Photos from my site visit

One of my the cooperative socios at the Salina (salt harvest starts in two weeks), On a lancha with Sulma on the way to Las Lisas, Las Lisas beach and turtle project.

Total Eclipse

Somehow while I was in Coban Eswin discovered and then fell in love with Bonny Taylor. I believe i’ve mentioned my host family is evangelical and thus, the only thing I have heard come from the speakers of their boombox (cause it is a boombox) since I arrived here two months ago, is either Spanish Christian pop music or the broadcast of Alotenango’s daily Evangelical mass/culto (into which, by the way, Silvia once called and the DJ dedicated a Christian Pop song to Analuisa Cojolon <-- that’s me). So you could imagine my surprise when, while sitting in the courtyard learning subjunctive with my spanish class, the sound of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” came floating over to delight my ears. The familiar tune came from the kitchen table where Eswin was working on his drawing homework (btw* they take straight lines very seriously here in Guatemala. The kids may not own markers but be damned if they don’t have a straight edge ruler hanging predominantly somewhere in the house). When the song ended, one minute later it started up again, and then it played again, and again, and again, until i think I had heard the song more times than it was played on KIIS FM in the 90s. When our class broke for a refacción (snack) I walked on over to Eswin to see what was going on with the “Eclipse” on repeat and as I neared i realized the song was coming from his JC phone. I call it his JC phone because his phone’s background wallpaper is a picture of Jesus kneeling on a mountainside. I don’t know who introduced him to this song or when or how he downloaded it to his cell phone and I really don’t care. I’m just happy its there. And to show my appreciation at lunch (after Eswin had played the song so many times I had it committed to memory) I performed a little lip-sync and dance number to it for Dona Paula while she was in the kitchen reheating some Pepian on the stove.

That night while laying in bed with “once upon a time i was falling in love” still twirling on the tip of my tongue I was forced back to reality by the ever present sound of Culto on loudspeaker. The Evangelical church is about 2 blocks away yet the penetrative clarity of that loudspeaker makes it sound like the preacher is giving mass at the foot of my bed. I have come to believe this is one of the reasons why so many Guatemalans are converting to Evangelicalism. You don’t actually have to be a part of the church to hear the sermon. Its quite genius actually. One night I walked by said church; lights on, megaphone at full blast, music playing, sounds of clapping, so much enthusiasm oozing out of the place you’d think the entire town of Alotenango was packed between the four walls of that church. However, when I peered into the open doors I was shocked to see the preacher with microphone in hand whole heartedly preaching to a whopping fifteen or so odd people in white plastic chairs at the front of the church and the remaining 9/10ths of the building was just an empty sea of red cement floor. Those cement floors make for stellar acoustics. Seeing the reality of Culto made me wonder if that loudspeaker is really necessary. Cause I’m pretty sure God can still hear them without the megaphone. But then maybe that is why there are only 15 people at the church, cause the rest of the congrigation is just listening to the mass like me, from the comfort of their beds.

*mom and dad, btw stands for by the way

p.s. HAPPY BIRTHDAY YESTERDAY KATIE SERDA!

Ronron

Last week we had field based training aka FBT. This is the part of training where we go out to a more remote part of Guatemala to stay in a village where volunteers currently live and work to get a feel for what life will be like when we move to our sites. All three training groups went to different places- Food Security went to Jalapa, Municipal Development went to Huehuetenango and my group, Agricultural Marketing, went to Coban. Coban is a small city about 3 hours north of Guatemala city. Google map it. We were up there visiting an aldea of the city where a volunteer works at a rural tea cooperative run by Q’eqchi Mayans called Te Chirrepeco.

