First Week of May

I have hot water now!  Which is really, really nice.  Now I am not as smelly anymore!  

Last week me and my site mate Grace tried to start English classes but no one showed up, so we will have to try again and publicize more or something.  I taught twice last week, and both days went really well.  One day we talked about the water cycle and did some water activities and then the other day we talked about recycling, if they would recycle if there was a program here in Santa Maria, and then made bracelets out of newspaper.  I also tried to explain packaging and how that is a big part of waste and how they can reduce their waste by making an effort to buy things with less packaging, but I don’t think that idea really caught on.  Maybe it’s because they don’t buy the food for their families or because there aren’t that many options where they can choose to buy something or not based on its packaging.  I like the kids a lot- it’s about 14 kids who are ages 13-16 and are just a lot of fun to work with.  I still have so much to learn about teaching and am basically just going by trial and error right now, but I am slowly starting to figure out what works.  One of the hardest things to figure out how to do is how to teach with limited resources.  I’ve been buying paper and stuff for my classes so far, but I know I can’t do that all the time and I can’t ask the students to buy school materials because I don’t know what their financial situation is at home.  They all speak Kiche too, so sometimes they speak in Kiche to each other, which makes me want to learn Kiche just so I know what they’re saying.

I went out to eat on Saturday night with some other volunteers and had lo mein with beef in it, which was soooooo good!  I hadn’t had Asian food in a while.  I am having a problem fruit flies right now because my fruits and veggies are just in hanging baskets right now and attracting lots of flies, but this week I am going to give in and get a refrigerator so I can save food for longer and don’t have to worry about it going bad.  I made pupusas this weekend successfully, which is really exciting for me!  I’ve tried making them before but have ended up with masa, or dough, everywhere in the kitchen trying to flatten them with my hands.  So I got a tortilla press, which is just two pieces of metal that you press down to flatten the dough instead of patting it in between your hands and shaping it, which I have tried many times to do but have failed miserably.

I thought I might just try to explain a typical scene you might see in Santa Maria; I have grown accustomed to it but when I talk to other people they are really interested in it.  In the streets, you might see a pick up go by full of people in the bed of the truck, going to one of the other communities near by.  You could see an older man in the picop wearing traje tipico, which for men in Santa Maria is a bright woven shirt, usually orange (or sometimes pink), with a brown flannel looking blanket tied around his waist  like a skirt that goes down to about the knees.  As you get out into the more rural areas, you could see horses or cows grazing on the side of the road while their owners are out doing something in the campo.  People use the horses to carry huge loads of lena [firewood] back into town and I feel so bad for them sometimes because they always look so tired!  You might pass a woman and her children, collecting lena to carry back on their backs.  It amazes me how much firewood these women and children can carry.  It’s not uncommon to see women in traje carrying their babies on their backs too, or even seeing the younger kids carrying the baby on their back while the mom is busy or has another kid on her back.  Not many people are in the street, but the people you do see will always greet you with “Buenos dias” or “adios” and you should greet them as well, or else you might be seen as the angry gringa. The occasional chucho  with one eye will be curled up on the corner and women walk by carrying tubs on their head with laundry in it, stuff from the market, or who knows what else.  They can even have conversations with each other while balancing these huge tubs on their head.  In the afternoon, you’ll see kids walking home from school.  If it’s market day, the plaza in front of the muni will be full of people selling fruits, veggies, laundry detergent, sugar, fish, chicken, eggs, and other random things like pots and CDs.

It’s been hot during the day lately and sunny, so people are usually talking about the abnormal weather, how it needs to rain because they just planted this year’s corn, or their kids.

Friday, April 29

Wow! I’ve got a lot to write about.

Things are going pretty well in Santa Maria, slow as usual, but there is nothing wrong with that! It’s learning to adjust to the pace of things that is really hard.

I am still working on designing an environmental education program for the schools, but the more I research the more I find out I have to do and the more complicated it gets.  I am using a book that I found online and that was free to download by Judy Braus called Environmental Education in the Schools: Creating a Program That Works!  It’s a book developed specifically for Peace Corps volunteers working with environmental education.  It’s a very helpful starting point considering I’ve never taken any education classes and brought up some good points that I didn’t think about.  For example, I should have done a more in depth study of the school system and schools here before I started.  Next week though, I hope to start observing classes and interviewing teachers and students to find out more about the strengths and weaknesses of the school system here.

