Swear in

Busy, busy week!  But the most important thing is: I’m now an official Peace Corps Volunteer!  

We swore in on Friday at the ambassador’s house in Guatemala city in front of our host families and the other current volunteers (around 400 people!).  It was also the celebration of Peace Corps 50^th anniversary, so there were lots of speeches, anecdotes, and recognitions of current volunteers who are leaving soon.  We made the front page of the national newspaper, Prensa Libre, the next day!  

I went home with my host mom after the ceremony to eat my last meal with the family and pack my stuff up.  It was very sad leaving them, mainly because Chiqui and Hugo are moving to Spain in a couple of weeks and I probably won’t see them again anytime soon.  

I checked into a hostel in Antigua with the rest of my ecotourism group (it was a challenge getting all my stuff on the chicken bus- but everything got to my site safely!).  We stayed in Antigua that weekend to celebrate and just to relax.  I didn’t really realize how tense I had been until I felt so free in Antigua!  During training, we have to follow strict rules and be in our houses before dark and were always getting training on all the dangerous things that could happen and all the sicknesses we can get, which I’m sure is so we know what’s out there, and that’s good.  It does make one tense, however!  It was nice to just walk around the park in Antigua, listen to live music, and hang out with good friends before we all left for our sites.  

On Sunday, I left Antigua for Santa Maria and arrived safely, but very tired, that afternoon.  Now it’s all a matter of getting my stuff settled and getting my new place arranged so that it feels more like home!

Site Visit

So much has happened in the past week!  On March 10^th I found out my site is going to be Santa Maria Visitacion, which is pretty near Lago Atitlan and I will be working principally with environmental education (mainly about solid waste management).  Then on Monday, the 14^th (Maria’s birthday!) we went to Santa Lucia to meet our counterparts, or the people who we will be working with in our communities.  My counterpart’s name is Elmer and he works in the Environmental Office in the Municipality.  He’s a really nice guy and hopefully it will be easy to work with him.  We spent the day in workshops with our counterparts, and unfortunately that day we also found out that Lily has to go home.  It was really sad because she’s such a lively, energetic person with lots of ideas but she was being sent home- we will miss you so much Lily!  Our group went from 17 and now we are just 14, so hopefully no more people will go home!  On Tuesday we went to Santa Lucia again for more workshops with our counterparts and then we went straight from the office to our sites with our counterparts.  Luckily I’m not all by myself in my site- there’s a town right next to me (like 5 or 10 minutes walking distance) where another volunteer, Justo, will be working, so I went with Justo and his counterpart and mine in a van to Santa Maria and Santa Clara, Justo’s site.  When I got to Santa Maria, it was like culture shock all over again!  Santa Maria is a small pueblo with about 3500 people, including people who live in the surrounding 4 communities.  It’s 98% indigenous and the people speak Tz’utujil and Kiche as well as Spanish.  I really want to learn at least conversational Kiche so that I can communicate better.   

I arrived and was dropped off at my new family’s house where they weren’t expecting me, so that was a shock in itself!  But it worked out fine because my room was already set to go.  My living situation is a lot different- I live in a family compound instead of inside the house with the family.  My little casita has a kitchen, a bedroom, and then outside there’s a small bathroom with a shower.  I worked out that I’m going to eat with the family the first month and then after that I will be cooking for myself.  Luckily since they had a volunteer before, there was already a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and a stove so I don’t have to buy any big items of furniture.  My new family is indigenous and there’s a mom, a dad, his parents, and two kids.  The grandpa and grandma are both very traditional- the abuela’s traje is beautiful and she always braids pretty silky ribbons into her long hair.  They even bathe in a traditional Mayan bath, which is kind of like a steamroom.  I definitely feel very safe and secure in my house and in the village (I can walk by myself to the municipality!) and Dona Isabel, my senora, is very helpful in showing me around town and where to buy things I need.  Sometimes, though, I wonder if she just wants to show me off!  She’s funny because she’ s very chismosa, or a gossip, so I have to be very careful what I say and who I’m with when she’s around, but she and her husband are both curious and helpful people.  The kids are still too shy to talk to me, but hopefully that will change!  They have two horses which the husband and his dad use to bring lena back from the campo to cook with.  It’s very quiet and the air just feels a lot cleaner than Ciudad Vieja.  It’s pretty cold though, so I will have to get used to that!

