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.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Eight clowns and a gringa go to El Chol
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Making chili in the campo, getting stuck in a barbed wire fence, medicinal plants, municipal soccer tournament, pork flu…
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.
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.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Reaching “that” point, Todos Santos – Nebaj hike, Women’s Office diagnostic, friends visit
At the beginning of May with a great group of volunteers we did one of the coolest hikes in the country from Todos Santos, Huehuetenango to Nebaj, Quiche. I don’t know the correct distance, but I think we did in the vicinity of 15 miles the first day and 10 miles the second day up and across the high Cuchamatans mountain range. The adventures started at 4:00 am when I left my site and arrived at my friend’s site in Todos Santos (the land of the red pants with the crazy horse race for All Saints Day) at 4:30 pm, picking up other friends along the way. We bought supplies and cooked a delicious dinner and headed out at 5:00 am in the dark and the cold the next morning. We took a bus to where we started hiking, with a quick stop along the way for a visit to some latrines with freezing cold cement seats and to buy hot tortillas with melted fresh cheese.
We had a fabulous guide, a Swiss man who came to Guatemala with Doctors without Borders and married an indigenous woman and stayed in Todos Santos 15 years ago. We hiked from 6:30 am to 4:30 pm almost constantly through a few sparsely populated areas of all indigenous Mam’ people that shyly peer out from their huts. It was lots of up and down, looking across a steep valley knowing that first you had to go down, and then all the way back up. We stopped for a respite at the bottom of the valley where a freezing pristine river ran through it and soaked our tired feet and watched two adolescent girls beating piles of clothes against rocks to get them clean. We breakfasted, lunched, and snacked on the food we had brought with us mostly consisting of tortillas, refried black beans out of a bag, hardboiled eggs, avocados, and mangos. The types of terrains we moved through were quite varied from the hot loose sandy inclines, cool pine forests, and the cold mountain ridge that had lots of rocks and very little vegetation and looked like some sort of disaster fallout (kind of reminded me of Mt. St. Helens).
The rain held off all day long until about the last ten minutes when we could already see our shelter for the night and it started to pour down rain so hard that we got as soaked as if it had been steadily raining all day long. We stayed the night in a small cold village settlement on the ridge in a wood house structure that had beds and wools blankets that some NGO had set up to promote ecotourism in the area. Our guide asked around for a family that would give us dinner and hungry and cold as we were, speculating about what they would give us, looking forward to the usual Guatemalan dinner fare of eggs, beans, and tortillas. As this is area lives in extreme poverty, we were given cabbage in water, corn dough wrapped in leaves, and hot sugar water to drink. It was a very humbling experience sitting in the “kitchen” of the house, a dark room with a dirt floor with an open fire built in the middle on the ground and thick smoke filling the air. The girl who served us, maybe about 17 years old, couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and only spoke Quiche and most likely had never been to a day of school in her life. We knew no more than two words in Quiche, matiox (thank you) and utz (good), which can barely get a smile but not much communication, so our group of eight just ate in silence as she reached her hand into the fire to pull out more corn dough wraps. That night we pushed the wood bed frames together and us five girls slept all scrunched together for warmth. Every single person had terrible gas and we all poisoned the air with our rank, all snuggled up together.
The second day we arose and started hiking early, having gone to sleep exhausted around 7:30pm. We arrived at our destination of the aldea of Acul, Nebaj, Quiche where we had to jump a fence where I ripped beyond repair my favorite hiking pants that I had had since freshman year of high school (1999?) In Acul there is a cheese making hacienda that we lunched on hot tortillas with this artisan cheese and cantaloupe juice and bought whole wheels of cheese, as it is only sold by the wheel, to divide amongst us. We caught a microbus into the actual town of Nebaj, where we transferred buses to make our way to Cunen where the married couple in group lives and had graciously agreed to house and feed us for the night. We had to wait at the crossroads for a microbus into their town when a giant thunderstorm moved in but we finally made it to their house where they spoiled us with homemade Mexican style chicken enchiladas and cold showers since the electricity was out the whole time we were there. It was very merry and jovial all of glad to have survived and to be hanging out together. Very cool hike, all in all one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in Guatemala. After being here for so long, I thought I had seen pretty much everything, but this was definitely new and pretty mind blowing.
