Day 178: In-Service Training

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”                                                                                                                           - T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I am now home from Early In-Service Training, the 10-day, project-specific course for all the volunteers in my training group. The training was held at Headquarters, which meant that for 10 days I was once again living with Claudia, my first host mom. Even though I knew from experience that Claudia is a great host mom, I was taken aback by how good it was to see her again. Eating dinner with her and her niece, washing my underwear in her pila, curling up in the thick wool blankets she put on my bed—it all felt like a sort of homecoming, which, when you think about it, is kind of weird, right? I only lived with her for two months, in comparison to the three months I’ve now spent in site. And yet, her home and lifestyle felt infinitely less strange to me than San José Chacayá. Maybe it’s because she lives in more of an urban town, or because she’s more educated than the vast majority of Chacayá inhabitants, or because we have a special lady bond. I don’t know. In any case, we spent long hours chatting about my life in site, my joys and frustrations with Guatemala, and, of course, Esmeralda.

Esmeralda is Claudia’s niece.  She’s one of fiercest Guatemalan girls I’ve met, self-possessed and outgoing and funny.  Whereas most young Guatemalan girls travel in quiet packs through the streets, keeping their heads down and giggling when addressed, Esmeralda roams solo.  She bargains for used toys at the market; she plays soccer; she once left a church service to go buy chips and soda pop, before coming back and chowing down in the pew.  She’s basically the coolest Guatemalan kid I’ve met.

But, as cool as Esmeralda is, she’s an unwitting example of just how poor the Guatemalan education system is.  At seven years of age, she’s just learning how to read.  She’s also learning a Mayan language, but neither she nor Claudia knows which one it is (at least Claudia knows what grade Esmeralda is in, which is more than I can say for some Guatemalan parents).  And then there’s this conversation I had with Esmeralda during EIST, which frankly made me wonder what they teach her in math class:

Esmeralda: How old are you turning this year?

Ann: 24.

Esmeralda: So, right now…you’re…25.

Ann: What?  No!  I’m 23!

Esmeralda: Oh.  Ok.  Good.  But then, when you have your birthday, how long until you actually turn 24?  Two days, or two weeks?

Ann: What?

Esmeralda: After your birthday, do you turn 24 in two days or in two weeks?

Ann: What?  I’m sorry; I don’t understand.

Esmeralda: So imagine today is your birthday.  Do you turn 24 in two days or two weeks?

Ann: I turn 24 on my birthday.  I don’t understand.

Esmeralda: Well, you called me after my birthday to wish me a happy birthday.  It must be because I didn’t turn seven until after my birthday.

Ann: Oh, that’s because I had the wrong date!  I called on the day I thought was your birthday!

Esmeralda: Oh.  Ok.  So when you turn 24, you’ll turn 25 in two days or two weeks?

Ann: …After I turn 24, I have to wait a year till I turn 25.  So I still have two years to go before 25.

Esmeralda: YOU’RE GOING TO BE 25 YEARS OLD IN TWO YEARS?

Ann: Yup.

Esmeralda: IN TWO YEARS.  YOU’RE GOING TO BE 25 IN TWO YEARS.  YOU’RE SO OLD.

Ann: I’m going to go do dishes now.

So that was weird, and fairly uncomfortable.  But it was also profoundly sad, really, because it made me think about what the future has in store for Esmeralda.  In all likelihood, Esmeralda, this spunky fearless girl, and thousands more girls like her throughout Guatemala, will end up finishing high school with a shoddy education, marrying young, having a few kids, and maybe working part-time at their family stores.  And they’re the lucky ones.  More rural girls, like those living in San José Chacayá, will probably drop out of school, get pregnant as teenagers, and spend the rest of their working lives caring for all their subsequent babies, while their husbands toil in the onion fields.  It’s a pretty dark future.

