other perspectives

So, yes, the trip is technically over, but there were a couple of last posts I wanted to put up.


I got to spend my last few days with the awesome Peace Corps people, Jaime (Jim) and Emily, pictured above supporting me as I was sick as a dog in Antigua. Although, for the most part, I felt like I reached a lot of the same conclusions as they did about Guatemalan life even in my much shorter period of time, we did have some different experiences.

For one thing, they knew that the Ministry of Health's budget was cut by a large percentage in order to finance Mi Familia Progresa, the program my host mother worked for. Mi Familia Progresa is a direct payment to women for keeping their kids in school, taking them to the doctor, and attending health talks. To me, it seemed like a good idea and not unlike what Jim and Emily are doing (they give health talks), but it turns out it's not so great in practice. There isn't enough money for it, and many of the women just get beat up by their husbands so they can take the money and go drink. I guess maybe paying the doctors and nurses at the clinics was a better use of health funds.


The other thing we differed on were tiendas (pictured above.) These little stores are found every few houses and sell pretty much anything you need on a daily basis. I thought they were kind of awesome: because you can always get fresh food, you don't need a big storehouse, you don't need to use a refrigerator, you can do all your purchases on foot (I think Guatemalans would find the idea of needing a car to go to the grocery store rather absurd, whereas it's one of the main reasons Americans won't give up a car), the food supply system is very robust (unlike America where several corporations control everything), and I also find the ease with which one can become a store owner or entrepreneur in general kind of appealing (no health codes, little startup cost.)

But, it turns out that there are downsides to the tiendas. They (of course) mark up the products- matches are 5 for 1Q at the market, but 1 for 1Q in a tienda. (They're probably 10 for 1Q if you go to the supermarket in Soloma.) So, families that are pretty poor are routinely paying 5x as much as they need to for basic supplies. It also (according to Jaime) contributes to a larger mentality of never planning ahead, and in fact, never having a need to plan ahead. And, it creates enough income to support a whole bunch of people who are not actually adding any value to the economy- they're not producing or improving anything, they're just transporting it to another place and marking it up.

I came across the not-planning-ahead mentality when I bought food for several days, and my host family ate a lot of it up the first day- they're just not used to my odd custom of stockpiling food.

I highly recommend Jim and Emily's excellent blog. I'm currently in the process of reading it from the beginning.

great and horrible

Upon returning, my mom said, “it doesn’t sound like the trip was that great, huh?” It was great... I had lots of incredible experiences that would be highlights of an ordinary packaged trip (guided trek, bus tour, study abroad program...)

These included:
-playing soccer with middle school girls
-drinking atol while watching chicks hide under their mother
-learning to wash clothes in a pila
-learning to make tortillas after taking the corn to the mill to grind
-learning to bathe in a Chuj
-getting an impromptu Q’anjob’al lesson from an old lady in a store
-being invited to stay in a house
-putting a little girl’s shoes on the right feet
-playing “which toy did I take away?” with a little boy
-watching a marimba band rock out in a wood shop
-having many “where are you going?” conversations with old people who speak no Spanish

But, I lacked many other everyday experiences... like walking on pavement, recycling a bottle, having a bathroom inside the house, turning on a faucet, or hanging out with anyone. I think the following things would have made my trip much better:

-having another outsider with me
-having a cell phone
-having a bigger project
-having a deck of cards
-staying with a family the whole time
-paying subjects
-knowing about the supermarket in Soloma

Having weighed the pros and cons- and without really being sure if it’s a classic case of liking what you suffer for- I’m somewhat sure I want to go back at some point in the next year. For one thing, the Peace Corps folks will still be there, and since I’m in SLA, it might be time for me to study people learning Q’anjob’al as a second language- I’d be able to study not only Jim and Emily, and the two new volunteers in a nearby site, but also Mariana and whoever else I can scare up who married a Q’anjob’al speaker. For another thing, why not put to use the connections I made and the tips I learned this trip? So, who wants to go with me?