I had the realization the other day that I am now doing what I had imagined I would be doing in the Peace Corps after coming out of training. As I have said several times, there is a really good reason that Peace Corps is for two years. I’ve hit “that” point…where Spanish comes without thinking and often easier than English; where I feel genuine community acceptance; I feel needed and valued at work, People seek me out for various types of consultations; I crave tamales, beans and tortillas; a 12 hour chicken bus ride or a giant cockroach in my bed doesn’t even faze me; I’m doing what I’d envisioned doing; and I’m starting to panic about leaving.
My relationship with my counterpart, Irma, the Women’s Office coordinator, is what I feel like the counterpart/volunteer relationship strives to be. We balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well and have both a professional and friendly relationship. She is great with the women out in the rural communities and runs all the activities that I helped her plan. I help her a lot with planning, organization, motivation, institutional strengthening and computer skills and I follow her examples of culturally appropriate ways to do all our work.
The work we are doing together is now fitting into that image that I had coming out from training. I had imagined trekking through picturesque countryside stepping over pigs and chickens to get to women’s groups to do lots of participatory activities. It’s pretty much coming true. As part of our annual operating plan Irma and I are walking an hour each way up and down the mountains surrounding El Chol to complete a community diagnostic in each of the 28 communities that have community development councils (COCODEs) organized. We always meet in the afternoon in the community school. We set the meeting for 2:00 pm, as the women might have a moment of free time in the packed days of domestic responsibilities, but as the concept of time is loose here, we don’t start til well after 3:00 sometimes. We always start by introducing ourselves and explaining the existence of the women’s office. We ask them to go around and say their names, which are pulled out of them after much giggling, feet shuffling, hand wringing, and face hiding.
The diagnostic activity consists of the women completing an individual questionnaire that we read out loud to them as a group with questions both factual and opinionated related to demography, economic activities, health, education, domestic violence, and migration. We will be using the information from the diagnostic to have a better idea of the situation that women are living in the rural areas to assess their needs and then to prioritize the communities and projects we will work with. For example, if lots of women have an interest in learning about reproductive health issues, we can plan an informative discussion about the topic or coordinate with the health center in town to do an activity. The sheet that they have to fill out just has the question number and the letter options that they can choose, so they only need to be able to distinguish their letters a – e. But since most of the women can’t read and write, or can do so at such a basic level, it is a very trying task. When you had the women the sheet of paper they panic and tell you they can’t read and write, even if they can a little bit. I tell them not to worry, that we will help them or to sit next to someone who knows. They are even so afraid to hold a pen or pencil, since they have done it so few times in their lives or feels like they aren’t capable of managing the foreign object. The first few questions always take forever as you explain the concept of drawing a circle around a letter to make a selection. With some women the problem is they don’t understand the concept, others can’t see the letters well, some weren’t listening to the options mentioned, others can’t hold a pen properly, others are too timid to make the bold move of marking a piece of paper. After the first few questions, things start to go smoother as they get the hang of it and start smiling, confidently encircling letters, and responding with their opinions in regard to the questions. Sometimes they just wrinkle their noses at a question, and it generates good discussion. Such as when we ask what topics in health they would like to learn about and HIV/AIDS is one of the options and they say to you, “whatever that is…” and then we mention that there are several confirmed cases of this fatal yet preventative disease and then they perk up and listen. Or a question about participation when we ask them what prevents women from participating in community activities or meetings and one of the answer options is that their husbands don’t give them permission to participate and they all nod their heads vigorously in agreement and chime in with their anecdotes from the experiences in their lives to corroborate the evidence that it is hard to get their husbands to let them leave the house, especially when there are always a bunch of kids to take care of and housework that needs to get done. A woman in her early 20’s who is not married yet because her boyfriend went to the states (and even though he now has a new Honduran girlfriend there) she is waiting for him to get back, was telling me how she is super active in all kinds of groups, involved heavily in her church, is a community health promoter, and always attends any workshop or community meeting…but once her boyfriend supposedly comes back to marry her she will have to stop being involved in all these activities because he will tell her she needs to be in the house. It’s sad because she’s obviously a smart girl, had the luck of finished 9th grade, has lots of potential to be a great community leader and help her small community develop, but once she gets married it’s like that’s just it.