The good news is that maybe it’s a future I can improve.  The whole purpose of EIST is to provide volunteers with tools they can use to effect positive change in their communities.  And believe me, my community needs change.  So I spent the long days at the Peace Corps Office immersing myself in talks on positive masculinity, HIV/AIDS, how to work with pregnant women, and how to train health workers.  Some of the sessions were moving and useful, like our group discussion of how to deal with machismo in site.  Other sessions served as brutal reminders of how difficult it is to work in the Guatemalan culture.  For instance, the session led by Guatemalan comadronas (midwives, basically) focused almost entirely on the importance of dream interpretation.  Dreams are really important in comadrona culture, it seems, but I couldn’t help but wonder how this information would prove useful, at all, in my work in Chacayá.  Then I felt culturally insensitive, and tried to refocus on the comadronas’ message, only to find myself getting frustrated with them all over again.

The highlight of EIST was undoubtedly a two-day retreat, held at a completely kooky hotel in the department of Chimaltenango.  The various hotel cabins were surrounded by herb gardens, rusty swingsets, giant wooden giraffes with hand- and foot-holds for climbing, brightly painted bicycle parts, and little bridges over dry streambeds.  There was also a chapel, an exercise facility with walls made of plastic bottles, and a weird zoo-like area containing deer, dogs, and sheep.  I spent most of my free time wandering the grounds and soaking it all in.

I didn’t have unlimited free time, though, because of course the retreat had a purpose: discussing the role of gender in Guatemala, both in our personal lives and in our work.  I think most of you know that gender is one of my favorite subjects, so I was pretty much in ecstasy throughout the training.  Best of all, the Peace Corps Guatemala Gender Equality Committee, which led the retreat, was looking for two new members.  I applied, and I got a spot!  I have high hopes that a position on the committee will provide more opportunities for me to make lasting changes here.  I can help train other volunteers on gender equality, so that they can pass that knowledge on in their sites; I can help plan educational activities with locals (the committee is currently producing a Spanish and Mayan-language version of the Vagina Monologues); and I can work in monitoring and evaluation to assess what Peace Corps Guatemala is doing well in terms of gender, and what it can do to improve.  I’m pretty pumped.

In closing, I must apologize for the lack of photographic illustration in this blog post; I basically forgot that my camera existed during IST.  However, I do have one picture to share with you, albeit for very prideful and selfish reasons.  I spent a lot of IST doodling, because that kind of mindless activity helps me focus during lectures and group discussions.  I didn’t expect the doodle to turn into anything, but it grew into a pretty neat little art project, and I’m proud of it.  So, even if I my coworkers in San José Chacayá continue to prove difficult to work with, at least my time in Guatemala will have produced this drawing.  It’s the little things.

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).

Day 122: Thanksgiving

“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”                                                           - Marcus Aurelius

As Thanksgiving Day drew closer over the past week, a palpable excitement seemed to hang over Peace Corps Guatemala. For many of my fellow volunteers, it was a nervous excitement, based both in severe homesickness and in eagerness for the giant Thanksgiving party being thrown by my training group. Several other volunteers were excited about the rapidly approaching arrivals of their families, who had chosen Thanksgiving as a good time to visit Guatemala.

My excitement was something else entirely. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still very homesick, and no doubt will be throughout the course of my service. But Thanksgiving has never been my favorite holiday (probably due to the fact that I strongly dislike almost all classic Thanksgiving foods), and therefore didn’t cause a spike in homesickness (Christmas will likely be another story). And I wasn’t actually planning to attend my training group’s Thanksgiving party. I love my fellow volunteers, and I love spending time with them, but I really prefer small group activities, sans vodka. Finally, my family did not come visit over Thanksgiving, because they don’t love me. I kid; my parents actually think I’m pretty cool, but I’m not allowed to have visitors yet. And given the fact that I will probably only get to see my parents a couple times during Peace Corps service, it makes sense to postpone family visits for a little while.

Anyway. I spent the past week in a state of extreme restlessness, which I think could most appropriately be called cabin fever. It turns out that living in a small town can be kind of limiting, and can really get in your head and MaKE yOu CrAZy. Well, stir crazy, at least. First of all, everyone in town knows you, and always wants to know how you’re doing. This is actually quite nice most of the time, but when you’re having a bad day, it sucks. I don’t want to lie to my local egg seller, but I also don’t want to tell him, “Well, I’m actually having a bad day, because I’m PMSing and right now everything about your culture seems backwards.” Probably not a great way to make friends. What’s more, any sort of excursion requires preplanning; you can’t just decide to go to the movies or out to eat. The closest cinema is an hour and a half away, and the restaurant in my town got very confused when I asked them for a vegetarian meal (they ended up serving me plain pasta with a teaspoon of tomato paste and three pieces of onion on top).

