To Toto

So this morning they gave us our site assignments. Prior to this, the entire group was a nervous wreck, with lots of uncomfortable giggling, hugging, "oh my god"s. It was a long drawn-out process. They brought out a large map of Guatemala, and we each had to put a pushpin in one of the sites (just randomly). Then we each had to read a short description of each site. Then, FINALLY, they gave us our envelopes, and all at once we opened them up to see our destiny.

I am going to be serving in an aldea in the western highlands in the district of Totonicapan. It's a village high in the mountains, close to San Francisco El Alto, a larger town where the biggest market in Guatemala takes place. It is a largely indigenous site, populated by the Kiche Maya (but they also speak Spanish). It's in a cold climate. I will be the only volunteer in my site, as well as the first. Still, there are other volunteers in the area, and some not too far that are in my program and friends of mine. It's only 35 km to Queztaltenango, or Xela ("Shela), the 2nd biggest city in Guatemala, which is supposed to be awesome. I will also have access to the internet and there's a small library.

So far, I am very pleased. I wanted to be alone, in the mountains, in a smaller village, but I am also relieved that I will have easy access to the city and other volunteers in the area when I need it. And it's not as far as it could be to Guatemala City and the rest of the country.

There is still a lot more to find out. Is it beautiful there? Just how big exactly is it? How cold really? But next week I will go on my site visit where I'll see the schools, meet the directors, and try to find housing. More than anything, I'm just so happy to finally know.

I find out my site assignment on Wednesday. It seems like an eternity away.

Volunteer Visit in Alta

This past week, me and three trainees went to the beautiful district of Alta Verapaz to visit a youth development volunteer at her site.

The trip couldn't have come at a better time since I was having a bit of tension with my family: I got home "very late" on Monday (as in 6:30 p.m.) to find them all panicking and upset because they were worried (...even though I always get home that late on Mondays b/c we go to the training center). Oh well. Regardless, very early the next morning I made the several hour journey with my two companeros on a pullman (a non-camioneta, greyhound-quality bus- luxury!) up to the city of Coban in Alta Verapaz where we met up with the volunteer we'd be spending the week with.

She is very nice, very laid-back, and very good at what she does, and we felt lucky to shadow her for the week. We got lunch at a Chinese restuarant (AMAZING), and that was only the beginning of a week of incredible food... at least to us, after 2 months of Guatemalan food (which isn't bad, but rather bland to American tastes... not spicey and flavorful like you'd expect).

After that, we took a short bus ride out to her town near Coban. It is a beautiful place, a larger town, and by far the loveliest I have seen yet in Guatemala. It is in a warmer climate, surrounded by hills blanketed in tropical forests. There was a lake nearby, and a natural park on an island called the "Petencito" (little Peten). Part of the town was on a large hill, at the very top of which was a beautiful old church and a little park, from which there were astonshing views of the valley and town below and the surrounding mountains.

The schedule for the week was much more relaxed than training, where every minute is scheduled, except for the evenings where you can't leave your house. In contrast, this week we slept in every day, started off with cups of good (not-instant coffee), did some prepping, and went to schools for only a couple of hours in the afternoon. Then we had the evening free to cook up some delicious food as we listened to good music, and then sit around having drinks and talking. I got to meet other volunteers with the Peace Corps and a couple of other foreigners volunteering in Guatemala through other agencies. On Friday night, we took a public van back into Coban where we met up with other volunteers in the area for delicious Cuban food, and afterwards some dancing.

The classes we saw were also very impressive. One day, school had been canceled, but the volunteer had asked her students to come for her class regardless and had asked one of the teachers several times to come unlock the door to the classroom. Well, the students showed up, but the teacher never did. Me and the other trainees led a couple of dinamicas (games) on the outdoor field, and then it began to rain. The volunteer ended up giving her lesson under the awning in front of the classroom in the pouring rain. It was a very inspirational lesson on gender, where the students had to discuss the differences between what opportunities they have within the culture because of their gender. The schools are notorious for being inconsistent, and school is cancelled about half the time for the smallest of reasons. We'll have to show her same kind of creativity and flexibility.

