Chocolate Chip Cookies and COMUDE meeting

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!!!!

More feria times and posadas

Well things are getting back to “normal” in El Chol as the feria leaves. I’m sad to see it go, since its been such a good time. A brief review of the events from the rest of the week.

Thursday was an all day soccer tournament where we sat out all day and cheered on the El Chol team as it played against other teams from other munis around the area. After that there was a big tug-o-war competition with teams of 5 people. There were two womens teams that entered and my team won! So I earned another 50 Quetzales (like 6 dollars) for our efforts. It was quite hilarious with everyone cheering us on in the approaching dusk as we yanked on the rope with all our might. It was hard to keep footing in the dusty dirt soccer pitch but we triumphed best two out of three.

Friday was a big rodeo in the afternoon with bull riders from all over the country who came to participate. I had never been to a rodeo in the US, so it was all a new experience for me. I was impressed with their skills and it was highly entertaining. There were some really good riders. I held my breath every time one of the guys fell off hoping the he wouldn’t get pummeled to death. They actually did wear vests and helmets, which surprised me since safety equipment as a general rule doesn’t really exist here. Of course there were also scantily clad women to sing and entertain the crowd as well during the breaks as they danced around and the drunk men came out to dance with them. That night there was a live Tex-Mex band that played in the market. I’m learning to follow guys when I dance since I’m not used to guys actually having good dancing skills. The rhythms are fun I danced until late that night and had a great time.

Saturday was the biggest day of the feria and all the roads in town were impassable due to crowds and stuff for sale. Some other Peace Corps volunteers came and visited and we spent the day taking in the sights, sounds, smells and spectacles of the greatness of what is the feria in El Chol. In the afternoon there was the rodeo again. Everyone gets really into dressing up for it with boots, cowboy hats, button up shirts, and huge belt buckles. I was so glad that I bought my cowboy boots in Pastores during training and could wear them proudly. At one point during a break from bull riding the announcer called for 5 guys and 5 women to come participate in a competition. Nobody volunteered. So they he called my site mate and I out by name to come down and when the whole town is watching and you’re called out by name, you have to go. So after navigating the tricky packed stands in my jean skirt to get down and managing to climb through the fence without flashing too many people, I found myself standing in the bull riding ring with the ENTIRE town watching. We were paired up with random men and music was put on and we had to dance this really awkward dance that is really fast and basically just rocking back and forth wildly. So with everyone watching, I attempted to follow my drunken partner to the crazy beat while preventing my skirt from hiking up, my hat from falling off, and my boots from stepping in cow pies (none of which I successfully avoided). I didn’t win, but we all got a laugh out of it and it was quite the experience.

Saturday night continued with a gastronomic experience of eating “gringas” which are street tacos made with flour tortillas and some sort delicious meat and all the fixins. Its quite funny to joke about the gringas going to eat gringas. We then followed those with delicious churros which are made in one giant long churro and snipped off in pieces with scissors. The fluffy hot fried bread is rolled in sugar and dipped in Nesquick chocolate and strawberry syrup. Out of this world good. We finished up with a nice steaming cup of ponche, which is essentially hot eggnog. They heat it over open fires in the street in giant 10 gallon pots that bubble and boil and smell of cream, sugar, and cinnamon. They throw in a just a splash of a strong alcohol for an extra kick in addition to the spices sprinkled on top. I miss gingerbread, pumpkin spice and eggnog lattes during this holiday season, but it was a nice substitute. There was another live band with Ranchero music that night and once again danced late into the night, this time with my gringo companeros. I think people found it funny that we would stand in a group and dance rather than dancing in pairs. But there were also plenty of opportunities to dance with guys from El Chol and from the surrounding towns. The band was awesome and had four guys who were back up singers/dancers and had amazing energy the whole night.

Sunday the other volunteers went home after enjoying a typical breakfast in a comedor of coffee, black beans, eggs, tortillas, and a fresh salty crumbly cheese that is common here. I spent a couple hours teaching the family that lives below me how to play Phase 10 card game. They got a kick out of it, although the kids had a bit of a difficult time with some of the concepts. It was a really hot day so one of the girls who lives there invited me to go to the river with her cousin and her brother to go swimming. Well, dipping since none of them can actually swim. After catching a ride down the road on the truck that had been delivering beer, we got to the same spot in the river where the triathlon had taken place. We spent the afternoon cooling off in the water and splashing about. I attempted to teach one girl how to swim, but its quite challenging in a river that’s not very deep and doesn’t really have anything to hold onto like the side of a pool. Good times though. There were lots of people there bathing, like literally whole families washing their hair and soaping up. That evening there was a live marimba band (a giant wooden xylophone that is one of the national symbols) to close the feria. I danced for a bit, but its sort of a difficult rhythm to follow. I prefer just listening to the music and watching the spectacle.

