Finales de Agosto

A lot has happened since my last blog update, so I will try to do justice to all the exciting events and I hope you excuse the long post. On Sunday last week I went on my first trip to Antigua with about half of the trainees (probably 15 of us or so). It was kind of a mixed trip for me. On the one hand, Antigua is absolutely stunning, and walking around and seeing ruins everywhere is pretty awesome.

With some ruins on the street

Iglesia La Merced

On the other hand, when you are in Antigua with a big group of Americans there is really no getting around the fact that you are tourists, and feeling like a gringo is not that fun. Instead of being a special volunteer in a small town with only three others, in Antigua I was just one of a bajillion other tourists who come and visit. Adding to my mixed feelings about being a tourist is the fact that there is a LOT to buy in Antigua and as PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) we do not have that much money to go spending. The first thing I did upon arriving in Antigua was split a soy chai with another trainee, which cost Q27 total (we get Q26 for daily expenses…). It was a really good chai, but I think of it as an early birthday gift to myself, there will not be too many more of those over the next two years.

Half a day´s budget

On Monday August 24th, the 25th anniversary of my birth, I went to a morning meeting with the mayor of our town in order to discuss a project us four PCTs came up with. After meeting the mayor, doctor, and talking to people the week before, we decided that we would like to contribute to the municipality by giving a couple of presentations in the elementary schools about trash and recycling. We came up with a whole prospectus and presented it to the mayor, a director of one of the two public elementary schools in town and some other people on the town council. Our proposal, to work in two classrooms giving a series of three charlas (talks) with activities every two weeks was really well received and our first charla about throwing trash in the street is going to be this upcoming Friday. In the afternoon, we met our mentor for the rest of our training session and into the first three months of our site placement, a Muni Volunteer who was in our shoes a year ago. She was placed in El Quiche and lives about 6 hours away by bus from Antigua. She is a very positive person and spoke to us about her experiences and answered questions and doubts. Finally, in the evening I went home and Mamatina made a special meal to celebrate my big day, a dish called Pepian, which is kind of like a soup with a tomato/chili base and with vegetables, meat and rice. She dressed me up in one of her outfits and I surprised my three classmates when they came over with a cake for dinner.

Birthday suit with Mamatina

On Wednesday we finally met with our counterparts in our municipality to discuss our technical practicum over the next ten weeks. Another volunteer and I have been placed with the OMP (Oficina Municipal de Planificación) and the other two girls will be working in the OMM (Oficina Municipal de la Mujer). The way that democracy is supposed to work in the municipality is that COCODES (Community Councils on Development) come up with projects that they want to seen undertaken and these proposals are brought to the Mayors office and then according to the most need and economic capacity, projects are carried out by the OMP. This is a really rough description, but basically the idea is that Guatemala is in the process of both decentralizing power to the municipalities and attempting to increase citizen participation. For technical training, we are going to do a SWOT analysis, work with a COCODES (giving some sort of training), and need to come up with some project we can contribute to in order to learn about how the office functions and then hopefully use those skills on our own in our sites.

In the OMP we met two architecture students who are doing 9 months of professional practice in order to get their degree, a civil engineering student who is also doing some sort of professional internship as part of his degree program, and a technical assistant.

After spending half a day in the muni and planning for meetings next week, in the afternoon we took a hike to ‘Donde Nace El Agua’ the site of the spring that gives our town all of its fresh water. A host mom, and a young messenger from the muni accompanied us as we undertook the hike. At the end of our half our hike or so, we arrived at Nimaya, the place where the spring comes out. It was a very tropical setting, with humongous trees and tons of bugs. There are a lot of pipes all around that capture the water for public use, but the river still runs down the mountain and it was a very tranquil and beautiful place.

