flown back; and “All I want to do is go visit my brother. Why is it so hard to get a visa?” It’s hard because people see it as their right to be able to go to the US and don’t understand why it’s made to be so difficult.

Last weekend I went and visited two other volunteers who live in the next department over. One made an awesome spaghetti dinner and it was great to get out and see their site and visit. The next day we went to the capital to go to Hiper-Paiz (the super-mega-uber store half owned by the evil Wal-Mart). I stocked up on goodies that I can’t get in my site like hangers, brown sugar, ground turkey, mozzarella cheese, and face wash to name a few. I also picked up pencil pouches and lunch boxes for the two little girls.

January 14th the new President, Alvaro Colom took office and it all went smoothly. January 15th was the taking of office for all the municipalities. My mayor was re-elected for the fourth time so he didn’t change but there was some changes in the city council and what not so there was a big ceremony in the market. I got there early in the morning to help my co-workers decorate for the event. While gigantic speakers blasted music I blew up tons of balloons for like an hour and a half. We strung them from wall to wall and set up the stage covered in pine branches. It turned out looking quite festive. Lots of people came out to witness the event with speeches, a review of the projects from the previous year and lots of formality of everything. A cool thing is that there are three councilors to the mayor and two of them are women. This is very rare and very cool. That should help get the Women’s Office approved and to receive funding I’m hoping. After the ceremony everyone rushed to congratulate the mayor and give hugs all around and take pictures. A marimba band played and the mayor provided a delicious lunch with beef to EVERYONE who attended. Pretty impressive.

That afternoon I went with my site mate to visit another volunteer who lives about half an hour away to hang out at her feria and attend the dance that night. We had a great time but it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the El Chol feria. The dance was in the outdoor basketball court in the center of town with a live ranchero band.

One of the women in the family has a brand new computer with Windows Vista on it and I’ve been showing her and her daughters how to use it. The 8 year old has some experience and catches on really quick and especially liked the videos of various animals on Encarta. Her mom has basically no computer experience and wanted me to show her how to print off big letters of the alphabet to post in her classroom. I was showing her word art in Word and it was quite the task since I had to show her the very basics of how to type a capital letter on the keyboard, delete letters, and how to click and drag a mouse.

My program director of Municipal Development for Peace Corps came for my site visit. My counterpart’s wife made a super yummy lunch for all of us with carne asada and rice with cheese! (Kraft-knock-off). He checked up on my living situation and we visited the office and met about how things have been going and plans for the upcoming months. We talked about my current projects with the Women’s Office, the municipal newsletter, ArcView GIS, coordinating with other NGOs and GOs, and English classes. He also brought me a mountain bike from the Peace Corps! So now I can peddle about on all the dirt mountain roads surrounding here. The family was all excited when I brought it home and everyone, including the adults, all tried it out and took it for a spin around the block. This morning I went for a nice ride before work.
Just today we set up a meeting with a bunch of NGOs and GOs that work in El Chol to meet in a couple weeks to coordinate the efforts that everyone is doing since up to this point there hasn’t been very good communication among the different organizations. I’m excited for that to be able to get a better grasp of everything that goes on and where I might be able to fit in.

I’ve been reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman here. If you’re not familiar with it, it is an interesting piece of nonfiction about globalization and the factors that have “flattened” the world such as the internet, PCs, offshoring, and outsourcing. It discusses how these innovations have made the world flat by increasing the existence and importance of horizontal relationships in the economy instead of vertical ones. I find it quite ironic to be reading about how advanced technology is getting and connecting the world together and how everyone is rushing around to find their new niche in this changing world economy while I’m bumping along a dirt road on a mountainside in Guatemala. On the one hand it so true and you see the evidence of the shrinking and flattening world with all the connections to the states. Buts its also hard to see the implementation of all that work flow software has to offer when all the official documents and registries for the muni are still handwritten. It makes me ponder…