We also got to help out in Peace Corps' incredible HIV/AIDS taller (workshop) one of the days with the students. A volunteer came from her site on the other side of the country to help facilitate the taller, and me and the other trainees got to lead parts of it. It is several hours long and involves a lot of games and interactions. I've learned about it in training, but experiencing it with the students was an amazing experience.

More than anything, this week was an enormous relief to me. As trainees, we have to spend every evening at home with a family, we're not allowed to leave apart from day trips, we follow a very tight rigid schedule, meals are given to us, and we basically have no control over our lives. In contrast, the life of a volunteer involves a lot more independence-- with what you eat, your schedule, your work, your free time. I will be able to be much more myself, and I can't wait. July 18 can't come quickly enough.

Jalea

Making jalea.

The finished product.

About a month ago, our Spanish teacher took me and my teammates to the house of a lady that sells cake and jelly at the training center, and we learned how to make strawberry jelly.

(My friend said I looked like Strawberry Shortcake with my outfit. I certainly do know how to dress for any occassion.)

Iximche

Last Saturday, Peace Corps took my training group to Iximche, the site of an ancient Mayan city that was the last stronghold of the Katchickel Maya when the Spainards took over.

A beautiful older Mayan woman performed a thanksiving ceremony for us, blessing us. She prepared a sacred fire full of sweet offerings-- incense, sugar, even blocks of chocolate. Hornets circled around her and us, but she told us to be calm and unified with nature, and she moved among them as if they weren´t there. No one got stung. As the fire burned, they gradually left.

The ceremony lasted for a couple of hours as she gave thanks to all of the elements of nature and the 20 "nuales", major Mayan spirits. We we able to place two sweet candles into the fire representing different elements (I choose green earth and white air) and give our personal thanks and also bless those in our lives that have passed away. It was long, but I felt very at peace throughout.

The ruins were also beautiful. They had a more ancient feel than those of Misco Viejo because many were partly overgrown, so they looked like large mounds of earth with traces of stone stairs and walls poking through. Several had beautiful gnarled old trees growing out of the tops. It was in a lovely place, on forested hillside, and you could even see the top of Volcán Agua in the distance. It was a peaceful way to pass a Saturday morning.

Footsoldiers of Compassion

Before coming to Guatemala, we had two days of "Staging" (general orientation and paperwork) in Washington DC. It was a strange and overwhelming couple of days, sitting in a room with 30 strangers that I´d be spending the next two years getting to know excruciatingly well (including their digestive systems) and trying desperately to imagine what Guatemala would really be like.

But the strangest part of all was our surprise visit to the White House and meeting the prez. It just so happened National Volunteer Day fell on the date of our Staging, and we were invited to the White House to be part of an event recognizing American volunteers. All the of the Country Directors of the Peace Corps were there, and the head of the Peace Corps, as well as representatives from AmeriCorps and other service organizations. As an incoming volunteer group to Guatemala, we were chosen to take a photo with the president, and given assigned seat in the small room where he made his speech. We were personally recognized and applauded, and President Bush referred to us in his speech as the "footsoldiers of compassion", a name we´ve definitely taken to heart. Yeah, so the man´s not exactly known for his eloquency.

The coolest part was that we were given some free time prior to the event to poke around the White House and mingle with the Peace Corps heads, which were really interesting and easy to talk to. As far as the president, I just felt like I had stepped into a movie scene or something... he looks and talks just like he does on tv. But regardless, it definitely spiced up Staging a bit.

Misco Viejo

On our way back from Field Based Training, we stopped to visit some Mayan ruins at a beautiful place called Misco Viego. The settlement was on top of a hill surrounded by other hills and mountains and endless countryside. There was nothing marring the landscape apart from some farmland and the highway. The ruins were beautiful, and you could climb up them freely. We were the only ones there. These were the first Mayan ruins I´ve seen yet.

Diego the Mechanical Baby

So last week, I returned to my host family´s house carrying a 15 pound, life-size, three month old, of African decent, mechanical baby christened Diego.