Guatemalisms

Here are some phrases I didn’t notice before going to Guatemala, before I forget them all:

refacciones- snacks
para servirle- at your service
agua pura- drinkable water
frijoles volteados- really blended-up refried beans
atol- hot drink made of corn flour
mosh- hot drink made of oatmeal flour
gracias- said to everyone at the table at the end of the meal, even if they didn’t help prepare it (e.g. even to other diners in a restaurant as you leave)
buen provecho- proper response to “gracias” at the end of the meal
plancha- wood-burning “grill” stove
chuj- traditional sauna for bathing
corte- skirt made of lots of fabric (unshaped in any way) tied at the waist with a long belt
tarda (mucho)- it takes a long time
falta un poco- it lacks a little (e.g. rice that isn’t done yet)
de plano- obviously
pila- water basin/sinks
bueno, pues- to end a conversation
chompipe- turkey
tinaja- water jug
lo vas a tirar- you’re going to drop it (literally, ‘throw it’), said to kids
chupar- to celebrate by drinking (this one is funny, because it literally means ‘to suck,’ so I tried to get around it by saying “celebrar,” which cracked them all up because it means to celebrate something by praying. I’m still not sure if there’s a word just for ‘celebrate.’)

amoebas

So, I'm down in touristland-- Antigua-- and it's amazing how much more I appreciate it now than at the beginning of the trip. The toilets flush! (during the daytime when there's water pressure.) There are sinks with soap and sometimes even paper towels! The cheap hotel I'm staying in (thanks, Peace Corps people) is clean enough that I could go barefoot!

But, in keeping with my earlier Antigua experience, something has gone horribly wrong, and that something was a falafel. Jim and Emily didn't get sick from it at all- it came with lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, which I normally would eschew, but they make up at least half of the falafel experience AND the store had a water filter on the tap (and was run by a British guy.) So I ate it. Cue two days of lying around in bed because in a horizontal position is the only time my stomach doesn't hurt.

Antibiotics are doing nothing, so it's probably amoebas (a parasite common to here). But it's Sunday, so no medical attention. I bought a get-well kit of Coke, Gatorade, water, white rice, some packets that are supposed to "restore your intestinal flora," and (on the recommendation of the girl at the hotel), a packet of chicken noodle soup powder. It's supposed to restore the salt you've lost. Improbably, the chicken noodle soup seems to have done the most good of everything, enabling me to venture out to a nearby youth hostel and see Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), I really didn't have particular goals to accomplish in Antigua because I've been here before and was only coming back to get some books from a Linguistics organization in a nearby suburb. But, the contact person's phone has been turned off for two days (straight to voicemail), and he hasn't returned my email, so it looks like the books are going to stay here (maybe Ryan can get them in the fall.)

The moral of the story? No matter how clean someplace seems, do not eat raw vegetables in 3rd world countries.

Hike

The fellow pictured here invited me to walk to an aldea with him to give his cows some salt. His family used to live there, but now the house is pretty much abandoned- they just store some random stuff there, like cow salt dishes.


He walks there (an hour) about twice a week to check on the four cows, who have an enormous green space with a stream for water (hence the ‘healthy glow’ they have in this photo). The cows are rotated between the area around the house and this field every two months, in order to let the grass grow. They just sell the cows- they don’t milk or eat them.


On the way, we passed a defunct hydroelectric plant:


And afterwards, we went to this waterfall, which involved a lot of scrambling and a somewhat dubious lookout point. It’s really enormous- it falls all the way down to tierra caliente- but was kind of hard to see.


Following the waterfall, we hiked directly up a hill for an hour in the (unusual) baking sun, which just about killed me- but at that point it was a point of pride to finish the 5-hour circuit on foot.

Modernity

It’s funny which artifacts of modernity have arrived here, and which haven’t. It primarily has to do with the portability of the objects. Putting up a cell phone tower and having everyone buy cell phones? Easy. Adding insulation to houses so they could be heated? Hard. Buying a car? Easy. Widening and/or paving the road? Hard. Creating a reliable supply of drinkable water? Hard. Hopping in your brother’s car and driving down to the spring to get some water when yours dries up? Easy.

The linguistics stuff I’m doing is pretty much done, but I feel like I could also write a paper on the mechanics of everyday life here. The pila is a favorite of mine. It can be filled by rain (through elaborate gutter systems), by a tap (which sometimes has water and sometimes not), or by carrying water. It’s usually full- in this shot it’s empty because Mariana was washing the tank. To wash things, you scoop the water up into the sinks with the red or blue basin, and it drains through the pipes that hold up the sinks. It’s ideal for taking an uncertain water supply and evening it out by storing water when available.


Every house I’ve been in has two stoves- the wood-burning “grill” is for making tortillas and making meals for the whole family, whereas the gas stove (with accompanying gas tank) is for making a quick pot of instant coffee or cooking something that has to be really hot. You’ll also note the microwave, which is hardly ever used, and never at night, because there’s less electricity then.