My site mate and I are planning on starting English classes next week as well since we have both been asked by various people to continue the English classes that were given by the previous volunteers.  My fellow trainees are all going at different paces- some have to work on the weekends, have multiple counterparts, or came into a project already in place so they have a lot more work, and some are like me where we’re still trying to figure out where to start.

One of the biggest problems about development that I’ve learned about since I’ve been here is the attitude of dependence.  This is not just a problem in Guatemala, but in countries all over the world.  There are so many organizations, non-governmental and governmental, that just give the communities things like a landfill, or water filters and then they don’t train people on how to use them or care for them that people just become used to hand-outs.  Behavior change is definitely one of the biggest obstacles I’ve come up against so far.

Other than learning more about environmental education, though, I’ve been going to several meetings this week.  The one yesterday was in Sololá with all the Peace Corps in the department and it was an update from the Country Director and head of security about safety issues in Guatemala.  Since rainy season has started (and oh yes, has it started) and we are in an area very prone to landslides, they warned us about any transportation issues we may have.  The bad thing is that after Hurricane Agatha last year, they still haven’t repaired some of the roads or they did a sloppy job repairing them, and now rainy season has started so that makes them even more dangerous.  But we do have an emergency action plan, so no worries!  It is also election year, so they made us very aware of any violence that may occur (I am so glad Santa Maria is such a peaceful little place!).  Today (Thursday)  I went to a COMUDE meeting, or Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo, which is a meeting of all the leaders and representatives of the different communities of Santa Maria, members from the Muni, and members of the NGO’s that work in Santa Maria.  It was really long but nice to learn about all the projects that are going on in Santa Maria, the state of the different communities (at least one community does not have running water), and the different organizations that are working here.  There are various organizations here that work with nutrition and especially with little kids since Guatemala has such a high rate of malnutrition.

One thing that is crucial to doing any kind of project in Guatemala is developing confianza with your community.  Confianza is basically a trusting relationship where people feel comfortable coming up to you and talking to you about the communities problems and are open to listening to your ideas.  I’ve been debating back and forth about whether to take Kiche or Tz’utujil classes for a while now and a woman I met brought up a good point- some people in the community only speak Tz’utujil and it is harder to gain confianza with them when you only speak Spanish, or for many people Spanish is also their second language.  So I think that is the deciding factor that made me want to take Tz’utujil, now the hard part is finding a teacher that meets Peace Corps requirements.  The fact that I’m a foreigner already makes some people wary of me, so it would help if I at least knew some phrases in the official language of Santa Maria.  I was walking with my host mom to Santa Clara and these little girls were staring at me and she jokingly said to them that I was going to steal them, which is a fear that many Guatemalans have- that foreigners have come to kidnap their children.

An attitude that many people have here, and that they preached in the church, is fatalism.  Things happen because God wanted them to, and we are in these circumstances because it’s part of His plan and there’s nothing we can do about it.  It’s hard for me to understand because it inhibits people from taking action, but I think it also helps people believing that things are going to be taken care of by God.

Anyways, Semana Santa!  That was a fun week.  Work was so slow, the office didn’t even open on Wednesday.  We had vacation Thursday and Friday, and on Wednesday night two of my friends, Ben and Brandon, came to visit.  On Thursday and Friday we went to the lake, but it started raining Thursday and Friday as well.  We came back and went to Justo’s town, Santa Clara, where they have the famous toronjeada every year.  Basically there’s two teams of guys, each with about 20 on each team, and the town provides each team with easily over 200 unripe oranges (so they are almost green).  They get in the big town square and just throw oranges at each other for about an hour.  It was so much fun!  It rained the whole time, and Ben, Brandon, and Justo all participated in the battle.  It’s pretty brutal cause oranges hurt! It was fun though because the whole community came out to watch, and I got soaked!

Email from Rosemary

Hey mom and dad!...

Over the weekend I went to visit my other host family, which went really well, and then on Monday it was a holiday here (World Work Day or something) and so I just cleaned my house, studied Spanish, and finished reading Help [The Help?], which another volunteer lent me.  It was so good!  

Today was an eye opening day.  I went with my counterpart and volunteers from another organization to do a survey in the poorest communities of Santa Maria about their attitudes towards the forest. It was crazy to hear how much these families lived on per month- one family of five lived on less than $118 per month.  None of them made more then they spent either, so most of the families were in debt. One of the woman interviewed is really active in the womans group here so we decided to work on a project  to help out.  She said the main problems with receiving outside help is that people just come and train them and dont give them any help to get started or train them in things that arent useful or they just give them gifts without training.  