All in all the feria was quite the cultural experience. I got to know a lot more people in town by participating in lots of events. I got really good at foosball since we played like every night. It’s addicting. I’m really sad to see it go, but it will be nice to be able to walk through the streets again and not have so much trash everywhere. And it will come again next year and I’ll get to do it all over again.

Monday morning I waded through the piles of trash and the last of the feria remnants and boots being disassembled to go back to the office. In typical Guatemala fashion I am uninformed and I get there and my counterpart has gone to the capital for the day and the guys in my office tell me that we’re going to walk to a meeting. Of what I ask, and they just say that it’s a bunch of mayors from the department (like province or state level). So we get there and it turns out to be a very important meeting of the CODEDE, which is the Departmental Development Council. In the scheme of development councils, there are the community level ones which I will hopefully be working a lot with, then the municipal one which meets once a month with representatives from the communities, and then the departmental one with representatives from all the municipalities. So the governor was there, all the mayors, representatives from the ministries of health, education, forestry, agriculture, womens issues, etc. were all there. I got to meet the woman who is the representative for the secretary of womens issues for the department of Baja Verapaz. She is a great contact to have and we had communicated over email about getting their support to start the womens office here, so it was nice to meet her by chance. The meeting lasted from 8 am til 2 pm with a snack of ceviche (shrimp with tomato, onion, and cilantro) to break it up. They discussed the year in review of what the various commissions had done and the status of the many of the projects in the department. There were some interesting disagreements over various topics and it was interesting to see the dynamics of everything play out with democracy in action. Afterwards the mayor of El Chol invited everyone to have lunch at his place so everyone (maybe 60 people) enjoyed a delicious carne asada courtesy of the mayor.

I spent Monday evening scrubbing my pila clean, making a nice vegetable stir-fry with peanut sauce over rice, reading and listening to pirated reggaeton music, and arguing with the lady who sold me an extension cord that didn’t work over why she should give me my money back. (I finally triumphed and got my 8 quetzales….like 1 dollar….back).

December 12th the posadas started. This is the tradition where Mary and Joseph go around visiting houses looking for shelter the 12 days before Christmas. The very first night was at the house where the family lives below me. The preparations included making buckets full of tamales and preparing the places where the figurines would be places with flowers and pictures of saints. A group of people arrived in the evening after dark and sang a song to be let into the house. Then they prayed and sang and lit candles while incense swirled about. After about an hour, tamales and punch were served to all. The punch was an amazing hot fresh pureed pineapple concoction with lots of sugar and a touch of cinnamon. Delicious. Its a fun festive experience. I went to one the next night too and it was pretty much the same, except hot chocolate and sandwiches. Im sure all next week will be filled with them too. Its neat to get to see inside other houses and meet more people and see other Christmas traditions. Lots of stores have decorations and lights up now and its starting to feel quite festive, except for the fact that the weather is so warm and sunny I just can´t convince myself that it´s December and almost Christmas. Missing everyone during this holiday season!

Officially a volunteer and Feria time

Okay so Im reposting the last blog since some people couldnt read it. Theres also some new random stuff throughout and more new stuff at the bottom if you keep scrolling. Sorry about the screwiness....gotta love using the internet in Guatemala.

