Noche Buena en Pachalúm

My Christmas and New Year's Blog Posts will be mostly just photos since I have not had time to compose any interesting insights. Basically - I ate a lot, a convivioed a lot, and I got sick again (gluttony is a deadly sin for my stomach).In Guatemala Christmas is celebrated on December 24th - Noche Buena. Families celebrate by making tamales with raisins, paches (the potato-tamales), drinking ponche (hot fruit punch) and eating apples and grapes. For lunch I was invited to Rosy's house and made my popular baked apples dessert again.

Emilio double-fisting food - an apple in one hand and guisquil in the other

Lunch at Rosy's December 24th (I am in the back on the left-hand side)

In the afternoon, I participated in the first annual Christmas Parade. We went all through town dancing and throwing candy to the children. The bands from the three high schools played some of the best versions of Christmas classics that I have heard in a long time.

The first annual Pachalúm Christmas Parade

After the parade there was a concert/closing of vacation classes/clown presentation in front of the municipality. I handed out certificates for the participants from the art class and received a certificate for the communications class (even though I only went to two or three of the classes).

Can you tell which one is not a local beauty queen?

In the evening I was invited to five dinners and I was proud of myself for being careful - I ate one tamale with Doña Tona (the lady I live with), then I ate one more tamale at the second dinner and after that I was done. The third house I went to I refused tamales but was offered Ensalada de Nochebuena (beet salad with nuts, apples, and grapes). I then went to the mayor's house and just drank some ponche, followed by Rosy's house for midnight (though I did not eat anything there). At midnight the tradition is to light tons of fireworks, a really neat and very unsafe experience, and to give hugs to everyone you see on the street.

With sparklers at midnight December 24th/25th

I woke up Christmas Day with another serious case of food poisoning, which lasted the rest of Christmas weekend. During a lull on Saturday I went down to Rosy's house for Saturday lunch - but I brought my own lunch to prevent any more contamination. Nevertheless Saturday afternoon I fell ill again and was just barely on my feet again for New Year's.

Emilio has really taken to being photographed

Conviviendo

This past week has been a flurry of holiday festivities – or convivios as the parties are known here – which I guess would literally translate as living together, or celebrating together in this context. My policy of accepting any and all social invites has resulted in my being out almost every single night the past week and a half, and also has led to some personal insights to ponder in the upcoming year. 1. I am more patient now than I was when I arrived in Guatemala. Invitations for activities always start at least an hour after the established start time and the events drag on way longer than I am interested in staying. 2. I am a lot quieter than I used to be. In most social settings I tend to sit back quietly and observe unless I am spoken to directly. While I have enjoyed the copious amounts of food coming my way, I am also a little convivio-ed out at this point, so I look forward to eating my weight in tamales for Christmas and then detoxing on my own for a while.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Work before parties. Last week started out with women’s groups. On Monday I was very excited to go to Ciprés because I had made a really good charla about nutrition. Basically, we started out with a dinámica (dynamic or ice breaker) called fruit-vegetable-grain where we would toss a ball to a random person and shout one of those terms and the woman who caught the ball had to name a fruit-vegetable-or grain. Then she would throw the ball and the process would repeat. The point of the game is to not repeat anything that has already been mentioned and it was meant to get them started thinking about different classifications of foods. Then we had a discussion about the five different types of nutrients (carbs, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals) followed by my introducing the food pyramid and then handing out cards with different foods for the women to read the backs of (each card described a different vitamin or mineral that could be found in that food) and then post up on the board in the food pyramid that we made out of string. Of all the charlas that I have done since arriving in site, I think this one was the most balanced and best prepared, so it is a good model for next years work.

Luz with our food pyramid

On Tuesday we had our clausura, or closing ceremony, in Las Vegas where Luz has been going for the past six months and taught cooking classes and handicrafts. We went early because for the last class the women wanted to make paches – which are tamales made out of potatoes –imagine mashed potatoes with meat filling, and they take a LOT of work. I also requested that we make arroz con chocolate since no party is complete without some form of fattening beverage. It was a long afternoon and it was a bit sad to say goodbye to all the girls (even though they never really talked or seemed all too enthusiastic about participating, they were bummed about classes being over). Three of the girls in class wanted to take photos with me for the memories, which I found very flattering:P Two of the girls are twins and they each wanted two photos individually with me and one together. I guess I now know how Hollywood stars feel a little more now hahaha.