I was also feeling significantly frustrated with my daily work, or lack thereof. Everyone at my CAP is very nice, but they often spend entire afternoons napping or browsing Facebook. This makes collaboration difficult. When they do have work to do and I ask them how I can help, they usually say that I should “just be.” According to one of the Peace Corps trainers, this is likely due to the fact that I have a college degree (a rarity here), and am seen as being too fancy or important for basic CAP work. This makes me very sad, because I would really like to be helping! I do have some diagnostic work I can do for Peace Corps, but it feels very condescending to only work on figuring out what my fellow CAP workers are doing wrong.

So, in summary, by Thanksgiving Day, I was desperately excited to see my friend Hannah (a fellow volunteer who had come to stay), and to get out of town. We spent a glorious Thursday in Panajachel, hiking along the lakeside, sipping non-instant coffee, eating tempeh stir-fry (ACTUAL TEMPEH!), and getting massages from a darling Guatemalan lady. We also had an interesting grocery store run-in with a young Jehovah’s Witness missionary, who assured us that Peace Corps volunteers are “politically funded.” He was shocked to learn that there are “real expatriots” living in Pana. I don’t know how he missed the vast number of white people wandering around and running businesses, but whatever.

The day ended with a positively inspired pizza-from-scratch kitchen party, and a screening of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Weirdly, MFBGW, which I considered a masterpiece in junior high and now consider superbly cheesy, fit with Guatemalan life perfectly. Seriously, if you want to gain some perspective on gender roles and societal expectations in Guatemala, just listen to Toula Portokalos expound on the importance of marrying men of the same ethnic background, having babies of said ethnic background, and cooking for said babies of said ethnic background. I basically felt like I was watching a video of my current life (although John Corbett does not, to my knowledge, live in Guatemala).

On Friday, Hannah and I hiked to the local lookout over Lake Sololá (the same one introduced to me by my fellow CAP workers). While soaking up the sun and the view, we had a long, emotional, and ultimately helpful chat about integration difficulties.

The view en route to the lookout

The lake view from the lookout

Hannah and I then headed to another friend’s house, to begin cooking our real Thanksgiving dinner (pizza, while delicious, doesn’t really count as Thanksgiving food). Our exhaustive efforts over the next 24 hours produced a veritable feast: mashed potatoes, biscuits, cornbread stuffing, sweet-and-sour carrots, green bean casserole, spinach salad, apple pie, pumpkin pie, peach pie, and pumpkin rolls. This may sound like a pretty typical Thanksgiving lineup, albeit sans turkey, but it felt like a huge accomplishment, given the fact that all of the food was prepared using a portable stove and a toaster oven. Best of all, while eating, I got to catch up with six other volunteers. We talked about our successes in site, our frustrations, and what we are thankful for. It was a really nice, really homey Thanksgiving…despite being celebrated in a cement block in rural Guatemala.

My conversation with my fellow volunteers made me realize that, even though I’m frustrated with small town life and my lack of progress in my CAP, I have a TON to be thankful for. I’m thankful for all the opportunities I’ve had in my life, many of which were afforded to me because I was born in a country like the United States, and not in Guatemala. Seriously, how amazing is it that I got to go to college, study abroad, work as a medical scribe in an ER, and join the Peace Corps? Those things are unheard of here!

I’m also thankful for my health—another anomaly here. The vast majority of Guatemalans are malnourished, and many Guatemalan women my age (23) already have three or four children. The results of such early and frequent childbirths can be devastating—Hannah just met a 17-year-old mother, whose recent bungled Cesarean section left her paralyzed from the waist down.

I’m thankful I’ve been placed in a town I like, with a generous and caring host family. And I’m thankful for my friends and family back home. I’ve always been thankful for the people I love, but since coming here I’ve realized more than ever just how much I love all of you.

Today, a few days after Thanksgiving, I have a new something to be thankful for. I’m talking, of course, about Cyber Monday. Just kidding! I’m actually talking about a promising work opportunity in my health district. However, given the length of this blog post, and as part of a sneaky plan to leave you hanging so that you read my subsequent blog posts, I’ll tell you about it next time!

