Work Ethic

My town on market day.

Since school has started, my life here has been good, but exhausting. I am in a unique position because I have over 600 students (significantly more than the other people in my program) and teach 17 separate classes (neither of these numbers include the elementary school, where I give an English class to every grade once a week). I have very little planning time during the day because I teach so much and am also taking K'iche' classes in the mornings (most of my coworkers have a full day free to use for planning or planning other activities, but I teach 5 days a week). Much of my planning falls onto my evenings, and I often find myself working late into the night and getting up very early, preparing materials and lessons or workshops. I am also trying to maintain my Girls' Group, but that has become increasingly challenging as I have less time to devote to it, and my girls are also much busier now that school has started. I get asked to do other random projects, both from the Peace Corps and my community. One Saturday night I found myself up very late preparing a four-hour workshop about self-esteem for adult members of the Catholic Church for the next morning, that I got asked to do last-minute. (I thought a little sardonically about what my friends in the US where probably doing that Saturday night...certainly not anything like this!)

I´ve also found since being here that basic cooking and cleaning is a much bigger demand on my time than it was in the States. Making meals out of whole ingredients (turning a scoop of dry beans and a pile of vegetables into dinner), although very healthy and rewarding, is also incredibly time-consuming, and dirties a lot more dishes (which I have to haul up and down the stairs to the pila to wash). And keeping my apartment looking somewhat respectable is also a much bigger task here, especially now during the Dry Season, which could just as well be named the Dust Season. The cornfields that surrounded all the houses and buildings in my town are converted into empty dust fields after harvest time and most roads are covered with a layer up to 3 inches thick that gets billowed all around in the wind. Unfortunately, all my doors have a sizable gap between the floor which permits dust to seep in and cover everything. My bathroom also opens directly onto my patio and is covered in a fine layer of dust even just a couple days after cleaning it. (I´m not sure it will be much better, though, in the Rainy Season, or Mud Season.)

It has been a very busy life. Sometimes I feel frustrated by how busy I am because, in joining the Peace Corps, I had had a romantic vision of getting in touch with a slower pace of life, on focusing on writing poetry and other hobbies I´ve neglected, on finding a balance between work and personal life. Yet I´ve found my personal time tangled up in work in an almost similar way to how it was when I was in AmeriCorps, where I maintained a very unhealthy and very overworked lifestyle (though not quite so extreme). I am also sad by how much I am NOT able to do. I would love to work with the Woman´s Group, help community members plant tire gardens, develop a scholarship association for my middle school students, start a drama club... but when? I can barely maintain what I am doing now.

But then I have to remind myself, I am living in a community where people work very hard. My landlord and “host brother”, for example, maintains a very successful hardware store, teaches English to most of the students in my big Institute in the afternoon, studies at the University all day on Saturday (all of his classes are crammed in from 8-6 in one day), and is a devoted husband and son, and father of 2 (a six year old and an 8 month old), and he oversees the planting and harvesting of the corn fields that feed his family all year. His case is not unique. Almost all of the teachers at my Institutes are University students, and many of them also teach all morning in the primary school before rushing to the Institute to teach all afternoon. (I have one day a week, Tuesdays, where I teach all morning at the Primary School, starting at 8, and then go to the Institute to teach for a few hours. Those days kills me... I lose my voice, I get a terrible headache, and at 5 p.m. when I finally get home, I collapse exhausted into bed, a worthless puddle. But that is only one day a week, and technically I get off early since I don´t teach the full afternoon.)

Part of the Peace Corps experience, or the idea of it, is to live with the people of your community, and to some extent, as they live. This is certainly not followed to the letter. I get paid an amount than many people would use to sustain their entire families (and less than many whole families have to live on). I cook with exotic spices and buy yogurt and whole wheat bread from the supermarket. I also escape a lot on the weekends, vising Xela and other parts of Guatemala, eating in restaurants and sometimes staying in hotels, activities that are not an option for the vast majority of people in my community (they do go to Xela, but only for special shopping or school). Whenever I feel frustrated and tired and that this kind of workload was not what I was looking for, I have to remember how hard the people around me are working all the time. When I am sleepy-eyed and crabby on my Tuesday mornings on the bus at 7 a.m. to the elementary school, I see whole families already out tilling their fields, and they are still there on my bus back home at 4:30 p.m. If my working this hard is giving me a taste of life as a Guatemalan, then that is definitely what I signed up for. The people here work very hard for the very little that they have. For this experience to be real, I need to be willing to do my share as well.

And I am blessed to have work that I love, with people that I care deeply about. I love my students and teaching far more than I expected to. Getting them to laugh or seeing them work hard and earnestly on a project is extremely rewarding. Nothing makes me happier than an afternoon with my Girls´ Group, joking around, playing basketball and dreaming of our garden. My elementary students act as though Santa Claus was coming to give them class each time I show up. It may be a lot, but it is the only time that I will ever be a teacher in Guatemala, and I am sure when I get back to the US, I will treasure ever minute of it. I´m sure I will never say to myself, “God, I wish I hadn´t done so much!”