With the twins

Tuesday night was also my first convivio of the week at the nicest local restaurant – Tamarindo. The dinner/gift exchange was with people from the Center for Special Education and from the radio station. Since I had spent the better part of the afternoon burning my mouth on arroz con leche and paches before they were cool enough to drink/eat, I was not too hungry, but the food was good, and the gift interchange was pleasant. I preferred the gift that I had to the gift that I received, but thankfully this was just the first of many gift exchanges.

On Wednesday evening, I participated in the first of what will hopefully be a long running radio show – Mesa Redonda Juvenil (Youth Round Table – I came up with the moniker!!). Our first show was about how to get youth to volunteer more in town, why it is important, and how we can promote volunteerism. The show was about 1.5 hours long and apparently got good reception. For my part, I am excited to be involved in another radio show that will hopefully help me speak more fluidly and naturally on the radio and also get to know other people.

With the rest of the panel on the radio show

Thursday we were supposed to go back to La Joya to work with the women on their candle-making operation, but we got a call on Wednesday afternoon informing us that our services would no longer be needed since the women had already dissolved their group. Apparently this happens a lot with groups of women, so it is not a total shock, but it is still disappointing since I was really looking forward to going over my finance spreadsheets with them (nothing that Professor Kane would recognize, just basic sheets for calculating expenses and income). Hopefully one or two of the women will take the skills she used and translate that into a successful income-generating source.

On Thursday night I went back to Rosy’s house for the third night of cookie baking. All initial growing pains are fully behind us and we made some killer thumbprint cookies and brownies from a brownie mix I had bought in Guatemala City the week before. It was really funny because I kept getting complements on how good the brownies were when all I did was add the water, oil, and egg the recipe called for, but I guess the unnamed ingredient – love – did play a role in the cookies tasting so good, so I took credit.

My cookies!

On Friday afternoon we had another convivio – this time at the Centro Educativo Fé y Esperanza, the center where we have been giving art classes. A lot of the children with special needs came to the center and enjoyed some free gifts from Santa, music, tamales and ponche (hot fruit punch – the typical Christmas drink).

After the convivio at the Center I accepted an invitation from the mayor to go with him and his family to a nearby community in Baja Verapaz to see how artisan sugar cane juice is made. When I was in Bolivia last year I saw a lot of sugar cane and smelled the results of its processing in a factory, but I had never seen the processing up close. The cane is fed into a grinder that grinds as two oxen walk around with a yoke in a circle. The liquid that comes out is funneled into a huge barrel in the ground and then buckets are used to translate the juice into a big cauldron where it is boiled and then the resulting liquid is put into molds to dry into panela, a sweetener that preceded the use of sugar. I drank some juice as it came into the barrel, it was nice and green, sucked on sugar cane, and ate panela and other sugar derivatives. It was all very tasty and I was very thankful that the mayor invited me along to check out a dying craft.

Making sugar cane juice the old school way

On Saturday I went back to Boanerges’ house for my weekly lunch invitation. At lunch I got my first Christmas invitation for lunch the following Thursday (for some reason they celebrate Christmas here on the 24th). After lunch, I went back to Rosy’s house where her father took out some artifacts that he had found on his property some ten years back. He is not sure what their value is nor what time period they were made in, so he was showing them to the optometrist who has some friends with studies in archeology. I took advantage of the opportunity to take tons of photos. There were 13 statues, one of which Rosy’s uncle took with him to California and lost, so 12 remained and they all seemed to be paired (with two statues holding corn, two holding birds, etc) with a male and female deity in each pair.

Artifacts

Sunday was my most social (and cold!) day to date – eating every single one of my meals with someone else. In the morning I went downstairs to have breakfast with Doña Tona, the woman who’s house I am living in. I am hardly ever home so I do not have much of a relationship with her family, which I started feeling bad about. A week ago Sunday I went downstairs and invited her to have some tea with me, and in exchange she offered me some bread and we had breakfast together and chatted. During the week I attempted to invite her to tea again, but she heads out to one of the communities to take care of her mother every day so she never has time. So I bided my time and when Sunday rolled around again we had tea and bread again. Doña Tona invited me to have Christmas dinner with her family, an invitation I eagerly accepted and filling up my dance card for Christmas Eve Day (lunch and dinner, check!)

At 9am I headed down to Rosy’s house to help her mother make tortillas. We did not start making tortillas until 11am (hora chapina – Guatemalan time), and I was able to make some pretty good ones for an hour or so, at which point they began to tear and fall out of my tired hands.