See those little radio towers?  That's my town!

Day 103: Frustrations

"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."                                                             - Søren Kierkegaard

After a quiet Monday at the CAP, I packed my bags for an overnight youth camp on sexuality. The camp, which was held at a beautiful local nature reserve, was planned entirely by Laura, my site mate, and she had invited me to come along, both to help with lesson plans and to learn about how such camps are run, what local high-schoolers are like, etc. The overall experience was, in a word, jarring. I was disappointed and even a little bit frightened by the gender dynamics among the students, the students’ lack of knowledge regarding sexuality (both before and after the camp), and the lack of order among the students. Allow me to explain each issue a little more clearly:

Gender Dynamics: The boys were loud, raucous, and frequently disrespectful to the teachers. They laughed uproariously with every mention of body parts or bodily functions, and ridiculed their fellows who dared to answer teachers’ prompts. The girls, on the other hand, were quiet and withdrawn. During one of opening icebreaker activities, in which a ball was thrown around a circle to prompt introductions, about 90% of the girls refused to even try to catch the ball. If it was tossed their way, they would sidestep it and then meekly watch it roll away. I’m not sure why they didn’t want to talk in front of their classmates, but the scene made me feel profoundly sad.

Lack of Knowledge: I was pretty shocked that the 14- through 17-year-olds attending the camp didn’t know how menstruation works (I was less shocked that they didn’t know what homosexual means, given Guatemala’s conservative and religious atmosphere). I mean, I think it’s safe to assume that most of the young women at the camp had experienced menarche/been visited by Aunt Flo/“become women,” and yet only a handful of them could explain WHY they hemorrhaged from their vaginas every month. As a woman, allow me to tell you that getting your period is scary enough even without the added difficulty of not knowing why it’s happening.

The lack of knowledge was further demonstrated in the pre- and post-tests given to the students at the start and end of the camp, respectively. Despite the fact that the tests were identical, and the two-day camp was spent spoonfeeding the answers to the students, most of the participants scraped only a 4/10 or a 5/10 on the final exam. What’s more, a lot of them blatantly cheated during the exam, copying answers word-for-word (if you’re going to cheat, at least get a little creative!). But we’ll come back to that in a minute. For now, allow me to share some of my favorite answers with you; they’re quite comical, really, but also insanely frustrating:

Question: What are the signs of an abusive or dangerous relationship?
Answer 1: When a woman is pregnant and the man beats her and she has an abortion.
Answer 2: Having sexual relations

Question: What are three possible consequences of an unplanned adolescent pregnancy?
Answer 1: Friendship, love, caring
Answer 2: Birth, natural birth, Cesarean section
Answer 3: Having sex, don’t inject yourself, stop injecting yourself

Question: What are three ways of preventing pregnancy?
Answer 1: Abortion, spontaneous abortion, unwanted pregnancy
Answer 2: A woman can prevent pregnancy if she gets an injection for strength.

Question: What are three ways of preventing HIV transmission?
Answer 1: Sexuality, cough, cold
Answer 2: Blood, sex
Answer 3: Calendar, cough, sexuality

Question: What is a resource that you can access to receive help regarding your sexual and reproductive health?
Answer 1: When a man loves a woman, he has to ask her father and mother so that she stays healthy.
Answer 2: Don’t eat a lot of fats. You have to eat vegetables and fruits so you don’t get sick.

And the best response of all:

Question: What is sexual responsibility?
Answer: Reproduction, pleasure, snack.

Lack of order: I’ve already mentioned the blatant cheating. What I didn’t mention is that when teachers at the camp told the students to knock it off, the students either ignored them, or mocked them to their faces. It seemed like disciplinary action is just not something these kids are familiar with, and I didn’t feel like I was in an appropriate position to introduce them to it. The students also flaunted authority by showing up thirty minutes late to lessons, sneaking off into the woods at night to make out, and holding an all-night music party in the boys’ dormitory. None of those things are distinctly Guatemalan, of course; I’m sure you would find them at American youth camps too. But that doesn’t make them any less annoying.