After the questionnaire activity we do a community mapping exercise where we give the women the chance to draw on big paper their community. In color blue the things that are already present and services that they have, and in color red the way they want to see their community and themselves within ten years. After a few giggles about how they will all be “viejitas” (little old ladies) in ten years they get into the activity. It’s cool cause they have so few opportunities to get out of their usual routine of doing work in the house and relax for a bit, see their neighbors, and do something novel like drawing. At first it seems weird to them to be talking about so far in the future, since they live subsistence day-to-day lives. But as I try to explain to them, drawing what they want doesn’t mean that we have a magic wand to make it so, but that we have to be futuristic thinking if we ever want to develop and improve the quality of our lives. If we only think of today, today, and maybe tomorrow, then things will always stay the same. It sounds cheesy, but you have to dream it first to make it reality, so we try to get them to think in that mode.
Visiting all the communities in the municipality has been really interesting because they vary a lot from each other. Some are highly indigenously, some are more timid than others, some propose things, others take it all in silently and hardly participate. It’s given me a good chance to really get to know all the rural roads and pathways since the muni doesn’t have any money right now to give us transportation, and even if they did it is extremely difficult and complicated to make that happen; so we walk. We sweat. A lot. But it also gives you a new appreciation for your surroundings noticing with greater detail this year’s corn sprouts which are just coming up, the gecko scurrying across your path, and the pungent smell of fermenting mangos which have fallen from the huge mango trees which shade the road at some parts. It gives you the opportunity to properly greet people that you pass with the appropriate literal “Good afternoon. May that you go well.” It gives Irma and I lots of time to discuss what went well in the meeting, what we could change, life, and the differences and similarities in the realities in our lives.
Rainy season is back in full force. It started early this year and it’s looking like it will be a rough one. Walking back from the rural communities in the afternoons, we get soaked and muddy. But it’s still suffocating hot and muggy at mid-day when we have to walk up the mountains to get there, and then it pours in the afternoons as we slide our way down on the slippery “roads”.
At my urging from awhile back to some of the NGO’s, there has been organized a coordination among the women’s offices in the department of Baja Verapaz. We’ve had a couple opportunities to all get together and have a sharing of experiences, since most of the offices are quite new. Irma and I were invited to give the feature presentation at one of these workshops, where we focused on writing of a vision and mission statement, creating an annual operating plan, and shared our experience of organizing the Municipal Forum of Women Leaders. It went really well and felt good to be an example to the other offices in the department because we all face many of the same challenges in the work that we do. We had gotten a ride from the mayor that morning and our activity finished at 1:00 and we called him to which he said he would be ready to go at 2:00. He came and picked us up, and then we waited in the car and in the street for the next six hours for him to finish a meeting with one of the departmental representatives to Congress. Got home late, really annoying, but totally normal for here. This is why I now have more patience than I know what to do with.
There are continuing perpetual financial problems in the muni, employees haven’t been paid in three months, still no money to buy us a computer or to give us reliable transportation to meetings, workshops, and community activities. On a positive note, Guatemala passed a national law guaranteeing access to public information that requires any institution receiving public funds to make public all their documents and records by means of an information office, and gives jail time and stiff financial penalties for noncompliance. They are working hard to increase transparency and reduce corruption in this country. They have a long way to go still.
I have lots of coworkers in the muni and no one really tells other people when it’s their birthday, til it comes up later since they don’t really make a very big deal of birthdays for adults here. Since Irma’s birthday passed and she didn’t tell me til a month later and she is the person that I spend the most hours of my day with, I decided to make a nice cake for her and all my other coworkers and celebrate everyone all at once. (Plus it’s expensive to be baking a cake for someone every couple weeks). So I make a yummy chocolate cake out of a box with rich chocolate butter cream frosting from scratch to celebrate. My mom had sent me some seasonal cake decorating supplies so I put those to good use and make it really pretty. I brought it to the muni and surprised everyone and made them all sing to each other. It was a festive occasion and we took pictures to remember it by.