I’m officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!! We had our swearing in ceremony at the ambassador’s house in the capital on Friday morning. It was a lovely ceremony, all in Spanish, with all of the host families attending. There was coffee, mini sandwiches, and brownies following. I said my tearful good byes to my family, and headed back to Antigua to celebrate with my fellow volunteers. Early Saturday morning I took a 6 hour bus ride to Xela, the second largest city in the country where we spent some time during field-based training. Randomly I ended up going with my friend Becca from Olympia who happens to be in Guatemala at the moment. We survived to bus trip with a family of five crowded in the school bus seat next to me all throwing up into the same plastic bag. It was quite tragic, all were very feverish and the bus was so crowded two of the little girls kept laying there feverish headed in my lap. Had a good time in Xela, visited a Guatemalan friend who goes to the University there, ate a yummy pasta dinner, listened to some live music with a glass of red wine, and headed out to my site at 6:30 the next morning. Traveling is always an adventure here. While there was no one throwing up next to me on the way back, I did have to wait three hours in San Juan for a microbus. Evidently I had missed the last camioneta because I was waiting where they usually come, but that day there was a procession and the streets were closed and the buses were on different routes. After almost panicking that I was going to have to spend the night there, I called my counterpart who called the guy who drives the micro and found out that he was on his way still and I hadn’t missed the last ride back. I finally made it to my site at 8 pm after almost 14 hours of travel. Whew. Public transport is wonderful, cheap, but unpredictable.

Yup, here I am at my new site now. It's good so far, my house is awesome…my own little “casita” with four rooms above a family compound. It came with a couch, love seat, chair, bed, and some random kitchen stuff. There is a bathroom just outside my door which has a shower and a toilet. To the side of that is the pila, the water containing device with spaces on the sides for washing clothes, dishes, teeth, etc. The house was sort of decorated in a way with lots of Jesus paraphernalia on the walls and a wooden cross with JC above my bed. Other random decorations like a Winne the Pooh poster that says “Te amo” and various stuff animals and other tacky knick-knacks. But I’m trying to make it my own. I’ve made a nice collage of all the cards I’ve received on the wall next to my bed and posted all of the photos I brought from home. On Sunday night I fell asleep to the singing from the evangelical church nearby and was awoken various times by firecrackers. In the morning there is an abundance of loud wild bird calls and various children’s noises.

The family is very nice so far. There are a ton of people who live there...they didn't even know how many when I asked. There is the matriarch who had 12 children. Three died, and three went to the US, so six live there. Then they all have children and grandchilden. It’s fun and chaotic but I have my own space, so that's good. So far I’ve been eating my meals with them just to hang out and because I haven’t bought a stove yet. My first night there was a birthday party for a three year old boy who is adorable. So there were a bunch of family members over and I realized a bunch of people I had met last week were all family. Well, everyone in town is connected somehow.

I’ve started giving English lessons to one of the little girls in the house who is 8. She’s really smart and really eager to learn. She comes up with all the vocabulary words that she wants to learn, especially animals and fruits. After the first evening of about a 2 hour stint, she requested a test the next day. Okay, it you want I told her. Its really cute.

I shared the box of Applets and Cotlets that I brought with me with the whole family. They were a big hit and the box was gone in no time. The cotlets were the favorite of everyone.

The whole family helped me to go buy an armoire. It was quite the adventure. The furniture shop is like 2 blocks away, but everyone came in the family pick-up. After the bargaining was done I got a beautiful handmade wood stained armoire with four drawers and a hanging space with a full length mirror for less than $100. Everyone helped to get it up into the truck and hold on to it for the short journey. Then all the kids piled out with a drawer in hand and we sweated our way up the flight of stairs to get it into my room. A fun mini adventure.

The town is cool, very small, so it's also awkward with knowing what kind of greeting to give people (hug? kiss? shake hands?) it could be any of those. It's also hard finding the things that I need for my house since its all confusing and stores only care specific things so you kinda have to go around searching. I’m just trying to take everything an hour at a time because I'm in a different mood every hour, depending on what's going on. Its hard being the new kid in town, especially when you're so different.

Work is interesting....I work in an office with all guys and its hard to find my place. Especially since this is all taking place in Spanish, which is good, but way harder when you're trying to work. The town’s feria in honor of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, their patron saint, is the first week of December. Thus, every activity in the Municipal Planning Office has to do with planning these activities and there isn’t much work related to anything else going on. Already the central park is filling up with a ferris wheel, trampoline, food booths, and carnival games in preparation for the festivities.

Using the example of another municipality that started a Municipal Women’s Office, we’ve been trying to adapt that to El Chol. So this morning we went around to various institutions trying to get data , such as women’s participation in voting, to justify wanting to start the office. It’s slow going, and data isn’t readily available, so we have to wait for some people to get back to us. So then we decided to look at women’s participation in the COCODEs (community development councils). All of the registration information is in a big book, hand written. So we’ve been going through that to create a digital database of the registered COCODEs and the gender of the participants to assess the situation. So that turned into a whole other project.

