Day 160: New Beginnings

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.”                                                                                                                             - Walt Whitman

I’m not sure whether or not my last post communicated just how difficult Christmas in Guatemala was for me. I was trying to stay positive, but the fact is…Christmas was really hard. December 25 is kind of my favorite thing in the world. I look forward all year to slogging through slushy parking lots with my arms full of presents, bounding through fresh snowdrifts with my little brother dachshund, and waking up on Christmas Day to my dad’s steaming poppyseed rolls and my mom’s warm cuddles.  So Christmas in Guatemala was a struggle, both because I was away from my family, and because I was away from our traditions.  Guatemala has been starting to feel more like home, but on Christmas it felt more alien than ever.

I had decided at the end of training that I would spend Christmas in site, but that I would spend New Year’s on vacation.  Christmas would be a big integrational push for me, and New Year’s would be a mental break.  And by December 26, I was ready for a mental break in a major way.  I was homesick, I was reeling about the health situation in my CAP (as revealed by my diagnostic work, and detailed a little further on in this post), and I wanted to speak English again.  So, on December 31, together with some of my favorite fellow volunteers, I bought a bottle of wine and hopped on a chartered Eurovan to Monterrico, Guatemala’s famous black-sand beach.

First things first: Monterrico is beautiful.  The miles-long beach is lined with palm trees, funkily-painted hostels, and oceanside bars.  Within hours of arrival, we got to enjoy this glorious sunset over the Pacific:

One of these things is paler than the others...

The rest of the trip was just as fun, and often just as picturesque.  I spent the days running on the beach, sunbathing on the beach, swimming in the peaceful surf past the dangerous riptide, exploring different beachfront restaurants, and eating lots of ice cream (one of the local chains has a new “dark chocolate” flavor, which is basically equivalent to regular American chocolate ice cream…in other words, it is luxurious).  It was one of those vacations where you never really take off your bathing suit; you just wear it into whatever shop or restaurant you may need to enter.

Aside from all the ice cream and beach time (and cinnamon-spiced piña coladas), there were two undeniable highlights.  The first was a morning expedition into the local mangrove lagoons.  We set our alarms for 5:30 am, bundled into a narrow flat-bottomed boat paddled around by a local gondolier, and got to watch the sun rise over the volcanic landscape.

Once there was a little more light among the mangroves, we were able to enjoy a healthy dose of local wildlife: majestic wading birds, fluttering sparrows, cackling monkeys, and tangled water weeds, to name a few.  My favorite animal sighting was this strange little fish that skimmed across the top of the water just like a skipped rock.  Interestingly, the ecosystem of the lagoon changes every half year, thanks to the ocean tides—it’s a freshwater habitat for half the year, and saltwater for the other half.

The second highlight of the Monterrico trip was buying, and releasing, a baby sea turtle.  For a measly Q10 ($1.50-ish), I got to acquaint myself with Tyrion Turtle (we had just been discussing Game of Thrones), and set him free to seek his fortune in the swirling ocean currents.  It was a bittersweet goodbye, but I feel sure his life won’t be rough as his namesake’s.

All too soon, it was time to head back to site, where I had a couple days to finish up my diagnostic work before heading to Early In-Service Training (EIST).  EIST, held at Peace Corps Headquarters, is a time for volunteers to share what they’ve observed so far in their communities (the diagnostic), learn project-specific strategies for improving community conditions (i.e. how to teach classes about birth control, how to collaborate with midwives, etc.), and formulate future project plans.  Best of all, it’s an opportunity to reunite with all the volunteers from my training group.  I can’t wait.

But, back to the diagnostic: As you would expect, the Maternal and Child Health diagnostic is an assessment of current community health practices.  I’ve spent the past three months working on it, and I’ve made some interesting/surprising/disheartening discoveries:

• 70% of the population in San José Chacayá lives off less than Q1500 per month ($200).  This actually puts us above the average departmental poverty rate (77%).
• 14.8% of local women use birth control, with monthly injections and exclusive breastfeeding accounting for about 75% of their birth control use (exclusive breastfeeding is a hugely popular method of birth control here, though all but unheard-of in the United States.  Basically, after giving birth, a woman can prevent the return of menstruation, and fertility, by breastfeeding any time her child is hungry—about 12 times a day.  As you might suspect, this is not the most effective birth control method).
• 7.8% of local men use birth control, all in the form of condoms.
• The average woman in San José Chacayá will give birth to five children in her lifetime.  No wonder the locals look at me like I’m crazy when I say I only have one sibling.
• Only 31.94% of local births take place at institutions run by the Ministry of Health (i.e. hospitals, the CAP).  This preference for home births was further illustrated in my interviews with local pregnant women, when I asked, “What will you do when you go into labor?”  About 40% of the women answered that they would tell their husband or their mother that they were about to have a baby, and stay home.
• My CAP does not educate young women (or men) on birth control until after their first pregnancy, their reasoning being that women only need to know about birth control in order to safely space out their pregnancies.  I think the lack of education also has something to do with the strong religious fervor here, and the extreme hesitance to discuss female bodily functions.
• The municipal government used to provide free Pap smears to all women of reproductive age in San José Chacayá.  Since the funding ran out two years ago, Pap coverage has dropped to less than 1%.