So there you have them: my frustrations with the camp. Of course, it wasn’t all bad. There were thrills, like piling into box trucks for transport to camp…

…beautiful views…

…and the following moments of genuine joy:

Laura maneuvers a girl, pretending to be an ovum, through an imaginary fallopian tube

My new biffles, fellow PCV Sam and fellow CAP worker Luisa

Did I mention there was a zipline?

Yeah, a zipline.  Just look at that awesome midair chicken dance.

Anyway, after an exhausting two days of youth camp, it was time to head back to San José Chacayá. Although the other gringas and I got seats in the cabs of pickup trucks, most of the camp attendees were not so lucky:

Thursday morning found me at an ebola training, and on Friday my coworkers decided to re-strike. This is logical, given the fact that they still haven’t been paid, but it’s hard to take. In the first place, I’m sad that my friends are being mistreated. I still struggle to imagine how it would feel to go 6-7 months without pay. Second, I’m upset that no one in my community has access to easy healthcare right now. Third, I’m frustrated that my days will once again be spent sitting around the CAP doing absolutely nothing. And fourth, I keep thinking about that annoying-to-the-point-of-hilarity SNL sketch starring Jimmy Fallon and Ben Affleck as warring DJs, screaming, “AND WE’RE BACK!” I now have “AND WE’RE BACK (on strike)!” playing on repeat in my head.  Since I can't access the Youtube video from a non-U.S. IP address, I can't embed the SNL video, but you can check it out here: https://screen.yahoo.com/z105-morning-madhouse-000000804.html.

As an attempt at optimism/hope/positivity, I’m choosing to end this post with a list of some of the really great things Guatemalans do—more specifically, things that Guatemalans unquestionably do better than Americans. It can be difficult for me to remember that I have just as much to learn from Guatemalans as they do from me, and I hope that ruminating on and sharing this list will help keep me sane and balanced. So, without further ado:

1. Retention of artisanal crafts: Whereas most U.S. tourist shops are filled with hokey T-shirts, cheap plastic doo-dads, and novelty shot glasses, Guatemalan tourist destinations are overflowing with woven textiles, jade intricacies, and beautiful wool blankets. Yeah, there are some cheap T-shirts here too, but just imagine if the U.S. offered a similar number of Native American handicrafts. Don’t you think we’d all know a lot more about our country and its people’s history?

2. Breastfeeding: I rarely pass a day in Guatemala without seeing a woman breastfeeding her infant in public, something that is unfortunately a rarity in the United States. It’s true that Guatemalans in general are far more conservative in dress and mannerisms than Americans, but they don’t seem to have the same shame that American women have about baring their breasts to feed their babies, which is great. Sadly, the male equivalent seems to be public urination, but let’s not go there.

3. Bus painting: Why would you decorate a bus like this:

http://www.minnpost.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/article_detail/images/articles/metrotransitbus_main.jpg

when you could be decorating it like this:

http://www.unitedplanet.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/3232516247_253d21129f.jpg

4. Family: One of the most common questions I get here is how I could bear to leave my family for two years—not how I could leave my home, or my friends, or a stable income. I don’t even really get asked why I decided to come to Guatemala. All the questions are about family: how could I leave them, how much do I miss them, when will I see them again, and why don't Americans care about their families? Of course, I think most Americans do care about their families, quite a lot, but we don’t maintain the physical familial closeness practiced in Guatemala. Here, most men live with their parents throughout their lives (women move in with their husband’s families when they get married). Sometimes they share homes; more often they live in family compounds, little haphazard gatherings of houses grouped around a common courtyard. All the children are intimately acquainted with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., and most families exchange lots of favors over the course of each year. It’s a pretty beautiful communal way of life.

5. Local produce: Sure, it may be food considered too poor in quality to export to the United States, but it’s fresh, healthy, local, and way cheaper than what I can buy at the local (Walmart-owned) grocery store. This past Sunday, I bought a pound of beans, a pound of strawberries, 12 passionfruit, 15 jocotes (a chalky, tangy Guatemalan fruit), two onions, a bunch of cilantro, a half pound of carrots, a pound of peas, two limes, and an orange, for a grand total of…$5.00.

