Tikal

A few weekends ago, Shom and I had the privilege to accompany the graduating class of health promoters on their celebratory graduation trip to Petén, Guatemala to visit the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal. It was a 12 hour van ride from San Lucas to San Benito, where we stayed in the dormitories of a catholic parish there. So at 4:00a.m., a van full of thirteen adults and 5 children (some of the women are breast-feeding and others simply could not leave their youngest at home with inept husbands in charge) left the chilly highlands of Tolimán and Atitlán in search of the flatter, more humid terrain of northern Guatemala, home of Tikal.

For many of the health promoters, this was their first trip away from home, their first time sleeping in a strange bed and visiting a part of Guatemala where its indigenous people no longer wear “traje,” the traditional dress of a “corte” (wrap-around skirt) and “huipil” (woven tunic).

You could tell by people’s luggage whether they’d ever traveled on an overnight trip away from home. Some had backpacks and small duffle bags, but others simply wrapped their clothing and belongings in a large blanket (a la Huck Finn) or fit everything into two black plastic shopping bags.

The evening of our arrival was celebrated in style: Dr. Sue Hammerton, the woman who helped to found the health promoter program five years ago, was in town visiting from the United States, and the promoters prepared an entire evening of dances, songs and skits in her honor. (Below, you can seen Sue dancing with Vicente... and of course Shom in the background acting cheeky). The temples of Tikal are so large! Anyone who knows me well will tell you I am petrified by heights, yet nevertheless I did manage to convince myself that this was a “once in a lifetime experience” and I (miraculously) made it to the top of Temple IV. Coming down the rickety wooden steps was horrifying (they have built wooden stairs so that people don’t walk all over and erode the ancient stone steps), and notwithstanding the panic attack I had on the way down, I made it in one piece, and don’t regret having forced myself into the “experience.” I even have the picture to prove it (below). That was the first – and only – temple I climbed that day, (one near-death experience was quite enough for me, thank you) yet Shom and many of the health promoters managed to climb everything permitted.

The view from Temple IV - amazing!

In addition to the ruins, Tikal is also a national park. Here, you can see our whole group, posing in front of a Ceiba tree, the national tree of Guatemala.

Me, enjoying the magestic height of Temple V... from the ground.

...

Visiting Tikal with Mayan people was such a wonderful experience. The opportunity to be with them as they explored the ruins, learning about their roots, their anscestry, their people’s ancient legacy, was a gift I will never forget.

A particularly charming thing happened on our way home from Tikal that is worth noting because I think it may touch your heart the way it touched mine. It was lunchtime as we passed through Guatemala City (the capital) and we had been driving for nine hours, so we decided to stop at a shopping mall for lunch. Everyone seemed very excited that they were going to eat at the food court on the second floor – very excited, that is, until they saw the escalator trundling along before their eyes. At first there seemed to be a traffic jam a the base of the escalator, with the whole group bottlenecking into each other as we waited to make our ascent. It wasn’t until 15 or 20 seconds had passed without movement that I realized that most of the health promoters had never been on an escalator before! They were afraid they’d get caught in the steps, and so there they stood, at the foot of the mechanized staircase, giggling nervously and looking around at each other as if in an attempt to psych themselves into hopping onto the churning steps. A handfull of businessmen at the mall, apparently on their lunch break and in a hurry to get to the food court, were quite rude, pushing the women out of the way so that they could pass. Graciously and proudly, the promoters seemed to ignore this brusque treatment, and – with some encouragement - finally made onto and up the escalator, with smiles plastered upon their beaming faces.

Ya somos de la colonia

As some of you may know, Elena and I moved recently. I have been staying with a family in Colonia Pampojilá (or “la colonia,” as it is referred to by community members and the attendants on the pickups that serve as local public transportation), a hamlet that is about 15 minutes from San Lucas by pickup. This community is inhabited primarily by descendants of plantation workers laboring under a system of debt peonage on an adjacent finca. I found the family when, asking around about places I could stay to be immersed in Kaqchikel, I was introduced by a friend of a friend to Lorenzo Cuj, a very active local community organizer who incidentally had an extra room and whose family speaks no Spanish in the home. After a few weeks of hearing about my evenings and mornings with the family, Elena started asking about the possibility of both of us staying with them, and about a week later, we packed up all our things and moved down to Lorenzo’s.

This move has elicited quite a variety of reactions. Initially, a good deal of concern and incredulity from Vicente, warning us that the “environment is different down here” (“pero, el ámbito es muy distinto aquí”). Then, more concern from our groundsman in San Lucas, who, as a semi-urban Ladino, barely hides his uneasiness about indigenous, rural folks. Peals of laughter from Petrona and Rosalina, the giggly health promoters from Pampojilá, amidst jokes that they are going to visit our house to make sure we don’t have tuberculosis, since we are now in their catchment area (“¡ya son de la colonia!”). Speechless, open-mouthed stares from children poking their heads in the kitchen window to watch the gringos eat. And tough love from Dominga, who has begun speaking to me almost exclusively in Kaqchikel and waiting to see how much I understood before translating into Spanish.

Our digs are a bit more rustic. Day-old newspaper serves as toilet paper in the outhouse latrine. At the moment, an astonishingly large pig is tied up next to the outhouse—Miss Piggy is getting greedy (her grunts and squeals can be heard all over the neighborhood if she has not been fed), and she will likely be sold in the next month as pork is called for in recipes traditionally prepared during the Christmas season. Until last week, outdoor bucket baths in very cold water straight from the pila (see the photo below) were the only option for bathing. A recent upgrade was made in our bathing situation—we now enjoy a bathing station fashioned by pinning three tall pieces of tarp to form three curtains; the fourth wall is a piece of sheet metal that serves as a fence between the yard and a steep ravine. These arrangements were made when Elena inquired about what measures the women of the house took to maintain modesty while bathing; we have been told repeatedly that this was a welcome change for the other women, as well, and even one of the sons has expressed his appreciation of the wind cover that the tarp bathing station provides. Hot water is apparently available, but, for now, we are not requesting this because it would require burning precious firewood for something other than food. We shall see how far into “verano” (“summer,” which is apparently the season we are entering, although it is far colder than the preceding rainy months of “invierno,” or “winter”) we make it with unheated pila water.

The food is wonderfully different from the pseudo-North American fare served at the parish—dozens of tortillas are served hot off the woodburning stove at every meal, and I have found myself becoming unable to eat until a stack of them are within reach. Beans, eggs, roasted tomato sauce and the occasional piece of chicken or slice of soft white cheese are the usual, with a few egg noodle dishes and soups thrown in here and there.

Also, we have been informed by Lorenzo that the water coming from the tap itself has held up to multiple studies by Centro de Salud (the local government health center), even though the water stored in the pila is full of coliforms. In general, after a few conversations with employess from the Centro de Salud, I don’t really trust that very much of what they say or do is of the highest standard, but Lorenzo’s sincerity and insistence made a trial of tap water obligatory. The trial is still continuing, and our GI tracts have not yet mounted a full-scale revolt against this act of solidarity. In any case, our backup plan is to begin disinfecting the tap water with a few drops of bleach if we find that we are getting too sick, too often.

The most important thing, however, is that the family is a delight, and being in a house full of people and commotion is a welcome change from the beautiful but cavernous and empty chalet-style building where we had been staying.

