Independence Day Part I

My legs can’t take much more independence. 189 years of independence, three parades, and one 15k. And so far, I have only completed 2 parades. I’m skipping out of the next one so that my legs will still agree to carry me the 15k I have to complete next Sunday.

I have never heard of a country dedicating so much time and energy to celebrating Independence Day. Schools have been practicing for a month for the parades this week. Yesterday we walked in the pre-k parade. I was tired by the end; I have no idea how the pre-k kids stood up so long.

Today was primary school and Laura and I decided it would be a good idea to put on corte. We were invited to march alongside the school supervisor’s secretaries, as usual, but today they magically figured out who we were. So as we marched into the town square with hundreds and hundreds of people watching, they announced “And here come the North Americans who make up the healthy schools team! They look very pretty today dressed in traditional clothes from this town, etc., etc., etc.” The only good part of this public shaming was when they called us “Patzuneras.” Really all I wanted at that point was some water from one of the 14 year old “first aid workers” who had set up an outpost with camping tents.

Being a minor local celebrity does have its benefits however- unlike the students, we got to sit down during the ceremony. Still, the up and down required for all of the entrances and exits of more important figures and the 10 verses of the Guatemalan national anthem was quite the workout.

I'd like to take this opportunity to add on to friday's post...

And share three recent accomplishments that I am very proud of:

1) I did my part for world peace this weekend and taught Guatemalans tie-dye, both what it is and how to do it.

2) I can now accurately estimate a pound of tomatoes without the use of a scale.

3) I beat Laura at Bananagrams (once).

Update

Normally my blogs have some kind of theme, but today you will have to bear with my random update…

I’m so excited! This afternoon was my first time working with my new girls group and it was AMAZING! My site-mate is a youth development volunteer, so her Guatemalan counterpart suggested that she work with girls from a local orphanage, and she asked me to help. There are about 12 girls between the ages of 14-19 and we meet once a week to do activities and life skills talks. This week we baked a cake together, and next we are doing team-work. Its wonderful how this opportunity just fell into my lap, as I have been looking for something like this for a while. In my primary project I don’t get to work with kids, so I think it will be a nice variation from my normal work.

Otherwise work is going well. We are wrapping up the school year, and actually haven’t worked much lately because all of the schools have been preparing for Independence Day celebrations. The schools basically spend the first half of September not teaching, but preparing “alters,” poems, speeches, and songs to perform on the 15th . I am not looking forward to the three parades we will probably be expected to walk in. Everyone loves a gringa on parade. School ends in October, but that whole month is taken up with exams… so we are really nearing the end of the year.

Laura is celebrating the Jewish new years, so I decided to make a new year’s resolution as well. My resolution is to play Laura in Bananagrams once a day. I want to become a wordsmith and hope to one day defeat Laura, that grand champion of Patzún and probably the world.



Eli and mom’s visit was great! We were able to make it to Antigua and the lake and relaxed and ate yummy food. It was nice to have someone else help cook and my host fam absolutely loved Eli the human amusement park ride. We had a big lunch where they made me wear the traje that they gave me and the whole fam came. Mom held her own with Spanish and they were a huge hit overall. Despite the heavy rains that hit the country that week, we were able to get both mom and Eli out of the country safely. The day after we traveled back from the lake, landslides blocked off the roads and crushed a camioneta on the same highway, so we were happy to have gotten out of there in time.

Normal?

Yes, I just tried to blow dry my clean underwear. No, it didn’t work as well as expected. I should have sprung for the quick-dry, but Peace Corps said that I shouldn’t pack for a 2 year camping trip. What they didn’t tell me is that rainy season + no dryer, makes life tricky for someone who doesn’t do laundry ‘til they are wearing bathing-suit bottoms as underwear. Mom and E are coming to visit in a week, the list of things for them to bring just keeps getting longer. I am excited for their visit, as I think it will give me some perspective on the things here that I have gotten used to, or have become normal for me.

For example, while driving to a village where the landscape used to blow my mind, I only thought that it was “pretty.” The teachers next to me hardly seemed to notice anymore. It’s a bit sad to know that the amazing mountain vistas here no longer grab my attention like they used to, but it also makes me wonder what other amazing things I am failing to notice because they are familiar.

Another thing I notice that I am getting used to is living alone. Maybe that’s because I now have internet, which is almost like not being alone…but I wonder what having a roommate again will be like after I have gotten used to washing dishes when I want to and walking around in my long-underwear.