Working in a country with such ties to the US through all the immigration that takes place adds a strange facet to the Peace Corps experience. I get constant inquiries from people if I can help them get a visa or people asking me I know so-and-so who lives in New Jersey. I hear lots of stories about the dangerous crossing from people who have come back. I feel sick to my stomach when I hear of people that I know getting ready to the attempt. This week a woman I am close with from a very poor family from one of the rural communities informed me that her son who just turned 19 is leaving in a few days. As is customary for people who don’t have the money to pay the huge coyote fees, the family had to turn over the titles to their land and house as a guarantee that the debt gets paid back. But who knows if he will actually make it? If he makes it, it will be a huge help to the family to help his siblings go to school and to pay for other important things. And if not, that leaves his parents and all his little brothers and sisters homeless without land to even plant the corn that sustains them. It’s a big gamble. I imagine this kid, who speaks not a word of English and has lived a very limited experience thus far in his life consisting of working the little patch of land that his family has, first making the dangerous desert crossing lasting days without food, water, or sleep, being beat up by the gangs that control the territory, and then walking the wide paved streets with traffic lights in the States. And the anxiety of his mother going weeks without hearing word from him. There’s really nothing you can even say to her other than “May that he go well with God.”
Another visit with good friends from college! We had a fabulous time hanging out, catching up, and getting to show off this beautiful country that I have the opportunity to live in. Seeing their reactions to everything makes me realize how accustomed to things I have become and how it all seems so normal to me now. They kept saying to me, “Caitlin, you’ve been here too long. You’ve got your Guatemala goggles on.” We went to Antigua first and explored around churches and ruins and walked up to the hill with a giant cross that overlooks the whole town with a direct view of Volcan de Agua (Water Volcano). We climbed the Pacaya Volcano (for my third time) but every time it’s different and this might have been the best lava flows I had seen. We went out dancing and I felt like a “real person” as we say in the Peace Corps when we do things that are familiar from home. Then we made the crazy trek up to El Chol and I think they barely made it on the long, hot, bumpy bus ride and they asked me “How do you live like this?” I guess you just get used to it. The time in my site was super fun and relaxed. They came with me to my English classes and my soccer practice and loved the group of little girls that I have. We went to the river in a tuk tuk (motorized three wheeled rickshaw) but evidently we were a lot of weight for the smaller motor and I had to get out on the inclines otherwise it wouldn’t make it up the hills. We got the priest in town to take us into the underpart of the church where bats live and supposedly people were buried before El Chol had a cemetery. My friends were super helpful in my office too because they helped me set up the Excel spreadsheet and formulas to tabulate the results from the Community Diagnostic for the Women’s Office. Since they got here right at the start of rainy season, supposedly the chequenes (big flying edible ants) were supposed to come out. My coworker called me at 4:00 am to go out and hunt for them, so we all got up and waited patiently in the soccer field for awhile, but alas, sadly they never showed up so they never got to try them fried up with lime and salt. I don’t know if they actually would have tried them though, since the whole time they freaked out about my bug-infested house, which really isn’t that bad, it’s just that when you live in the countryside in an unsealed house, you are a part of the living environment and living things get in. Either way, there was lots of concern over spiders which I guess I’ve just learned to live with. After my site we took another chicken bus adventure to Lake Atitlan and stayed at the beautiful Casa del Mundo hotel that is built into the hillside and it feels like you’re floating over the volcano surrounded lake. Cool. We relaxed in the hotel and they got all their souvenir shopping done in Panajachel. Since my friends knew I had been to the lake a bunch of time, they told me to pick something for us to do that I had never done. So, we went and did these awesome zip lines in the lake town of Santa Clara which were sweet! There were two actually, the first one was short and you held on to a pulley as you swept across the lush green valley. Then you walk up for a bit and then do a longer one when we got strapped on from our backs so you soar like an eagle across the valley. On that we were up higher and the clouds had rolled in so we flew through a cloud without being able to see the other side which was disorienting and exhilarating. One of the coolest things ever. I want to go back and do it again on a clear day since supposedly there are great views of the lake as you soar across, but I kind of liked the cloud effect. I have been missing my friends from home the whole time I’ve been here, but seeing them again made me really realize how much I missed them and it got me getting excited to come home.
