Cara Piedras Guatemala: December 2009

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of climbing Chachaj, the highest mountain in the Cuchumatanes, the mountain chain surrounding Chiantla. It started out as a fun Saturday afternoon idea with some other Huehue area PCVs and ended in (somewhat) disaster – but an unforgettable time nonetheless! We had just left my house in the Chiantla town center to catch the bus going up the Cumbre (note photo of my fellow PCV friend below, who ended up standing next to a turkey the whole way). When we reached the destination, it was rather cloudy, but we figured that the worst that would happen is that our view just wouldn’t be as good. Well, we were quite wrong. We were minutes from the summit of the mountain when boom, the cool clouds that had just been whizzing by our heads started pouring on us. And since it neeever rains in December, we were far from prepared. Three of us found ourselves falling behind the others, since we were trying not to fall on the slippery rock and mud, and when we reached near the bottom, we realized we were lost. In the Cumbre. Where houses and people are few and far between. So, we continue down some muddy roads, as it continues to rain and then begins to hail, trying to figure out how to get back to the main road. We finally approach a house where someone was home, and this nice old lady points us in the direction that we wanted to take. I waited thirty minutes for a micro, and an hour later was back home, still soaking wet. It was about an hour and 5 cups of hot chocolate before I felt completely defrosted, but it was definitely a Saturday afternoon that I won’t ever forget. And I really do look forward to hiking Chachaj again on a clear day – I hear the view from above is spectacular!

This past week was Christmas, and I must admit that I did not have the best holiday. First, I was feeling homesick and missing my family. And my plan to celebrate with my host family did not quite work out. See, I live in an apartment within the property of an elderly couple. My host mom/landlady is totally sweet, but half deaf and somewhat “losing her marbles”, so to say. Before the holiday, I had joked that I should remind them that they invited me to spend Christmas, but in reality I should have acted on that, because they changed their plans last minute and forgot to tell me. So, I spent some time with them on Christmas Eve and then was pretty much flying solo on Christmas Day. I did enjoy some 12:00 midnight fireworks on Christmas Eve and spent most of Christmas Day reading and watching DVDs, so it wasn’t the end of the world. And the next day, when the family returned to Chiantla, I had a nice three-hour lunch with them that made me feel a lot better. But thanks regardless to all my family and friends back home who wished me happy holidays and sent me fun surprises in the mail :)

Two days prior to Christmas, the municipality had its annual party, which was an interesting experience. The lunch for the 200 muni workers started very “hora chapin”, about two hours late, and they brought out bottles of rum before they served the food. I was staving at this point, and that rum hit me pretty hard. But it came in handy when I won the raffle and had to go up to the mic and give a mini speech in front of everyone! It was pretty terrifying but worth it for the awesome plastic sippy cup and Tupperware container that I won.

A few days after Christmas, this really nice couple in my town who are great community leaders invited my counterpart and me to participate in the annual donation delivery that they do through their church. This year, the church had selected a community of Chiantla that is high up in the mountains and really difficult to access. Going up the road to the Cumbre, sitting on bags of corn and stuffed animals, was a treacherous adventure. We were in the back of a very old pickup, which was completely stuffed and quite low to the ground because of the heavy load. Halfway up, on a particularly steep uphill, the truck got kind of tired and we started rolling backwards. While my life began to flash before my eyes, luckily one of the guys in the truck was a little faster to think on his feet and jumped out to quickly put some large stones under the back tires. This literally happened six more times before finally reaching our destination, but by then I was getting accustomed to the feeling (not really, but I didn’t freak out quite as badly). The drive took about three hours, one and a half of which was on a very rocky unpaved road, but it was really beautiful. This community up over the mountains looked somewhat like how I’d picture Scotland to look – lots of herds of sheep, really green land, few trees, weird giant rocks sticking out everywhere. The sky was gray and misty the whole time because we were literally at cloud level. There were about 150 people waiting for us when we arrived in the community and we immediately began sorting the trashbags of donated items – beans, corn, clothing, shoes, toys, etc. I was put in charge of the little boys’ clothing, which was really fun. Some of the kids would cry when separated from their mothers and forced to come over to my area where I gave them pants, a sweater, and a t shirt, but they always left with a huge smile and very confused look as to who is this stranger with white skin and light brown hair who just shoved a “Grandma Went to San Antonio, Texas and Brought Me Back This T-Shirt” shirt into my hands? Flat out donations do not quite fit into my definition and goal of sustainable development, but it is without a doubt incredibly gratifying to hand out clothes, food, and toys to people who literally have one pair of shoes.