Love,
Rosemary

Third Week in Site

This past week has been really fun!  I participated in a sewing workshop with some of the women in town, which was really fun.  We learned how to use sewing machines that work by using a pedal instead of electricity.  The first day was spent just learning how to use the pedal since all the machines were new and the pedals were really stiff.  It was really funny because all of us were huffing and puffing trying to get the machines going!  The muni bought about 10 machines for the women to use so that they may be able to earn some extra income or make clothes for their family.  We never actually sewed anything- just worked on making lines and curves and everything and then next month the trainer will come back for another week.  The trainer was really nice and interesting to talk to.  She’s with an organization that sends her out to give workshops about all kinds of stuff- sewing, crochet, knitting, baking, etc.  I made peanut butter cookies one day for snack for everyone and was asked to teach them how to bake, so hopefully that can be something I can do.  Also recycled art is really big here, so I might see if the women would be interested in learning how to make bracelets and purses out of chip bags and things like that to sell in the market.  The only downside is that there are no tourists here and I don’t think any locals would buy them so they would have to sell the goods in a more touristy town.   

Besides doing the sewing taller (workshop), I worked some more on my presentation and then on Friday went to Panajachel, which is a really touristy town on the lake, for an eco-festival put on by an NGO called Pura Vida.  They are the ones who invented the eco-ladrillo and bottle constructions and they work a lot with solid waste management around the lake.  At the festival they had all kinds of eco-friendly goods for sale and lots of info about composting and vermiculture.  I learned a lot more about worms so I think soon I may go visit a vermiculture specialist in Chimaltenango to see how he does it.  I went with Justo, who is another volunteer who lives in Santa Clara, the town right next to me.  It was really fun to get out of town and go see the Lake, which was beautiful even though there are so many hippies and tourists everywhere there!  It made me miss the beach a lot.   

I finally started cooking for myself, which is really nice.  Tonight I made dobladas, which are like empanadas, with fried plantains.  It was really yummy!!  Now I just have a lot of dishes to do.  I’m finding it’s really hard to find time to do everything I need to do!  Laundry takes at least two hours to do, and there’s lots of dust everywhere so I have to sweep a lot.  There are also tons of cobwebs in my house so tomorrow I’m going to try to do some spring cleaning and try to mold proof my casita before rainy season kicks in.  There’s already a little bit of mold creeping up some of the walls, so if anyone knows how to get rid of mold just let me know!  Peace Corps has made me so domestic!  I’ve been sewing and baking and washing clothes and cleaning a lot this past week.  And I’m working on turning a dress I found at a PACA into an apron.  I found a free podcast with snippets of Ricky Gervais’ comedy bits which are really funny, and I like listening to those at night when I’m cooking or having a coffee or something like that.  Even though I’m in Guatemala and the coffee here is SO good and is exported all over the world, I drink instant because the good stuff is too strong for me!  Lots of people in the campo, or rural areas, drink café con cereales, which is kind of like a really weak, watery coffee with barley and other grains in it.  I’m not a big fan.   

This week is the beginning of the Semana Santa, so the town is getting prepared for the celebration at the end of the week.  We have Thursday and Friday off, and on Friday in the town square the Catholic Church is building a couple platforms for the dramatization they are going to perform on Friday.  In Santa Clara, they do something called the toronjeada, which is where a bunch of people, some who are drunk, just throw oranges at each other.  That’s one of the major reasons why there has been a rise in the evangelical church here.  It’s about 50% evangelical and 50% Catholic.  A lot of people are evangelical because they think the Catholic Church is too loose with its rules- it allows people to drink, for example.  The Evangelical Church doesn’t, and so that’s why some people prefer that faith- it’s a lot stricter.  The family I live with is evangelical, and they are very, very religious.  They go to culto, or church service, every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday for at least two hours.  

 I apologize for all the grammar and spelling mistakes in my blogs, by the way.  It’s pretty much just a stream of words running from my brain to the page so that may be why I’m getting worse at spelling and grammar.   

Lately the shower has seemed colder than usual- I woke up on Saturday morning to take a shower, and it was so cold I could see my breath!  It definitely woke me up though and makes me take shorter showers.  Plus, when you get out, the air around you feels  a lot warmer than it did before you took a shower so that’s another plus. 

Sewing Class

I am also doing some sewing!  I started the sewing workshop on Monday and it was very funny.  The machines we're using are like electric ones except they are powered by a pedal instead of electricity.  It was really hard to get the machines going because they were new and the pedals were really stiff so we were all sweating and our legs got tired.  But it was fun! 