Soup on a bus, English, weather

2008-01-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

My trip back to El Chol from Panajachel on the lake where I had been for new years was a pretty typical Guatemalan experience here. It took me about 9 hours to get back, but it was much more enjoyable since I traveled with another volunteer who lives about half and hour from me. I stopped to buy some groceries that I can’t get in site on the way. While waiting in San Juan to transfer, I decided to go find some lunch and the chicken soup with rice caught my eye. The senora placed the soup in a plastic bowl and put the uncovered bowl in a plastic bag. I thought I would have plenty of time to eat my soup, tortillas, and chocolate milk since I usually wait like one to three hours there for a bus, but of course the bus decided to arrive at that moment and I had to get on. I had to juggle the soup, my backpack, and my large bag with dirty clothes and groceries onto the bus. My avocados got a bit smashed and my (Washington!) apples started falling out from the shelf above the seats since the bag I was using didn’t zip or close. My friend help me scarf the soup before it got too bumpy, I rescued my belongings as best I could, and got a good laugh out of it. So much of the soup had spilled into the plastic bag and I didn’t know what to do with it. Unfortunately, I must confess that I tossed the plastic bowl and bag with soup remnants out the window as most Guatemalans would do, as the situation demanded since there was no where to put the soup bag on the bus. I remarked how Guatemala had a bad influence on me and made me a litterer.

During that ride there was a very strong smell of gasoline the whole time that kept getting stronger. I went to investigate in the back of the bus and found a jug of gas without a lid and only a piece of plastic wrap over the opening. I ensured that it was far enough away from my groceries, which I had moved back there since my apples kept falling out. It was a bit concerning when the driver and the ayudante (helper) lit up a cigarette. To further my concern, the driver and ayudante switched places for what appeared to be a training session for the ayudante. The windy dirt mountain road did not seem to me to be the best training ground. He stalled the motor a couple times and struggled with the grinding gears, but at least took it really slowly.

I made it back in one piece and in good spirits. The family was really happy to see me and there were lots of hugs and story sharing. I gave them the gifts I had got them and enjoyed a cup of coffee and dinner with them. It was nice to see people from around town too and everybody asked me where I had been since they hadn’t seen me around for a few days. It was nice to know that I was missed. It was nice to get back to my house too and feel the relief of “coming home” after a trip. Now I just have tons of laundry and cleaning to do.

I've been preparing to start teaching English classes next week. They will be Mondays and Wednesdays at 5:00 in the municipal library. I went around town posting flyers and talked to a lot of people about it. Already there is lots of interest and excitement and people keep coming up to me to ask details, so we'll see how it goes. I think it will be fun to get to know people and I think people will really appreciate it. However, learning a language is a slow, challenging process, as I am well aware, so I hope people don’t get discouraged and stick with it.

There was a strange change in weather and its been relatively cold here (like in the 50s) with lots of wind. The power went out in the entire country for about three hours night before last. The wind has been kicking up all kinds of stuff and particles are flying around from the trees. Since my house isn’t really sealed, there’s tons of leaves and dust that comes in from under the doors and between the walls and the roof. It just requires a lot of sweeping and creates drafts. My corrugated tin roof was making such a racket I thought it was going to blow off. Its not THAT cold but when you don't have heating and when your shower barely warms up to above icy it feels a lot colder. I’ve been sleeping in my fleece and socks and sleeping bag, plus blankets. I shouldn’t be complaining cause I know it’s a lot colder in other parts of the country right now and in a few months I’ll probably be very uncomfortable in the heat that I am told will be pretty fierce.

Its 2008!!!! And camping...

2008-01-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

Well I rang in the new year Guatemalan style. Our gigantic group of gringo Peace Corps volunteers got all dressed up and went out on the town. There was music, there was dancing, there was a countdown en español, there were late night street tacos, and boy were there firecrackers. Ear shattering firecrackers, to be exact. The streets were completely littered this morning with all the debries. I received various text messages from various Guatemalans wishing me a happy new year and God blessing me in 2008.