Host mom at her site

On Thursday morning we went to Antigua for my second of three visits this week. Sandra took us to visit Cabecitas de Algodon (Cotton Heads) an old age home for people who were abandoned by their families or who do not have families. It was probably the most depressing hour and a half I have spent thus far in Guatemala. Thirty-eight elderly people live in a small house and do not really do anything all day and share one bathroom. I talked to a few different people and didn’t understand much of what was said except that their lives were hard and now they were stuck in a small house with not enough food and nothing to do. After that thoroughly depressing experience, we went to Hermano Pedro, the only public hospital in all of Guatemala where people can go and see a doctor for a small fee. The Hospital used to be the state hospital, but after the earthquake of 1976 it was abandoned until Franciscans bought it and made it into a public hospital. Along with treating anyone who comes in (this involves a lot of waiting, people come at 5am to line up to get a number) the hospital also takes in abandoned people with mental or physical handicaps or with degenerative diseases. We went and saw the children’s area where kids in wheelchairs were out in the yard, and Sandra told us that most of these kids would never see the outside of the hospital.

Finally, on Friday we had our first site visit to see a volunteer who is finishing up service. Along with another muni group, I went to a town in the southernmost part of El Quiche. The town has had three volunteers in the muni program, one who left early and two who have worked out really nicely working with the OMM. The town mayor is a very active guy, and he has overseen a lot of really neat projects, including a lot of outreach to the huge expat population in the U.S.A. The site visit was really exciting because the counter-parts (the mayor and the woman from the OMM) are very enthusiastic and interested in Peace Corps Volunteers working there. I am betting that one of the girls is going to be placed in Pachalúm and I am VERY interested in being the one who is picked, though then again it is only the first site we have visited and I am sure that the upcoming visits will be equally cool. Still excited!!! athalia

Of Bed Bugs and other Happenstances

This Saturday marks my one-week mark in training, and it is hard to believe that so little time has passed since I arrived in Guatemala. People keep telling me that time flies, but I feel like I have already been here a month at least with all of the new stuff I have been seeing and doing. I have settled in pretty comfortably with my family here, I am even starting to call my host mom ‘Mamatina’ (which is what all of her grandchildren call her) and which feels a little more familiar (kind of like saying grandma instead of Missus host mom every time I talk to her). First things first before I forget, I have finally become the proud owner of a TIGO telephone and my phone number for those of you itching for long distance phone calls is 5185-1401 (I think the international calling code is 502). Since I last wrote I have been getting a lot of love…from zancudos (mosquitos and little flies that bite) or maybe something else?

As I might have mentioned before, Guatemala has been suffering from a drought this past year, but the day that I arrived in my host community, it poured and ever since it has rained almost every day at least a little bit. While this is wonderful for Guatemala, it has been less than ideal for me since I am a bug-magnet and the rainy season is a huge aphrodisiac for bugs, they are EVERYWHERE. This past Wednesday I woke up with bug bites all over my back, and since I have been wearing clothing pretty regularly, I was really concerned that I might have bed bugs. Mamatina told me that she coubted that I had bed bugs since the last volunteer who left two weeks before I arrived did not have any problems at all. I decided to start wearing deet spray and we lit some incense that kill bugs in my room and I thought all was solved... until I saw a flea on my bed! I ransacked the bed looking for the flea and siblings and we changed the sheets to white ones (to see if bedbugs would leave the tell-tale signs) and found nothing. The mysterious back bites and other sundry bites seem to be from zancudos and possibly from fleas that I unknowingly brought into my room off of the street (from now on I need to take my socks and pants off and shake them out as soon as I enter my room to prevent further problems). While I recognize that this issue of mine is probably not nearly as interesting to anyone else as it is to me, it has definitely been on my mind this past week so if anyone has any suggestions for home remedies for bug bites (or preventing them, how can I make my blood less tasty?) let me know.
Thankfully, it has not just been scratching and bed hunting this past week, there has also been plenty of interesting cultural experiences to recount. Every day this week, except for Tuesday, which is training day in the Peace Corps office, we have been attending Spanish class from 8am-1230pm and then 130-3 or 4pm. One day our afternoon activity we played musical chairs and whomever lost had to answer questions about Spanish grammar.