Lorenzo, the father of the family, is a small but fiery and outspoken man in his early forties. He taught himself to read and write at the age of 8 using books and listening to a literacy class transmitted by a local radio station; by the time he was 9, he had gained sufficient proficiency to be named a literacy promoter, charged with teaching his fellow community members. He proudly relates that he and two other boys taught every male in the community and that people still call him, “professor,” even though he has never had any formal training in pedagogy. At 13, he was appointed secretary by the community’s junta directiva, or administrative council, for his written communication skills in Spanish, a language that few of the community elders understood or spoke (much less read), but that was nonetheless the medium required for all government legal proceedings.

It was from his grandfather, who was a member of the junta directiva and an important proponent of local land reform, that Lorenzo learned to channel his personal experience of the racism, poverty and violence suffered by indigenous finca workers into a life of service and struggle for social justice. He relates how his “popular education” evolved through a series of stages, beginning with a short stint in seminary and continuing with workshops on community organizing, Marxism and liberation theology. He has worked for land reform and an end to impunity all over Guatemala, from the K’iche’ to Cobán to the Petén, and he relates that during the worst of the overt violence in the early 1980s, he rarely stayed at home and never told his family the truth about where he was going so as to protect them from harm. As a result of his work throughout the country, Lorenzo now speaks three Mayan languages in addition to his native Kaqchikel: Q’eqchi’, K’iche’ and Tz’utujil.

He was once taken from his house by soldiers, bound, gagged and thrown in the back of a pick-up to be questioned at the local barracks for three days. He left the country on numerous occasions, ostensibly to attend workshops and conferences, in reality to get out when it seemed that he might be in danger. In 2002, he helped to exhume and publicize a mass grave in the K’iche’, and his group was able to provide convincing evidence that the army was responsible for the murders; when legal proceedings began, he and others began to get signs that they might be targeted, and he was urged by colleagues to flee. A U.S. American attorney, who had befriended Lorenzo many years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, returned to Guatemala to accompany him and keep him safe while working to get papers in order to bring him to California.

Lorenzo spent four years in the United States (“I got a tourist visa, then I bought a green card,” he says), and has many stories of the racism and xenophobia he encountered there. He came home last December, and he says that he wants to stay around home as much as possible now—his children tell him that he missed their childhood, between all his work in other parts of the country and his stint in the U.S.—but he has not lost sight of his compromiso (obligation) to continue what he considers important work. In 2000, he graduated with a degree in social work and is now working with other active community leaders from the surrounding rural areas to conduct needs-assessments and to initiate grass-roots community development projects.

Although he has only been back for about a year, he has already been elected president of the community’s junta directiva. One of his plans for the coming year is to fight for legal acknowledgment of a neighboring hamlet’s natural springs as public domain. When the community’s land was purchased by the parish from Miramar, the wealthy finca owner reserved the right to the water on that land, using the river to generate energy and the natural spring water for the foodstuffs produced by his dairy factory Parma, all at the expense of the community members’ own water supply. All in all, Lorenzo might embellish a little bit, but he only does so because he knows that he has had an amazing life and is a tremendously inspiring person, and I am glad to have met him and look forward to getting to know him better.

Lorenzo’s wife, Doña Candelaria, is a similarly amazing person. Unfortunately, we have not learned as much about her life because she speaks little “Castilla,” or Spanish, and my Kaqchikel, though improving, is still hardly good enough to engage in real conversation. She is up before the sun every morning, shuffling around to get a start on the day before anyone else is awake. She does all her duties as the matriarch of a Mayan family, cooking, cleaning and making beds, but, probably in part due to Lorenzo’s frequent absence for many years, she also does work that is usually delegated to men: digging ditches, tending to and harvesting coffee and maize up in the mountain. She is an amazing, graceful and humble woman, and I look forward to learning from her—not just how to speak Kaqchikel, but also how to give much more to one’s world than one has received.

The children in the family are, in order: Lesvia, 24, married and with her first infant, she lives with her husband in another part of town; Rubin, 21, a seminary student in the department capital of Sololá; Werner, 19, studying in San Lucas to be a bilingual school teacher in Spanish and Kaqchikel; Mariela, 15, an adorably chatty and playful girl; Greysi, 13, also pleasant but painfully shy, and an astoundingly good weaver; and Rosbin, 7, (above) the cutest, sprightliest little boy I have ever met!

We have enjoyed our life thus far in Colonia Pampojilá, and we look forward to sharing more about our experiences here in the future!

Chicken Surgery

Last Sunday, Kate, Shom, Vicente, Dominga, and I led a day of training for the 3rd year health promoters. The topic? Gastritis and the digestive system. Shom's creative approach? Dissecting a chicken! (You should have seen the look on the lady's face when we went to her chicken shop and asked to reserve two chickens with the guts still in them!) Here are some photos from our "practice" dissection at our house on Saturday, and some of the real thing on Sunday. After the training session, the two students with the best quiz scores each got to take home half of the chicken!

Us, trying to find the stomach...

Our roadmap.

Now we know where everything is, we're ready for the training!


Shom and Dominga, teaching about chicken guts.

Kate, explaining gastritis and acid reflux in humans.

Halloween & Día de los Muertos

Halloween is not celebrated in Guatemala, but last Wednesday night, we carved jack-o-lanterns anyway! Kate and I bought the closest thing to pumpkins: green-and-white-speckled "chayotes" that are just like pumpkins except for their color, taste, and thickness. Kate lives with a host family that has 13 children (that's an aggregate count, because in Guatemala many people live with their extended family, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.) so Kate had the idea to share our Halloween traditions with all the kids. They loved it! They have only ever seen jack-o-lanterns on TV, and they were so excited to be carving their own and learning about the holiday.

The chayotes were difficult to carve, especially the taller ones. The meat was very thick, and it took a lot of huffing and puffing to get the knives through. Angel, Kate's host-father, is a carpenter, so after much grunting and straining on our part, he decided to help us out and got out his electric saw!

Angel and the kids, hard at work.

Jennifer and Davíd helped out by picking out the seeds for toasting.

In Guatemala, pumpkin seeds are prepared by soaking them in lime juice and salt and letting them dry in the sun... delicious! All in all, the night was a big hit, especially with the kids, who kept jumping up and down, shouting, "Happy Halloween! Happy Halloween!" in their limited, bashful, giggly English.

The next day, we got to experience a Guatemalan holiday, Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), which is celebrated on November 1st (All Saints' Day) and November 2nd (All Souls' Day). During these two days, it is believed that the spirits of the deceased come back to wander the earth.

According to my research on Wikipedia and Mundo Maya Online, Día de los Muertos celebrations can be traced back to various Mesoamerican indigenous peoples, including the Maya. Rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors have been observed by these civilizations for as long as 2,500 to 3,000 years.