I also adapted a letter requesting to get the ArcView GIS program for El Chol which I’ll send to a company in the capital to request the program from the company in the states. This process is supposed to take 4-6 months. Argh.

Another afternoon I went with my counterpart and another co-worker to an aldea (outlying small town) for a COCODE (community development council) meeting. This community is only accessible by foot on a fairly steep winding path that took about an hour to get to. We gathered at the local primary school that was pretty much in the middle of nowhere but the hike up was absolutely gorgeous. We had to step around lazy cows and the pies they left behind. The views of the green covered mountains and corn fields are stunning. At the meeting I watched the process of them prioritizing projects for their community. “Which is more important, creating an accessible road, or making structural improvements to the school? Okay, which is more important, making the road or getting flushing toilets?” and so on it went. It was great to see this community democracy in action. The other purpose of the visit was to conduct a community diagnostic, kind of like a census. So I interviewed people about their demographics, education levels, type of housing and access to water and electricity, and their assessment of municipal services. It still is hard to believe when you talk to people who only finished second grade and for example one person who had children when one was 8 years old and in second grade and the other was 11 and in first grade since ages don’t necessarily correspond to grade levels like we’re used to.

I went around with one of my co-workers to give invitations to participate in the towns Culture Night as part of the feria. The neat part was that every house we went to, we were invited in to sit down and have a little chat inside the house. People are so cordial and nice. I can’t imagine a random person showing up to my door in the states and me inviting them in to sit on my couch. It was cool to see the insides of a bunch of houses and meet more people from the community.

Thanksgiving was fabulous. A group of 20 Peace Corps volunteers went to the US ambassador’s house for a splendid meal with all the traditional festivities. The mashed sweet potatoes and pumpkin cheesecake were especially delicious. The ambassador and his wife were very gracious hosts. There were a few other people associated with the embassy that were there as well who were interesting to talk to about their jobs. It was a day of luxury as we strolled through the gardens and lounged by the heated pool in the beautiful Guatemalan November sunshine around 75 degrees. It was great to see my fellow volunteers again after having been in site for a week and to hear about everyone’s diverse experiences so far. It was nice to decompress and compare notes of what everything is like.

I headed back to my site Sunday morning and made the trip in about 6 hours from Antigua. This week I only had to wait 2 hours in San Juan for the bus. Transportation sucks.

Okay, so the Feria is in full swing. The quiet sleepy town has turned into a raging carnival and commecial extravaganza. Everything is for sale in the street...kitchen wares, blankets, clothes, hats, tacky toys, candy and tons of food. Its quite festive. There is a giant ferris wheel that goes ridiculously fast but you get a great view of the town from the top. Im getting really good at fooseball cause we play like every night. No one works in the office this week because there are activities all throughout the day. One evening was the crowning of the princesses of the Feria where one of the little girls I live with participated. Its basically a beauty pagent with elaborate costumes, scenery, music and fanfare. Very interesting. There have been activities such as pushing motorcycles that are turned off, motorcross, slingshots, various soccer tournaments, various other races, and yes, a triathlon which I participated in yesterday.

For the triathlon I was one of three total participants and the only girl. But the whole town came out to watch. We swam in a river that was 10 meters across and one meter deep back and forth a bunch of times for a total of 100 meters. The bike was all uphill up a rocky dirt mountain road for three km. I had borrowed a crappy mountain bike from someone and the chain fell off part way through. Still, I won the bike part cause the other two guys had to get off and push. The whole time there was a car with a loudspeaker behind me blasting reggaeton and giving the play by play. They called it an international race since I was participating and kept commenting {and here we have Caty McKee, la norteamericana!{. One guys passed me on the 2 km run, which was also uphill in the mid day heat. So I got second place, won 200 quetzales which is like 25 dollars, and beat one of my male co-workers who wasnt too pleased about it. It was hilarious.

Its nice to have this week for the feria to hang out and get to know a lot of people in the community at all the different events. And its nice to not being in the office. I finally bought a gas tank for my stove and have started cooking for myself now which is nice. Although its hard to get certain things around town, mostly good cheese Im missing.

Officially a volunteer!

