Community Visits for Work

So a large part of the work at La Fraternidad is visiting communities and giving lessons on various topics to the women there. La Fraternidad is the organization I work for, and they give micro loans to indigenous women for various projects. So the all the women of any given group all work on the same project. (I´m still not exactly sure how the groups are formed, but all the women of one group live in the same community). So some of the micro loans are for projects like growing potatoes, raising chickens, cows, or pigs, artisan projects (this ranges from making the tradition shirts, huipils, to weaving, to making bags). So when they get this loan they also agree to attend several meetings, which is where my work comes in. There are three education programs within La Fraternidad for the women who receive loans. One is agronomy, where they learn about organic methods of getting rid of worms in potatoes, treating their cows´ parasites, etc. Then there is the health and nutrition program, which is pretty self explanatory. And I work mainly with the pastoral de la mujer (basically, women´s ministry) where we talk about environmental, self-esteem, and other issues from a Biblical perspective. So each of the coordinators of each of the programs goes out to the communities several times a year to give these “capacitaciones,” as they´re called.
I prefer the community visits to the days in the office, but we often have to travel an hour or more in some combination of buses, 15 passenger vans, and (when we can´t find a bus) the back of a pick-up (or, in Spanish, a “piccop”) that passes by.
I don´t really do much yet in the meetings, but I enjoy talking to the women when I can… a lot of them, especially in the Mam areas, only speak their indigenous language of either Mam or Quiché. A lot of them kinda understand Spanish, but can´t really speak it, and some of the older ones don´t speak or understand Spanish at all. This sometimes makes it difficult for the coordinators to give the lessons, because a lot of times the women don´t understand and someone in the group has to translate.
I´ve gotten pretty used to being in some pretty rural parts by now. For example, I always carry toilet paper with me wherever I go (that goes for in my own community too), and I´ve learned it´s better not to have expectations when it comes to bathrooms. I still haven´t gotten used to the atol that they often serve in more rural parts, though. Atol is the traditional drink made out of masa (dough made from corn). It´s usually hot, which is nice in the colder communities, but I can´t usually choke down more than half of it, especially because the second half is usually really thick and has lots of masa that has sunk to the bottom.
Other than the atol, though, I really like the community visits. One of my first visits, though, was really hard for me. It was in a Mam community and the house where we met had one room with the kitchen and 3 beds in it. The part of the yard right outside the room was covered, which is where we had our meeting, but there were two cows living about 20 feet away, so there was a certain smell that was less than pleasant. I felt so bad thinking this, but I felt dirty and I hoped that they didn´t feed us anything. But we ended up staying for lunch—black beans and boiled eggs with tamalitos—which was actually pretty tasty (except for the atol that they also served us). It ended up being fine, which made me feel even more horrible for thinking what I had, but it takes me some time to adjust to certain things.
I also learned during that community visit that not all houses even have a latrine. Before I came to Guatemala I just kinda assumed that bathrooms were an essential part of any house. Then I came here and I realized that my idea of a bathroom (i.e. with indoor plumbing) is really really unrealistic for much of the world. So I got used to latrines. But when I asked at this house if I could use the bathroom she told me they didn´t have one. So I asked if they had a latrine… no. So I ended up using the bathroom in the middle of the cornfield, where they all use the bathroom. It actually smelled a lot better than many of the latrines I´ve used.
I also learned that that community doesn´t have water, another thing I assumed was an essential part of a home. Well, I knew that there are many people who don´t have water, and I knew that many parts of Guatemala were suffering because there wasn´t much rain during the rainy season, but I had never before put faces with this unimaginable problem. Each morning the women of this community get up at 4 a.m. to walk 30 minutes to some water source (I think it may have been a public faucet or something) and walked back carrying their water for the day in jars on their heads. By 7 a.m. each day the water at that source has run out. There are many other parts of the country, though, that don´t even have this much water. Their crops haven´t grown, so they have nothing to eat or drink, and a lot of the men from these communities are heading north to try to find work, hopefully before the kids start dying. And then when they get to the US they have to hide every day and work 2 or 3 jobs living with lots of other people in the same boat in a small apartment far away from their families while our government tries to find them to send them back and many US citizens gripe about them using our tax dollars and expect them to know English.