I am excited that in addition to Becca coming in late March, my parents also just booked their tickets for either that same month. I can’t wait to show all my visitors my beautiful town and experience some other parts of the country with them!

Wishing all my friends and family a very happy and healthy Año Nuevo!

Pushing the loaded truck up the hill

The kids in the back of the truck happy with their new toys. Although they thought "Barnes & Noble" was a strange name for the teddy bear

Apparently the whole West Virginia Mountaineers team decided to donate their shirts, lucky for the men in Tunimá Grande

With my mountain of clothing for niños

Line of families waiting to receive their donations

With my colleague Gloria and our Christmas baskets from the muni

Red and green rice crispie treats, my christmas gifts to people in my town

Before the hike/pouring rain began

Barrett with the turkey on the bus

Video clip - the cloud whizzing past us on our hike

I’ve been in my site for a month and a half now, and there's definitely not one specific emotion to describe how I feel here. Every day, I see or experience something new, beautiful, gross, challenging, mind-opening. I’ll describe one of my early morning runs from last week as an example:

I met Don Manuel outside my house at 6:15 and we begin running up my street on a new route that he is showing me. We then started up a very large hill that leads to the Cumbre (summit) of the surrounding mountains.
Beautiful- The view from even a short distance uphill was spectacular, looking down on my town and even further down on the city of Huehue covered in a layer of clouds and surrounded by more mountains.
Gross- The exhaust coming out of the trucks and buses that whizzed by. This is something unavoidable on all streets in all parts of Guatemala and one becomes accustomed to holding their breath when the camionetas drive by, but gasping for oxygen while 2000 meters above sea level and running up a mountain, I couldn’t help but breathe in the disgusting exhaust fumes!
Challenging- Seeing a large goat with its limbs tied together, on top of a microbus as it headed up the Cumbre. The microdrivers show no mercy even when there’s 30 people packed into a space designed for 15, and the situation was no different with this live goat on top of the vehicle as the driver ignored the speedbumps and sharp turns. The awful sounds that the goat made and just seeing it on top of the bus made me feel so sad and sorry for it, despite knowing it was to become a good meal for someone, it is still something that is hard to look at and accept in a certain sense.
Mind-opening- A woman breastfeeding her baby in the back of a crowded pick-up truck. The candidness with which women breastfeed in Guatemala is something that surprised all of us upon arrival to the country and usually never surprises me anymore, except that this particular woman was so squished into this truck and managing to hold on and feed her baby at the same time. Quite impressive.

The month of December has actually been rather busy, which is surprising because all PCVs warned us that not a single thing gets accomplished during this month, as everyone is either mentally or physically on vacation and preparing for the holidays. I’ve kept occupied by working with my office on the 2010 Annual Plan, which will include some exciting projects and initiatives, like voter registration campaigns and medical missions, as well as starting up my English classes, and helping another PCV with a kids’ environment camp in her site.

I’ve only done a few English classes so far, but the turnout of interested students has been really good and it’s actually been really fun. As I wrote earlier on, teaching English was something I was not thrilled about doing, but this particular group that I’m working with (the staff of a youth development NGO) is showing so much interest and motivation that it’s very easy for me to want to be doing this. Plus, I think of how learning another language changed the course of my life…I distinctly remember my first day of Spanish class in seventh grade, repeating over and over, “Me llamo Cara. Como TE llamas? Como SE llama?” Luckily I eventually moved on from the “my name is” stage, but if I had never learned Spanish, the last ten years of my life would have been completely different – what I studied in college and grad school, where I studied abroad, the jobs I’ve had since, and of course, the Peace Corps.