So the good news is there’s lots of room for improvement, in my eyes at least.  The hard part will be motivating Guatemalans to change, and making improvements in a culturally sensitive way.  As much as I’d like to, I can’t just charge into the local school and start handing out condoms.

I thought my diagnostic would be the last roadblock before EIST, but I was wrong.  The night before I was due to leave, my host dad came home with bad news: his brother-in-law, who owned and ran the shop next to our house, was dead.  My immediate reaction was shock.  I had seen Byron less than 48 hours ago, when he helped me pick out the ripest banana in his stock (this was our daily custom).  He was probably in his late thirties or early forties, and appeared to be in the peak of health.  I soon found out that he had long been suffering from some mysterious chronic disease, took a turn for the worse, and died en route to the hospital.

Guatemalans move quickly when faced with death, and Byron’s wake was already taking place next door, less than 24 hours after his death.  My host family and I went to pay our respects at about 10:30 pm, just after his body arrived from the hospital.  My shock had, by this point, turned to sadness, largely due to the thought of Byron’s two young and now fatherless daughters.  At the wake, my sadness was pervaded with horror, as each of Byron’s family members wept over his casket.  I felt like I was watching something far too personal, like I had no place observing this family’s raw sorrow.  And it wasn’t like I was just an out-of-place gringa among close family members—I was one of about 200 villagers crammed into the makeshift chapel, all of us mutely looking on at one of the darkest moments in this family’s life.

The worst moment of all was when the time came to “dar palabras.”  The direct translation of dar palabras is “to give words,” but dar-ing palabras is more than that: Guatemalans love to offer up praises, reminiscences, advice, and good will at all social occasions.  At the wake, Byron’s closest friends and family members took the stage to memorialize him, all the while crying, screaming, and gasping for breath.  One of his friends nearly fainted with emotion, and had to be carried into the house.  Byron’s sobbing teenage daughter begged everyone in the audience to love their parents while they still can.  That was where I lost it, and just started crying.  You see, being in the Peace Corps is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience, but it suddenly struck me as a rather selfish venture.  I’ve left behind all the people I love to have this incredible adventure by myself.  What if one of my parents gets sick?  What if someone back home needs me?

By the time we returned home around midnight, I had calmed considerably (although I did emotionally wolf down an entire pack of cheap chocolates before going to bed).  Byron’s death left me once again reflecting on how lucky I am.  I don’t mean to get overly preachy in all my posts, but, seriously, I have it really good.  I have a loving, supportive, and healthy family; I have an excellent education; I have my own health; I have amazing friends; I have the ability to serve in the Peace Corps without worrying about how my family will support themselves in my absence.  I’m really in the lap of luxury, even in my little cement-and-metal hamlet in the Guatemalan highlands.

Now, it’s off to EIST!  I’ll end this post with a shout-out to my dad: I saw your little milk truck’s cousin getting ferried around the Monterrico lagoon, and missed you more than ever.

Day 150: Christmas

"'One can never have enough socks,' said Dumbledore. 'Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair.'"                          - J. K. Rowling

Signs that it’s Christmas in Guatemala:

1. The assembly of a giant musical Christmas tree in Sololá, complete with the famous Gallo beer logo atop the star.

2. The overnight appearance of a metal frame tree in your town center.  The frame is soon filled with individual fir tree clippings, which are then spray-painted teal and draped with red and gold ribbons.  I think it may have been easier to just use a full tree, but Guatever.

3. An inexplicably threatening poster of the town mayor hung at the base of the town tree.  I think he’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, but he may be threatening broken kneecaps; it’s not entirely clear.

4. A second threatening photo of the mayor, this time with his full posse in tow.

5. A proliferation of those horrible singing Christmas lights that play tinny renditions of 2-3 Christmas classics on repeat.  Seriously, they even have these bedecking the Virgin Mary statue in church, and keep them playing through Mass.

6. The arrival in site of a new group of volunteers.  It’s great to see some friendly, albeit unfamiliar, gringo faces for the holidays, and to accompany them on a tour of the lake, reveling in the Guatemalan landscape and scoping out local real estate.

7. An abundance of fluffy white snow.  Oh, wait, actually, it’s 70 degrees here.

8. Posadas.  Meant as a reenactment of all the inn rejections Mary and Joseph experienced, posadas are nightly neighborhood gatherings at different houses.  A band plays, everyone kneels and prays for about two hours, and snacks are served.  It’s quite a to-do.  For the posada at my house, my host dad hung the garage with curtains, painted a desert landscape on the back wall, and erected a huge tree and dwarf-size nativity scene.  I took the afternoon off work to help my host family prepare, and, along with four other women, spent three hours chopping fruit to feed the coming guests.  Said guests filled the garage and the driveway, overflowing into the street.