The Maya have incorporated many Spanish customs and Catholic holidays (in this case, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day) into their ancient traditions and ceremonies. Día de los Muertos celebrations are just one example of this mixture of Catholic and Mayan religious traditions.During the period of November 1st and November 2nd, families go together to the town cemetery to apply a fresh coat of brightly-colored paint to their family gravestones and mausoleums (just as the girl is doing in the photo above), and decorate the graves with flowers (often marigolds), pine needles, and streamers (see the photo below). Families will also often bring a food offering with them to the cemetery, so they can eat a meal with the spirits who are present on earth during these days. Many people believe that the spirits of the dead eat the "spiritual essence" of the food, so that even though the family members are eating the food, they believe it lacks nutritional value.One popular food item prepared on this day is “chuchitos,” (meat and sauce wrapped in corn meal and banana leaves and then boiled, much like Mexican tamales). Another dish, “fiambre,” the traditional dish of the festival, is made only once a year. Although recipes vary from family to family, fiambre is usually a mix of cheese, meat, and vegetables cured in vinegar. Another Día de los Muertos tradition in Guatemala is flying “barriletes” (kites) made of crepe paper and bamboo. In the photo above, you can see a young girl selling kites on the market street, just outside of the cemetary. On November 1st and 2nd, families fly kites high above the cemetery or their houses as a symbolic link between the living and the dead.Finally, on the night of November 1st, children and youth roam the streets in costumes, much like our Halloween. The interesting differences, though, are that all costumes are extremely scary, and instead of asking for candy at each house, they ask for "güisquil" (pronounced "wee-skeel"), a boiled, gourd-like vegetable!

Colom Wins! Another Article from the New York Times...

Guatemalan Voters Elect Businessman

By MARC LACEY

GUATEMALA CITY, Nov. 4 — A former army general who once took on the insurgency in Guatemala’s long civil war lost his battle for the country’s presidency on Sunday night, with voters rejecting his plan to use an iron fist, as well as the country’s military, to control a sky-high murder rate.

The man who won was Álvaro Colom, a gawky policy wonk and businessman who made fighting poverty his campaign’s centerpiece.

Otto Pérez Molina, the former general, suggested that his background as a soldier and intelligence chief would help him take on criminals but Mr. Colom appeared to convince voters that electing a soldier, especially one tainted by allegations of past misdeeds, to the country’s highest office would return the country to a dark past when a corrupt military ruled.

In his speech claiming victory late Sunday, Mr. Colom described the vote as “a ‘no’ to Guatemala’s tragic history,” Reuters reported.

With about 96 percent of polling stations reporting Sunday night, Mr. Colom had 52.71 percent of the vote to 47.29 percent for Mr. Pérez Molina. Oscar Bolanos, president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said it was clear that Mr. Colom had won.

It was a violent campaign, with dozens of killings suspected of being politically motivated. And voters were conflicted, as shown in polls putting Mr. Pérez Molina, 56, a neophyte politician, neck and neck with Mr. Colom, also 56, who was in his third bid for the presidency. Mr. Colom will take over from President Óscar Berger on Jan. 14.

“It is incredible to me that a general was even running,” said Rigoberta Menchú, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for drawing attention to Guatemala’s civil war.

After suffering through decades of civil war and military dictatorship, Guatemala, a nation of about 13 million, found supposed peace with the signing of a 1996 accord. Mr. Pérez Molina was one of the signatories as a representative of the army; he billed himself the “general of peace.”

On Sunday night he acknowledged his electoral defeat but vowed to continue to press his case politically as “a constructive opposition,” The Associated Press reported.

But with more than 5,000 killings so far this year — one of the highest murder rates in Latin America — the country today is anything but peaceful, with drug traffickers, gang members and other outlaws acting with impunity. Guatemala is considered a major transit route for cocaine going from Colombia to the United States, and traffickers have infiltrated the country’s military, police and justice system.

“Guatemala is in dire shape today, with extreme poverty, failing institutions and ruthless mafias that have been growing virtually unchecked for over a decade,” said Daniel Wilkinson, deputy director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group.

That is the country the new president will inherit. Mr. Pérez Molina had vowed to take on delinquents with a “mano dura,” or firm hand, and his ads showed him raising a clenched fist.

Mr. Colom, who directed the National Fund for Peace, a government development agency, countered that confronting violence with violence was shortsighted.

“We had a firm hand for 50 years and it caused more than 250,000 victims in a dirty war,” said Mr. Colom, who lost several relatives during the war.

Instead Mr. Colom spoke of creating jobs and addressing the country’s dire poverty, especially among its indigenous communities.

Dr. Rafael Espada, Mr. Colom’s vice presidential candidate, said that a victory by Mr. Pérez Molina would have been a blow to the country’s fragile democracy.

“I can’t live with another military regime in Guatemala,” he said, referring to the possible election of Mr. Pérez Molina. “His job was to kill people. Now he says he has no blood on his hands.”

Interesting and Informative New York Times Article on the Guatemalan Elections

Crime-Ridden Guatemala Divided In Presidential Vote

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Eleven years after the end of Guatemala's civil war, Sunday's presidential election has split the country between left and right over how to fight a surge in violent crime.

Right-wing retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, who vows to cut Guatemala's high murder rate by putting more troops on the streets and using capital punishment, faces left-leaning businessman Alvaro Colom in a tight runoff.

Opinion polls are divided over who will win but several surveys recently gave a small lead to Perez Molina, whose Patriot Party's logo is a clenched fist that symbolizes his tough stance on crime.

The army ruled the Central American country for decades until the mid 1980s and committed hundreds of massacres in 36 years of civil war before the government and leftist rebels made peace in 1996.

Since then, Guatemala has been rocked by violent drug traffickers and tattooed street gang members. Almost 6,000 Guatemalans were murdered last year, nearly twice the level at the end of the war and one of the highest murder rates in the world.

"Guatemalans ... don't want an insecure country," Perez Molina said. "If the president doesn't have character and strength we run the risk of becoming a narco state," he said.

Home to 13 million people, Guatemala is a major transit point for cocaine shipped to the United States and drug cartels have grown in influence in recent years.

The soft-spoken Colom won the first round of voting in September by 4.7 percentage points but his campaign has flagged since a top advisor quit the race after receiving dozens of anonymous death threats.

The election campaign was itself marred by violence, with over 50 political party activists or candidates for Congress or local elections killed. Colom's party has been hardest hit with almost 20 party members murdered since last year. A party election monitor was killed in a gunfight on Saturday.

Colom, a chain smoker and factory owner who has run for president three times, has promised to spend more on health and education.

He argues that Guatemala will only cut crime by attacking poverty and removing corrupt police and judges, and says Perez Molina's army history gives him a dark past.

"My hands are not bloodstained," Colom said.

WAR ON CRIME

Despite bad memories of army atrocities, many are convinced that Perez Molina's vow to put more troops on the streets to fight crime can restore order.

"We are at war," said municipal policeman Jose Ramos in the town of San Juan Sacatepequez. "Perhaps he will come and put a stop to it."

Election results are due on Sunday night but the count could last for days if the contest is close.

Last week, locals sick of crime burned to death three youths accused of trying to extort a store owner in the town. Vigilante patrols and lynchings are now common in Guatemala, where barely 2 percent of crimes are resolved.

Guatemala, a coffee exporter, has the highest level of chronic infant malnutrition in the Western Hemisphere and one of the region's lowest tax collection rates.

"We need to talk about jobs and work, not just security," said lumber salesman Alfonso Puxtun, 42.