We arrived at the cooperative in the dark of Sunday night and all 7 volunteers crowded into the Te Cherrepeco office and drew host family names out of a bowl- a lottery of sorts to determine which family we would be living with for the week. I drew Gerardo Bac and off I went with Gerardo to find his house in the dark hills of the expansive co-op. When I arrived I was greeted by the entire family: the mother Lucia, four daughters: Blanca, Olivia, Maria, Elvira and her daughter Haiti, one son Ramon (the others live in the city), his wife (whose name has at present escaped me and it was quite rare so I don’t think its coming back soon), their newborn daughter Bianca and about five dogs and two puppies. One of the puppies was named chucho but they didn’t have a name for the other so I named him Lefty because his front left leg is white whereas all the rest are brown. The family liked the name and started calling him by it.

The rest of the week proved to be an exhausting one. I would wake up at 6 and take a warm bucket bath with heated water from the wood burning stove where breakfast was being prepared. The water had a rustic smokey scent that surprisingly was quite comforting. After a breakfast of eggs, salsa and tortillas (the biggest tortillas i’ve ever seen) I would walk 45 minutes through acres upon acres of lush green tea fields with Maria until we arrived at the Cooperative’s main building to meet up with the other volunteers for the day. Throughout the week we took a tour of the Tea Co-op, gave training to associates at a local coffee cooperative and visited an organic candle making operation. We also had an afternoon with Anacafe, the leading authority on coffee classification and certification in Guatemala, that consisted of a lesson on cupping and classifying coffee quality (surprisingly similar to wine tasting) and a field trip the their experimental coffee finca/plantation.

On the third morning, as I was packing up my backpack for the day, I noticed a huge cockroach sized beetle struggling on its back (visualize an upside-down turtle) on my bedroom floor. I had never seen such a strange bug so I took a few pictures of it and then showed the fam who thought it both hilarious that I would take pictures of bugs and fascinating that my camera’s zoom function could magnify it so much. Then Maria asked if she could enter my room and without a peep swept the bug onto the front lawn and crushed it with her shoe. I asked what the bug was called and she said “Ronron” which could be the spanish or Q’eqchi translation because the family speaks both. And then she said, ”para la cena” or “for dinner” and chuckled a little.

That day we visited a few businesses, two micro-finance/credit and loan companies and one governmental training office. All three are potential resources for our future work in the field. We arrived back at the tea co-op around 6pm and after downing my nightly cup of tea I chatted with the girls in the outdoor kitchen (dirt floors, walls made of large branches, laminate ceiling, complete awesomeness) until dinnertime. Conversing with the family was always entertaining because there were translations being thrown around all over the place. Lucia, the mother didn’t speak much Spanish so everything between us was getting translated. Luckily, Ramon’s wife is Poqomchi Mayan and is just now learning Q’eqchi so I wasn’t the only one needing the translations. From Spanish to Q’eqchi, from Q’eqchi to Spanish, and even sometimes from Spanish to English to Spanish to Q’eqchi when they were asking how to say English words like “shoe” “good morning” and “nice to meet you” which sounded a bit like “nycechomeecho”.

We were all chatting and laughing as Lucia and Maria made tortillas over the stove and Olivia, Elvira and Blanca husked corn on a long wood bench, when all of the sudden a huge bug fell from the ceiling onto Elvira’s foot. She violently shook her foot and the bug flew into the air and landed on the floor in front of my feet. It was a dark red and black hairy caterpillar-like bug that gathered itself and began to slowly crawl along the dirt floor. Blanca came over with a kernel-less corn cob and speared the bug with the tip. The process made me squirm a bit but when she looked up at me I said, “otro ronron para la cena? Vamos a comer buenisimo esta noche” “Another bug for dinner? We are gonna eat well tonight.” Laughing, Blanca threw the dead bug into the flames under the stove.