Weddings!

I feel like I should dedicate at least one post to my experiences of the weddings (“bodas”) here. I have already been to two- one in my second weekend here and the other on Halloween. Both were similar in a lot of ways… both had an extremely long “culto” (church service), complete with at least 30 minutes of straight praise music in each. The difference between the two music sets in the different bodas, though, was that in the second one the people who sang were actually the praise band for the church, so I assume there was some selection process based on musical talent in order to be a part of the group. In the first wedding, though, the people who sang were the maids of honor and groomsmen, whom I’m assuming were chosen for the part because of their personalities and not their singing abilities.

The first wedding I went to was here in the town where I live and the bride was the daughter of a cousin of my host mother. Since my family was so closely related to the bride, we went on Saturday to her family´s house to help cook multiple meals with every other female relative. When I say “we” I mean my mom… I just sat by the fire and tried to stay out of the way while distantly related children brought me flowers and asked me questions like how I changed my skin color from brown to white, what kind of shoes to people wear in my country, etc.

While I was sitting, there were at least 25 women cooking lots of different things in huge pots over the fires in the outdoor kitchen. They didn´t even seem to talk about what they were doing—somebody would just show up and start working. Finally, though, after the corn had been made into masa I could help make the tamalitos. Masa is the dough that is made from corn and then made into tortillas or tamalitos (masa put into corn husks and boiled). While we were making the tamalitos- my mom, me, and another older relative- I couldn´t talk, because the older woman didn´t speak Spanish… only Quiché. So I just kept stuffing masa into the corn husks while they talked. Sometimes, though, I´m relieved when people talk in Quiché because I can turn my brain off.

Then at about 6 p.m., before dinner, the groom´s family arrived to the house with five HUGE baskets of food and gifts for the bride´s family. The mother of the bride invited me to come into the room with her where they received the baskets so I could see what it´s like. There were pine needles all over the floor and the “guides” (an elder of the community that helps the family during weddings or other big ceremonies) from each family talked a lot in Quiché. I of course couldn´t understand what they were saying, but I think it was essentially an agreement between the two families--something more for tradition´s sake more than anything I think. I say that because I found out later that the bride had already been living with the boyfriend in his family´s house for 6 months and she was, at the time of the wedding, 5 months pregnant. This is called “robbing” or “stealing” the girl. A girl will go missing for a couple of days, and when her family is finally at wit´s end they call the boyfriend and he says that she´s now living with him. I asked my mom how this was possible considering that the boyfriends all still live with their families, and she said that a lot of times the boy´s parents know and approve, or sometimes the girl just sneaks around for a couple of days “until it´s too late,” because once she´s spent the night there, that´s it. Time to plan a wedding. Did I mention that they are 15 years old?

So after the basket giving the groom´s family left and all the people still at the bride´s house at dinner together. We left soon after dinner and returned the next morning, on Sunday, at 7:30, but we had already missed the wedding party leaving to go to what´s essentially the city hall to do the civil part of their marriage. But when the whole wedding party returned at about 10 a.m. to the bride´s house all their wedding gifts had been set out in the patio-a stove, a huge armoire and some other china cabinet type thing, along with all kinds of baskets and buckets and pots and dishes.

After that we went to the house of the groom´s family, where they both live now, for the church service (normally this part is in a church). Did I mention that the culto was extremely long… like two and a half hours??? Oh and it was really hot… oh, and I was wearing traditional traje, which is really heavy and hot. This was the first time I had worn it… my sisters and mom lent me the different parts to it… the skirt (called a corte), the shirt (a huipil) and the belt (a faja) you tie really tight around your waist to hold up the skirt.

After the ceremony, though, there was a delicious lunch of chicken and rice and vegetables. I sat across the table from the guide of the bride´s family, and he ate his whole chicken wing, sucking the meat of the bones at the end, with just one tooth in his head. No joke. On of the front ones on the bottom is all he had. I was impressed. After lunch we all sat outside and digested for about an hour before we went back in to eat bread and hot chocolate, the tradition here in my town instead of a cake. This is a good time to explain about the table and party manners here. First of all, it´s rude if you don´t suck all the meat off your bones, many people prefer to eat without silverware because “it tastes better,” and when you go to a party, everyone brings plastic bags to take home leftovers. And when there is bread laid out on the table like there was at this wedding, people just started shoving it into their bags. I´m used to it now, but this wedding was my first real “fiesta” experience in Guatemala, and I wasn´t quite sure what to do with myself.