Preparación de "Vicks"

This past Monday we helped Vicente and Dominga make a homemade, cost-effective, all-natural version of Vicks VapoRub as a treatment for stuffy noses associated with the common cold. The ingredients are: petroleum jelly, Eucalyptus leaves, Cypress greens, wood chips of an aromatic pine called "Ocote," which according to Wikipedia is known as the "Montezuma Pine" in English. Here is how we made it:

1. First, we helped to separate the Eucalyptus leaves and Cypress greens from their stems. In this photo you can see the Cypress (left) and Eucalyptus (right).



2. At the same time, Dr. Kate helped by chopping up the pine wood into little chips with a machete (Go, Kate!).

3. Dominga melted the petroleum jelly on her wood-burning stove, then added the leaves and wood.

4. After the mixture has boiled for a bit, it is put through a strainer and then the liquid is poured into containers that the health promoters can then sell for 1 quetzal (about 13 cents, U.S.) to their neighbors when they come down with "la gripe" (a cold).

Trip to Nicaragua (...and Costa Rica...for 2 hours)

We are back from a week-long trip to Nicaragua. Ostensibly, the purpose of our trip was to renew our visas for another three months; it helped, of course, that our friend Amanda happened to be on break at her grandparents’ beachhouse on the Pacific Coast with compañeros from her study abroad program. It was a good week, with much stimulating conversation with idealistic young gringos, good books, and delicious pescado a la plancha (fresh grilled fish!). Of course, I am currently suffering through a bout of GI troubles which I suspect may have been caused by something I ate during our trip down there… The pictures shown here sum up the week we spent with Amanda and new friends in San Juan del Sur:


A view of San Juan del Sur from above.



The beach house.



View from the house - Right on the beach!



A gorgeous sunset.


Due to a lack of lack of photo opportunities at border crossings, we were unable to pictorally document our travails through Central American immigration, however, and it was an interesting experience, so here’s the short of it. When we got to the Guatemalan-Salvadoran border, we were told by an overly concerned immigration official that if we did not leave the “4-country region” (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua) within 5 days, we would be fined $114 each and be required to leave the region by the end of the week. We had been alerted to this possibility by someone who has been living here a while, but we thought we’d risk it and maybe try to ho and hum at the border to see if a few pieces of green paper wouldn’t buy another three months’ legality in the country. Unfortunately, because we were traveling with a commercial busline, we had few opportunities to stand face to face with an immigration officer to have a semi-private conversation; moreover, some of the immigration posts seemed too official to allow bribery by suspicious individuals (as a South Asian, I am permanently suspicious in all continents; I was actually asked, “Are you sure this is your passport? The picture looks different from you,” to which I responded apologetically, “Yes, it was five years ago. I lost weight.”). In any case, we realized that our final destination, San Juan del Sur, was about an hour from the Costa Rican border, so we decided that we would try our luck there… Despite the Salvadoran immigration official’s insistence that we would just have to cross the border briefly to renew our visas, we had a feeling that we would have to stay in Costa Rica for a few days to get the 90-day renewal.

So, we took a local bus from Managua to Peñas Blancas, the nearest border crossing between Nica and Costa Rica. When we got off the bus, we were immediately accosted by a guy offering us immigration forms for a dollar. It turns out that this guy was not at all working with immigration or some other official entity; the alternative to paying for the immigration form is not to pay and just get the form when it is your turn in line at the immigration window. In any case, I told him that we didn’t want an immigration form but that we needed to talk to an immigration officer, because we needed a renewal of our visas. He told us that we would have to stay in Costa Rica for three days, and I told him that we didn’t have that much time, and he said, “Don’t worry, I will find you a ‘muchacho’ who can fix everything for you today, no problem.” So we followed this man a ways and were introduced to the ‘muchacho,’ who, incidentally, spoke amazingly good English, showing us his badge and introducing himself as an official “tourist guide.” The fees were laid out for us quite clearly: $7 + $2 to exit and re-enter Nicaragua, for a total of $25 each to be on our way the same day with renewed 90-day visas to the 4-country region. (Fishy arithmetic, eh? The remainder of the money went to our “muchacho” and to various officials along the way.) The majority of the time, I was worried that we would get caught and end up in immigration jail in Managua; Elena, on the basis of her experience last year working with detained immigrants, was completely unconcerned (“We’re not breaking any laws here, it’s the immigration officers who are breaking the law”). So, with my concern visible on my face (“el muchacho” kept turning to me and saying, “don’t be worried, these things must be done calmly”), I went along with the whole ordeal.

Despite feeling extremely sketchy on the Costa Rican side, walking directly 20 feet from the entry line to the exit line at immigration, and despite somehow stepping ankle-deep in mud at the side of the road, we got back to Nicaraguan immigration to be escorted by our muchacho, who apparently has an "arrangement" with the supervising Nica official. On our way through the last gate, three steps from freedom, a Nicaraguan official reached his hand out and slapped our muchacho on the back, saying, “Are you making problems? No more problems, that is the last one today, got it?” So, we were the last non-Central Americans of the day to be assisted by our muchacho in getting under-the-table visa renewals.

After our week at the beach, on our way home when we boarded the bus in Managua, the bus attendant inspected our passports, and, with a puzzled look on his face, said, “They stamped you twice.” And I said, “Yeah, that is for exit, and that is for re-entry.” He looked up at me, still confused: “The same day?” “Yes,” I said. Still confused, he shrugged his shoulders and handed back our passports, and we had no trouble at the other Central American borders. So we are back in Guatemala, legally!

¡La Feria!

The Feast of St. Luke (La Feria de San Lucas) happens every year in the Catholic calendar, falling on October 18th. The town of San Lucas Tolimán, however, celebrates its patron saint for an entire week!

Last week, the town population must have doubled or tripled, with vendors and make-shift shops crowding the streets and alleys, three Ferris wheels, and countless other rides and novelties. There was an extravagant parade mid-week, that kicked off the festivities, with baton-twirling, marching bands, and school children showing off the traditional San Lucas Tolimán dress.

Most of the festivities, however, take place inside the building of the cofradía (religious brotherhood) of a Mayan demigod or saint called Maximón (pronounced Ma-shee-mohn). On Wednesday night, the eve of the Feria of San Lucas, there is a procession of a San Lucas statue (shown below) followed by a mass of townspeople that travels from the Maximón cofradía to the church in preparation for the feast day.

Though I've learned a bit about cofradías and Maximón by talking with Mayan friends, most of the history surrounding this social and religious phenomenon has continued to confuse me. So, I've used this blog post as an opportunity to do some more research on the matter and sort things out for myself, and for you. The following is the best explanation I can offer, a patchwork of Google searches and my own village conversations...

Cofradías are lay leadership councils that were originally brought to Guatemala by the early Franciscan missionaries from Spain, where cofradías had existed since the Middle Ages. The purpose of the cofradía system was to promote the Christian faith and act as decision making bodies for remote towns and villages. Each cofradía was (and still is) responsible for the care of an image of the patron saint and the celebration of his feast day. Cofradías became very popular in Spain during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as instruments of the counter reformation. Transferred to the New World, they became tools for the propagation of the new faith to the "Indians."

By organizing the newly converted Mayans into cofradías, each with its set of officials responsible for the group's activities, the Spanish missionaries simplified the task of carrying out the liturgical and para-liturgical celebrations of the saints' days regularly occurring in the cycle of the Church year. Cofrades, as cofradía members are called, probably also served as the choir, participating with the friars in the chanting of the Divine Office and the Mass. They were responsible for the regular care of the Church and its numerous statues, the cleaning and replacement of candles, and similar services.