The environment camp that I helped with was in another PCV’s site in Huehuetenango. It was really fun to see another volunteer’s site and to help with the camp, which can only be described with one word: pandemonium. Please see the video link if you need more proof. There were 50 kids expected, ages 6-12, but 71 kids showed up, ages 3 and up. The objective of the camp was to give the kids who are now on vacation from school something to do that would occupy their time and teach them about different important themes related to the environment…one day was the forest and animals, another day was trash, another was water, etc. There were crafts, lessons, games, and even snacks related to the environment theme of the day. The kids were adorable but trying to get them organized, paying attention, not hitting each other, etc. was an arduous task. They were literally climbing the walls, stealing each other’s crafts, throwing water at each other…it makes me exhausted all over again just writing about it. Although overall it was really fun to participate and a good test of my patience :)

People have been asking me to describe my daily routine here, so here it is: I wake up at 6 and either go for a run, or convince myself it’s too dark/cold/early to run and go back to sleep. From 8-1:00, I am in the office or at a meeting or training, although stop at 10:00 for refacción (snackbreak) without fail, and then from 1-2:00 is lunchtime and I head home to eat or go to a comedor for a quick and cheap meal. From 2-4:00 I am back in the office waiting for the time to pass, as it seems that nobody really likes to work in the afternoons. After work, if I'm not doing English class, I usually run to the market to buy food, or I take advantage of the sunlight left in the day to wash clothes on my roof. In fact, I’d say that doing laundry takes up a really good chunk of my time here. To think that back in DC I would wash clothes every two or three weeks, and even then complain that it took me two hours to wash four loads of laundry! Then I make dinner, watch whatever crappy dubbed movie is on TV, go online, read, clean, etc. The pace of life here is so much more relaxed and tranquilo than in the states and more than DC especially, where everyone is constantly stressed out and running around. Although sometimes the slowness of things here can drive me crazy, I feel more relaxed and stress-free than ever before. I feel like my life prior to arriving here consisted of squeezing as many things into one day as humanly possible – work, exercise, happy hour, errands…no wonder even laundry day felt stressful!

I recently had the opportunity to attend a quinceñera (a “sweet fifteen” I suppose you could say) for the daughter of my friend’s counterpart in Todos Santos, another Huehue town which is famous for its Feria on All Saint’s Day and traje tipico (traditional dress). While women in indigenous communities in Guatemala almost always wear their traje, it is not common that men maintain the traditional dress, and Todos Santos is one of the few towns where men do still wear traje. The party was fun, with more people squeezed into this house than one would think humanly possible, and tons of tamales and meat and potatoes cooking in the largest pots I’ve ever seen. There were easily 100 people there. It was an interesting experience to be in an environment where everyone around me spoke Mam, the native Mayan language of the town. It made me feel thankful in a certain way to be living and working in a town where everyone speaks Spanish as the primary language, although Todos Santos has such a rich and beautiful culture that is unique to indigenous communities.

With the Christmas holiday around the corner, Chiantla is dressed to the nines for the festivities, with ridiculously tacky lights and decorations hung everywhere. It’s funny to see decorations of snowflakes and snowmen in a place where people have never seen snow in their lives, but I suppose without them, it wouldn’t really feel like Christmas! One thing that is so prevalent in the US during this time of year that has been absent in Guatemala – which I don’t miss at all - is the over-the-top consumerism. While street vendors are selling annoying musical lights on almost every corner, the annoying advertisements, sales, and pressure to find the perfect gift for everyone on your list don’t exist here. I feel that the reason is because Guatemalans are generally very religious and observe the holidays with more of a sense of family (and food – everyone obsesses over their tamales, typical Christmas food), plus they don’t have the extra money to spend on lots of gifts.

I'll be spending this Christmas with my "host" family (I live in an apartment on their property. We haven't had a close relationship but they are super nice) and then New Years with a bunch of other PCVs at Lake Atitlan which I am super excited for. Wishing everyone back home very happy holidays!!!