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