Mariana also has a refrigerator, but there are only about five things in it. Other families get by just fine without. Milk is powdered and cheese and meat are rare. There are a lot of people around to eat up leftovers quickly, food can stay hot on the stove, and the food sources are so close to the eating locations that things don’t go bad. Even the butcher doesn’t refrigerate meat (shudder.) There’s no need to stock up on anything because there are little stores every few houses- in less than two minutes you can get eggs, or sugar, or toilet paper, or matches, or whatever you might have run out of.


Basically, if all the corporations and government services stopped tomorrow, we’d be screwed, but rural Guatemalans could switch from lights to candles and carry on as usual.

fotos

Here are the aforementioned urchins in some of their cleaner states- the boy is four and the girl is five. For whatever reason, the boy calls me “señor.”




And a four-headed chicken:

The Old Man and the Milpa:

On dirty children

When we go to third world countries and see children with unwiped noses and ripped clothes covered in mud, we think they’re really poor—maybe even hungry or homeless. But that’s not necessarily the case.



When I moved to my new house, I met some of the neighbors- a filthy little boy, and a little girl in green sweatpants with multiple holes in them and barely-functional mud-drenched sandals. (They’re not pictured here, though I’ll try to get a shot of them.) Within a day or two, both of the little urchins had been bathed and changed into much better-looking clothes (which the girl wasn’t happy about- she preferred the sweatpants.)



The idea is that if you were camping with your kids, how would you dress them? Not in their best clothes, and you probably wouldn’t care all that much if they got a little dirty. Well, Guatemalan houses are kind of like camping. The bathrooms have toilets in them, but they aren’t connected to water- you pour a bucket of water in them to flush them. And bathrooms aren’t in the house, they’re little concrete boxes outside. Lwin’s parents’ house has 2 out of 3 rooms with dirt floors. Cooking is done with firewood. Water is scooped from a collection bin rather than emerging magically from a faucet. There is no heating or insulation.



And most importantly, things aren’t paved, and we’re in the rainy season. That means that even a fastidious adult can’t leave the house without getting a little muddy, and then you take a five-year-old child and let him go unsupervised into the muddy world (yes, the children here are definitely free-range). The impact of pavement on general cleanliness cannot be overestimated.



So, those filthy children you see aren’t necessarily neglected (though I suppose some are.) They’re probably just going over to the next relative’s house, where they’ll be played with, fed bits of whatever everyone else is eating, and let back outside to wander uncleaned.

new digs

I´ve now moved to my third home in Santa Eulalia! It´s the house of a Mexican woman (she married someone from here) which was constructed for seven people, and now only houses her and her youngest daughter, who´s 11. The other kids are married and her husband is working in the US. So they have two extra bedrooms (a rarity here.) It´s a sprawling one-story house with an entry room that is considered "outside" (the chickens and dogs are allowed in it), a kitchen, a huge living room with a couple of couches, and three bedrooms. The living room is currently serving as the office for her work, which is with "Mi Familia Progresa," an organization that pays women to keep their kids in school and take them to the doctor, etc. The cleanliness level is comparable to, say, a camping cabin, but hey! It has a stove where I can cook things, I slept great even though the bed is boards with an open-cell foam mattress, and most importantly there´s company. She invited me to stay with her completely unsolicitedly when we were waiting for our van to leave for Temux, and I was happy to take her up on the offer.

What you get to see when herds of barking dogs wake you up early:

A crowd watching a ginseng salesman in the plaza:

patej (tortillas)

This is the stove that pretty much everyone (including restaurants) cooks on. It’s made of cement, with a metal grill that I’m told was the latest innovation when it came out. (I think this stove is the replacement for a campfire on the kitchen floor, actually.) The metal circles are removable in case you want to boil your water quicker, and the whole surface is used for tortilla-making. The front part is “high,” the back part is “low.” The fire-starting process involved the 8-year-old son splitting a special firestarting wood into tiny pieces with a machete and lighting it up.

Lwin’s mom taught me how to make tortillas. The process involves washing corn with lime, carrying it to the mill where a line of women waits to put their corn through the belt-driven grinder for 12 cents, scooping up your masa from the bottom of the grinder, carrying it back home, and shaping it by hand like so:

Notice how large and white I look in the photo, and also that Lwin’s mom is wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt. After a while, she said I didn’t suck at tortilla-making anymore.

Peace Corps Outing

Unspoiled “tierra caliente” mountains:

The adorable house where the new volunteers get to live:

Coffee trees:

Talking to a local nurse:

The village was set on one of these ridges:

Santa Eulalia

Here’s where I am:

Actually, it usually looks more like this:

Here’s Lwin’s team working on morphology in the bedroom/laboratory of his house. It has a white board and two or three computers. Lwin’s the one standing (he’s the grad student at the University of Kansas).