9. All the tamales!  All the ponche!  These two Guatemalan delicacies comprise literally all the Christmas cuisine here—everyone serves them, and no one serves anything else.  The tamales consist of corn meal filled with peppers, raisins, and unidentifiable meat (possibly beef?), all stuffed in banana leaves and boiled until cooked through.  Ponche is a Guatemalan twist on fruit punch: a pell-mell mixture of any and all available tropical fruits (papaya, pineapple, plantains, coconut, etc.) dumped into a veritable cauldron of water and boiled until syrupy.  I foolishly thought this was a healthy Guatemalan treat, until I saw my host mom dump four pounds of sugar into her ponche pot.  I wish I was exaggerating.

10. Too.  Many.  Firecrackers.  “Bombas” are a popular Guatemalan entertainment year-round, but the locals really scale up their efforts for the yuletide.  It’s practically impossible to walk down the street without experiencing an auditory assault.  The grand finale comes on Christmas Eve night: everyone waits up till midnight with their families, then sets off hundreds of Quetzales’ worth of firecrackers.

And so, at 12:30 Christmas morning, I found myself in my host family’s driveway, clutching a mug of ponche and shivering against the night breeze.  I watched in horror as my host dad instructed Isaias to aim his firework gun directly for the power lines hanging about six feet above his head, while my host mom pelted the two of them with lit bombas (the whole fireworks safety thing hasn’t really caught on in Guatemala.  It’s quite common to see people missing eyes or ears or cheeks or fingers, and it’s a safe bet that said body parts were lost to incendiary devices).  Luckily, my host family and I escaped unscathed.

Forty-five minutes earlier, I had timidly presented my host family with their Christmas gifts:

• A can of American chili for my host dad (he is obsessed with American chili, and once told me this story of how he made chili without a stove, by wrapping beans and meat in a plastic sheet and hanging the assembly in his hot shower for three hours.  He swears it was delicious)
• Fancypants American body butter for my host mom to rub on her burgeoning stomach (I am actually concerned she is going to explode, a la John Hurt in Alien)
• Dodgy bootleg DVDs for my host brother, including Monsters University and the Muppet Movie (it’s a little weird to gift such obviously black market material to a seven-year-old, but bootleg DVDs are the only available DVDs here, and I figured he could benefit from a little Tina Fey in his life) 

My host family hadn’t gotten me anything, but I consoled myself with the beautiful purse gifted me by my CAP family, and with the recent Christmas care package lovingly shipped from Minnesota.  Say what you will; good tampons and New Yorkers make a positively heartwarming Christmas gift.

After the gift-giving hugging time, the heartstopping fireworks celebration, and some weepy prayers in the garage (Guatemalans are big on crying while praying, and I was feeling pretty homesick), my host family and I headed next door (my host aunt’s house) for tamales and ponche.  I ate my way around the mystery meat in my tamale, and, to the delight of my hostess, drank a full two mugs of steaming ponche.  The Guatemalans, in a truly welcoming fashion, wanted to hear all about Minnesota.  I was happy to oblige, although blabbing about snow and Christmas in the U.S. didn’t really help the whole homesickness thing.

We all crawled into bed around 3:00, then got up at 6:30 to go to Christmas Mass.  Seeing how the churches here are overflowing every Sunday, I fully expected the Christmas service to be mobbed.  But there was hardly anyone there!  My host parents explained that most people are just too tired from tamale-making and firecracker-exploding to venture out on Christmas morning.  So, instead of a hymn-heavy, candle-filled Christmas Mass like the ones I used to attend in grade school, I was treated to an intimate acoustic show, with the priest strumming Silent Night and Feliz Navidad on his guitar.  I quite liked it.

The post-firecracker lethargy didn’t end with Mass; it apparently lasts all Christmas Day.  I spent the day wandering my town, chatting on the phone with other Peace Corps Volunteers, and jaunting to Sololá to find a pineapple (I had a craving, ok?).  I hardly saw anyone, and returned home to a quiet dinner of Velveeta mac ‘n’ cheese (a great splurge), half a pineapple, and peanut butter M&Ms—in other words, my own little Guatemalan feast.

Now, before ending this post, I have to tell you about my Christmas present from Guatemala, as promised.  Around Thanksgiving, I was contacted by the Coordinator for the Sololá Área de Salud (the Health District, essentially).  He wants me, along with two other nearby Peace Corps Volunteers, to plan and lead a year-long training for the district’s health educators.  We’ll be teaching them about how adults learn, how to use the experiential learning cycle to plan lessons, and how to make do with available resources to give interactive and useful lessons.  Right now, community health lessons are usually given by reading off a sheet of paper, so there’s a lot of room for improvement.  I’m pretty excited, mostly because I think the training could make a big difference, but also just because it’s something to do!  I’ll keep you posted.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas, whether you have snow or not.  I leave you with this photo of a fairly adorable puppy, found by another volunteer and transported by yours truly to its new home (with a friend’s host family).