Some of my prettier tortillas with Doña Berta's (mine are smaller)

I stayed at Rosy’s until 230pm eating, cooking, doing dishes, and hanging out until 230pm. One of the things I love about hanging out with Rosy’s family is that they think I do not eat enough and get annoyed when I do not eat everything I am offered. I also liked that when I left at 230pm, five hours after I arrived, they all asked me if I would not be returning, which makes me feel like part of the family. By 230pm it was raining pretty hard, finally getting some winter weather (though we are in the dry season in Guatemala so the rain was really unexpected) and I ran home to put on some warmer clothing before going down to the municipality to meet with Luz Maria and some other folks for my fourth convivio of the week at Luz’s house. Given that Luz came to drive us to her house in a pick-up, the rain was a complicating factor, and we did not end up leaving until 430pm. Luz’s convivio was pleasant – we ate paches, drank ponche, and had a chocolate interchange. We stayed at Luz’s house until 830pm and the rain showed no sign of giving up, so I put on my nylon and rain coat and got in the back of the pickup for the half-hour ride back to town.

Still smiling because we have not yet embarked on the ride back

It was while I was sitting in the back of the pickup with little feeling in my hands and none in my butt that I realized accepting all social invitations was really not worth my time. Sure I like eating, but I also like being dry – Athalia’s hierarchy of needs. I hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season and Prosperous New Year’s! Feel free to make comments on the blog posts and also let me know if anyone is interested in skyping and I will look into the local internet café’s skype options.

In Sickness and in Health

The past two weeks have been full of activity – both in my stomach and at work. On December 1st in commemoration of World HIV/AIDS Day my Youth Development Volunteer site mate and I coordinated an HIV/AIDS workshop with our counterparts and with a youth group. Together we practiced the four-hour workshop provided by Peace Corps and the nine of us gave the workshop to almost 30 participants (mostly youth but also some teachers). Given the short period of time we had to prepare the event, it went off rather well, though for next year I hope we can do more preparation and have even more events around World AIDS Day with increased participation by community members.

The steps in correctly using a condom

The mayor of my town, who had been in Israel for my first month in site for a workshop on security and youth development, arrived back in town the day before the workshop, and he came to give the closing speech before certificates were handed out. The mayor of my town is a very good public speaker and in his speech he talked about how he had been inspired by his trip to my home-country (since I tell people that I was born in Israel, I am often asked about Israel and they consider me as Israeli as American. This is interesting because one of the three goals of Peace Corps is to share American culture with host country nationals – and while I do that I am also spending a lot of time talking about Jewish culture and Israel – so people here get a good deal, two cultures for the price of one PCV). During the workshop in Israel, the mayor was inspired by all the extracurricular activities that are available for youth and he decided that starting next year he wants to start an after school non-formal education school with classes for youth, children, and their parents. It was a great speech and I am really excited that this upcoming year I will have more work to do.

All of the participants with the mayor and their certificates

The trainers

I also continued doing artwork this week, finally finishing up my first recycled paper basket and making decorations for Rosy’s corner store. Thank goodness the art classes with children are coming to an end because they have turned out to be a big headache. Most of the kids are pretty calm and follow directions and help clean up, but as an excellent Eric Clapton CD was entitled, there is one in every crowd (or a few more in this case). The source of my morning headaches and Homer Simpson level internal rage are a few 8-10 year old boys who do not listen to instructions, create a huge mess, do not want to clean up, and yet refuse to leave to let me clean in peace. It is disappointing to find myself getting so riled up by little boys since I used to be so patient with kids…but I guess I have turned into a crotchety old lady prematurely.

Mi canasto

Antojitos Xoyita with my decor

On Thursday December 3rd I attended my second CONALFA Clausura (Guatemala’s National Adult Education program). Like the previous event I went to, the event was long involving a lot of speeches by various officials from Guatemala City and throughout the department, followed by the handing out of certificates to graduates of the program. Pachalúm has a really low illiteracy rate compared to other municipalities in the department or even in the country. The mayor’s goal is to make Pachalúm the first completely literate municipality, followed by making it the first municipality where everyone has completed high school. While all of this is encouraging, I have also seen the spelling of some teachers around town, and thus am not completely convinced that this goal will be realized any time soon.

With Ada at the CONALFA Clausura

In the evening of the 3rd I started a weekly baking date with Rosy at her house. Rosy used to bake a lot and I do not have an oven, so we figured it could be fun to bake different recipes once a week. For our first date, we made chocolate chip cookies.Hard at work

Unfortunately, we had some technical malfunctions with the oven heating up properly, so instead of baking the cookies for ten minutes, we left them in the oven for forty minutes and then had to use the spatula like a sledgehammer to get them off the sheet. Despite the less than ideal texture, the cookies were really tasty.