But this period of intense post-conquest missionary activity was followed by two and a half centuries of relative abandonment by the clergy, during which time the interpretation of Catholic ritual and symbolism in terms of Mayan beliefs and cosmology was accomplished in the cofradías.

This process was facilitated by the congruence of some Catholic and Mayan traditions, such as the solar orientation of both calendars and the great number of holy personages venerated in both religions. The statues of the Saints in the church and in the cofradías were easily identified with the lords and Guardian-spirits of the Mayan pantheon, so that today it is debatable how much remains of the Catholic identity of the Saints except for their names and the calendar date of their feast days or ferias. Maximón, for example, is a Mayan deity who is sometimes identified as Saint Simon, and during Holy Week is identified in a town ritual as Judas Iscariot.

The cofradías, which had functioned as part of the Church, are now of equal or greater importance in Mayan religion than Catholicism. The primary rituals originally transferred from the Church to the cofradías are now performed not by Catholic priests but by Mayan shamans.

The Maximón cofradía in San Lucas Tolimán has a council of official members or brothers (cofrades) who volunteer their service for two years at a time. There is also a leader or guardian who accepts the responsibility of taking care of Maximón for a one year period. Traditionally, the guardian would accept the statue of Maximón and the other cofradía furniture into his house for a year. His house served as a chapel for Maximón, and was the focus of calendric festivities of music and dancing, a place of prayer open to shamans and others who wished to honor the saints and ancestors or perform rituals at any time of day or night, and a meeting place for the cofrades. According to our friend Kate's host-dad, Angel, Maximón would move to a new house each year, and he remembers Maximón living with his family for a year when he was a child. "But then Padre Gregorio came," he said, "and he built Maximón his own house." So now, when people speak of "going to the cofradía" they are referring to the permanent building that houses Maximón and is the site for all related festivities and rituals. Below you can see a photo of a Mayan girl offering a candle to Maximón inside the cofradía.

The day and night leading up to Feria are enjoyed inside the cofradía, drinking and dancing to a marimba band, keeping vigil until 4:00a.m. when fireworks are lit in front of the church in preparation for the 5:00a.m. mass. In fact, fireworks were a theme throughout the week, and would go off at all hours of the day or night. Below, you can see an old San Lucan man using his matchbox to join in the festivities.

After staying up all night, everyone goes home for breakfast and a nap, and then wakes up in time for a big family lunch of "Pulik," the traditional San Lucas Tolimán chicken made specially for feria. The afternoon is then spent drinking and dancing with family and friends, interspersed with continued fireworks and processions that linger on into the evening.

¡Feliz Feria!

A response to the new parish co-administrators' ideology of volunteerism

When I’ve asked the health promoters to respond to the questions, “What do you want, what do you need to do your work well,” the answers I hear are as follows: “We need more medicines. We need more trainings. We need more autonomy and more material resources. We need to receive compensation for our work.”

It may seem to some that these are grand demands. And of course providing all these requests at once and in full might prove unsafe for patients and be detrimental to the credibility of the health promoter program, were resources or medicines to be used inappropriately. Nonetheless, as grand as these demands might seem, they are also quite simple, and quite logical. The felt needs of people who are trying to help their communities have been expressed quite clearly to me—as a person who has been accompanying them daily in their work and collaborating closely with them to support and expand their existing activities. These needs are echoed, in one form or another, regardless of whom you ask among the senior and graduated health promoters. On the other hand, even the most superior health promoters are afraid to ask or demand what they know very well is their due—they feel unfree to express themselves to the people with the most authority in the local system of symbolic power and political economy, that is, administrators and other caciques in the parish hierarchy.

So, I am at times upset by immodest, cultural relativist claims that stress cultural difference, when the real differences seen in the communities here are those of poverty—poverty of financial resources, poverty of opportunities, poverty of education, and so on. These claims—much accepted in traditional development thought because they make the work easier, lowering the standard of care and justifying sometimes horrifying outcomes—are all the more irksome when one realizes who is stressing these “cultural” differences. These explanations erase and suppress—sometimes after obligatory acknowledgment—the fact that these “cultural” differences are more a product of generations of “unfree, desperate, and short” lives and ways of being. The people laying these “ideological landmines” (“Things are just slow down here,” “it has to come from them, not from us,” “that’s not sustainable,” “you are not here to do anything, your job is only to learn”) would have us believe, in some degree, that impoverished Maya communities in rural Guatemala are inhabiting a different political and economic universe than us U.S. Americans. We thereby run the risk of forgetting that our lives of luxury and endless opportunity are based on hundreds of years of oppression and violence against indigenous peoples.

To make development, social justice, and socioeconomic rights-building efforts work, we certainly must work in concert with people and communities. If we insist “radically” that all efforts for community development must come from the oppressed and marginalized with no intervention or assistance from us, I think we are making a huge mistake. Doing so would be to waste the symbolic and financial capital that we enjoy as powerful people in a deeply stratified world—and the health promoters, like other impoverished and marginalized people elsewhere, are very aware of our power and of the wastage of that power: Vicente recently said to me, “You will buy these things for the training session, because you have money”; the graduated health promoters’ response to Elena’s presentation of the topic of family planning amounted to, “We want family planning methods, and women in our communities want it, but until you help put these methods within our reach, it is pointless to talk about this issue.” If we choose not to listen to oppressed and marginalized peoples’ opinions and protestations that those of us who have power and money should consider it an obligation to use these resources to help them struggle for their rights and for more just lives, then we run the risk of taking a comfortable seat in our liberal leather armchairs, munching on popcorn as we watch the lives of the poor unfold and pat ourselves on the back for “witnessing” and doing development “work.” We run the risk of being so keen on listening and learning that we become deaf and impotent, recapitulating the theme of foreign invaders taking more than they are giving in return.

If anything, the health promoters insist that we NOT remain seated, that we get up and walk with them towards more just realities. The graduated health promoters exude hope and love when they speak of past volunteers who have "fought" (“luchó mucho por nosotros y por nuestras comunidades”) for their cause. The health promoters are credible, inspiring people who speak on behalf of their communities, and they have reproached us for not doing everything in our power (and we do have a lot of power) to get them the means to get what they need to take care of their neighbors. I cannot say in good faith that I am upholding the pillar of subsidiarity if I do not heed their rather clearly expressed, felt needs.

Barriers to Access

This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to lead a discussion on family planning with a group of graduated health promoters (those who have been serving their communities as health workers for the past four years) during their monthly meeting. I was interested to find out what, if anything, they knew about family planning methods, and what their opinions were on the subject.

A few years back, the health promoters had access to birth control methods through another, non-religious NGO that was supplying pill packs, injections, and condoms to all interested health promoters in the area. This worked well for awhile, until a woman who was unknowingly pregnant received a progesterone injection for birth control and later lost the baby due to a miscarriage. The NGO promptly recalled all birth control methods from each community and now only allows pre-screened, qualified medical professionals to administer any type of family planning. This means, of course, that the health promoters can no longer give out condoms or birth control pills, let alone Depo-Provera injections.