So that’s my living situation.  My work situation is a lot different.  The moment has finally hit me where I’m like “okay, I’ve made it here, made it through the application process and training, now where do I start?”  It’s one thing to hear your job description on paper, but then to actually see what the people expect of you is a lot different.  It’s also hard to explain why I’m there because to a lot of people, they don’t understand why I would want to come here when they want to go to the United States.  I just don’t want to end up working in the municipality from 8-5!  But it’s funny how things work- when I was in Antigua today, wondering how I was going to start going and getting to know the community, two girls came up to me and asked me if I was in Santa Maria that week.  It turns out they used to work there and saw me that week and they gave me the contact of a woman in the community who’s really active and could help me out a lot.  So I have a place to start!  And I’m glad it’s a woman- gender roles are very defined in Santa Maria and I would really like to work with women’s groups as well.  In training, one of the nurses quoted a former volunteer as saying that Peace Corps was kind of like “being comfortable with feeling lost”.  That’s kind of how I’m feeling right now, how I think everyone is feeling right now!

Anyways, so on Wednesday I went to meet my counterpart at the muni around 8 but then after waiting around for a while I found out that he wasn’t going to be able to come that day and that another person was going to show me around.  So David, a guy from the City Planning office took me to a couple schools to introduce me to some of the teachers and kids.  I saw a lot of the country side that day because we went to one of the communities that was more rural.  Apparently deeper in the forest there are spider monkeys!  Hopefully I will get to go some day.  Then on Thursday I went to the muni again at 8, waited for my counterpart until about 11 (that’s the hora chapina- expect people to show up 2 hours later then you plan on meeting) and then got introduced to the mayor and the council, which was really nervewracking cause I wasn’t expecting to meet them that day!  My counterpart teaches an agroforestry class every day at 2, so I went with him to the school to work with the kids.  It was fun because I was with the girls, who were about 15 years old and were really funny.  We got to use machetes and dig up some plants to transplant them!  On Friday I showed up at the muni again to meet my counterpart but then found out that he wasn’t going to be able to show up so he said just to work in the muni that day.  So I talked to various people that day, read up on the situation of the environment around Santa Maria and what the other volunteer worked with and then went home around 5.  In my host community I’m known as “Rosita”.  That night I went around with my host mom to visit her Avon customers and collect money.  Selling Avon, Tupperware, and Mary Kay is very popular here!

Well that's enough of my ramblings for now!  Moral of the story:  I love Santa Maria and I'm really excited about living there!

Site placement!

So here I am, sitting in the peace corps office, waiting to get my site placement!  We had to wait all morning and were supposed to find out at 1, but now we won't find out until 2!  I can't remember ever being this nervous!

PACA, meat, and The Vagina Monologues

PACA:  These are the clothing stores here that you see on every corner in Ciudad Vieja.  IF you need shoes, a bag, a jacket, whatever kind of clothing, even a onesie, you could find it at a paca if you looked hard enough!  The clothes seemed to be used clothes donated from the United States because you can find a lot of nice brands there, like Express and Limited for the equivalent of $3.  You have to bargain a lot though and never buy at the price they give you!  People who own Pacas go to the capital and get big boxes of clothes and then sell the clothes in their stores or homes.  I went into one paca and there were UNC basketball shorts, a Topsail Island track suit, and a Myrtle Beach bag!  It was weird!  I saw a Guatemalan walking down the street wearing a UNCG sweatshirt.  Maybe he went to UNCG, but it was still weird seeing someone countries away wearing clothes from home!  You can find some awesome clothes though that works for a Peace Corps budget!