A local woman making a huipil

Along with sitting and discussing Guatemalan History and culture, Sandra takes us out every day to meet different people in and around the community. One day we went on a walk and passed by one of the many tortilla stands (basically a house that says in front ‘Se vende tortillas a los tres tiempos’ – We sell tortillas in the morning, afternoon, and evening). We walked into a house where two young girls were tortillando. Sandra spoke to us about the comal (the oven that the tortillas are cooked on) while the girls looked on and then asked them if we could try to make tortillas. The girls were surprised, Sandra is probably the most forward Guatemalan I have met, but they said ok. We paid for the dough and while we tried to make tortillas, which was entertaining to watch since we all took forever to make deformed tortillas, we found out that the two girls are sisters of 13 and 14 years old and the older one essentially works all day while the younger one does go to school in the afternoons. My tortilla was really tasty and I have decided that my new goal is to learn how to tortillar before I leave Guatemala. Mamatina lives right around the corner from a tortilla stand and I have been going there to buy tortillas and observe the ladies who work there. I am hoping that through watching enough I will learn better form.

On Thursday this past week we had our first technical training meeting. Our meetings for technical training are going to switch around to be in each of the four communities that municipal development volunteers are doing their training in. For this first training we went to another host town, a town that is known for its boots (good quality, good price). We had our reunion in one of the houses of another PCV and I must admit, while my lodgings are pretty cushy, I felt like I was on MTV Guatemala Cribs. The house had a humongous backyard where we all sat and had our meeting; the bathroom had a door that locked and a faucet indoors with running water (which I quite literally have not seen since I got here, most people have a pila outside which they use to wash their hands, laundry and do dishes). Along with a faucet, I got pila-envy since the house had a customized pila that looked like a pool. In our meeting, we all got assignments for the upcoming weeks. This Wednesday my group will be meeting up with our counterparts in the Municipality and we'll be working with the OMP (Oficina Municipal de Planificación) and the OMM (Oficina Municipal de la Mujer). We were also informed that we only have one more week of Spanish class to go, we'll be doing more work with the municipality instead of taking Spanish classes since we have the language skills necessary already. We are all pretty excited to meet our counterparts, it seems like we are constantly being told about work that is going to come up but we have yet to really get started, but we are sad that Sandra is going to leave us:(

This Saturday for our half-day of Spanish class we had a special event where we learned local wedding traditions of our town. Not only were we given an explanation in both Spanish and Kachiquel, two of my co-trainees were dressed in the traditional wedding-garb and were fake-married, with Sandra as godmother.

Antes de la boda

It was a really fun and interesting experience. Here in town, the tradition is for a man to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage a year before they get married. The novio first asks his mother if it is ok, and then he and his mother go to the house of the novia to make a pedido. Between the time that the novio asks the novia and the marriage, the novia has to make a huipil, called a zooter for the suegra (mother-in-law). Depending on how this zooter is, the suegra sees what kind of nuera (daughter-in-law) she will have (if it is well-done that indicates that the novia is a good worker). It is local custom that the groom’s family pays for the whole wedding, so while the bride only invites family, the groom’s family has to invite half the town. It is very expensive for the family to pay for a wedding, so sometimes the novio roba la novia (that is, he asks her if she wants to run away with him, they spend the night together and then are de facto man and wife without the celebration).

Once the bride and groom are married, they usually live with the groom’s family until they can build their own house. The typical age for getting married in our town is between 14 – 17 years old for girls, and slightly older for boys. Couples choose each other; there are no arranged marriages. Marriages here are seen as an equal union, neither the man nor the wife has all the power in the relationship but instead the marriage is a partnership. Normally, a couple that falls out of love does not actually go through the process of getting a divorce since that is very expensive. Instead, they separate without going through the paperwork.

The bride and her bridesmaids. The woman immediately to her left is the woman who performed the ceremony in Spanish and Katchiquel and explained the whole process and the woman to her right sat quietly as her mother.