Aprofam, a non-profit that works in family planning and sexual education in Guatemala, has a mechanical baby program similar to the kind in some middle schools do in the States. The youth development training staff wanted to connect us to the program that we may in the future do it with the youth we work with. But rather than tell us about it, they felt it would be much more powerful if we experienced it.

Now bear in mind that I am already a walking freak show in my village, as someone that has white skin and light hair, is about a full foot taller than anyone else in town, speaks English, and wears pants. As it is, people stare constantly, hiss, act awkward, or shout out my nationality (grina! grina!) when they see me in the streets. Throw an African American mechanical baby that cries into the mix and things begin to get really awkward.

The mechanical babies cry frequently, and when they do, you have to try a number of things to get them to shut up: give it a bottle, change the diaper, hold it, or burb it. (It can also tell if you don´t hold it properly or if you´re rough or if you leave it alone too much.)

So of course my Spanish teachers makes us take a walk through the town with the mechanical babies 10 minutes before class gets out, and mine begins to cry after people are already staring at us in bewilderment for carrying around large life-like dolls and a truck full of men is slowly passing by. To the great amusement of everyone present, I had to drop down on the sidewalk and change the thing´s diaper.

To make matters worse, Diego´s bottle was broken so he wouldn´t accept food. My partner in the activity took him the first day and (sleepless) night, so by the time I got him, I had a hungy, "sick" mechanical baby on my hands. When the babies get sick, apparently their cries become even more frequent and ear-piercing. So it had me up all night long, wailing it´s heart out and there was nothing I could do. Not only did my partner and I suffer more than anyone else, we also failed the project (52%).

Maybe we didn´t have it as bad as one of my friends who was walking down the street with her baby when it began to cry. The screams sent two street dogs into attack mode, and she had to swing the baby at them to fend them off (but she somehow managed to get 82% on the project).

Fortunately my host family thought the whole thing was just hilarious. As far as the rest of the town, I´m not so sure, especially since there is a rampant myth in Guatemala that foreigners kidnap babies. There have even been lynchings for some mistaken incidents. Luckily, I didn´t get lynched... yet.

High School Musical

One of the unexpected high points of FBT was when a high school invited us to participate in their school dance. We were surprised to find that it was almost exactly like a high school dance, with lights and a nice sound system. The music ranged from popular Latino music (hip hop, reggaeton) to American 80s to Evlis.

Almost immediately I was asked to dance by a skinny boy half my height and a third my weight who nonetheless could move his hips better than I could (we were told ahead of time that the kids would be appropriate and that it was fine to dance with them). Pretty soon all of us trainees were on the dance floor getting our groove on like it was serious, occassionally dancing with the kids but mostly as a group. It was ridiculous to see what happens when you get a bunch of alchohol deprived, sexually repressed twenty-somethings on a high school dance floor after a month of evening spent at home with the host families. But in an awesome way.

Another night, we were invited to the high school´s talent show, where we got to see a range of singing modern love songs, traditional folk dances, and a dance/lip syncing to a Spanish-Cyndi-Lauper type song with a whole fake band. The volunteer in the village had begged us to put together something to showcase American culture, so we sang "Yellow Submarine", did the electric slide, and put on the sort of skit you see in summer camps where two people are the heads and bodies of the characters while hidden people made their arms and legs... and they acted out a typical American day. So we may have been short on the actual talent, but at least we had fun making a spectacle of ourselves, and they loved it.

FBT in Baja Verapaz

This past week, the youth development training group traveled to BajaVerapaz for our field-based training. The first few days, we stayed ina quiet little village high in the mountains. We traveled for hours on a one-and-a-half-lane bumpy dirt road that snaked around the mountainsides to get there. At one point near the end of the trip, we lookedout our van down the mountainside and spotted a deceased camioneta (public bus) that had obviously lost control and tumbled halfway downthe ravine to be abandoned there.

After this long, peligroso journey,we were surprised to find a thriving village with a picturesque town center and many little tiendas. It was in a lovely place, nested in mountains amidst the clouds, manteled in tropical forests.We were there for the first few days, staying in a hotel with running water and cable (luxury!). As much as I love my family, it was very nice to get away and have some independence and spend time with the other people in my training group. We even got to have a pajama party in one of the rooms, with Little Miss Sunshine, beverages, and a lot of laughing. It was also exciting to visit the volunteers in the area, see where they live and work, and hear about their lives. It made it seem more real, and I began to feel very excited for when I´m at last in my site, on my own, and beginning the real work.