Meat:  My group in Ciudad Vieja gets into lots of discussions about food because we cook together on weekends sometimes and there is a vegetarian in the group, so we mainly talk about meat.  I am kind of becoming obsessed with knowing where my food comes from, and the good thing about Guatemala is that it’s really easy to find out that information.  My host mom here gets here chicken from a lady who raises chickens in her house, slaughters them herself, and then sells the meat that day.  The pork we eat is fed Purina pig feed and has a happy life, living in a senoras back yard getting bathed twice a day until it is sent to the butchers.  We don’t eat beef very much at all, I think mainly for the reason that people don’t raise it around here.  It’s really nice to know that much about where your food comes from!  It’s nice having a farmer’s market every day on fourth street and not having to wait until a certain day to buy veggies and hope they last the whole week or something like that.  You still do have to clean the produce extra well (even soak it in water with chlorine if you are going to eat it raw) and I’m sure it’s not all organic or anything like that,  but it’s definitely nice knowing more about food and where it comes from.

The Vagina Monologues:  This was such an interesting experience!  Today I saw a bilingual version of the Vagina Monologues put on in Antigua by members of the Peace Corps and Guatemalans.  It was really empowering seeing Guatemalan women in traditional clothes expressing themselves in such a bold way in a country in which women’s opinions are rarely heard.  The proceeds went to an organization here that supports women’s and girl’s clubs in rural areas here. 

Field Based Training and the following week

Here’s a little bit about what we did each day for field based training:

Sunday, February 13

We got picked up in our towns and rode to Totonicapan, where we went on a cultural walking tour.  We got to visit several artisans in their workshops and talk to them about their work.  We went to a ceramics place, a wood working place, and textiles place.  The textiles place was amazing because they had these huge wooden machines and they made all the patterns by hand and had to count thousands of strings- it seemed very difficult but the artist could do it while talking to us! 

Monday, February 14

We spent the night in cabins at a beautiful but cold ecological park called El Aprisco, which was a huge pine forest.  This day was really fun because we were in pairs and each pair had a station to present along the trail.  A group from the local school came and visited each station and we taught them about the environment and at the end they cut out hearts and wrote Valentine’s Day poems on them to give to their parents along with a seedling.  It was really neat because when we asked the kids if they knew how to plant the trees that we were giving them, they all said yes because the city had done a reforestation project with them.  The kids were so cute and so tiny even though they were 10-13 years old and a lot of the girls were wearing traje tipica, which is the traditional Mayan way of dressing.

Tuesday, February 15

So we got up this morning, ate breakfast, and then found out the place we were going to go to was inaccessible because protesters were blocking all the roads.  They told us the protest was supposed to be over around 2, so we stayed in El Aprisco to learn how to use several tools (even sharpen a machete!) and then we helped start a new trail.  We got in the vans to then go to Nueva Alianza near the coast, which is where a coffee and macadamia farm is located.  We were stopped by the road block though, which was still going on and wasn’t going to stop until the following day.  It was very ironic- the protesters were protesting road blocks!  We had to change our plans and get a hotel for the night, which was fine because it was very warm where we were and a nice change from being bundled up!

Wednesday, February 16

We woke up and traveled to Corazon del Bosque which is in Solola.  Corazon del Bosque is another small park, and it was also very cold when we were there!  We stayed in cabins though and this time the bathrooms were inside the cabin too so that was nice.  This was probably the most boring day, with a lot of it being charla based.  There were various volunteers with our group, and they would give us a charla, or talk/lesson, on topics like Emergency Plans, Aveturismo (bird tourism), and Interpretive writing.  It was probably the hardest day, basically because we didn’t do many hands on activities and we were missing out on the warm weather and café/macademia farm tour.