We had a fabulous guide, a Swiss man who came to Guatemala with Doctors without Borders and married an indigenous woman and stayed in Todos Santos 15 years ago. We hiked from 6:30 am to 4:30 pm almost constantly through a few sparsely populated areas of all indigenous Mam’ people that shyly peer out from their huts. It was lots of up and down, looking across a steep valley knowing that first you had to go down, and then all the way back up. We stopped for a respite at the bottom of the valley where a freezing pristine river ran through it and soaked our tired feet and watched two adolescent girls beating piles of clothes against rocks to get them clean. We breakfasted, lunched, and snacked on the food we had brought with us mostly consisting of tortillas, refried black beans out of a bag, hardboiled eggs, avocados, and mangos. The types of terrains we moved through were quite varied from the hot loose sandy inclines, cool pine forests, and the cold mountain ridge that had lots of rocks and very little vegetation and looked like some sort of disaster fallout (kind of reminded me of Mt. St. Helens).
The rain held off all day long until about the last ten minutes when we could already see our shelter for the night and it started to pour down rain so hard that we got as soaked as if it had been steadily raining all day long. We stayed the night in a small cold village settlement on the ridge in a wood house structure that had beds and wools blankets that some NGO had set up to promote ecotourism in the area. Our guide asked around for a family that would give us dinner and hungry and cold as we were, speculating about what they would give us, looking forward to the usual Guatemalan dinner fare of eggs, beans, and tortillas. As this is area lives in extreme poverty, we were given cabbage in water, corn dough wrapped in leaves, and hot sugar water to drink. It was a very humbling experience sitting in the “kitchen” of the house, a dark room with a dirt floor with an open fire built in the middle on the ground and thick smoke filling the air. The girl who served us, maybe about 17 years old, couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and only spoke Quiche and most likely had never been to a day of school in her life. We knew no more than two words in Quiche, matiox (thank you) and utz (good), which can barely get a smile but not much communication, so our group of eight just ate in silence as she reached her hand into the fire to pull out more corn dough wraps. That night we pushed the wood bed frames together and us five girls slept all scrunched together for warmth. Every single person had terrible gas and we all poisoned the air with our rank, all snuggled up together.
The second day we arose and started hiking early, having gone to sleep exhausted around 7:30pm. We arrived at our destination of the aldea of Acul, Nebaj, Quiche where we had to jump a fence where I ripped beyond repair my favorite hiking pants that I had had since freshman year of high school (1999?) In Acul there is a cheese making hacienda that we lunched on hot tortillas with this artisan cheese and cantaloupe juice and bought whole wheels of cheese, as it is only sold by the wheel, to divide amongst us. We caught a microbus into the actual town of Nebaj, where we transferred buses to make our way to Cunen where the married couple in group lives and had graciously agreed to house and feed us for the night. We had to wait at the crossroads for a microbus into their town when a giant thunderstorm moved in but we finally made it to their house where they spoiled us with homemade Mexican style chicken enchiladas and cold showers since the electricity was out the whole time we were there. It was very merry and jovial all of glad to have survived and to be hanging out together. Very cool hike, all in all one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in Guatemala. After being here for so long, I thought I had seen pretty much everything, but this was definitely new and pretty mind blowing.
I had the realization the other day that I am now doing what I had imagined I would be doing in the Peace Corps after coming out of training. As I have said several times, there is a really good reason that Peace Corps is for two years. I’ve hit “that” point…where Spanish comes without thinking and often easier than English; where I feel genuine community acceptance; I feel needed and valued at work, People seek me out for various types of consultations; I crave tamales, beans and tortillas; a 12 hour chicken bus ride or a giant cockroach in my bed doesn’t even faze me; I’m doing what I’d envisioned doing; and I’m starting to panic about leaving.