His house has adorable chicks running around it.

This is the relief map of the province of Huehuetenango. You start at that flag next to the rusty one, and then go straight up the mountains to the third flag, which is Santa Eulalia.

The pink thing is my first (crappy) hotel.

But it did have a nice view from the bathroom window:

Though a bit blurry, this is a pila, which is where they wash both clothes and dishes. The water chamber can be filled with rainwater or tap water, and you just scoop water up into the washing basins.

This bizarre orange plant is seen frequently, and though it sure looks like a parasite (or a collection of plastic string) to me, people here don’t seem to think it’s a problem.

Peace Corps

Today I ran into the aforementioned Peace Corps people... the first Americans since I´ve been up here! It´s strange how different it is in a place with NO tourists/foreigners/Americans compared to a place with even a couple of them... it gets lonely.

The people in question were Jaime, a volunteer in the Guatemalan Peace Corps public health program in a village right near Santa Eulalia, and his boss. They were driving an awesome and brand-new looking Jeep with a "Cuerpo de Paz" logo on the side, and they spotted me as I was trying to change hotels (with two backpacks and a 5-gallon jug of water.) They offered to take me to the other hotel, which quickly turned into an invitation to go to a village way down the mountain in "tierra caliente" to set things up for incoming volunteers.

The road we took was two hours of up and down with lots of erosion on the slopes, and quite frankly, I can´t believe we made it with no problems. It ran along ridges with dropoffs on both sides a lot of the time, which made for spectacular views since it was an unusually non-rainy day. (Have I mentioned that it´s the rainy season up here?) The village was completely tropical, with coffee trees and banana trees everywhere, and people even had their shirts off. Compare to Santa Eulalia in the same township, where people go around in hats and jackets with gigantic umbrellas all the time...

It was really great to talk to other Americans, and I´m jealous of the volunteers that are going to live in this rather pristine tropical village in adorable painted houses and teach the people about good health practices.

In other news, my new hotel is NICE for $10 a night... brand new, huge, and the restaurant has filet mignon on the menu ($9). Compare that to the other restaurants in the town, which don´t have menus at all. Someone is doing Santa a big development favor, and I hope they get rich in the process. It sure beats my $6 hotel where the shower shocked me, the water didn´t always come out of the sink, and the mattresses smelled like either mildew or *other things*...

finally a functional computer

Hello! I´m sure you´ve been thinking that I´m dead, because I never go this long without internet. Well, it hasn´t really been SO long without internet, but a) there´s only one internet cafe here, b) the internet is satellite so it frequently goes out for hours or days in bad weather, and c) the computer that kept being free (I wonder why?) is ancient and virus laden (it opens a lot of popups and the popup blocker is ON), so it actually won´t load the ¨logon¨ button for the Blogger homepage. Hence no blogging.

So, how are things going? Well, I´ve started actually interviewing people, which is good, but otherwise, Santa Eulalia in the rainy season is not exactly a happening vacation spot. I basically go to sleep from 9 pm to 6 am, take a walk in one direction or the other if it´s not raining, meet for a couple of hours with Lwin´s team that´s learning how to identify morphemes, look for people to interview and/or meet with them, study the Q´anjob´al grammar, watch bad American movies on TV, and/or read. Which is to say, life is getting a bit boring up here. I have literally not seen another tourist the entire time I´ve been here (nearly a week.) I hope to go meet some Peace Corps volunteers or some of the people associated with one or another language school, because really, you can only go so far talking about the weather and why I´m here! Two more weeks of research to go...

mom and dad are gone!

To an American, Latin America (and even Europe) seem like places where the parents aren't home.

No one's saying, "put on your seatbelt," or even, "standing up in the back of that pickup truck is dangerous." No one admonishes you not to set off those firecrackers before 7 am because people are sleeping. No one tells you to go home when it gets dark, or while you're out in the dark, not to play with that ball right in front of the street and then not to run after it when it rolls into the street again. Or to wear a bike helmet. Or not carry young children on your bike. Or not to get so close to the edge of a cliff. Or that that's dirty, don't touch it.

It must be a lot of fun.

Food surprises

1) Pancakes (complete with "jarabe de maple syrup") and banana bread are quite popular here. And the pancakes are exactly like at home.