The next day we were chatting in the kitchen as usual when out of no where came scurrying a black skinny runt of a puppy that I had never seen before. He ran through the legs of my chair and hid under the kitchen table. As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty dogs in the house. The majority of which would chase and bark at me whenever I pass the kitchen or walk to the back outhouse. This caused some issues early on because in the middle of the first night I woke up and had to use the outhouse but I was A.) worried that the dogs would violently bark at me and wake up the rest of the house and B.) scared that i’d get bit and have to rush back to Santa Lucia to get rabies shots (standard procedure for any mammal bite). With all this in mind, that first night I just held it in until daybreak which i’ll admit was unpleasant. Wanting to avoid further unnecessary pain, the next day I asked for a “palo” or stick to use to scare away the dogs at night (all dogs here, even street dogs, have an innate fear of sticks, its great). So the family armed me with a broom stick, nice and thick and very frightening. The rest of the week I walked around the house with my palo, even after the dogs became accustomed to me, because the family insisted I keep it on me at all times (they thought it was hilarious). Whenever I was without it they’d ask me, “Annalisa, donde esta tu palo?” “Where is your stick?”

So back to the random dog in the kitchen. It was extremely frail and evidently undernourished. I was shocked to see this strange dog just chilling in their kitchen so I asked where it had come from. Maria translated the question for her mother and from what I could gather from her facial expressions Lucia must have said something along the lines of “I have no idea” in Q’eqchi. So jokingly Maria said, “It just fell from the ceiling like a bug.” She then threw the scrawny dog a hardened tortilla. As the three puppies fought for the food I announced that this new addition to the household was in need of a name. Maria asked me what we should we name it, and I said “Ron-ron.”

The fate of that dog is still TBD. I don’t know if the family will proactively adopt Ronron into their already full-house or just leave him be in the kitchen eating scraps and see what happens. All I know is he was still scrounging for food the morning I left the Tea Co-op. The family did invite me back for Christmas (and has already called my cell phone three times to check in on me) so I’m sure I’ll be back for a visit and when I do go I’ll let you all know if Ronron is still there. The dog that is, not the bug.

Bac Family Album

Bac Family, Haiti, Lefty, Ramon's wife tortillando and the ronron...

Coban

Coffee Plantation, Tea Co-op, Giving Charlas etc.

Independence Day Addendum

I realized I forgot to mention two very important independence day festivities in my last blog post and felt it necessary to fill you in. Both activities take place in every towns main plaza and both involve pig fat. Men in town are challenged to first climb to the top of a flag pole greased with pig fat. The first to reach the top wins money- anywhere from 300 to 1000 Quetzales (equal to 40-120 dollars). In the second competition the men chase around a pig greased in pig fat (if only the pig knew right?) and whoever catches the pig gets another nominal prize. The day after independence day I came to find out that after three hours worth of attemps not one person from Alotenango successfully climbed the pole to win that game and the guy who was able to ¨capture the pig¨ broke his two front teeth in the process. Sadly, I don´t think the $40 he won will be enough to cover his dental expenses.

Feriado aka Independence Day

September 15th is Guatemalan Independence Day. Although its technically a holiday, Guatemalans celebrate it as a holimonth. Starting September 1st the national flag began to appear everywhere. Schools put on cultural performances and began organizing events and band practices. Eswen is in his school band so I had the pleasure of passing by his band practice in the street outside of his school on a few occasions and embarrassing him with attention.

The few days leading up to independence day La Torcha began. La Torcha is a Guatemalan pastime where people from all over the country run from town to town carrying torches a la the olympics. On numerous occasions I asked people about the origin of or reason for this activity and the best response I got was that it represents liberty. After some more questioning I came to realize a few things about La Torcha 1.) there is no particular path or pilgrimage with the torch. Guatemalans start running wherever they want to start and end wherever they want to end. Esquintla to Alotenango, Solola to HueHue, Ciudad Vieja to Aguas Calientes. Any route is fare game. 2.) There is a trick to La Torcha. The torch carriers have an entourage usually following 50 meters behind in a pick-up (or camioneta/bus if its an entire school of torch runners). The torch runners typically only run through the center of towns they pass and when they get to a stretch of highway they get in the car or bus and drive to the next town. Giving the perception that they are running long distances but actually aren’t. There are some faithfuls that run the whole way or that have a relay of sorts with their reserves in the truck that switch off running with the torch. 3.) Those citizens who don’t particularly like to run or choose not to participate will line the main streets where La Torcha passes and throw water on the runners. Silvia told me its to try to put out the Torch. This seems a little ironic, if the torch symbolizes liberty, why would anyone want to extinguish it? Whatever, I’ll go along with it anyway.