Sadly I am a lot older than the average marriageable girl here, and the man I have fallen in love with is significantly younger. He is my host mothers grandson and he just turned four months old. Sadly, with the almost 25-year age gap between us I think we’ll have some problems making a life together work.

Host family

Host Community

Since I last blogged I have been placed in my host community for the next 11 weeks of Community Based Training. I will be living and working in my host community, leaving only once a week to go back to the training cetner for more training and vaccinations at the Peace Corps Compound there. My host community is close to Antigua. There are two groups that are living here, so we are 7 PCVs in total on site, but the three PCVs in the Agricultural Marketing program are based on the other side of town and will be working with a women’s cooperative, while I am the only one from my group living in town while my other three site mates live next door in the next community. I was actually surprised at how large these two towns are and how cushy the living situation is since we were told repeatedly in training that we would be getting into a more rural environment with less comforts. This has most definitely not been the case for me. I am living with a 60 year-old woman who has lived in town since she was a young child. The great news is that I get my own large room that has a door and lock, I get my own little outhouse bathroom for my bucket-bathing pleasure, and my host mom is a vegetarian, which I imagine is pretty rare for Guatemala. My host family

The day I arrived in site it was pouring when I arrived, which actually made me pretty happy since it reminded me of home. I was shown to my room and then had lunch, vegetarian Chow Mein, and then my host family took me on a walk to a vista point of two local volcanoes.
We walked up a huge hill and then down into the campo, and there were maize fields all around. It rained on us while we walked and I was able to get a photo of a rainbow with the maize fields and a new sports arena. I raced ahead with one of the granddaughters while my host mom walked along the road and picked leaves for tamales, which her daughter-in-law was making on Sunday per an order someone had made.
On Sunday I woke up bright and early for a morning run around town, I was told that it is totally safe in town. I ran around the central part of town and greeted everyone I saw (people in the street always say hello and many say both hello and goodbye). After breakfast, I went over to the daughter-in-law's house in order to help with the tamale making. Let me tell you, I have SO much more respect for all women in Guatemala and tamale makers in general after this day. The daughter-in-law started preparing the masa of corn the night before (she had to boil the corn and then go to the molino to have it milled). In the morning she started by cooking the corn powder with oil oil and water into a paste, then she recooked it a second time in a huge pot over an open flame constantly stirring. While she was doing that, I helped out by cleaning all of the maize leaves she had picked both the day before and prior. The order of tamales she was filling was for 60 and she was making some more for us to eat as well. In the photos below I will post some comments, but suffice it to say that I was there from around 11am (when the masa was already being prepared for its second cooking) until 7pm, and the tamales were not yet done. Sunday is clearly not a day of rest for everyone.

Piles of maize leaves that I cleaned by wiping off.

Helping stir the masa for like two minutes. It gets really thick and goopy, very hard to stir.

She first placed the maize leaf on a plate, followed by a banana leaf that she bought. Then she put in some masa, salsa, mixed the two up, put in the filling, more salsa, more mixing and then tied it together. In the evening I started helping by tying them up.

Along with tamales I helped make chuchos/chuchitos. These are like little empanadas made with masa that has only been cooked once. You get a ball and make it into a tortilla (I told them I knew how to make it because I had seen people making tortillas before...but it is not as easy as it looks). After you make the tortilla, you put in sauce and a filling, then fold it over to make a little empanada, then put sauce all around and wrap it in a leaf to cook. The chuchitos go on top of the pot when you cook and when those are done it is a sign that the tamales that are cooking are also done (usually 1.5 hours). This is the best looking chuchito I made and it was like half the size of the others (I could not get the tortiallas very big because they kept breaking) and it had way less filling.

For all the work that each tamale took, it is sold for Q4 (Q8=$1), so it is really a money-losing operation. While we were working, I learned some words in Kachiquel, the local Mayan language, but I will save that for another post.

On Monday we had our first day of Spanish class and went around to all the host families to see where we were staying. My house is probably the sweetest deal, but another volunteers lives in a bakery, which has a great view.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Guatemala!