I'm officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!!  We had our swearing in ceremony at the ambassador's house in the capital on Friday morning.  It was a lovely ceremony, all in Spanish, with all of the host families attending.  There was coffee, mini sandwiches, and brownies following.  I said my tearful good byes to my family, and headed back to Antigua to celebrate with my fellow volunteers.  Early Saturday morning I took a 6 hour bus ride to Xela, the second largest city in the country where we spent some time during field-based training.  Randomly I ended up going with my friend Becca from Olympia who happens to be in Guatemala at the moment.  We survived to bus trip with a family of five crowded in the school bus seat next to me all throwing up into the same plastic bag.  It was quite tragic, all were very feverish and the bus was so crowded two of the little girls kept laying there feverish headed in my lap.  Had a good time in Xela, visited a Guatemalan friend who goes to the University there, ate a yummy pasta dinner, listened to some live music with a glass of red wine, and headed out to my site at 6:30 the next morning.  Traveling is always an adventure here.  While there was no one throwing up next to me on the way back, I did have to wait three hours in San Juan for a microbus.  Evidently I had missed the last camioneta because I was waiting where they usually come, but that day there was a procession and the streets were closed and the buses were on different routes.  After almost panicking that I was going to have to spend the night there, I called my counterpart who called the guy who drives the micro and found out that he was on his way still and I hadn't missed the last ride back.  I finally made it to my site at 8 pm after almost 14 hours of travel.  Whew.  Public transport is wonderful, cheap, but unpredictable.

Yup, here I am at my new site now.  It's good so far, my house is awesome…a little "casita"  with four rooms above a family compound.  It came with a couch, love seat, chair, bed, and some random kitchen stuff.  There is a bathroom just outside my door which has a shower and a toilet.  To the side of that is the pila, the water  containing device with spaces on the sides for washing clothes, dishes, teeth, etc.  The house was sort of decorated in a way with lots of Jesus paraphernalia on the walls and a wooden cross with JC above my bed.  Other random decorations like a winne the Pooh poster that says "Te amo" and various stuff animals and other tacky knick-knacks.  But I'm trying to make it my own.  On Sunday night I fell asleep to the singing from the evangelical church nearby and was awoken various times by firecrackers.

The family is very nice so far.  There are a ton of people who live there...they didn't even know how many when I asked.  There is the matriarch who had 12 children.  Three died, and three went to the US, so six live there.  Then they all have children and grandchilden.  It's fun and chaotic but I have my own space, so that's good.  So far I've been eating my meals with them just to hang out and because I haven't bought a stove yet.  My first night there was a birthday party for a three year old boy who is adorable.  So there were a bunch of family members over and I realized a bunch of people I had met last week were all family.  Well, everyone in town is connected somehow.

Work is interesting....I work in an office with all guys and its hard to find my place.  Especially since this is all taking place in Spanish, which is good, but way harder when you're trying to work.  Using the example of another municipality that started a Municipal Women's Office, we've been trying to adapt that to El Chol.  So this morning we went around to various institutions trying to get data , such as women's participation in voting, to justify wanting to start the office.  It's slow going, and data isn't readily available, so we have to wait for some people to get back to us.  So then we decided to look at women's participation in the COCODEs (community development councils).  All of the registration information is in a big book, hand written.  So we've been going through that to create a digital database of the registered COCODEs and the gender of the participants to assess the situation.  So that turned into a whole other project.

I also adapted a letter requesting to get the ArcView GIS program for El Chol which I'll send to a company in the capital to request the program from the company in the states.  This process is supposed to take 4-6 months.  Argh.

The town is cool, very small, so it's also awkward with knowing what kind of greeting to give people (hug? kiss? shake hands?) it could be any of those.  It's also hard finding the things that I need for my house since its all confusing and stores only care specific things so you kinda have to go around searching.  I'm just trying to take everything an hour at a time because I'm in a different mood every hour, depending on what's going on.  Its hard being the new kid in town, especially when you're so different.

Thanksgiving was wonderful at the US ambassador´s house in the capital.  I got up at 3:45 in the morning to catch an early microbus to be able to celebrate and it was well worth it.  We ate a classic turkey dinner with all the fixins.  It was great to relax at his beautiful home and chill out with other Peace Corps volunteers and decompress after out first week in site. Heading back to El Chol tomorrow morning to roll up my sleeves and do some work!

First visit to El Chol

Well, the mystery and the waiting are over....after applying for the Peace Corps in January 2007, I now know my destiny for the next two years. I spent from Wednesday night until Sunday morning at my new hometown.