2) They advertise vegetarian food. It's not weird that there is vegetarian food, since "for most Guatemalans, meat is a bit of a luxury" (LP), but the fact that they know the term vegetarian and know that it'll bring in business (solely from Americans?) is surprising to me compared to the situation in Spain ("what? it's just a little bit of ham to flavor the green beans!")

3) Almost anything comes with one or two slices of Roma tomato.

4) The portions are American-sized. I{ve only been eating breakfast and dinner, which is backwards since lunch is the biggest meal of the day (with corresponding cheap set menus.)

eight thumbs down for Huehue

I{m in Huehuetenango, which I would charitably describe as a complete shithole. Unless you{re fond of huge piles of garbage rotting in the street. (To be fair, I haven{t gotten around to asking anyone if the garbagemen are on strike or something, but we{re talking piles of multiple garbage bags that have been ripped apart by dogs.) The city is also infested with giant loudspeakers. Right across from the church is a loudspeaker store, so while you{re talking to God you can be listening to five second stretches of music interspersed with announcements. My motel also used their ginormous loudspeaker to broadcast religion followed by music at 7:15 am.

The only cool thing in the entire town is the maps- since most people are just passing through, there are lots of maps of the entire province of Huehuetenango. The awesomest one is a sculpted relief map in the central park, which shows how high the places are that I{m going, and where they are in relation to each other and the mountains. It also tells the climate (frio, for me), population and language of each town. I{ll upload it at some point, but right now I have to get the hell out of here!

Xela market

I went back to the market at the entrance to Xela to snap a few photos. In the middle one, the woman on the right is texting and listening to music. By the time you read this, I'll be doing linguistics in Santa Eulalia...

Miscellany

Here is a helpful drawing of a cow placed above the beef display in the supermarket. Pieces of interest: viuda (widower), caña (cane/small beer in Spain), manita de Rochoy (small hand of Rochoy), and lagarto (alligator.)


Antigua sunset:


Flowers in hotel courtyard:


Sawdust decoration in the street:


The old church was crumbling, so they just propped up the facade, demolished the rest of it, and built a new one behind it:

Guatemalan language schools

I've never seen as many language schools as there are here. They all have a one-on-one teaching system, too, which I've certainly never seen anywhere. Five hours of one-on-one instruction every day, five days a week. Sounds tiring. Pairs of one Guatemalan and one American decorate little tables at the schools, cafes, and plazas, and every young American is thought to be a Spanish student.

It only costs a little more than $100 a week, so that means the teachers get paid $4 an hour (or less depending on how big of a cut the school takes). Personally, I'd much rather teach a whole class for one hour a day. But hey, it does provide more jobs, so if $4/hour is a decent wage here, then Guatemala has developed a fantastic new industry.

Two thumbs up for Xela

(That's Quetzaltenango to you)

On the way to Xela, I sat next to two very interesting people: first, an old man who lived in Santiago de Atitlán (across the lake from Pana, where I was originally) and hires women to make jewelry and keychains for export to the US. He was very pro-US: "mejor en Estados Unidos, mejor desarollo para Guatemala." Second, a young guy who works for the Ministry of Education monitoring schools. He drives around to all the schools in the small towns and makes sure that they're actually having classes ("The teachers sometimes decide on Wednesday that that's enough classes, and they don't give any on Thursday and Friday.") He was returning to his village for 15 days of vacation since they've closed the schools due to the swine flu scare. He invited me to go up and go hiking with him, which I probably would have done if I had more time as he was interesting and non-creepy, but the thought of a few extra hours on a bus with all the rest of the bussing I have to do wasn't terribly appealing.

As I stepped out of the bus in Xela, a single raindrop fell. It was soon an enormous storm, and I ducked into the huge, mazelike market along with several hundred other people who had the same idea of avoiding the rainstorm. It was pretty incredible- in short order, I was completely lost, but my two backpacks and I remained dry.


The first night I stayed in a quirky Spanish school, and unfortunately got the one bed in the place that was almost literally a board with one or two blankets for padding. But it had wifi! After a night spent on the board listening to drunken Guatemalans blunder in and out of the adjoining bathroom, I moved to a much nicer B&B that Ryan had recommended.


I then attended a nonprofit breakfast held by an American man and his Guatemalan wife in this beautiful garden:



Afterwards, a girl from the breakfast and I hiked above town to the "Cristo Viene" church.


We ran into a local woman with her five children, who were picking cherries. The kids were very interested in us (especially after I got them some cherries that were out of their reach.) This little girl is named Nancy Paolo. In the second photo, the oldest boy is up in the tree. The mother was only 24.





It was really nice above the city- cornfields, grass, and a shrine with some sort of praying figure.