Cansancio

I spent most of this week exhausted still trying to recover from FBT in Huehuetenango. The recovery process was not aided by the fact that we had tons of events going on, which cut into sleeping time. On Tuesday we went to the Peace Corps office for our weekly training and had a special guest for lunch: Ambassador Steven McFarland, who was appointed under President Bush and was retained under the Obama Administration. Ambassador McFarland is apparently a really cool guy, he participates in the big 4th of July soccer game and when he visits PCV sites he always brings brownies along. Mamatina, who has had two volunteers before me, has gone to two swearing-in ceremonies and was very impressed with Ambassador McFarland because he spoke in Quiché when addressing the audience (she told me he spoke very well, but then again she does not speak Quiché). Ambassador McFarland did a Q&A with us and his advice for us was to think small in terms of our impact and to take the time to learn an indigenous language, which I would love to do, but I do not think I will get an opportunity (Peace Corps will pay for a tutor but only if there is a need in one’s site).

Tuesday was also the day that we presented the results of our PACA, a community analysis tool that we did with our host families. Each training group gathered their families together in order to draw community maps (giving us insight into what places were important for the residents of the community), create daily and seasonal calendars (in order for us to determine what would be good times to hold meetings with community groups). We did our community mapping the week before FBT and the results were a little disappointing. Only two of our mom’s were able/willing to participate, and they started drawing their houses and the store, but quickly got embarrassed by how their drawings looked and stopped entirely. The children (we did another map with kids) just started drawing all of the games that were in the central plaza for Independence Day and forgot entirely about the rest of town. In contrast with our maps, which were pretty empty, other towns had really detailed maps, though I was told that none of them were actually physically accurate. This activity was just practice for our future site placements as activities to do with our community groups, so I am curious to see how it will work in the future, hopefully the women will be less embarrassed about their artwork.

Women's Map of Santa Catarina

I also did a daily calendar with Mamatina on my own. Her daily calendar is significantly different than those of the other mothers in our group since she has a little store and does not do any farming and her children are grown. A good amount of her day is dedicated to her income sources – weaving and sewing. Mamatina is a really good seamstress and she told me the other day about how she went to Guatemala City when she was a girl (maybe fourteen years old) to learn how to sew in a woman’s house. She lived there for two years on her own, learning how to sew and eating very little food since the woman she lived with was poor. Mamatina’s life experiences sound really difficult and the fact that she has achieved financial stability and a nice house is definitely a reflection of her hard work and business acumen, nothing was given to her.

Mamatina's Daily Calendar

On Wednesday afternoon, all the folks from my town headed to Guatemala City in order to meet with two different organizations that work with women’s issues. The idea is that since we are more advanced and do not have Spanish classes that we have time to go visit all these organizations and then report back to the group. Needless to say other towns are somewhat irritated by the constant referrals to us as the avanzados. I tried to convince our trainer Carlos that it would be better to call us superiores, but for some reason he did not heed my advice:P Anyhow, we have gone on previous interviews with government agencies, and this time we split up with two going to talk to the Secretaría Presidencial de la Mujer (SEPREM), a government agency headed by President Colom’s wife. Felicia and I went to UNIFEM, the UN Fund for Women, which has a branch office here in Guatemala. The UNIFEM office is in a huge four-tower complez in Zona 14, pretty much the ritziest part of town. When Felicia and I got there, we were made to wait around 40 minutes and then when we were finally seen, we had a bunch of information thrown at us and were told to come back on Monday to discuss how we could collaborate after we read all the information. Given the short interchange that we had, it seems pretty clear to me that collaborating with UNIFEM will not really be possible during our service since they work at the national level with lobbying and policy-making, while our job as PCVs is to work at the local level. UNIFEM does policy and national campaigns; it does absolutely no execution on the ground…so we’ll see how the second meeting goes. It was a trip to see the offices of UNIFEM, more specifically the location of the offices really, since it is basically like any nice business area of a U.S. city, quite a change of scenery from where we have been living and where we will be working.