Its been hard to get a lot of work done lately since the schools have been on strike since the beginning of last week and all the teachers are in Guatemala city.

(from an email sent by Rosemary...) 

Second Week at Site

My mind is always thinking about trash now since that’s my main job, trash management education.  Being somewhere that doesn’t have a management system in place makes you really really think about how much trash you produce and how bad it exactly is for our environment.  It makes you think more about packaging, plastic bags, and everything.  I am trying to get a hold of some red wrigglers so I can try vermiculture in my casita and have a little compost and with the stuff I can’t compost make eco-bricks.  They are a really cool way to use trash in a good way and not burn it or throw it in the campo.  Basically you take a plastic soda bottle that still has a lid, and stuff it with trash like chip bags, plastics, and other inorganic trash so that it is really solid.  You can end up fitting a lot of stuff in one soda bottle!  Then once you have enough, you can use them to build different structures like schools, latrines, and recycling centers.  Several other Peace Corps volunteers have done projects like this and it has turned out really successful!  I know it may sound kind of crazy, but it’s a way to manage trash when there are no landfills or a trash pickup service. 

On Wednesday I went for a hike with several of the guys I work with to the site where the landfill and recycling center is going to be.  It is so beautiful out in the rural area!  There are HUGE avocado trees that grow in the wild and look like they would be great climbing trees.  It was fun going with those guys because they are all really funny- David and Hugo, who work in the Planning office, both were wearing dress pants and nice shoes, and then Elmer and Don Bernabe always dress like vaqueros, or cowboys, with HUGE belt buckles and really pointy boots.  Don Bernabe even had on his sombrero.  Bernabe is really religious and asked me how to say a lot of things in English while Elmer filled me in on where the best places to buy good quality boots are. 

I also made oatmeal-chocolate cookies in my toaster oven for my host-brother’s birthday on Thursday!  It was so nice to have my room smell like cookies and be all warm and toasty.  Even though I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I used fake M&Ms instead of regular chocolate chips and put in honey instead of brown sugar, they still turned out pretty tasty!  I’m looking forward to making another batch this weekend for my co-workers with the leftover ingredients.  The nice thing about here is that you can buy eggs one by one, so you don’t have to buy a whole dozen at once.  You can do the same with sticks of margarine, pounds of flour, even cinnamon!  On Thursday I gave my first charla here to 16 year olds at La Salle, a private school run by brothers.  Apparently there are schools like La Salle all over the world, even in the United States.  They were founded by a rich French guy or something like that.  I will look it up first before I try to explain it more.  Anyways, my charla was over organic compost, and their assignment is to make little composts in 3 liter bottles that they find.  Hopefully it works!  It was really fun and the kids paid attention most of the time.

I have slowly but surely tried to wean myself off of pan dulce and am now down to 1 a day.  I’ve started eating mangos a lot though- you can buy bags of mango slices in the street for 1 quetzal and so that’s usually my before lunch snack.  Hopefully I will get a cutting board and knife this weekend so I can just start buying mangos and make my own mango slices so I don’t use as many bags.  But it’s really refreshing!  And sometimes there are these weird spices on them- like a mixture of salt and something called pepita and it tastes really good.  My stomach has been hurting lately from eating too many beans and tortillas.  I think they’re both kind of hard to digest in large quantities, and my host mom doesn’t put garlic or anything in the beans to make them smoother, so I’m excited to start cooking for myself next week!  Since it is mango season, mango chicken is first on my list to make.  I ate my first pollocriollo yesterday.  This is what I understood: Pollocriollo is basically chicken you raise yourself at home.  It’s fed corn, tortillas, and other kitchen scraps while the chicken she usually buys is fed something like a Purina mix for chickens.  We had a rooster for a while and then my host mom killed it for her son’s birthday and made a stew with it.  It was really good but I’ll be honest- couldn’t really tell a huge difference between pollocriollo and the pollo that she usually buys from the meat lady. Some people here though only eat pollocriollo and it’s something that people eat on holidays or celebration days.

Earlier on this week I met with the CTA, who is kind of like the school superintendent for Santa Maria, and talked to him about going to the schools and doing educational programs for them.  He said that was a good idea and that I should come up with a plan and a curriculum to present to the principals at their next meeting in May.  I’m really excited to come up with a curriculum about waste management but it’s a daunting task at the same time!  I really want whatever I do to be sustainable, so I would love to leave behind a curriculum the teachers could continue teaching.  So that’s what I’m working on now as well as trying to get together English classes again.  The volunteer before me taught English and I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and ask me to start the classes again because everyone wants to go to the States.  I probably won’t start them until after Semana Santa, which is the week before Easter.  Next week I’m going to attend a sewing workshop with the women’s group here to get to know the women better.  The only problem is, they usually all speak Tz’utujil.  I went to their meeting on Monday, and it was all in Tz’utujil.  Very confusing. 