Thursday, February  17

We woke up early this morning to go birdwatching in the park.  It was so neat- we saw a rose headed warbler (I think that’s what it’s called in English) and some people even saw a quetzalillo, which is similar to the quetzal but has a smaller tail and is more common.  We had more charlas today but a fun game of ultimate Frisbee at the end.  It’s always nice to have a hackysack or Frisbee on hand!

Friday, February 18

We left this morning to go to a park near Lago Atitlan called Chiuraxamolo.  The park was awesome with a zipline and a cool interpretive trail.  We got to walk the trail and see a couple Mayan altars, and then after lunch we went on the zipline and helped maintain the trail.  The zipline was awesome except that we were told afterwards that it hadn’t been mainatained in 9 years!  The volunteer who works there has had a hard time getting the park to cooperate with him and motivate them to work.  Since it’s a municipal park, the mayor appoints his friends to be guards (whether they enjoy being at the park or not) and they get to slack off.  It’s really hard to train them too because when the next mayor gets elected, he just replaces all the old guards with people from the new party in office.  The muni doesn’t want to pay for maintenance of the zipline or safety training either.  Things get very ugly when politics are involved!

Saturday, February 19

This last day we finally went down to Santa Catarina, a pueblo right on Lago Atitlan.  The lake is so beautiful but knowing that it is so contaminated hurts!  It was even recommended to a volunteer near the lake that he shower with purified water.  Despite all the bad news though, we had fun eating a huge barbecue lunch and then headed back to our sites.

So, that was field based training!  I was so worn out after that I slept a lot on Sunday and this week we’ve been working on our project for Ciudad Vieja.  It’s been very exciting to actually be putting into practice the things that we’ve been learning.  We are trying to put together a walking tour/brochure with a map that has the location of different workshops of artisans here in Ciudad Vieja.  That way the tourist can visit various workshops and get to see how things are made by hand and then perhaps buy something if they want to from the artisans.  So last Thursday and Friday we walked around the city with a couple of people from the muni and visited several talleres.  We saw some awesome carpenters and a guy who worked with metal, and some women who made typical sweets.  Most of the people were really friendly and showed us how they make everything and welcomed us into their workshops.  We even got serenaded by this really cool guy who taught guitar lessons as well as carve wooden statues.

Email from Rosemary

Hello!

...I survived Field Based Training, even though it was freezing! There is a lot of anticipation now about where we will be placed because all the Altaverapaz sites are off limits and most of us will be placed in colder sites now so I am trying to find good clothes just in case! We had a lot of fun though, doing environmental education, building a trail, hiking (up to 9000 ft!), seeing Lago Atitlan, and more! I am still writing a blog enty so hopefully that will be up soon. My sinuses were really bothering me though by the end of the week so I just slept a lot over the weekend. So far my group has been pretty healthy except for some bacterial infections. We've gotten really comfortable with each other which is nice. Yesterday it was back to business though and we worked with the municipality some more of Ciudad Vieja. I have to go back to training though but hopefully I can talk to you all tonight!!

Love,

Rosie

Email from Rosemary

Hello!

I hope everything is going okay at home. I figured out I can call the United States for free with google, but I cannot find anywhere that has a working microphone so hopefully I will be able to use Wifi somewhere in Antigua this afternoon.

If I cant get in touch with you all by tomorrow, I just wanted to let you know that I will be out of touch starting tomorrow until next Sunday. We are going on Field Based Training and my group plus a couple volunteers and Spanish professors will be traveling to different sites in the highlands and near Lago Atitlan. We will be listening to lots of charlas, giving environmental education lessons, doing trail maintenance, and a lot more! I will try to upload photos today too. This week has been packed again and Im very excited to get a break from classes!

Yesterday our new Spanish teacher, Maria de Jesus, gave us a cooking lesson on how to cook tamalitos and platanos. Hopefully I will get to talk to you sometime today!

Love,

Rosemary