Finally, the people who were left at the wedding (mostly just close family), all went into the bedroom of the couple. The couple sat there while the padrinos (kind of like godparents, but for special occasions like baptisms, confirmations, weddings, etc. and you might have different padrinos for each occasion) talked about marriage. He referred to domestic violence and talked a lot about respecting your parents, since they were to live with the parents of the groom. Then the madrino (the wife of the padrino couple) did this ceremonial thing of taking down the bride´s hair and putting an apron on her. Then the bride put an apron on her mother-in-law and everybody hugged and the bride said good-bye to her parents.

So that´s the (very long) description of how weddings basically work here. The other one I went to a week later was a little different…the groom was 24 and the bride was 19, but they were also pregnant, which is the way marriages work here a lot of the time (if not most of the time). This wedding, though, was in a different town where the tradition is to serve cake :)

The Big Move

We all said goodbye to each other and moved in with our new families on Monday October 12. I was really nervous the night before we left about so many things, and I felt really restless, so I decided to make a list, well 2 actually. One was "Things I am nervous/anxious about the day before I move in with my new family" and the other was "Things I am excited about the day before I move in with my new family." On the nervous list were things like the latrine, showering (we didn´t ever shower the week before and I knew there wasn´t a bathroom in my house, but I didn´t know how I was going to bathe), being cold, feeling awkward, being sick a lot, having too much stuff. On the other list, though, I discovered there were actually more things-- like bonding with my new family, new foods, speaking Spanish, learning their stories, learning to make tortillas, creating new stories together, etc.

So I was feeling better about things the day I moved in with my family, and now, not quite 3 weeks later, it seems funny that I was so nervous. My oldest sister´s 16th birthday is in a few days, and so her big Quincieñera is next weekend (They celebrate the birthday at the end of your year... so when we would celebrate a 16th bday, they celebrate the 15th). So the first day I was there I walked all over our pueblo and one other one nearby with my mom and youngest sister to invite various family members to the fiesta.

That night at dinner, when the older brother and sister had gotten home from school (younger kids go to school in the a.m. and older kids go to school from 1-6 p.m.) they gave me the "official welcome" and Miriam told me how happy they were to have me there and that if I ever need anything to please just ask her or if I don´t like a meal please tell her, etc. I have been really lucky that I´ve felt like I can tell her. Although I haven´t told her yet that I think I have bed bugs because she´s been so busy with the fiesta coming up that I don´t want her to worry about it and have to maybe go buy a new mattress in Xela. Besides, I sleep with so many clothes that usually the bugs can´t get to me... just my hands usually.

On my first Sunday there we went to the cemetary, because the 7 year anniversary of the father´s death was that week. So we went and bought flowers and hiked up this HUGE hill eating frozen coconut covered in chocolate, my sister carrying the flowers on her head, and hung out at the cemetary for a while with the grandparents too. (The paternal grandfather is no longer living, but the other three were there). My family in the states doesn´t really ever go to the cemetary, mostly I guess because we´ve been fortunate enough not to have any deaths in our close family, but I imagine it´s pretty different from here. Here the families had to clean the graves (i.e. pick out the weeds and stuff from the dirt, because they don´t let the grass grow over the dirt of the grave) and the kids are all running all over the mounds of dirt screaming and chasing each other. We also ate bananas and oranges (we´re always eating) and then we left and went to the market in the town where the cemetary is.

In the market I bought a really warm poncho for the cold and a pee bucket. That pee bucket is the best 5 quetzales (about 60 cents) I´ve ever spent. Now when I have to pee in the night (which is every night usually 2 a night) I just pee in my bucket in my room instead of going out of the house to the latrine in the freezing cold. Then in the morning I empty it out. This goes on the list of things I never expected to be excited about.