Tuesday we met our counterparts at the training center which was a long, awkward, but good day. Imagine meeting the person that you will be working with the closest for the next two years of your life and what its like to make small talk, in another language. On Wednesday morning we took off headed for El Chol in the microbus owned by the muni (like a small van, but you can cram a lot of people). Like oftentimes in Guatemala, I never really know what's going on and you just go with the flow. We went to Guatemala City and stopped at a car repair place to do some routine maintenance. As auto shops are anywhere in the world, of course they found something else wrong and we were told it would be a couple hours to fix it. So my counterpart and the driver went to Pollo Campero for lunch. Pollo Campero is like the national KFC....its a Guatemalan company that is so popular that its now in the US in some places too. (My Spanish teacher joked that flights to the US from Guatemala smell like Campero chicken because their family members living there request it from home. Evidently US nutrition rules don't allow as much fat at the "real" Guatemalan version). When we headed back to the auto shop, of course it wasn't ready yet and we had to kill some more time. Well the mayor of El Chol happened to be in town, so I met him and his whole family right there. I went around with them for awhile in their pickup to run some errands with them. When the microbus was finished, we drove it about a block and it was making bad noises that it hadn't been making before, so we had to go back and wait a couple more hours. Finally we started making our way to El Chol after dark so I wasn't able to see the sites very well.

While I was visiting I stayed with my site mate, another volunteer who has been there for almost four months working in the Youth Development program. I went into the office for awhile on Thursday and Friday and met everyone. In addition to my counterpart, there are 5 other guys who work in the Municipal Planning Office, all between 20 and 23. The muni is actually pretty organized and has a long term plan until 2020. My main work goal will be to start the Municipal Women's Office. So that is pretty exciting. Hopefully I'll be able to work with some GIS and with the COCODEs as well.

El Chol is very pretty and very small. It is quite clean, has a brand new park and a small municipal hotel and market. The people are incredibly nice. You can't walk anywhere without greeting everyone and stopping to have a conversation with them. It is surrounded by green mountainous terrain and has pretty pink sun sets. The main streets are paved and there is even a post office where I can get mail directly. (Ask me and I can give it to you). The first week of December is their feria, or community festival. There are already arcade games and a ferris wheel and food stands being set up. Its a really big deal and people from all over will evidently be there and no one works that week. I'm really looking forward to it and it should be lots of fun.

On Friday afternoon some other volunteers from around the area came and visited so I got to meet them and hang out with them. We had a relaxing day on Saturday where I continued to look for housing options and then I took off this morning. It took me about 4 and half hour to get back to Antigua. I have two promising housing options, so I'm waiting to hear back on how much one place wants for rent and then I'll decide. Nothing is perfect of course, but at least there are options, even though I wish it was set up already.

So this is our last week in Alotenango and we'll be going into the training center almost everyday to finish up training activities. Swearing in ceremony will be Friday at the US Ambassador's house in the capital. I'm so sad to say good-bye to my family and my wonderful fellow trainees but excited to get started.

Elections and random things for your imagining

Here I sit in a lovely cafe called Bagel Barn in Antigua using free wireless internet on my friend's laptop sipping a gigantic cappucino. I feel so at home, like I'm in Seattle. We're writing some final reports of our training activities and coming down the home stretch on this part of the Peace Corps adventure. Yesterday was a lazy Sunday hanging out around Alotenango...enjoying life among three volcanoes for the last week. I went around and got more music for my ipod from my friends and am now loaded up with 2500 songs and a ton of reggaeton to get me through. I started the painful process of organizing all my papers, books, and STUFF in preparation for packing. I'm going to try to take as much of my stuff as I can when I go visit my site for the first time on Wednesday.

It was election day, but people were pretty apathetic and didn't really want either candidate. My family told me it was like choosing between cancer and AIDS. Turns out that a fellow by the name of Alvaro Colom won over Otto Perez Molina. The hottest issue was security, which is bad here. You can check out the NY Times take on things at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/world/americas/05guatemala.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

A few funny images for your imagining...

In this country people like to advertise things over loadspeakers blasting from vans or trucks. Any product really, cell phones, fresh fruit, you name it. So one day while Kelly and I were running, a van with a loudspeaker past us and called out things like "Way to keep up your figure. Let's go ladies!" It was quite hilarious.