The first three days, I had to co-teach three charlas, so I began every day with a knot in my stomach that didn´t go away until the charla got over in the late afternoon. We taught the first two in a classroom of about 50 students. It was a wonderful class, very engaged and participatory. After the first day, we took them outside to playgames for about a half hour (including one that they suggested that turned out to be a kissing game... which we didn´t realize until a boy strode up to my compañera and kissed her on the cheek). When wefinished our second class, the kids surrounded us, begging us not to leave and asking us about the States. It was cool to feel a connection with them, despite my bad Spanish.

The second classroom was about the complete opposite. Even though there were only 20 kids, it was much more challenging. When we asked questions, they simply stared at us and refused to speak. We hadto randomly call on them to get any kind of participation, and even when we stopped to play a game, they did it half-heartedly. We´ve been warned that we will undoubtedly have classrooms like that, since mostGuatemalan schools (especially telesecundarias) involve an extremely passive teaching style. Basically, the kids copy stuff down and read from a text book, and have no need for critical thinking. But it´sgoing to be hard when our curriculum depends on discussion and interaction. Hopefully it just gets easier.

Telesecundaria

Friday marked the first time I gave a ¨charla¨ (a lesson) in the school in my village.

Our village has a ´telesecundaria´, one of the three types of middle schools in Guatemala. As the name suggests, it involves watching a lot of television. In fact, the tv does the majority of the teaching. But not in a cool, hyper-tech futuristic Jetson´s sort of way. Just try to imagine those horrible low-budget educational videos you maybe had to watch in middle school. And imagine that´s all your day consists of.

The first time we went to the school, just to observe, I left feeling shocked. The students, in classrooms ranging from 30 to 40 students depending on the grade, watched a 15 to 20 minute video on a tv that was very poor quality. I sat in the back of the room and could barely hear. A teacher may or may not have been present at any given moment, and after the video, the teacher (if present) may or may not give a brief recap and answer questions. Otherwise, students were basically expected to work individually and unsupervised in their textbooks. The day we came, only two of the four teachers were at the school, and there are three classes (one for each grade level)... so obviously at least 30 students were unattended at any time. One of theteachers did very little to provide any discipline or structure (no recap after the video, no ´quiet down´ as students were chatting and laughing while others were earnestly trying to work). The other was a little more proactive, having students read along in the textbook. Still, quite depressing. I don´t know how anyone could learn much information in such circumstances.

Teaching the charla was very challenging. I co-taught with one of my teammates, but still, facing 40 unknown teenagers and having to engage them in a lesson about decision making for an hour in a language I barely have a handle on was extremely intimidating. More than once, I found myself at a loss, struggling to find the words for what I wanted to say, or knowing that what I had just said was blatantly wrong and made no sense (my teammate and I definitely got some snickers for ourSpanish). It was also very challenging to get them to participate...which was no surprise since they spend most of the school day zoning out in front of a tv or working directly from a text book. So we got a whole lot of the silent treatment. However, even though I was a bit shaken afterwards, we did eventually get them to open up and contribute some. And it can only get easier.

If anything, we got to break up the tedium of the day a little bit, even if it was just to entertain them with our bad Spanish. After all, it´s not every day two gringas come to class.

Cafe y Macademias

The famous arch in Antigua

Saturday was my first day of truly getting sick (if I thought I was sick before, I was wrong). I had to make trips to the bathroom literally every half hour (and as soon as I got back to my room, I felt like I had to go again). My family was kind of freaked out. They just kept giving me lots of chamomile tea. I knew it was coming evenutally because it's a universal reality for all Peace Corps trainees/ volunteers... still, not pleasant. Leaving the house was definitely not an option.