6. Dog vaccinations: ARE FREE! I recognize that this might contribute to the dog overpopulation problem, but I still think it’s great that local health centers offer regular free dog vaccination days. No dog deserves the pain and suffering of a preventable disease.

7. Tamales: Maybe it’s cheating to say that Guatemalans make better Latin food than Americans do, seeing as Guatemala is a Latin American country, but if you tasted a tamal de elote (a sweet corn tamale), you would forgive me. Each tamale, served piping hot off the grill, is slightly crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. The color and flavor is similar to cornbread, except for the unexpected burst of cardamom you get in each bite.

8. Bilinguality: In a similar vein with artisanal crafts, Guatemala manages to maintain 21 different indigenous tongues. Most of the people in my town, including children, are bilingual, and can switch between Spanish and Kaqchikel seemingly without thought. Most U.S. children, on the other hand, at least in WASPy white Minnesota, don’t start their forays into non-English until high school, at which point they struggle to learn even the most rudimentary Spanish. Yeah, Guatemalans have a leg up in that over half the population here is indigenous. But it’s still pretty neat to think how much their language does to preserve both Mayan tongues and local culture. It’s especially cool when you consider how difficult it can be to speak Mayan dialects, which sometimes don't even sound human to me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3t0sJ-SJ6g).

9. Hospitality: Guatemalans regularly welcome me into their homes with proclamations that I should consider it my home, offers of delicious homemade food, and pleas for me to let them know what they can do to make me happier. They often greet me on the street with hugs and kisses. And when I thanked my host dad for driving my friend and me to Walmart, a 7-hour-trip, so that she could buy a futon, he told me, “Ana, as long as there is breath in my body and blood in my veins, I’m happy to help you in any way I can.” Whoa.

10. Menswear: All the native clothing here, known as “traje,” is pretty cool (just Google “Guatemalan traje” for some dizzying pictures), but I’m especially taken with the menswear. It usually takes the form of a festively colored, striped and embroidered shirt; similarly colored and striped pants; and a thick wool wrap, worn around the waist in a kilt-ish fashion. WAY cooler than a business suit.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBII9FI_kwDnzwXECg5PJKNC4FpPD1zBO9VJ8yGT1eV8O0i2o1p7cJzCPYEvniooCdH47Z3OG5JncHVZXXNJu5jQ9PPZOnL7dRkAy0xOJaozdacT5K18LLOzDD7liLw08IYpkYCB5U1iI/s1600/guate+man+clothing+on+mountain.jpg

I desperately want to invest in pairs and pairs of said stripey pants, but I think a gringa in men’s clothing might be frowned upon. Ah well. Until next time!

Laura teaching camp-goers about menstruation

Day 97: Holidays

"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."

                                                                                                              - Edvard Munch

Brace yourself: this post is going to be a long one (in other words, Ann got a little overeager with her camera over the past week, and can’t resist showing the results).

With the end of the strike at my health center came a difficult realization: they don’t have very much for me to do.  I’m excited to propose some projects of my own (i.e. forming a support/information club for local pregnant women, improving computer literacy among health center personnel, etc.), but I’m also nervous to immediately propose these ideas without fully understanding how the health center works.  For this reason, I’ve spent the past two weeks mostly as an observer.  I’ve accompanied educators on house visits to weigh and measure babies, attended staff trainings, and done some data entry on malnutrition and dietary supplementation.

I’m also spending time getting to know the local community, aided by my delightful host family and my equally delightful site mate, Laura.  My host family is only too happy to include me in their daily activities, whether that’s Mass at one of the two local churches or a visit to my host mother’s indigenous family (even though her grandmother only speaks the Mayan dialect K’iche, she knew enough Spanish to ask me if I was married.  I am learning that for lots of Guatemalans, this is the most important information about me.  They always seem disappointed to learn that I am unmarried and unattached at 23—basically a spinster).

Laura, always generous with her time and knowledge, is doing a great job both showing me around the area and introducing me to her Guatemalan friends.  We spent a memorable Sunday afternoon climbing a steep hill (I would even go so far as to call it a mountain, but maybe that’s the altitude talking) to the radio towers overlooking San José Chacayá.  We were rewarded with a beautiful view of Lake Atitlán,

our first site mate photo,

and a hair-raising but invigorating climb up one of the radio towers.