Sorry about the weird photo additions, I have to learn how to work on public computers, so the photos are not in order and obviously not integrated into the text. Will try to do better next time. Part of my first host family. The mother Dona Eva is to my right and her oldest daughter and husband and child along with another PCT Cara are to my left.
Reagan International at 2am a pretty hopping place to be

Hola a todos! I am writing now from the training center about an hour outside of the city of Guatemala and ten minutes from Antigua. The center is absolutely beautiful (I will try to post photos later), and I have spent the past two days here for pretty much all daylight hours for the first intense part of training. But I am getting ahead of myself, so a small summary of my past few days:

On Monday I flew out to Washington DC for Peace Corps pre-departure staging. I stayed in a hotel room with Annalisa, a girl entering the Agricultural Marketing program after a few years working in marketing for high end car manufacturers. Unsurprisingly I was unable to sleep, and the next day I met the 31 other people in my training class (we are 33 total, about evenly divided between Municipal Development and Agricultural Security/Agricultural Marketing). From 3-7pm we went through basic orientation, were shown our new passports, a lot of group bonding exercises and stuff, and then I went out for my last dinner in the USA and ate Pad Thai with Tofu.

I was super nervous/excited about heading out to Guate, so I did not sleep well again on Tuesday night, and at 1am I woke up to head down to the lobby to check out of the hotel and go to the airport. We arrived at Reagan at 220am, a mere four hours before our flight. As one of three people who volunteered to be a group leader, I kept myself busy by helping print all of our tickets out and at 4am we were allowed to finally check our bags and go through security.

We finally arrived in Guate around 1230pm and were met by a group of Peace Corps staff and got on a bus to the training center. After a brief introduction, I was assigned with two other girls to live in a house in town for the first three days of training. My first night in the house I made a fool of myself attempting to eat chicken with just a spoon and a fork. I was a vegetarian for 9 years and for the past year, while I have been eating chicken sparingly, I really never had to cut it that much...and if I did a knife was available. Anyhow, I had chicken on my plate and I was pretty hungry, so I tried to hold it down with the spoon to skin it with the fork and then use the fork to take pieces off. This technique, while logical in theory ended up getting a lot of chicken juice and pieces onto my skirt, which I thankfully had already decided I would not be wearing again since it was dirty. After dinner, I asked if I could take my shower in the evening and was given a bucket of warm water with a smaller bucket inside to pour water over myself with. To be honest, the experience was not as bad as I thought it would be. It is definitely not as warm as taking a real shower, and I can imagine it would be unpleasant in a really cold climate, but yesterday I went ahead and even washed my hair that way, and I think it was pretty successful.

In training the past few days we have basically just been bombarded with health and security information. We have also been told a lot that Peace Corps is not for everyone and that just because we came out here does not mean that we need to stay. I guess I appreciate that I have an out, but I really hope that I can be successful and roll with the punches especially since so far everything has been great, I do not want to end up being one of the people who do early termination.

Yesterday we were interviewed and based on our performance everyone was placed in a Spanish class. I am in the highest level class with three other people doing Municipal Development (our classes are divided according to technical area). Our two hour class this morning was great, we just talked the whole time and tomorrow my three classmates and I are going to be placed in our training site for the next eleven weeks. Starting on Monday we will have Spanish classes in our host community from 8am - 3pm, followed by technical training in the afternoons. Since we are at a high level of Spanish ability, most of our Spanish classes will also revolve around doing technical activities. On Tuesdays all PCVs from the 8 training communities we are being sent to will be coming back to the training center for health and security training.

It is all very exciting so far and I cannot wait to meet my new host family (I was told there were three little kids!!!!). On the off chance that anyone wants to send a letter or a package (which should be in a padded envelope in order to avoid taxes), the mailing address here is:

PCT Athalia Markowitz
Cuerpo de Paz
Apartado Postal 66
Antigua Guatemala
Sacatepequez 03001
Guatemala
Central America

Hope all are well and I will try to post again with photos soon!