My relationship with my counterpart, Irma, the Women’s Office coordinator, is what I feel like the counterpart/volunteer relationship strives to be. We balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses very well and have both a professional and friendly relationship. She is great with the women out in the rural communities and runs all the activities that I helped her plan. I help her a lot with planning, organization, motivation, institutional strengthening and computer skills and I follow her examples of culturally appropriate ways to do all our work.
The work we are doing together is now fitting into that image that I had coming out from training. I had imagined trekking through picturesque countryside stepping over pigs and chickens to get to women’s groups to do lots of participatory activities. It’s pretty much coming true. As part of our annual operating plan Irma and I are walking an hour each way up and down the mountains surrounding El Chol to complete a community diagnostic in each of the 28 communities that have community development councils (COCODEs) organized. We always meet in the afternoon in the community school. We set the meeting for 2:00 pm, as the women might have a moment of free time in the packed days of domestic responsibilities, but as the concept of time is loose here, we don’t start til well after 3:00 sometimes. We always start by introducing ourselves and explaining the existence of the women’s office. We ask them to go around and say their names, which are pulled out of them after much giggling, feet shuffling, hand wringing, and face hiding.
The diagnostic activity consists of the women completing an individual questionnaire that we read out loud to them as a group with questions both factual and opinionated related to demography, economic activities, health, education, domestic violence, and migration. We will be using the information from the diagnostic to have a better idea of the situation that women are living in the rural areas to assess their needs and then to prioritize the communities and projects we will work with. For example, if lots of women have an interest in learning about reproductive health issues, we can plan an informative discussion about the topic or coordinate with the health center in town to do an activity. The sheet that they have to fill out just has the question number and the letter options that they can choose, so they only need to be able to distinguish their letters a – e. But since most of the women can’t read and write, or can do so at such a basic level, it is a very trying task. When you had the women the sheet of paper they panic and tell you they can’t read and write, even if they can a little bit. I tell them not to worry, that we will help them or to sit next to someone who knows. They are even so afraid to hold a pen or pencil, since they have done it so few times in their lives or feels like they aren’t capable of managing the foreign object. The first few questions always take forever as you explain the concept of drawing a circle around a letter to make a selection. With some women the problem is they don’t understand the concept, others can’t see the letters well, some weren’t listening to the options mentioned, others can’t hold a pen properly, others are too timid to make the bold move of marking a piece of paper. After the first few questions, things start to go smoother as they get the hang of it and start smiling, confidently encircling letters, and responding with their opinions in regard to the questions. Sometimes they just wrinkle their noses at a question, and it generates good discussion. Such as when we ask what topics in health they would like to learn about and HIV/AIDS is one of the options and they say to you, “whatever that is…” and then we mention that there are several confirmed cases of this fatal yet preventative disease and then they perk up and listen. Or a question about participation when we ask them what prevents women from participating in community activities or meetings and one of the answer options is that their husbands don’t give them permission to participate and they all nod their heads vigorously in agreement and chime in with their anecdotes from the experiences in their lives to corroborate the evidence that it is hard to get their husbands to let them leave the house, especially when there are always a bunch of kids to take care of and housework that needs to get done. A woman in her early 20’s who is not married yet because her boyfriend went to the states (and even though he now has a new Honduran girlfriend there) she is waiting for him to get back, was telling me how she is super active in all kinds of groups, involved heavily in her church, is a community health promoter, and always attends any workshop or community meeting…but once her boyfriend supposedly comes back to marry her she will have to stop being involved in all these activities because he will tell her she needs to be in the house. It’s sad because she’s obviously a smart girl, had the luck of finished 9th grade, has lots of potential to be a great community leader and help her small community develop, but once she gets married it’s like that’s just it.