Intro to Mayan Spirituality

That last week of lang school we had classes from 8-1 (5 hours is a long time to speak Spanish one on one by the way), then we´d all 5 go to my house for lunch because it was closest and all our families were related anyway, and afterward we had an activity with the school in the afternoon. One day we attended a Mayan ceremony. I´m pretty sure it was arranged just for us, because we were teh only ones there, but maybe it was better that way. I´m still not sure exactly what it was for, but it started out with the 6 colors of candles that are really important to Mayan ceremonies. Red, yellow, white, and black are the colors of corn, and green and blue represent the Heart of the Land and the HEart of the Sky, respectively, which are the creative beings in their creation myth.

We each also got a bundle of candles of many different colors, each one representing something, but I don´t know what. First we each knelt by the fire she had built and she prayed over each of us in Quiché (most of the ceremony was done in Quiché). Then we all stood in a circle around the fire and she would talk in Quiché and sometimes throw sugar or liquor into the fire, and then we would each throw a certain color of candle in. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I understood more of what was going on... I also just didn´t really feel much during the ceremony-calmness, but no larger connection. I think that language is so powerful that maybe it´s hard even for me to feel connected to God without it. Everyone always says there are so many things that transcend language, and in many ways, with many things that is true. But there are also so many things that, at least for me, feel impossible without language.

Another day after school we went to these natural hot springs that are kinda near here. It was pretty touristy--there were several other groups of Europeans, but it was really nice to have a relaxing and self-indulgent afternoon after what had been kinda a challenging week in several ways (my brain was exhausted from the Spanish, I had heartburn from all the fried food, I ate pig three times in 1 week for the first time in probably 8 years, and did I mention the stinky latrine and the cold adn the scary dog?). It started raining while we were there so we got out and dried off and sat on the covered porch and drank hot chocolate. It was amazing. And it only costs 25 quetzales (which is like $3.50) or something.

I need to add here, because I realize what I´ve said so far about that last week is kinda negative, that it really wasn´t a bad week. I really really liked the family-they were very welcoming, they taught us how to throw tortillas (which is really hard haha), and Whitney and I really liked talking to the grandmother and the daughter-in-law, who told us about their lives growing up. Most of my journaling, though, focused on the hard things, because everything was really new and different and things that I´m now used to (i.e. latrines) were really challenging at first. But you can pretty much do anything for a week, and it wasn´t really as bad as I thought it was at first. I´ve just had to readjust my definition of what a "house" is. For example, before coming here, I just kinda assumed that all houses had a shower and bathroom. Not so. The transitioning is hard, though, sometimes.

Latrines, dogs, and COLD! OH MY!

For our last week of language school, Marcia wanted to make sure we all got a "rural experience" (I´m the only one who´s living in a very rural setting out of the 5 of us), so we had language school in a pueblo outside of Xela, which is actually where some relatives of my family live, but I didn´t know that at the time. Anyway, we were really lucky that only 3 families wanted to host some kids from the US, so the girls got to pair up for our homestays, which was really good for us. Whitney and I stayed together with a family of 7- a great-grandmother, a grandmother, her grown daughter and son, the sons wife and their 2 boys ages 7 years and 18 months. It was my first real experience with an indigenous family, and it was really interesting, because the great-grandmother doesn´t speak Spanish, only Quiché, and the boys only speak Spanish. Everyone else, though, spoke both, and of course they always spoke Spanish to us. However, when we would be in the kitchen eating or just sitting they usually spoke Quiché to each other so we had no idea what was going on.

They also had this dog that was really mean and we were terrified of it... The first day we went out into the street to play with the 7 year old (we weren´t being irresponsible that´s just where they play) and when it was time to go back in we told him we were scared of the dog, because it was in the driveway growling and guarding the house. So he handed us each a rock, and it took us about 15 seconds to realize that he meant that we should throw it at the dog. We were both shocked and started saying ¨no no no esta bien no no por favor¨when he threw a rock at the dog, but then the grandmother heard the commotion and came out, saw that we were still standing in the street and the dog was growling at us, and said "don´t worry" and hit it square between the eyes with this huge rock. The dog yelped, of course, and ran away, and the grandmother laughed and told us to come drink some coffee. This has been one of the really difficult things for me to get used to here... it´s not that the grandmother (who´s really just 56 we figured out) is mean, that´s just how they treat animals here. But I´m still not used to it.