This was very bad timing because I had spent the entire week organizing a trip to climb one of the volcanoes on Sunday and looking forward to it. So I had to resign myself to the fact that 14 of my fellowtrainees would be going and having an amazing time. on something I had planned, without me. Fortunatley, after a long weekend feeling pretty bored and let-down, I had a great day on Monday. We went with our Spanish teacher toAntigua, where we visited the "Museo de Cafe" and about the process of making coffee from plant to bean. Included in the tour were some pretty ridiculous statistics about the cost breakdown of wherethe purchase money goes. Sixteen percent of it goes to the country that actually grows and harvests and packages the coffee. Eighty four percent of it goes to the country that transports and sells it. How's that for f--ed up.

On the plus size, we got to have a very strong (though tiny) cup of coffee at the end of the tour, which was nice after weeks of drinking instant coffee. Yes, in the country marked seventh in the world for coffee production and third in the world for coffee quality, it is very very hard to find anything that is not over-sugared, watery instant coffee. Just another irony of the reality of a developing country.

Anyhow, after the coffee tour and a long relaxing lunch at the BagelBarn (yes, it's called the "Bagel Barn"-- I'm not kidding when I sayAntigua is more European than Guatemalan), we took a bus out of thecity to a macademia nut plantation that we'd heard about. It is owned by this slightly crazy older hippy and his beautiufl Guatemalan wife. And it's wonderful. Apparently macademia trees give off an extraordinary high level of oxygen, and as soon as we got there, the air tasted different-- sweet and moist and clean-- a hudge change fromthe generally smoggy diesel-flavored air that's prevalent here. And we were treated to macademia nuts, macademia nut-chocolate, macadmia skin oil and lotion, and a macadmia oil face massage-- for free. We were also given an open invitation to come and hang out whenever we want(they love Peace Corps). I bought macademia butter. I never thoughtanything could compete with my love for peanut butter, but this stuff has it beat. More than anything, it was so nice to be enjoying a peaceful outdoor space for a little while, which was safe, something I hadn't found yet in Guatemala. I'll be sure to be back. It was also just so nice to finally be out of the house (as much as I love my family) and spend some good time with my very ¨tight¨ team.The day almost made up for missing the volcano... almost.

At the macadamia nut farm with my team.

Antigua-'Tigua!

Last Sunday, I went with my site-mates to Antigua, the old colonial city, where we met up with several other trainees. Antigua is definitely a world apart from the rest of the country. It´s a great tourist hub and language school center, which means there are about as many gringos walking around as women in traje. There are several beautiful ruins and old colonial architecture, as well as a gorgeous park. I have not been in my village that long, but it was so refreshing to feel anonymous and normal for a day. I could walk around and speak in English without being stared at. I felt a great sense of relief, like I had stepped out of a giant spotlight. At lunch, I had a sandwich, french fries, and a drink, which was a nice respite from Guatemalan food (even though I generally like it). The group of us sat at the lunch table talking for hours, about nothing much. Other than that, we just walked around. It´s a beautiful city, but it has a distinctly un-Guatemalan feel to it. I won´t go there all the time, but for now, it was just what I needed.

Me and my team after a nice meal in Antigua.

Useless

Me with my amazing host sister, who is a few years younger than me but runs the entire household. I like how freakishly enormous I look in that picture.

The laundry hanging out to dry. The mulicolored clothes are the "cortes" or skirts of the traditional outfits.

The pila and "bathroom", where all the magic happens.


I feel like a small child here. My conversations are very rudimentary. I can do very few useful things, such as make tortillas, properly wash my clothes in the pila, cook delicious meals from scratch. I need to be home by dark (as in 6:30), and if I´m late, my family panics and assumes the worst. My degrees, work experience and education seem to amount to very little here, and when my family asks me about it, I feel like an alien trying to describe life on an entirely different planet, there´s just no point of reference. Most people here finish school in 3rd grade, some go on to básico (middle school), precious few go on to Diversificado (high school), and going to university for most people is about as plausible as going to the moon. Here it´s a different ball park, and I´m just learning the rules of the game. The 5 year old in my household knows how to be a better Guatemalan woman than I do.

Bugs

You know how sometimes, in the US, you feel a little itch and get paranoid and think it´s a bug, but it´s always just a little itch? Well, in Guatemala, it´s always a bug.