This would not be such a large problem if people in rural areas were willing to come into town to San Lucas and go to the government-sponsored Centro de Salud (Health Center), where all forms of birth control are free of charge. The truth, however, is that the Centro de Salud keeps lists of birth control patients organized by community, and so when you go to see the nurse for your birth control, she pulls out the list to log in your information, thereby revealing all of your neighbors who are also using family planning. Due to the small size of each community, and the gossip-loving nature of people in small towns, within days of your visit to the Centro de Salud, everybody in your community knows your business. This is especially frightening for women using the injection without their husbands' permission. If word gets to their husbands that they are using any form of birth control, violence can ensue.

On the other hand, people put a lot of trust in their health promoter, and, when it was available, used to go to their health promoters regularly for birth control because they knew that their confidentiality and privacy were safe from prying eyes.

Now that the only access to birth control comes from the Centro de Salud, health promoters can’t do much to help the women in their communities, other than encourage them to go to the Centro de Salud. But besides the lack of privacy and confidentiality at the Centro de Salud, the other reason that women don’t want to go there is because of the prerequisite pelvic exam and pap smear that they require before they give out any form of birth control. Women are afraid and skeptical of the pelvic exams because there have been rumors that the speculums are reused on more than one woman. Though I doubt these rumors are true, I don't blame them... If I had reason to believe that the un-sterilized speculum being used on me was the same one used on the previous patient, I wouldn’t be too jazzed about pelvic exams either.

In addition to religious beliefs and lack of access, misinformation is a large barrier to the use of birth control methods. For example, this past Tuesday, I tagged along with Shom and Kate, a pediatrician, to the remote village of San Martín, to see patients. One patient, a woman in her thirties who came in seeking treatment for a yeast infection, told us that she and her husband didn’t want any more children (they already have four) and so she had been using Depo-Provera for a year. Unfortunately, somehow or another the woman’s grandmother found out that she was using the birth control injections and told her granddaughter that people have died from using Depo-Provera. Frightened, the woman stopped the injections, but according to our conversation, is now unwilling to try anything else besides natural family planning, which has a pretty poor success rate. For every 100 women who practice natural family planning, 20 of them will become pregnant within a year. Woah. Double woah when you consider that less than 1 woman out of 100 gets pregnant during a year of using Depo-Provera.

It seems to me that there are two possible solutions to the lack of access to family planning. The first would be to drum up some funding so that the health promoters could provide the birth control themselves. The other would be getting the Centro de Salud to allow the community health promoters to provide a list of the women seeking a given method and the result of a current pregnancy test, the Centro could provide the method to the health promoters, the health promoters deliver it to the women and get a signature from the women that they received their method free of charge, and return the documentation to the Centro. This would protect the women's privacy and take advantage of the fact that family planning methods are free via the Centro de Salud, making the system sustainable. It would also keep family planning in the hands of the Centro de Salud so that statistics could be kept and would ensure that pregnancy testing was being done before initiating a method, maximizing safety.

The health promoters had proposed this idea to the Centro de Salud in the past, but the government health center refused to compromise and continued to insist that all women come in person to receive their preferred method of birth control (don't you just love beaurocrats?).

Shom, Kate and I have been wondering if there might be a way to reopen this issue for discussion with those who manage the Centro de Salud. Given that all entities share the common goal of improving access to family planning for women, a brainstorming session with the Centro de Salud could be fruitful, right?

I’ll keep you posted…

Visit to Vicente's in Quixayá

Vicente invited me to his family's home in Quixayá for lunch yesterday. Previously, I had thought that Quixayá looked relatively wealthy in comparison to some of the other aldeas. There is a large, covered "salón" at the pickup stop where school children have P.E., and a paved road takes you up past the salón and a family-owned convenience store to the community center, which is the home base for the health promoters and doubles as a clinic when visiting physicians give consultations in the community. Quixayá, despite lacking the impressive (and propagandistic) city planning of three resettlement communities (Tierra Santa, Totolyá, and Porvenir) that were built after landslides wiped out entire campesino plantation communities, nonetheless did not seem all that poor to me previously, at least on the basis of brief visits to the community center. Moreover, I thought that if Vicente, who is educated and displays certain behaviors associated with improvements in socioeconomic status (e.g., he and his wife plan to have only 1 child), lived in Quixayá, it was likely that it would be different from the other communities we are working in.

When I arrived, Vicente led me from the salón in a direction opposite to the one that takes you to the community center. We walked down a wide and surprisingly steep path--once paved, I think, now comprised of rubble--and turned onto a more narrow path between closely approximated one-story cement-block houses. Vicente indicated the house of one of his brothers; three steps later he pointed out the house of another brother, turning onto steps that led to an alley milling with women and children. This was his home--his wife stood at the end of the alley, washing at the open-air pila. We greeted her and stepped through an open doorway into Vicente's four-room house. The health promoter system is grass-roots and community-based--Vicente, as one of two paid health promoters, lives no differently from the population he seeks to serve through his monthly programming of health promotion activities.

...

I met Israel, Vicente's brother, who purportedly has studied pedagogy and Kaqchikel at the university level. I was confused to learn of Israel's educational background last week, because despite my frequent, insistent vocalization of the importance of Kaqchikel learning for the work I hope to do with the health promoters and community members, Vicente never mentioned that his brother had relevant experience. In any case, one reason Vicente had invited me to lunch was to speak with Israel about my objectives with respect to Kaqchikel and how he might be able to assist me.

Israel and I discussed the possibility of me moving in with them for language-learning. He said that perhaps I could spend the night during the week so as to sit with him in the evenings without having to worry about transportation back to SLT. He said he would call me next week when he is ready to have me.

...

Vicente became visibly anxious and embarrassed when I asked to use the restroom--he got up quickly and spoke to his wife, who was tortillando at the outdoor "pollo" (woodburning stove) shared by all the women in Vicente's extended family. They both turned and peered down the alley to see if Israel was home. There was no bathroom in their house, they explained, and only Israel had running water. I said it was fine, that I didn't really need running water, and Vicente reluctantly led me back through his house, explaining that all he had available was a "hoyo seco" ("dry hole," or outhouse latrine). Of course, Vicente's worry was unfounded--it was quite easy to use, as far as outhouses go, despite being built for clientele of Mayan stature--but I am warmed by his kind concern, and it is deeply humbling to imagine feeling his embarrassment when entertaining visitors in my own home.

...

Vicente later led me to the cliff behind his house to show me where the highway turns above the river between Quixayá and another community called San Juan Mirador.

Standing there at the edge, looking out over the ravine, Vicente began speaking, painting a political geography of the lush, hilly land surrounding Quixayá. On the other side of the river is San Juan Mirador and the former campesino plantation community owned by the family Miramar. Miramar started a dairy factory (Parma, which, according to multiple return short-term volunteers, serves "the best icecream in the world," and which the new U.S. American parish "co-administrators" have similarly raved about) on the plantation land adjoining the campesino plantation community. After a few years, the national goverment imposed its own regulations, requiring the finquero (plantation owner) to relocate the entire community a certain minimum distance from the factory. Some people were able to get out at that time, moving to San Juan Mirador and other aldeas; others, however, could not. Miramar did not have enough land on his own finca (plantation) to house the remaining campesinos, so he bought half of the adjoining plantation of Quixayá. Vicente told me that his family originally lived on the land bought by Miramar, and I was struck by the realization that Vicente is the descendant of indigenous Mesoamericans gifted into a system of slavery, and, later, debt peonage, to cruel and absentee criollo landowners. In the 1990's, the parish bought the other half of Finca Quixayá--land that is rocky, steep and high above the river, and therefore less safe, arable, and aesthetically pleasing, but nonetheless affordable and habitable. It was then that Vicente's parents moved off the finca. The parish--in large part due to Fr. Greg's persistent dream of preserving traditional Mayan agricultural lifeways, which is informed by community elders who advise him--has been very successful in effecting land reform where the government has failed miserably (so much so, in fact, that the government made a huge effort to assist the parish in relocating landslide victims--and then proceeded to put up huge signs showing the balance sheet of the construction effort: apparently, the campesino plantation community members contributed nothing, which is complete and utter bullshit--they and their ancestors gave hundreds of years of uncompensated, backbreaking labor and suffered preventable and treatable disease, violent discrimination, and premature death to allow the concentration of the very wealth that permitted the huge outpouring of government support to rebuild their homes).