It was also FREEZING at night... we slept in so many clothes, but here they drink lots of hot drinks, all of which they call café, so that´s one thing I´ve really gotten used to here-drinking lots of hot drinks with LOTS of sugar in them. The most common type of café is made from corn, as most things are, and it´s often served with sweet corn bread, called quesadillas, and it is a delicious pre-dinner custom. My family now also drinks this café almost every night that´s made out of the seeds of something, but I´m not sure what, but pretty much anything is good that is 2 parts sugar, 1 part other flavor, and hot.

However, after drinking all that hot drink I would always have to go to the bathroom in the night, which was really a bummer for several reasons. First, it was freezing and I never wanted to leave my bed. Second, the dog. Third, it was a latrine so it was outside the house so the dog and the cold were real obstacles to going to the bathroom in the night. The latrine also smelled horrible... like gag reflex horrible. I´m not really sure if it was the latrine itself or the pigs whose pen was right next to the latrine, but I hated using the bathroom there, especially in the middle of the night.

Visiting everyone´s sites

We left the Antigua region on October 1 and spent the next few days traveling to Xela and visiting everyone´s work sites and families. We first went to visit Willem´s site... he´s working on a coffee finca, at a school, and at the church his family attends. We spent a lot of the afternoon at the finca (after eating an amazing lunch with his family), which was really interesting. It´s owned by 3 siblings, one of whom is married to an American/French ex-pat, so he could explain more of the goings-on to us in English. We got to see the general idea of how teh coffee is picked, sorted, and weighed. This finca pays higher normally than the other surrounding fincas, but I think their main goal is to try and provide fairer working conditions for workers. The fincas, especially the coffee fincas, have been places of horrible working and living conditions in the past, and still many do not pay well or provide good working conditions for the Guatemalans who work there. Now, most of the coffee pickers are women, which was interesting to me.

On Friday October 2 we visited my organization and my home. I was really surprised when we visited my home, because Marcia had told us in March at the placement event that she thought everyone would have indoor plumbing since none of us are working in very rural sites. The office of my organization is based in Xela, but my home is not, and I had a hard time at first adjusting to thinking about using a latrine for 10 months, but I really loved my mom when I first met her... she seemed really excited about having me, but I´ll write more about my family later.

On Saturday we visited Whitney´s site...her work is similar to mine... both of us work with women´s ministries in church-affiliated organizations. She is a little bit further away, so that is kinda a bummer, but well get to all see each other at retreats every 5 weeks or so.

Bettina´s homestay is really different than mine... her home is very much like a home in the US, but her family was very welcoming, and I think she´s adjusting to have 6 brothers now! She is working with an organization called CEIPA, which works with kids who are behind in school because they´ve been working, so it´s a really important and necessary organization, because there are so many kids here who work and never really get an education.

On Sunday we went to the Episcopal church in Xela, where Dana will work. It was nice to go to a church service that was kinda familiar in format, and it was women´s month there so they had a sermon/lesson about the equality of men and women within the Church... I was actually a little jealous that Dana gets to go there every week, because my family is Presbyterian, but here anything that´s not Catholic (or Episcopalian) is Evangelical.

I should say that I liked the Episcopal church once we got there, because getting there was anohter matter. We had all our stuff with us, because we´d all been staying together for the weekend before we went for our last week of language school near Xela with new families. So we had to fit all our luggage plus 8 people into 2 taxis... I ended up sitting on Whitney´s lap in the front seat in some sort of pretzel formation with my left leg across my body and sticking out the window, because there just wasn´t room for it in the car. But we´ve learned that the number of seatbelts in a car is in no way an indicator of how many people can fit in one car... such is the way in Guatemala.

whew what a month!

So it has been over a month since my last post... sorry about that! It has been a really busy one, with two moves, two retreats, starting work, etc. And I don´t exactly have really easy access to internet, but I will be better in the future as my life gets more settled and I hopefully can have some kind of routine. But for now, here are a few posts over the last 4 or 5 weeks...