The outing made me genuinely happy, both because it was fun to talk with Laura and her friend Oscar, aka Coca (don’t get me started on the weird nicknames here), and because it reminded me of how much staggering beauty there is all around me.  I don’t think any location will ever replace northern Minnesota in my heart, but gazing at the Guatemalan countryside, with all its tangled greenery, precipitous cliffs, and myriad waterfalls, makes me feel more at home here.

Laura then suggested that we organize a pumpkin-carving activity with my coworkers and some of her students (she works in the Peace Corps’s Youth in Development project, in the local high school).  Halloween really isn’t a thing here, and neither are pumpkins, but we decided we could improvise with some enormous local squash, dull kitchen knives, and horrifically scented tea lights found at Walmart.  The results were surprisingly pleasing:

  

After our costume-less (and, more devastatingly, candy-less) Halloween celebrations, I got to experience Guatemala’s own death-themed holiday: Día de Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day).  As you may have guessed from the name, it’s a religious holiday, dedicated to honoring both the saints and departed loved ones.  And although Guatemalans spend much of November 1 and 2 in their graveyards, the holiday seemed to me to be about anything but mourning.  No doubt this perception is partly to do with the bright colors of Guatemalan cemeteries, which seem to banish melancholy.

The Sololá cemetery

But it’s more than that.  The weekend of Día de Todos los Santos seemed to positively ooze happiness, from the festive grave-decorating activities, in which Guatemalans bedeck their family member’s tombstones with pine needles, flowers, and food…

Flower vendors outside the cemetery

…to the graveside cookouts and serenades…

A graveside band

…to the kite-flying competitions held across the country.

My host brother, Jon Isaias, and his kite

Interestingly, perhaps the only sour note in the entire weekend took place at San José Chacayá’s kite-flying spectacle.  I noticed right away that all the children were flying red-and-white kites, which were being handed out by my host dad’s sister.  I assumed that red and white were just the colors she’d had on hand.  But after about an hour of watching the soaring kites, an orange-and-blue-bedecked pickup drove by, jeering at the children.  This pickup was full of orange-and-blue kites, and was labeled, “Partido Patriota.”  The “Patriotic Party” is one of the two main political parties in my town; the other is Lider (whose colors, wouldn’t you know, are red and white).  I quickly realized that the children’s kite-flying activity was color-coded according to their parents’ political allegiances.  Then, when I asked my host dad’s sister if the Patriotic Party children would be joining us, I learned that they had their own kite-flying event, and would not be mingling with us.  This left me feeling somewhat dumbfounded.  I know that the local political parties are at loggerheads, due largely to their fierce competition for voter support, but I never imagined they would segregate such a happy children’s activity.  By the way, this is probably a good moment to mention my woefully incomplete blog page documenting the different Guatemalan political parties, which you can conveniently access from the main menu.  End advertisement.

Laura and I spent the second day of Todos Santos celebrations on a grand journey to Sololá and Panajachel, a nearby tourist hotspot with breathtaking lake views, excellent restaurants, and two (two!) stores peddling American wares, including olive oil and Parmesan cheese.  We started our adventure in the Sololá cemetery,

A distant view of said cemetery

which afforded us some lovely sights of the local celebrations and the lake scenery.

Lake Atitlán, as seen from the Sololá cemetery

Even though there are frequent (and cheap) buses from Sololá to Panajachel, we decided to continue on foot, as it was a sunny but cool day and we both relished the thought of stretching our legs.  This turned out to be a great decision, because the road to Pana is dotted with scenic overlooks.  A few of my favorite shots from the day:

One of the volcanoes overlooking Lake Atitlán

Panajachel

A waterfall along the road

We then spent the afternoon enjoying all that culinary Pana had to offer: fresh strawberries, Thai food, and real coffee (despite Guatemala’s status as one of the world’s coffee capitals, the coffee actually served here is pretty, pretty bad.  This is because they export all of their quality product (or sell it at outrageous markups in tourist destinations), and serve all the leftovers to the locals.  It’s a crying shame, especially when you consider the mere cents Guatemalan coffee farmers receive for every dollar of their coffee sold abroad).

And on that happy, caffeinated note, I bid you good night!