We all had a lazy morning and went out to breakfast and then sat by the lake for a few hours. I went swimming and it was absolutely delightful. I just had to declare how much I loved life. The water is super blue and clear and quite chilly at first but so refreshing once you get used to it and makes a nice contrast to the heat of the day. Theres nothing like floating on your back in a lake surrounded by volcanoes. Did I mention that the lake is surrounded by really cool volcanoes? I could have sat there all day taking it all in, but my burning skin made me go take refuge from the sun. I did a bit of poking around and shopping. I bought a gorgeous brightly colored table cloth for my dining room table that will add some color to the gray box that I live in. I also got a napkin holder for the family that lives below me and some worry dolls for all the kids. The town is such an interesting mix of wide eyed foreign tourists arriving by the vanful every 15 minutes, Guatemalan tourists from the bigger cities, and Guatemalan locals wearing the traditional clothing of brightly colored skirts and tops. Every day that I´m here I´m still struck by the diversity of the country and how much it changes with such little distance.

So back tracking a bit, I forgot to write about when I went camping in the mountains above El Chol before Christmas. I went with a group of about 12 Guatemalans from my town to spend the night. We brought food and cooked up there after collecting a ton of firewood to last us all night. We roasted marshmallows and heated up tortillas, chicken and beans on our make shift grill that was really the shelf of an old refridgerator. Someone brought a guitar and we sang and a bunch of them knew more lyrics of classic songs in English than I did such as Dust in the Wind and Tears in Heaven. I was pretty impressed. Theres nothing like a campfire and a guitar to bond with people and I had a great time getting to know everyone. There was a really full moon and we hardly needed flashlights to see because it was so bright. From up there you can see the lights of Guatemala City the capital. Its crazy that its so close (90 km) yet feels soooo far. It was so cute because when I told the señora from my house that I was going camping, she prepared me a bunch of tamale like things to take with me. It was very thoughtful and so cute that she was worried that I would be hungry. I woke up at sunrise and snapped a few pictures of the sun coming up with the volcanoes.

Okay, that´s all for now...I´m sure I´ve forgotten tons of details. Its really hard trying to capture the essence of being in a blog. Kind of like trying to take pictures of a sunset...it just never does it justice. But I´m doing very well, missing everyone, and wishing you all a very happy new year!

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! I had an excellent Christmas on the beach on the Pacific Coast in the small sleepy town of Monte Rico. It was a great vacation, but didn´t feel like Christmas at all. We spent four days lounging in hammocks, sipping fruity beverages, reading, and splashing in the waves. I went with a fun group of other volunteers and we all kept each other in good companty while being away from our families, many of us for the first time. We made an awesome meal Christmas eve night of a couple roasted chickens, mashed potatoes, beans, and salad. There was some really intense Catch Phrase playing that occurred as well. At midnight the town exploded in fireworks and general festivity. We walked through the streets of the town trying to avoid getting caught in the cross fire of young children setting off firecrackers. There was music and dancing in the central park but most men asking to dance were too drunk to barely stand up. We spent a significant portion of the warm night sitting on the beach lit brightly by the full moon listening to the waves and soaking it all in. It was most different Christmas that I´ve ever spent, but it was really nice.

The beaches are dark sand from volcanic rock and its too hot to walk on during the day. The waves were really powerful and really tumble you about but the water is so delightfully warm and its hard to believe that its the same ocean from the Washington coast. We played some beach volleyball with some random Koreans that we met who could speak about four words of English and frou words of Spanish. Monte Rico is famous for its endangered turtle hatchery and we watched baby turtles being released from the beach at sunset. Amazing sunsets where the pictures can never do it justice. The colors! We took tons of pictures, unfortunately at the time I was convinced my camera had been stolen, so I didn´t take any but luckily I found it at the bottom of my bag. Whoops.

