Who needs to go to the Peten? I've got jungle in my backyard

Important Peace Corps lesson #1 (or maybe #44331 at this point): you never know when you will be surprised with a really cool experience.

This morning I had agreed to go out to one of the communities where we work to take pictures of their water system for a grant we are helping them complete. This community has only 20 families, and they built their own gravity fed water system out of small PVC tubing and barbed wire. The terrain is mountainous, and in various places, they had explained to us, the tubing was strung across ravines. This manner of construction left the tubes vulnerable to both the natural elements and water thieves who drill holes in the PVC to steal the community’s water. An engineer we are working with on a project in the school wants to replace these parts with sturdier metal tubing.

I arrived at the community with Juan, my trusted taxi driver and friend (there is no transportation to this community and its too far to walk), and expected to see a few tubes and be done in an hour or less. We started off through the few houses that make up the village, through the cornfields, now grown up tall around the houses, and headed into the woods. The woods there look a lot like Florida woods, and the air is clear and crisp. It is beautiful, and I was loving it. Two “bridges,” or sections of tubes spanning ravines, later I was feeling good. So when they told me that from there on the terrain got worse and that they weren’t sure if we should go on, I insisted that I needed the photos and measurements, and we pressed on. We passed through a lush river canon and started to climb. An hour and a half and 5 “bridges” later found me feeling like a novice Avatar on Pandora. I tried to act cool, but there were a few times where my life flashed before my eyes as I pictured myself tumbling down a cliff. “Throw yourself uphill,” advised the wise village mayor. I felt even more foolish when I found out one of our guides had a fractured knee (or something like that, they were all speaking Kaqchikel and Juan wasn’t helping much to translate). I decided it was time to turn around while I still could. At this point, hiked almost 2 hours into the mountains, they informed me that we had only reached the middle of the water system and had covered the most manageable terrain. I am still flabbergasted that this tiny community built and maintains such an extensive and vulnerable water system, and that they were able to engineer a gravity fed system over kilometers and kilometers of mountains.

At one point while we were hiking, a helicopter passed overhead, and Juan made a joke that we were guerillas hiding in the forest from the army. Later I got a chance to talk to the community leaders about the “violence” as they call it, and found out that 7 members of their community were disappeared during that time. Many more left the community and moved into the municipality, where it was safer. In those times, they told me, one couldn’t wander around the mountain like we did today with out the fear of being found and killed by either the army or the guerillas. It’s interesting to note that in many history books and in many circles here in Guatemala these years are referred to as “The Civil War.” Indeed they were ended in 1996 with Peace Accords, as if these years comprised a legitimate war. But here in this community that lived only the violence and sided neither with the guerilla or army, their name for the time period describes their experience. In college I took a class on periods of state violence in Latin America and read multiple books about how Guatemala spent the better part of second half of the 20th century, but being there in that forest and talking to people who can claim that as part of their life and history is an inexplicably different experience.

I arrived home exhausted, full of soda and imitation cheese puffs that we had been served after the hike (the things I do for confianza), but grateful for such an incredible morning. After lunch I headed off to teach English, which is not always my favorite activity even on days when I haven’t been dragged all over the mountains. Last week we learned how to make words plural. So today while reviewing pronouns, 7 year old Wesley solemnly informed me that if “They” were plural, it would be “Theies,” and I was reminded of another Peace Corps lesson: it’s the small victories that count.