What else has become normal?

Resource Conservation in Guatemala

I haven’t blogged in a while, and I am thinking that that is because life has become almost normal here. At first everything was new and deserved to be written about, now things don’t jump out at me as easily. It can’t be that things have stopped happening to me, maybe I have just forgotten to notice so much.

I had a dream the other night that I was in a giant supermarket and was overwhelmed to see all of these foods that are out of season here. Perhaps it is now normal to me that what I eat depends on what season we are in. The mangos that so enticed me when I first arrived at site are gone, and have been replaced by apples. There is broccoli everywhere. Avocados are harder to find. There are less watermelons and pineapples. I kind of like this eating by season, but I had just managed to perfect my mango curry, and now I have to wait until next year to eat it again. At least I will have perfected eating locally.

It have also fallen into the habit of unplugging every appliance that I am not using. Phone charger, toaster oven, laptop. I can’t believe that I used to leave my computer running with an away message on my IM while I went to class. Here conserving energy is not just an ecological, but a financial priority. Thus, people only plug in their microwaves and TV’s when they use them. Perhaps this is a wise energy saving technique that we should adopt in the US.

Not only energy saving, but water saving is also a priority in households and communities here. In schools that don’t have water, the kids bring it in bottles from home and brush their teeth with water from a cup (yay kids are actually brushing their teeth!!). This technique saves a lot of water versus letting the faucet run while we brush. I am less surprised, although still exasperated, when I occasionally come home from a run, to find that I have no water, and have to go to work to tell people to bathe themselves, without showering myself.

When thinking about the practices here of buying in season and conserving energy and water, I remember that here these things are done out of necessity because of limited resources. I wonder if we in the US will conserve our abundant resources by adopting the same practices willingly, or if we will wait until dwindling resources force us into them.

Camionetas: Classics

My favorite camioneta classic? The Spanish version of “My Heart Will Go On,” hands down. The words may be different, but the feeling is the same every time it is played on the camioneta. It occurred to me while enjoying the melodious tones of this classic on a recent trip, that I spend way to much time on these sardine-can-like-vehicles-of-joy to not be writing about them on my blog.

When pondering the mystery of the camioneta, the first thing to consider is the issue of where all of these circa-1980 U.S. school buses came from, and how they got here. The sheer volume of their presence throughout the country is staggering. Did they all caravan down through Mexico? Were they shipped on a ship? Taken apart and transported piece by piece? It may always remain a mystery. But here they are, the Guatemalan versions of “pimp my ride,” painted bright colors and decked out with racks, rails, ridiculous stickers, and tassels. Each bus company has its own color pattern so they can be recognized from far off and can be boarded with barely a full stop. On these babies, the rule-of-thumb is three to a seat and “corranse pa’ atras jovenes.” This is simply a friendly reminder to keep squishing towards the back in the aisles as more people pile on from both ends. The very daring hang out the front and back doors and on the back ladder as we pummel down the highway at break-neck speeds.

But the bravest and most agile of all is the ayudante. His job is to pass through the aisle collecting bus fares, which vary depending on your starting and ending locations, and you just have to know. Because the aisle is often packed with people, ayudantes are a mix between shape-shifters and monkey-like humans. The worst are the fat ayudantes who force you into strangers’ laps when they pass. But the best pass through the press of people nimbly, or collect fares through the window from the outside of a moving bus. They scurry up to the roof from the front of the bus, and magically appear at the back door for more fares.

Camioneta drivers share my father’s view that the biggest one on the road wins, but apply this belief with much greater conviction in the absence of concretely enforced traffic laws. During a traffic jam the other day, my camioneta simply veered off into the lane of on-coming traffic and continued on its way. When faced with approaching cars, we moved a “lane” over to the left, which was actually just the cement area in front of all of the stores on that side of the road. I’m still not sure how we finally got back into our lane.

I like riding camionetas for the music, the company, and the leg room, but most of all, because they are the major form of transportation here, and help me feel like I do actually live here. They link the whole country, and are surprisingly reliable despite the general lack of an apparent schedule.

Unfortunately, camionetas have recently become an area of concern for those who monitor our safety as PCVs, and of great danger for many who rely on them for daily transportation. In the past month there has been a string of bombing and grenade attacks on camionetas (and other buses) leaving Guatemala City. I’ve heard that these attacks are related to the extortion of bus companies (which is a common reality here), competition, and politics. For now we are not allowed to use these buses to leave the capital, which basically means for me no more movies or grocery shopping trips there for a while. But for Guatemalans who have to travel in and out of the capital for work every day, it’s a much more serious risk they don’t have the choice to avoid.