There are lots of sounds to be heard from my bedroom; this country is never really quiet. For example, I fall asleep and wake up to dogs barking, roosters crowing, conversations heard completely clearly from the street, firecrackers, church bells, pick ups screeching, wind blowing through election propaganda banners, tuk tuk honking, camioneta breaks and honking and aydantes yelling "Antigua!"

Speaking of camionetas, I've decided that a good personal safety strategy is to never get on a bus that has posted in the front "Yo manejo, Dios me guia" (I drive, God guides me). Essentially, there is a sense of fatalism here where people think that their lives are more guided by outside influences and God rather than their own actions. When this comes to bus drivers, they think that the driving responsibility is God's, not theirs, which obviously poses various safety risks. There is this one spot on the road from Antigua to Alotenango where the driver always turns off the lights inside the bus when its night time. Its a surreal experience to be speeding down the highway, packed in, listening to blasting ranchero music, and not being able to see a damn thing. Those are moments where you do a reality check and think about "huh....I'm really in Guatemala".

I find young couples with the girls dressed in traditional woven Mayan clothing and the boys sporting modern Abercrombie shirts very interesting. Traditional clothing is much less common in males due to the persecution of the indigenous people during the war. It is still quite common for females, which results in an image that seems to clash. Every time I see one of this couples hugging or making out in the street I just stare for a moment and think about it.

The other night Kelly and I had an incredible experience doing yoga at night on her terrace. I spread out my Barbie beach towel and under the clear night sky full of stars we did yoga. In the upside down poses you could see upside down volcanoes silhouetted against the night sky. It was a bit windy and almost knocked you out of the balancing poses. Wow. I've never enjoyed a yoga session that much. Magical.

You have to be careful wherever you go for the little things like tripping and hitting your head on ill-placed window sills. There are random holes in the sidewalk that people in the states would sue you over. I cant tell you how many times I've come close to whapping my head on the windows, poles, and other randomness hanging around when you're not paying super close attention to where you're walking, not to mention the little street dog presents scattered about.

On the sides of the highway, men cut the shrubs and grass by hand with machetes, not lawn mowers. Very large swaths of land, with machetes.

Site Assignment and Day of the Dead

So! We received our sites... at last after a long period of excruciating waiting shrouded in secrecy. I will be spending the next two years of my life in a very small pueblo called Santa Cruz El Chol in the department of Baja Verapaz. Looking at a map of Guatemala, El Chol is betwwen Guatemala City and Coban a couple hours from the department capital of Salama. The climate is supposed to be warmish-temperate and it sits at an altitude of 1000 meters above sea level. The whole municipality, including rural areas, has about 9000 people, with about 3000 that live in the town itself. It is a mostly Spanish-speaking ladino (metizo, mixed) community but the nearest other towns are evidently very indiginous and speak the Mayan language of Achi'. It's only about 90 Km from the capital, but half of that is on unpaved dirt roads with not so frequent transportation. There are some pictures of the town that you can see at http://www.inforpressca.com/santacruzelchol/index.php. The website is in Spanish, but theres tons of neat info and just click on the picture to see the gallery. I will be working in the Municipal Planning Office and with a variety of community groups. My mayor was reelected, so the entire administration will hopefully not be changing much come January. I'm very excited to get there and get to work and start intergrating myself all over again. Right now its still a huge unknown. I will be very sad to leave Alotenango, my current host family, and my fellow trainees. Mostly everybody is in the Western part of the country far, far away. There is one volunteer in the Youth Development program in my site and there are some other current volunteers close to me, but Im the only one from my training group in that department. Our counterparts from the host agencies will be coming out to the training center next Tuesday to meet us and then we will go out to our sites for the first time with them on Wednesday and stay there til next Sunday. We are supposed to start searching for a place to live and start to get to know the community. I'm very excited, but really just have no idea about what to think.

This whole process is a little crazy because you think you're joining the Peace Corps and going to be all independent and everything, but then you realize that you feel like you have way less control over your life than you did in the states. You sign up for Peace Corps, they tell you the country you'll be going to and then assign you your site with very little input in the process. I'm not used to feeling such a lack of control over my life....I've always decided where I want to live and work and all of a sudden that decision isn't up to me anymore. Its a bit odd.