On Thursday we went back to Peace Corps for the second of three visits this week in order to listen to presentations by two more organizations that work with women’s issues here in Guatemala. CODEFEM presented first and was really impressive. They are a private, feminist, non-religious organization that has been lobbying for women’s rights for years and they have been fighting to ensure that every municipality has an OMM (Oficina Municipal de la Mujer – Municipal Women’s Office). Eight years ago the number of municipalities with OMMs were in single-digits, while today there are over 240 municipalities (out of 333 total I think) with OMMs. Every municipality should ideally have an OMM, however in the Municipal Code it was not made clear whether the municipality needed to have one and where it would fit in (that is, its position within the municipality organizational chart and what personnel it should have). CODEFEM along with other feminist organizations and government groups are working to revise the Municipal Code to make it mandatory for every municipality to have an OMM and to define what the OMM should be doing. The lady who came and talked to us was really passionate and inspirational, and she told us that when we get to our sites and we find out what our OMM needs, we could get in touch with CODEFEM to see if they could come and give trainings or some sort of assistance to our offices. The next speaker we had was a representative of CONAPREVI, the government ministry that deals with domestic violence and violence against women. Recently, in 2008 I think, Guatemala passed a law that mandated harsh punishments for violence against women and femicides. The laws were put in place to address the sad reality that there is a high rate of violence perpetrated against women solely because they are women. The laws are meant to ensure that any perpetrator of violence against women has to serve a prison sentence that cannot be plea-bargained away or paid off. While the laws look good on the books, CONAPREVI has had a hard time convincing judges to enforce them, and the statistics on violence against women, while not accurate are also really depressing. One man I know who will not be perpetrating any type of violence towards women is my Guatemalan love who is a mere few days away from turning six-months old. Kenny has gotten one tooth and a lot grabbier since our first meeting (my earrings and glasses were easy targets), but he remains the chillest baby I have seen, he does not fuss and is happy to be carried around by all family members, including the colocha.

With Kenny

On Friday I woke up feeling a little worse for wear but I figured it was the result of waking up before six am a few times this past week. I went with Felicia to the local school to give our last in the three part trash/recycling series of talks. When we got to the school, all the teachers were in a meeting and kids were running wild through the hallways. We got to the classroom and started doing our talk about different types of trash and then our activity: trash art. With my kids

While we were giving the talk and later when I was helping the kids do art I felt really drained and had stomach pain and hot flashes. Luckily for me, I was able to make it home before puking up the contents of my stomach. I suspect that the culprit of my malestar were the funny-smelling beans I ate the day before (they were pureed black beans that had been sitting out all day without being reheated or refrigerated). My morning was decidedly unpleasant, and in the afternoon I pulled myself together to go to Peace Corps for yet another series of presentations, but instead went to the medical office. The nurses offered me Gatorade, Pepto-Bismol and an anti-nausea shot (which I kindly declined) and with that I was set. Of all my illnesses due to food experiences in Latin American countries, this was probably the tamest since it did not involve me getting hooked up to an IV, I recovered within 24-hours, and I got some free Gatorade (there is always some neon-orange lining around cloud of illness). Now every one of us in my town has gotten sick due to food, Mamatina had been very proud that she fed me the best food, and I am hoping that I learned my lesson: eat beans hot or not at all.

On Saturday I went on a walk in the morning, I tried to run and my stomach said NO, and then went to Antigua to meet with Nelly, the head of Namaste-Direct here in Guatemala. Namaste-Direct is a microfinance institution that has been giving loans to groups of women through intermediary NGOs (like CARE). In January 2008, Namaste-Direct opened up an office in Antigua in order to give loans directly, though they still work with intermediary NGOs to find their groups of women. Namaste-Direct currently works with around 350 women in women’s groups in four departments (Chimaltenango, El Quiche, Sacatepéquez…and one more). They have a 24-month period where they give loans (loan cycles are on average 6-months long, so the ideal is to have women go through four loan cycles) and along with receiving money the women receive training and one-on-one business mentorship by local business-people (the mentors have to be Guatemalan and speak the local dialect among other qualifications). I was put in touch with Nelly, the head of the Guatemala office, through IRPS connections (thanks Preston!) and she has come up with a few projects that she would like me to do for her. The one project that really appealed to me was to help her improve the monitoring and evaluation tools that N-D is currently using. Every loan cycle there are a lot of diagnostic tools used to attempt to assess how the women are faring and whether the program is really helping them salir adelante. Nelly thinks that the monitoring program could use some improvements, but she does not have the time to figure out how to improve it since the day-to-day operations take up all her time. Revising the monitoring and evaluation strategy will be a long-term project, and since I will be here for two years, it would be a good match. I was very excited about the possibility with actually using some of my IRPS ‘toolkit’, but until I find out my site (THURSDAY!!!) and the work that I need to do at my site, I cannot commit to anything. I got some materials and will wait until I am in site a few months to figure out what I can commit to, but I am hopeful that I will be able to work with N-D.

I finished up my day on Saturday completing my embroidered pillowcase that I started with Mamatina about a month ago. One week Mamatina asked me if I wanted to learn how to embroider. I figured since I had a lot of time on the weekends that it would be a neat idea. At first I was going to make a napkin for my tortillas, but Mamatina decided that it would actually be better to learn how to make a pillowcase so I could embroider one for my future husband and then for my children. I informed her that I was hoping to marry a man who would have enough money to pay for someone else to embroider the pillowcases, but she would have none of that. I told her that with my lack of dexterity I could only look for a blind husband, or that my pillowcase would only be put on pillows in the dark. Below are the results of my efforts, as they say in Guatemala, it came out ‘dos que tres’ (literally: two out of three, figuratively: not so good, not so bad).

My pillowcase or sobrefunda