Our Job and Some Thoughts on Development

Its raining again, I don’t know if you can tell by the picture. It reminds me of college when we would put too many clothes in the dryer and they wouldn’t dry. I couldn’t wait for the rain to stop, I had to do laundry, so I put on my rain boots, rain pants, and rain jacket, grabbed my umbrella, and made the trek across town where I have found someone with a washing machine who I pay good money to wash my clothes. Its totally worth it. My clothes and my hands love me for it. What I have yet to find, is a dryer. All that to say, its raining again, and thus I have decided to sit down and write an overdue blog entry.

There have been many things over these past few weeks that I have wanted to write about:
1) The ride we got to school with some men buying pigs who drove us all over creation while one of them told us about his experience in the US. His view on the welfare, “the US is great because the government pays you to have kids and you don’t have to work,” almost made my liberal self want to abolish all social welfare programs.

2) The teacher who called a requirement to celebrate the Day to Abolish Child Labor a farce because “children work because of poverty.” This teacher made me realize the irony of this requirement passed down from the Education Supervisor’s office. A majority of the children who would be participating in these activities would go out later that afternoon to work in the fields to help support their families.

3) Here is the big one- our job and development.

After finally visiting all of our schools and completing my first three months in site (I can’t believe it took that long), I have made some observations about development both regarding my program, and other organizations that work in our schools. There are a multitude of charitable organizations that work in my town that cover a broad range of topics. Usually they come in, provide aid or projects, and leave. It has, and will continue to be, our privilege to see the impact of these organizations over the short term, because, as our APCD is always telling us- in development, 2 years is the very short term.

We have seen a school where all of the materials were donated to build latrines, but after building one, the parents decided that they didn’t want to build the others. So there the materials sit behind the school, where the children go to use the bathroom despite two flush toilets (which don’t work anyway) and one latrine. In another school, an organization donated tooth brushes and even taught how to brush teeth. The children all brought the toothbrushes home and promptly forgot about them. Now that we want them to bring the toothbrushes back to school, they all seem to have disappeared. In both of these cases, materials were provided, but from what I can see, what was lacking was information and follow up. If the parents of the first school don’t have latrines in their homes or know why using them is beneficial to their health and well being, they have no reason to want to build them in their school, and the children have no reason to start using them. Same with the toothbrushes- without a why, they are useless. And simply providing a “why” is not enough to change habits, it takes time, repetition, and lots of patience to change communal knowledge and practices.

Sadly, because so many organizations have operated in this way here, when we arrive at schools, it is what is expected from us. We constantly have to explain that we don’t have material resources, but that we bring information and support. Many schools react positively to this different approach, but I don’t think that they all realized that this program requires a significant amount of work on their part.
Another recent experience drove home for me the importance of institutional change in development. Our work here is mostly grass-roots, working from the bottom up. I feel that this approach is important to understand and really serve the needs of a community, but I am not convinced that this approach alone is productive in making real change.

Schools here receive money from a few different government programs, one specifically provides for materials to maintain the school infrastructure- brooms, wastebaskets, soap to wash dishes, etc. There is a very specific list of items that may be purchased with these funds, and receipts must be turned in. We saw that “soap” was on the list, so we have been suggesting to schools that they use these funds to buy hand soap. In a recent meeting with our supervisor, we found out that schools are only permitted to buy soap with which to wash dishes and rags, and not hand soap. The list includes floor wax, but does not include hand-soap or toilet paper. That means that if a school wants to purchase these items they have to ask the students’ families for the money, or buy them out of their own pockets. This is an example of how institutionalized health priorities are here. If not even the government thinks that it is gross to wipe with your hand and then not wash-up after, well good luck with the schools and the students. These basic supplies are never going to be available in all schools unless there is a change on the institutional level.

I hope that our program will be successful in tackling these development challenges. Laura and I are the first 2 volunteers in what is planned to be a 20 year program. Hopefully over those all of those groups of children that start in kindergarten and practice healthy habits through sixth grade, something will stick in the schools and in the communities. Our APCD is also working to get Healthy Schools made into a law; maybe this will be helpful in making changes on a higher level that will support teachers in making hygiene and sanitation a priority in schools.