After the questionnaire activity we do a community mapping exercise where we give the women the chance to draw on big paper their community. In color blue the things that are already present and services that they have, and in color red the way they want to see their community and themselves within ten years. After a few giggles about how they will all be “viejitas” (little old ladies) in ten years they get into the activity. It’s cool cause they have so few opportunities to get out of their usual routine of doing work in the house and relax for a bit, see their neighbors, and do something novel like drawing. At first it seems weird to them to be talking about so far in the future, since they live subsistence day-to-day lives. But as I try to explain to them, drawing what they want doesn’t mean that we have a magic wand to make it so, but that we have to be futuristic thinking if we ever want to develop and improve the quality of our lives. If we only think of today, today, and maybe tomorrow, then things will always stay the same. It sounds cheesy, but you have to dream it first to make it reality, so we try to get them to think in that mode.
Visiting all the communities in the municipality has been really interesting because they vary a lot from each other. Some are highly indigenously, some are more timid than others, some propose things, others take it all in silently and hardly participate. It’s given me a good chance to really get to know all the rural roads and pathways since the muni doesn’t have any money right now to give us transportation, and even if they did it is extremely difficult and complicated to make that happen; so we walk. We sweat. A lot. But it also gives you a new appreciation for your surroundings noticing with greater detail this year’s corn sprouts which are just coming up, the gecko scurrying across your path, and the pungent smell of fermenting mangos which have fallen from the huge mango trees which shade the road at some parts. It gives you the opportunity to properly greet people that you pass with the appropriate literal “Good afternoon. May that you go well.” It gives Irma and I lots of time to discuss what went well in the meeting, what we could change, life, and the differences and similarities in the realities in our lives.
Rainy season is back in full force. It started early this year and it’s looking like it will be a rough one. Walking back from the rural communities in the afternoons, we get soaked and muddy. But it’s still suffocating hot and muggy at mid-day when we have to walk up the mountains to get there, and then it pours in the afternoons as we slide our way down on the slippery “roads”.
At my urging from awhile back to some of the NGO’s, there has been organized a coordination among the women’s offices in the department of Baja Verapaz. We’ve had a couple opportunities to all get together and have a sharing of experiences, since most of the offices are quite new. Irma and I were invited to give the feature presentation at one of these workshops, where we focused on writing of a vision and mission statement, creating an annual operating plan, and shared our experience of organizing the Municipal Forum of Women Leaders. It went really well and felt good to be an example to the other offices in the department because we all face many of the same challenges in the work that we do. We had gotten a ride from the mayor that morning and our activity finished at 1:00 and we called him to which he said he would be ready to go at 2:00. He came and picked us up, and then we waited in the car and in the street for the next six hours for him to finish a meeting with one of the departmental representatives to Congress. Got home late, really annoying, but totally normal for here. This is why I now have more patience than I know what to do with.
There are continuing perpetual financial problems in the muni, employees haven’t been paid in three months, still no money to buy us a computer or to give us reliable transportation to meetings, workshops, and community activities. On a positive note, Guatemala passed a national law guaranteeing access to public information that requires any institution receiving public funds to make public all their documents and records by means of an information office, and gives jail time and stiff financial penalties for noncompliance. They are working hard to increase transparency and reduce corruption in this country. They have a long way to go still.
I have lots of coworkers in the muni and no one really tells other people when it’s their birthday, til it comes up later since they don’t really make a very big deal of birthdays for adults here. Since Irma’s birthday passed and she didn’t tell me til a month later and she is the person that I spend the most hours of my day with, I decided to make a nice cake for her and all my other coworkers and celebrate everyone all at once. (Plus it’s expensive to be baking a cake for someone every couple weeks). So I make a yummy chocolate cake out of a box with rich chocolate butter cream frosting from scratch to celebrate. My mom had sent me some seasonal cake decorating supplies so I put those to good use and make it really pretty. I brought it to the muni and surprised everyone and made them all sing to each other. It was a festive occasion and we took pictures to remember it by.