Vicente pointed at Miramar's new land--once the land that his family lived on--noting the ample road that had been built and the manicured foliage by the river: "He wants to make that land into a nature resort, something touristic or something." Beautiful land where at least 12 families (this is the number of families that recently left Quixayá for a new, more remote settlement because of overcrowding) could be building houses and lives is populated instead by a lawn and a row of palms--brought from the coast, I imagine, they will never bear fruit at this altitude. So the land lies fallow and overgrown except in patches where a gardener has been put to work, waiting for Miramar to send a decree from his home in Guatemala City to finish the landscaping in preparation for criollo and gringo tourists seeking to unwind and soak up the wonders of this "natural" paradise.

Vicente brought my attention to a large cement container: "The patrón buys elote (the stage at which corn is tender enough to eat on the cob but before it is mature enough to dry and grind into cornflour) and he stores it there. This way in the summer he doesn't have to worry about how to feed his cows--he can produce cheese all summer without any problems. But he buys so much elote that there is not enough mazorca (mature corn that can be used to make cornflour) during the harvest--and we have to pay higher prices for our corn to make tortillas. Because we are accustomed to corn. The patrón is very bad with the people." Vicente is rarely this candid, and I was surprised--and glad--to hear him speak this way. I think his openness was situational--it was a weekend, we were standing in his own community, and he was, for the moment, not representing the parish or the health promoters or anyone else except himself and his family and his people.

...

Quixayá is beautiful, and I am excited by the prospect of studying Kaqchikel with Israel, living in an aldea, and having more candid conversation with Vicente.

Health Promoter Photos & Activities

The health promoters have been busy lately! Here is some of the great work they've been doing in the rural communities surrounding San Lucas:

Home visits:
Home visits consist of visiting the homes of malnourished children, weighing them, measuring their height and head circumference, talking to moms about why they think their child is under-weight, offering suggestions of how to help each child, and giving out Incaparina, a vitamin-fortified, corn flour-based, mushy-drink designed to help kids gain weight. In the photo above-right, you can see a first-year health promoter, Micaela, measuring a little girl's head circumference. The photo above-left is one of Shom and Dominga goofing around between visits.

Nutrition Workshops:
So far we've done these workshops in two different communities, and the workshops basically consist of weighing and measuring children to track their growth (right), and offering a nutritious snack, such as hot chocolate with rice in it (left), or tamales and Incaparina for everyone who attends.









Trainings:
This month, the first-year health promoters learned how to do a finger prick and check for iron deficiency (everyone practiced on a partner, including me!). Here you can see two first-year health promoters, Domitila and Ingrid, practicing on each other. Below, you can see the hemoglobin chart they use to measure the iron level in the blood sample. Depending on the the shade of red (the darker the better), you can easily determine whether or not someone is anemic and in need of iron supplements.

Subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is one of the four pillars of Catholic social teaching that calls us "to respond to the expressed felt needs" of the poor and marginalized. Over the past few weeks, Vicente has asked the health promoters to put their heads together to generate a list of ideas that they would like to develop further, and needs that they would like to see fulfilled. Here is a sampling.

Rehabilitate 90% of the cases of child malnutrition through talks, visits, awareness, follow-up, trainings and searching for appropriate technologies for the purpose of treating malnutrition.

Family planning.

Medicines for chronic diseases: epilepsy, asthma, anemia, fecal exams, prenatal visits, general medical consultations.

House visits for 'special children.'

Pap smear clinics.

...and, lastly, my personal favorite:

Visits to people with incurable diseases or people with scarce economic resources; through house visits, people feel happier; and also, monthly clinics because there are patients who have indeed been helped a lot and are recovering from their illness.

Quite a bit of work to do, eh?

A week in Chiq'a'l

I spent this past week in Chiq'a'l, (San Juan Comalapa, in the Chimaltenango department). Over the past few weeks, I've become increasingly frustrated with my difficulties in learning Kaqchikel in San Lucas. Although Kaqchikel is the preferred linguistic medium in the surrounding "aldeas" (literally, "hamlets," or "communities"), it is uncommon to hear it spoken in the town of San Lucas, itself. Moreover, I have been told by a number of luqueños that the language that they speak at home is a blend of K'iche', Tzutujil and Kaqchikel; this is both because San Lucas lies at the geographic intersection of these linguistic groups, and also because the town has historically attracted migrant farmers seeking work on surrounding plantations or stopping on their way to the coast.

When I told Peter of my frustration with my stagnated Kaqchikel learning, he offered to see whether a good friend of his, Magda Sotz, an experienced language teacher whose family speaks Kaqchikel at home, might be willing to let me stay with her a while.

...

I'm sitting here at the border between Magda's father's terreno and the neighboring plot, surrounded by seven-foot stalks as a calming breeze rustles through the cornfields. I asked Don Mateo a couple of days ago if I could come see his land, and he replied, happily, "Ütz!" ("Bien!" "Yeah!")

Although Comalapa has about the same population as San Lucas Tolimán, as far as I know, it seems that life here is more pastoral--most families work their own land; with adequate care, smaller lots (2-4 cuerdas; 1 cuerda = 40m x 40m) yield a family's maize needs for a full year. Firewood is prepared every morning (shaking the walls and roof of my bedroom) for the woodburning stove. Family life revolves around the kitchen--Magda's mom and sisters are there a good part of the day, tortillando (*thap* *thap* *thap* as dough is slapped, hand to hand, into the shape of tortillas) and cooking. Magda sits and weaves on her backstrap loom a few hours a day, if her daughter Megan allows her. I think Magda is weaving a po't (huipil) for the museum exhibit Peter will be curating in Illinois.

When it rains, and when the wind blows hard, all who are seated at the stove/dinner table comment on the milpa. The rain is good for the crop (but bad for working in the fields), and the wind can bend a whole cornfield flat to the ground. There is a crucial time of the growing season when the stalks are tall enough to be snapped at the base by strong winds. If the plants and their roots are not "calzado" (that is, surrounded by a reinforcing mound of soil and compost), a few months' worth of tortillas can be lost in the course of a particularly stormy night.