On the 14th we had classes in Santa Lucia but had to get a ride back in a minibus because all the camionetas had been rented out for La Torcha. The traffic was insane and all along the route we saw hundreds of torch runners on the highway, soaking wet, blowing whistles and having the time of their lives. A few times our bus was also the target of water balloons and hoses.

In the evening I went with my family to the Alotenango plaza to watch Eswen perform in the band. The Alcalde was giving a speech and everyone congregated around the high schoolers waiting for the performance. I tried to keep as low of a profile in the crowd as possible. PCs have been warned that sometimes if we are spotted in the audience of a ceremony out of nowhere the person with the mic will say, “Let the Gringo talk” and an impromptu speech by the volunteer is expected. I preferred to avoid the extra attention so I hid behind a tree (although I did recite what i’d say in my mind just in case). The Alcalde’s (governor) speech was a bit long winded, so much so that the band struck up in song before he ended and he was fighting to be heard for about two minutes until he gave up and let the band take the spotlight. After one song the Alcalde got back on the mic and started saying something about not playing with fire and before I knew it there was a highschooler in a metal pyrotechnic cow apparatus in the middle of the street letting of flares that exploded into the crowd and rained sparks all over the place. Not sure if it was all that safe but everyone seemed to be enjoying the show. After the performance I went back to the house in Don Miguel’s pick-up. I actually rode in the front with him cause I was worried people might still be throwing water. On the ride back he asked me if I liked his car. I of course replied yes and he said, “look all the lights on my dashboard work”. Its amazing how much small luxuries can be the foundations of great pride here.

On the 15th all the kids woke up early to get ready for the big town parade. Every child in Alotenango (all 8,000 or so of them) participate in this parade with their respective school. So by the time I got up Silvia, Lidia and Eswen had already left the house. Since the 15th is Independence day PC volunteers get the day off so I was able to participate in some of the festivities. I woke up late, did a load of laundry in the pila, ate bread and homemade strawberry jam and chatted it up with Dona Paula. Quick note, almost all of our conversations turn to marriage. Usually she asks me when I’m going to get married but on this particular occasion she began telling me about marriage here in Guatemala. It struck me how matter-of-fact she told me that married men often take mistresses. But sometimes it can get expensive to have to give monthly payments to a wife and kids and support a mistress so a lot of times the men will go to their wives and ask for forgiveness and if the woman is a good wife (yes, GOOD wife) she will take him back. Sometimes women are “strict” and don’t take their men back and then they have to live on the streets but if a wife is good woman she’ll take him back. What does one say to this? I mentioned how in the States it isn’t uncommon for married people to separate if they fall out of love and then they may remarry and form new families. Her response to that was that divorce isn’t very popular here.

At 10 Dona Paula and I walked up to the gasolinera vieja (old gas station) to watch Eswen and Lidia and Silvia pass with their schools. It was adorable watching all the youngsters walk by - each school with their own theme. One class held global warming signs which was a huge surprise to me, another represented national symbols such as the Quetzal (national bird), Monja Blanca (national flower), Cieba (national tree), Others wore traditional clothing, there were bands and more bands and princesses... Finally Lidia walked by dressed in basketball gear- her school was representing all the sports of Guatemala and Eswen passed by with his band. When Silvia walked by she urged me to join the procession with her students so I jumped in and started walking down with 40 darling kids dressed in central american clothing. At the end of the parade some of the kids parents asked if they could get a picture of their kids with “the gringa” and then the photo ops began. Its interesting how amazed people are with white people. So I posed for a few pictures and then walked home with a very tired Silvia (she had to walk the entire parade in high heels) to rest and eat lunch.

Below are a few more pics of the parade.