Working in a country with such ties to the US through all the immigration that takes place adds a strange facet to the Peace Corps experience. I get constant inquiries from people if I can help them get a visa or people asking me I know so-and-so who lives in New Jersey. I hear lots of stories about the dangerous crossing from people who have come back. I feel sick to my stomach when I hear of people that I know getting ready to the attempt. This week a woman I am close with from a very poor family from one of the rural communities informed me that her son who just turned 19 is leaving in a few days. As is customary for people who don’t have the money to pay the huge coyote fees, the family had to turn over the titles to their land and house as a guarantee that the debt gets paid back. But who knows if he will actually make it? If he makes it, it will be a huge help to the family to help his siblings go to school and to pay for other important things. And if not, that leaves his parents and all his little brothers and sisters homeless without land to even plant the corn that sustains them. It’s a big gamble. I imagine this kid, who speaks not a word of English and has lived a very limited experience thus far in his life consisting of working the little patch of land that his family has, first making the dangerous desert crossing lasting days without food, water, or sleep, being beat up by the gangs that control the territory, and then walking the wide paved streets with traffic lights in the States. And the anxiety of his mother going weeks without hearing word from him. There’s really nothing you can even say to her other than “May that he go well with God.”
Another visit with good friends from college! We had a fabulous time hanging out, catching up, and getting to show off this beautiful country that I have the opportunity to live in. Seeing their reactions to everything makes me realize how accustomed to things I have become and how it all seems so normal to me now. They kept saying to me, “Caitlin, you’ve been here too long. You’ve got your Guatemala goggles on.” We went to Antigua first and explored around churches and ruins and walked up to the hill with a giant cross that overlooks the whole town with a direct view of Volcan de Agua (Water Volcano). We climbed the Pacaya Volcano (for my third time) but every time it’s different and this might have been the best lava flows I had seen. We went out dancing and I felt like a “real person” as we say in the Peace Corps when we do things that are familiar from home. Then we made the crazy trek up to El Chol and I think they barely made it on the long, hot, bumpy bus ride and they asked me “How do you live like this?” I guess you just get used to it. The time in my site was super fun and relaxed. They came with me to my English classes and my soccer practice and loved the group of little girls that I have. We went to the river in a tuk tuk (motorized three wheeled rickshaw) but evidently we were a lot of weight for the smaller motor and I had to get out on the inclines otherwise it wouldn’t make it up the hills. We got the priest in town to take us into the underpart of the church where bats live and supposedly people were buried before El Chol had a cemetery. My friends were super helpful in my office too because they helped me set up the Excel spreadsheet and formulas to tabulate the results from the Community Diagnostic for the Women’s Office. Since they got here right at the start of rainy season, supposedly the chequenes (big flying edible ants) were supposed to come out. My coworker called me at 4:00 am to go out and hunt for them, so we all got up and waited patiently in the soccer field for awhile, but alas, sadly they never showed up so they never got to try them fried up with lime and salt. I don’t know if they actually would have tried them though, since the whole time they freaked out about my bug-infested house, which really isn’t that bad, it’s just that when you live in the countryside in an unsealed house, you are a part of the living environment and living things get in. Either way, there was lots of concern over spiders which I guess I’ve just learned to live with. After my site we took another chicken bus adventure to Lake Atitlan and stayed at the beautiful Casa del Mundo hotel that is built into the hillside and it feels like you’re floating over the volcano surrounded lake. Cool. We relaxed in the hotel and they got all their souvenir shopping done in Panajachel. Since my friends knew I had been to the lake a bunch of time, they told me to pick something for us to do that I had never done. So, we went and did these awesome zip lines in the lake town of Santa Clara which were sweet! There were two actually, the first one was short and you held on to a pulley as you swept across the lush green valley. Then you walk up for a bit and then do a longer one when we got strapped on from our backs so you soar like an eagle across the valley. On that we were up higher and the clouds had rolled in so we flew through a cloud without being able to see the other side which was disorienting and exhilarating. One of the coolest things ever. I want to go back and do it again on a clear day since supposedly there are great views of the lake as you soar across, but I kind of liked the cloud effect. I have been missing my friends from home the whole time I’ve been here, but seeing them again made me really realize how much I missed them and it got me getting excited to come home.
Monday, April 20, 2009
El Mirador trip for Semana Santa
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…
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
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.
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.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Women's Office up and running!
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!
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!
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