Kelly and I have started calling great days here, GGD's: Good Guatemala Days. Yesterday was definitely one of them. It was November 1st, was Day of the Dead/All Saints Day and it was incredible. It is the day where everyone celebrates and honors ancestors and friends and family who have passed away. They decorate the cemetaries and graves with flowers and colorful wreaths and pass the day in the cemetary with their families eating picnics and listening to music. There is a big tradition of flying kites to communicate with everyone in heaven. They are brightly colored and made out of crepe paper and every little kid in the street has one. I started the day by going to cemetary to check things out in the morning. There were tons of peopel paying tribute, cleaning up grave sites and the crosses marking them, and of course, a sky full of kites. In the US, cemetaries are sad, somber places that may give you the creeps and people generally avoid. Here, they are a bit more....festive (?)....and natural. Not that death is a happy thing by any means, but there just seems to be a healthier outlook on it. There is just so much more respect and acknowledgement of it. It might have to do with the fact that Guatemalans are very fatalistc and know that death is unavoidable whereas Americans think that their lives are in their hands and have more control and death is to be feared. Just interesting the different takes on it.

After the cemetary I went home for the long anticipated lunch of fiambre. It a traditional dish made on this day taht is basically a giant salad of every meat you can imagine and picked vegetables. For example: chicken, tongue, three kinds of sausage, hot dogs, ham, salami, olives, corn, peas, colliflower, carrots, peppers, beans etc. Its all mixed up in a vinegar-type juice and has both Kraft and powdered cheese on top and parsely as a garnish. VERY interesting. I ate the whole portion (and again for lunch today), but didn't exactly enjoy it and mostly just took it down to be polite. Its such a huge process to make and very expensive. My mom and the whole family was working on it for days chopping and preparing everything and it was finally all put together in a giant plastic tub that is also used to wash clothes at times. Basically, they made a s*&@ load and then sold some, gave some to neighbors and family members, then we eat the rest. Its quite the event.

After lunch we all piled into my host dad's pickup truck and drove to the town of Sumpango, about an hour away, for their famous gigantic kite festival. Gigantic in the fact that theres tons of people, but also gigantic kites that are about 40-50 feet across. They are increible works of art with very intricate designs telling the story of Mayan histories and referencing the war and humans' relationships with nature. Those ones dont actually fly, but rather are displayed with huge bamboo poles supporting them from the back. The subjects of the kites were impressive and very moving. They had words on them that translated as

Guatemala has not stopped suffering for the cruel violence where we have lost our loved ones day after day.

Guatemala cries and struggles, searching for peace.

We want to live together with nature as our grandparents lived.

Oh mother earth! What have you done to man to make him harm you?

It was so cool to see so many people there all in awe of them. We went in later afternoon when the shadows were getting long and the sky was turning pink and it was so impressive. There was a carnival-like atmosphere with great music being pumped out over loudspeakers. There was a diverse mix of people in traditional and modern clothing. Walking up to the cemetary and to the place where the kites were displayed on top of the hill there were mobs of tightly packed people like any great carnival. And of course, wherever there are people, there are people selling things. Tons of jewelry, clothing, and FOOD. There is a whole array of dulces tipicos, traditional sweets, that they make. Basically any fruit cooked in sugar or anything sweet and fried. My family treated us to atol, a thick warm sweet corn beverage kind of like cream of corn soup with sugar and to some tostadas. It was fun to get out of Alotenango with my family on a little excursion. The whole day Kelly and I just kept looking at each other and smiling and saying how happy we were to be exactly where we were and how lucky we are to have to opportunity to see stuff like this.

That night I went out with my host sisters and cousins to go sing at people's houses and demand more dulces tipicos. I guess its some what of a twist on trick-or-treating. We drove around to various houses in Alotenango and a group of about 20 of us sang songs (none of which I knew) along with the blasting car stereo. You have to really earn the sweets by singing really loud and really long, and then eventually they come to the door and you take a picture with them and they give everyone something to eat. There were tons of drunk men stumbling home from the holiday of drinking in the bars through the dark streets. At one point, the local crazy man came along with a gigantic knife and a crazed look in his eyes. We all freaked out but he passed by us without even glancing over. The words for knife (cuchillo) and for spoon (cuchara) are very similar so I got confused and said, "oh my god that man has a giant spoon!" That broke the moment and everyone laughed and thought it was hilarious. It was great to paddle around with everyone and get to be part of their tradition. It was a long and fabulous day that made me love Guatemala even more and I get all warm and fuzzy inside thinking about it.