When Don Mateo describes his work as a "lucha," ("struggle") he is not exaggerating--2 of his 3 cuerdas are on a steep hillside, covered with enormous (1.5 ft in diameter) anthills ("Cómo pican," he laments--"They really bite."). Brent Metz, an anthropologist who has lived and worked with the Ch'orti' people of southeastern Guatemala, tells of an older man who died when he fell out of his cornfield--which, of course, was located on a vertical slope. Indeed, at times I felt that if I lost my footing, I could have easily slid 10 feet before catching myself. (Of note, there is an enormous plot of flat, fertile land next to Don Mateo's other cuerda that is owned by a man who owns a shop in the center of town; according to Don Mateo, the man rarely even visits, let alone works on, his own land.) The other day, Don Mateo carried 1 quintal (~45 kg) of compost by headstrap up and down the hilly, 4-km trek to his terreno. When he returns home after a day of work in the fields, Don Mateo's blank expression belies his exhaustion.

The pace of life here is much slower than anywhere I've ever been. A monograph on a neighboring town called Tecpán describes the phenomenon of subsistence economies, where ever-increasing "productivity" and "profits" (defined from an industrial capitalist perspective) are sacrificed in favor of increased opportunity for "leisure"--that is, for savoring and enjoying life. Of course, this can be mistaken for laziness--but the hours and intensity of work here can be just as overwhelming as in industrialized settings.

Every night as we wait for supper to be prepared, Don Mateo regales us for ~2 hours, alternately telling jokes and fables, interspersed with reflections on the history of Comalapa and surrounding towns, national politics and indigenous and rural life. (For instance, he taught me the etymology of several indigenous town names. The Kaqchikel name for Comalapa, Chiq'a'l ("donde la brasa quemada," or, "the place of the burnt reed") refers to an incident when, per Don Mateo, ladinos used torches to set fire to indigenous houses, leaving neighborhoods of burnt reeds where houses had stood the night before.) For my benefit, he offers to tell some stories twice, once in Spanish, once in Kaqchikel.

Doña Julia, Magda's mother, is adorable. She spends a good part of the day in-and-out of the kitchen, tortillando, processing dry food stuffs (beans, greens, etc.) and preparing meals. She listens quietly at mealtimes, occasionally contributing hilarious comments that produce peals of laughter.

Megan, Magda's 4-year-old daughter, went for vaccines this week. The doctor prescribed albendazole (deworming medication), Tylenol (in case of a fever after her vaccination), a cough suppressant (unnecessary, but it has helped her sleep a bit better at night), iron supplements (although Magda reports that no blood was drawn, nor was Megan examined for evidence of anemia), and folic acid (??? commonly given to women of child-bearing age to prevent neural tube defects in the fetus, e.g. spina bifida; I told them that the folic acid definitely wouldn't hurt Megan, but it might make more sense for Magda to take it than her daughter). I just hope Magda didn't have to pay for any of this. I have a feeling that the iron and folic acid supplements were actually intended for Magda and that this was inadequately communicated during the doctor's visit.

This week has been a good experience for me. I have learned a bit more Kaqchikel, and, more importantly, I've realized that the remedy to my desperation about language learning will be to find more opportunities for exposure and immersion. This, of course, is also a challenge. Chiq'a'l is quite a ways from San Lucas Tolimán, and it will be quite taxing to keep traveling back and forth every week (since I want to continue my involvement in the activities with the health promoters). I am going to have to figure something out this week. Will keep you posted. Thanks as always for reading.

Planificación Familiar

A few days ago I asked Dominga (one of the head health promoters we have been helping with fluoride treatments in schools) about her thoughts on family planning.

She told me that after she had her first 3 children, her husband came to her and told her to figure out a way for them not to get pregnant for awhile.

So Dominga asked the women in her neighborhood what they thought about using birth control pills or the birth control shot (Depo-Provera) to space pregnancies and avoid having too many children. The women scolded her and told her that if she used birth control she would be murdering her future children and denying them the right to a life God had planned for them. Dominga said she felt very ashamed at the women’s reply, so she went to a priest, who taught her about natural family planning methods.

Natural family planning requires a couple to refrain from engaging in sexual intercourse on the days when the woman is most fertile. This form of birth control requires the participation and cooperation of both the man and the woman, which is unfortunately the reason why this method failed for Dominga.

Because this method of family planning confines sexual activity to only specific days of the month, each time Dominga’s husband wanted to have sex on the wrong day and Dominga told him, “not today,” an argument would ensue. Her husband accused her of having an affair. He would say, “if you don’t want to have sex with me, it must be because you have been out having sex with your lover.” Inevitably these arguments would end with her husband saying, “I am the the man and you are the woman. I tell you when we have sex, you don’t get to decide.”

Dominga stopped her attempts at family planning to avoid these fights with her husband, and soon they ended up with 9 children.

Dominga’s children are between the ages of 7 and 24. She told me that now, looking back on her decisions, she wishes she had planned her pregnancies and used birth control because it is has been and continues to be very difficult to care for all 9 children, to feed them all and make sure they get an education. “People say it’s a sin to use family planning,” said Dominga, “but I think it’s a sin to bring more children into the world if you can’t take care of them the way they deserve.” She told me that her life as a parent has been very difficult, and the struggle to provide for the children has been a constant stress and worry for her and her husband.

Dominga’s story made me wonder whether a family planning project might be helpful in the rural communities served by the health promoters. I asked her what she thought about starting such a project and she suggested home visits. Public group talks would make people uncomfortable, she said, and would prevent them from asking questions for fear that their neighbors might gossip about them. She also told me she thought it would be important to have an outsider do the educating. “People do not want to hear these things from their neighbors,” she said. She explained that there is not wide community acceptance of birth control and family planning, and that there is a certain taboo associated with talking openly or publicly about the subject. She said that if there were a project, a large part of the project would have to focus on how to change community conceptions of birth control and making it more permissible for people to discuss such things.

“How would you do it?” I asked her. Her idea was to ask each of the health promoters to come up with a list of couples in their community who have less than 4 children, and schedule an appointment for a home visit to each family to discuss family planning. “It’s important to do it with the man and the woman together,” she explained, “because women here cannot make any decisions without their husbands’ consent.” The man would have to be educated as well, and the home visit would be focused on planning together as a couple.

“What about language?” I asked. Most women in the rural communities speak limited Spanish, so I asked her if I would need to learn Kaqchikel to avoid the problem of having an interpreter spread gossip after helping me with each private home visit. “It’s not necessary for you to learn Kaqchikel,” she said, “just bring an outside health promoter from a different community to translate for you.”

I’ve thought about that a lot, the role of language in giving a community ownership over their own health. I’ve decided that bringing an interpreter with me would serve the positive purpose of training each health promoter to do these visits on their own in the future.

Given Dominga’s overwhelmingly positive response to the idea of a family planning initiative, I was excited to talk to Vicente (the head health promoter who coordinates all of the health promoter trainings and activities) about my talk with Dominga.

He was supportive of the idea, but uncomfortable about including anything but natural family planning methods in the educational home visits. It’s my opinion that it is a person’s right to be taught about all the available options and their right to choose what’s best for themselves. I also understand, however, that the health promoter system operates under the umbrella of the Catholic parish programs and is thus obligated to adhere to Catholic ideology. I mentioned to Vicente that Dr. Tun (the attending physician at the parish clinic) prescribes the pill to patients in some cases, so there must be a multi-layered understanding of artificial birth control at least at the clinic. Vicente suggested that we talk to Dr. Tun and see what he thinks about the idea of comprehensive family planning education through home visits. I’ll let you know what comes of my investigation…