Emilio enjoyed sucking on the cookies

Last Saturday marked my first time out of site since arriving to Pachalúm with a day trip to the municipality in Baja Verapaz where my co trainee Devon is working in the OMM. The municipality was celebrating its feria, so Rosy’s family was going to see the cow fair (every day of the feria – which lasts about a week – are different featured events, including a day of selling pigs, a day of selling cows, dances at night, etc). I hitched a ride with them for the 1.5-hour ride and got to see my first cow fair (lots of angry cattle getting bought and sold and kicking). Devon met up with me mid-morning and we went around the fairgrounds where there were sweets, all sorts of kitchen supplies, artisan goods, blankets, clothing, games, etc.

With Rosy's family and my big purchase (the purse!!) in Devon's town

Last Saturday marked my first time out of site since arriving to Pachalúm with a day trip to the municipality in Baja Verapaz where my co trainee Devon is working in the OMM. The municipality was celebrating its feria, so Rosy’s family was going to see the cow fair (every day of the feria – which lasts about a week – are different featured events, including a day of selling pigs, a day of selling cows, dances at night, etc). I hitched a ride with them for the 1.5-hour ride and got to see my first cow fair (lots of angry cattle getting bought and sold and kicking). Devon met up with me mid-morning and we went around the fairgrounds where there were sweets, all sorts of kitchen supplies, artisan goods, blankets, clothing, games, etc.

Devon’s town was really nice, with a beautiful church in the plaza and tropical plants all over, and it is noticeably smaller than Pachalúm (I would guess maybe 2,000 people compared to 3,000). Unfortunately for me, the party was stopped short by some serious stomach pains that began around midday and which developed into full-out food poisoning by the time I got back to Pachalúm mid-afternoon. My second bout of food poisoning in Guatemala was the reason for no blog posting last week since it wiped me out through Monday evening. As miserable as it was being sick again, Rosy’s family kept calling to check up on me, which made me feel special.

This past week was chock full of work and extra-curricular activities, but since the post is running long, I will limit my reporting to the highlights. On Tuesday I had a meeting with the mayor about my work in the municipality and it was really productive. He is open to me collaborating with as many people in the municipality as possible, including him, and he invited me to go along with him to Guatemala City next week when he gives a presentation to the Secretary of the President. The mayor asked me to give him ideas for what I want to do and also proposed ideas that were inspired by his trip to Israel (more concrete information about the informal education school he wants to establish). After the meeting I went and wrote a proposal for possible projects for me to undertake – including working on a Youth News Roundtable, starting a volunteering program with teens, working with the Forestry technician to give talks about risk management and protecting the environment, and working with the librarian to get more books for the library. On Friday my APCD (Assoc. Peace Corps Director) arrived for my first site visit and while I was a little nervous, it ended up being a really pleasant experience. Roberto arrived midday and took me out to lunch, where we talked about how I have been adjusting and how work is going. Before we went back to the municipality, Roberto took out his notebook and asked me what I wanted him to emphasize when meeting with my counterpart and the mayor – basically how he should use his clout to make my job easier. I told him how I thought my work could be more productive and then in meetings with both Luz and the mayor he went to bat for me – asking for more money for the OMM, bringing up the idea of having us do a SWOT analysis and emphasizing the importance of scheduling regular meetings.

I took advantage of Roberto’s visit coinciding with the first night of Hannukah, to get a ride to Guatemala City to visit the Jewish community there (www.casahillel.com). Casa Hillel is a group of Guatemalans who converted to Reform Judaism around seven years ago. The community is small – about five to ten families – but it is slowly growing, and they were generous and kind hosts.

Some members of Casa Hillel

On Friday night we shared a Shabbat meal and I spent the night along with another family at the house, and then on Saturday I shared breakfast before Luz and Ada called me to give me a ride back to Pachalúm. I met up with Luz and Ada in one of the new malls in Guatemala City and it was like being back in the United States – with tons of stores, clean public restrooms (with toilet paper!), and non-stop Christmas music. While normally I hate shopping at this time of year back at home, it was a nice change of scenery and I got into the spirit at the Hiper-Paiz (WalMart) buying all the groceries that cannot be found in Pachalúm.

With Ada and the Christmas tree in the mall

That is a quick summary of my past two weeks. Chag Sameach and Happy Hanukah to all!