There are also mangrove swamps that we took a sunrise boat ride through. We got up when it was still dark and got into a canoe that is pushed along with a long pole. There was a full moon reflecting off the water. We watched the sun rise over the sillohouttes three volcanoes that I was living among in Alotenango. Stunning. There were tons of birds flying about since its also a bird sanctuary. We watched a pair of fishermen working with a unique tactic of creating a quarentine area with nets and then flapping plastic flags over the water to scare the fish into the quarentined area. They caught a ton, including some shrimp too. I had a very tasty meal of grilled fish with a delightful yellow curry sauce that rocked my world.

Right now I´m on the shores of Lake Atitlán in the town of Panajachel for a few days celebrating new years with almost my whole training class. Its wonderful to see everybody again and this place is beautiful. It is a giant lake surrounded by volcanoes!!! How cool is that? The sunsets and sunrises are breathtaking (yes, I set my alarm to get up to see another sunrise). This is a pretty tourist town, for good reason considering the setting. THe streets are lined with tons of artisan crafts and lovely jewelry. Women and little children come up to you everywhere, including while you´re eating in restaurants to try to sell you stuff. Its so overwhelming. They will drape scarves and things on you and its impossible to get them to go away.

Last night we all went out dancing together and the DJ played a great mix of salsa, merengue, reggaeton, American hip hop and everything. I danced my little heart out. This morning we went kayaking on the lake and took in all the scenery. I just really cant get over how beautiful it is and can´t think of enough good adjectives in English to describe it. The scenery here is splendid and the company is great.

El Chol seems very far away right now as I´m on vacation, but I will return to work on January 2nd with lots of hard work ahead of me. I hope that things will pick up work wise as things get moving again with other organizations and some shuffling happens in the muni.

Well, Happy New Year everyone. 2007 was a crazy year. Its funny to think that in January I was applying for Peace Corps, having just gotten back from South America and wanting to get back to Latin America. In June I graduated from college and in August I took off for Guatemala. 2008 will probably be even more of a rollercoaster...I´m hanging on tight and loving the ride.

Chocolate Chip Cookies and COMUDE meeting

2007-12-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

The evenings of posadas continued gloriously in true Christmas festiveness. I ended up eating for free most nights this past week with the generosity of tamales, sandwiches and coffee being offered at every hosting house. It’s quite mesmerizing sitting there listening to the chanting of the catholic prayers in Spanish all in unison monotone. I’m so amazed at how everyone has them all memorized and knows what to say and it just comes automatically. Same thing goes for the a cappella songs sung at every pitch. Everyone focuses on the lit up plastic christmas tree and images of saints on the walls while the incense burns strongly. It’s quite enchanting and I felt very Christmassy, even though I barely understood what was being said it was nice to take in the atmosphere.

My christmas contribution was to bake chocolate chip cookies and give away little plates of them to my co-workers and some of the families that I’ve gotten to know. What a task. Now in the states when I make cookies it can be a rather last minute activity to fill an hour on a lazy afternoon. Here, it took weeks of planning, many trips in search of ingredients, and difficult explanations.

Several weeks ago I decided to make them and knew that finding chocolate chips was out of the question in my site, so I purchased two bags of Hershey’s Chocolate Chips in Antigua for a whopping 33 Quetzales each…the equivalent of like 4 dollars….that could buy two nice big lunches here. I already had flour, eggs, salt, and white sugar on stock at my house. In several trips to the various shops around town I sought out a rather weak fake vanilla essence and a little unmarked baggie of baking soda. Butter is unavailable in El Chol, so I settled for a strange vegetable oil margarine that makes a poor substitute for real butter. Finding brown sugar was out of the question. After trying to explain what I wanted to several shopkeepers and receiving blank stares, I asked the women who live below me, one of whom is a rather avid baker. They told me you have to ask for the kind of sugar “that gets weighed here” because back in the day you would buy sugar in the raw by the pound, rather than the bleached white sugar that is now bought in sealed packages. Well, going back out at least the shopkeepers understood what I wanted, but most of them didn’t have it and one told me it was only available by the quintal, 500 pounds. I decided doubling the white sugar the recipe calls for would have to do.