First week at site

This week has been very busy but very interesting!  I’m getting to know my community little by little, which helps a lot.  On Monday, I helped paint some trash barrels to put in the schools and got to know my counterpart a little better.  It’s very difficult because we have to remember that our views are seen as the views of the Peace Corps as well, and so when people ask us difficult questions we should defer them.  For example, my counterpart was asking me what I thought of Barack Obama, immigration in the United States, and drugs.  It was very hard not to state my opinions, but I got to know Elmer more and he’s a pretty funny guy.  He’s never at the office, which is sometimes hard, but at the same time makes it easy for me to make my own schedule.  There’s another guy who works in the same office, Santiago, with CONAP.  He’s only here on Mondays and Fridays to deal with land issues and then the rest of the week he walks the forests, looking for people who are illegally taking plants and animals.  The law here is for every tree you cut down, you have to plant 10 more.  It’s a good law, but hard to enforce!  Santiago is awesome- he seems like a pretty tough guy on the outside, but on the inside he’s a funny marimba loving family guy.   

On Tuesday, I went with Grace, another volunteer in my site who’s working with health in the schools, to some schools in the more rural areas of Santa Maria.  We had to go in picop, or pick up, and ride in the back holding on for dear life.  I thought chicken buses were crazy, but that was before I rode in a pickup!  The roads are in terrible condition too- I definitely won’t be going on those roads during rainy season.  We went out to a Kiche only speaking community and went to the school there where she did an activity with the kids in Spanish and the teachers translated that to Kiche for the kids.  It was a fun morning and then we went to the market in Santa Clara, our sister town, where the market is bustling on Tuesdays and Saturdays.  I’m starting to slowly gather stuff for my house and hopefully this weekend I’ll get a toaster oven.   

That afternoon I went to a meeting with my counterpart (for three hours!) and got a better idea of what the muni is trying to do in terms of the environment.  They are currently building a landfill and recycling collection center so that they can start doing a trash pickup and have placed bins in the schools to separate trash into inorganic and organic.  I volunteered myself for something at the health post here just to get to know the community without actually knowing what I was volunteering for.  I was surprised to find out it was a gynecology clinic where they were giving PAP smears!  It turned out to be really fun though.  I worked with Santiago all day there, taking down the names and information of the women who did the exam and Santiago translated from Kiche to Spanish for me.  It was a challenge writing down all the names of the indigenous women!  For example, some last names I had to spell were Tox, Itaix, Tzaj, Chavajay, etc.  And I’m pretty sure I even spelled those wrong, but what made it even harder was that some of the women didn’t know how to write so they couldn’t tell me if I was spelling it right or not.  Santiago helped a lot though, and I got to know the nurses and some ladies from the Women’s Office in the muni.   

Today (Friday), I want to talk to my counterpart.  I will have to get him to give me a copy of his schedule so I know when he is going to be in the office and when he isn’t.  From what I have gathered so far, most of the time it will be me taking the initiative to introduce myself to the schools and other people I will be working with and developing my own projects, and then running it by Elmer to make sure I have his support. 

Things with my host family are a little awkward - the mom sells Avon products, and so she wants me to buy some of her things.  Who knew that Avon now sells kitchenware and sheets!  The excuse that I don’t have a lot of money doesn’t work because to her, I have a lot and I am looking to buy things like pots and silverware.  I just can’t afford Avon brand pots!  So that’s been kind of difficult, but other than that things have been fine.  I talked to the other volunteer who lived there about it and she said that that’s just how the situation is, that instead of integrating into the family like I did in Ciudad Vieja, here it is more of a renter-landlord relationship.  I came back and the grandmother is raising turkeys now to sell and there’s a cute kitten who always tries to get in my house.  My addiction to pan dulce is now very serious.  One day I didn’t have it and I was craving some sweet bread so bad!  I have had to limit myself to two a day.  I am still eating with the family, but that has turned into them serving me in the living room and then they stay in the kitchen.  I think after this month I will start cooking for myself so I can try to have a more balanced diet, or at least just eat more dairy because now that’s pretty non-existent in my diet.  I’ve been getting used to powder milk though because I can’t drink the raw milk that people sell.