After searching out several stores in search of cookie sheets and receiving head shakes, I concluded there were no cookie sheets to be had in El Chol, and settled on borrowing cake molds from the family upon which to bake my cookies. I did manage to come by styrofoam plates to put them on (no cute christmas pattern paper plates), aluminum foil to wrap them in, and curling ribbon to tie them up with.

Fully prepared with everything in my kitchen, I put on my ipod with some great Christmas tune classics and started mixed away. After mixing the butter, sugar, and vanilla, I added an egg, which upon cracking in the bowl, was evident that it was rotten. Needless to say I had to toss that batch and start over again. (And deal with the mess the next morning of the torn up bag of rotten egg batter that had been shredded by some sort of animal during the night). The lack of brown sugar, weakness of the vanilla, and strangeness of the margarine resulted in dough that wasn’t quite as tasty as I would have liked, but it sufficed and still tasted good.

The process of baking fascinated the kids in the family after showing them the dough and letting everyone sample. No one had ever tried chocolate chip cookies before. There was a parade of children in my kitchen as the cookies took form in my oven, which I am so lucky to have left there by the owner of the house. It was very exciting and they were all very curious about the ingredients and the whole process. Never have baking cookies been so eagerly watched. They took turns shining my flashlight in the oven to monitor the process. Luckily the oven functioned splendidly, being the first time I had used it, and there were no more gas explosions. When the cookies came out, many little hands reached for the finished product, which was received with big smiles. I took a plate down to everyone else to try as well and everyone was impressed with my efforts. I wrapped up the rest and tied up the plates with ribbon and took them around the next day to their recipients. All in all it was a fun process. Its funny how something that I’ve done hundreds of times in the states was turned into a whole new activity here with new challenges and the aspect of novelty.

Thursday morning at work was the meeting of the Municipal Development Council (Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo, COMUDE). Guatemalans REALLY like acronyms, but they’re always a bit tricky because each letter doesn’t necessarily stand for the first letter of every word, but posibbly 1, 2, 3 or however many are convenient. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a hierarchy of development councils in Guatemala as part of the decentralization process of the government. They going in ascending order from community level to municipal, departmental, regional, and national level. As I wrote about before, last week I had the opportunity to go to the departmental level one where the governor presides. This week was the municipal level meeting where the mayor presides. Municipal representatives from health, police, etc. are there in addition to the presidents of the community development councils (COCODEs). The mayor gave a review of the projects that have been executed and a summary of the year. Other topics covered were the need for strengthened parent councils for the schools and the problem of animal stealing in the rural areas. I was also on the agenda and given several minutes to introduce myself and explain my background, the Peace Corps, and my role here. It was a bit nerve wracking getting up and speaking in front of about 40 people in Spanish but it went smoothly and it was a great opportunity to make myself known and make connections with people. Several of the COCODE leaders were interested in working with me at the start of next year. That’s good news.

After the formal meeting everyone piled into whatever form of transportation was available and we headed out to an aldea (rural community) for a big lunch. Big it was, indeed. There was a whole group of women merrily hacking away at large chunks of cow and marinating it all in large plastic buckets. Everything was cooked on make shift fires built there on the spot and blood spilled onto the grass. After the first course of carne asada with beans, torilla, and tomato/radish salad I was full. Then they came around again with heaping bowls of fried pork skins with lime and more rounds of tortillas. It was quite the production. We went bumping down the mountain back to El Chol in the back of a pickup truck with about 12 other people. With a full tummy, stunning views, and wind blowing though my hair, I was quite satisfied and happy to be in Guatemala.

I decided to head to the beach on the Pacific Coast for Christmas and hang out with some other PC volunteers. I felt like I got some good festiveness in El Chol with the various posadas and other Christmas activities. I’ve had a lot of cultural integration this past month and am ready to go chill out and relax and be with other English-speakers who are away from their families for Christmas. Eat some extra ham, cheesy potatoes and pumpkin pie for me since I’ll probably be having seafood at the beach. WISHING EVERYONE A VERY, VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND ALL THE FESTIVENESS OF THE SEASON. MISS YOU ALL!!!!