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.

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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…

Unskilled Volunteerism

Usually what happens to people when they go on short-term mission trips is they become inspired by the people they meet and the stories they hear and excited about the houses or schools they built and the work they contributed to making somebody’s life a little better. In some cases, the volunteers are so fired up about all that they see and do on the trip that they decide to come back for a longer period of time so they can really contribute in a bigger way. This was us last year.

By now we’ve been here for over a month, and what I’ve realized is that the kind of work that people do on one- or two-week trips, while nominally helpful and inspiring, is not sustainable in the long term, for a year.

If I wanted to, I could help with construction every day this year, but anyone who knows me well will attest to the fact that I’m not very physically coordinated nor do I do I thrive in situations of grueling physical exertion. Furthermore, the parish and the community would benefit much more if they hired a Guatemalan worker, who would do the work twice as well and twice as fast.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the reality of coming here for an extended period of time without a “trade” or a “skill” of some specific sort, such as doctors or engineers, is that there doesn’t seem to be much for me to do that the Guatemalan people can’t do themselves, short of redistributing wealth and donating money, which, in my case, is not possible since I have none.

The truth is, if you can’t cure people’s illnesses or help them engineer potable water systems, there’s a shortage of long-term, unskilled work to be done. When I look at my volunteer options here in San Lucas, here is what I could spend my time doing… 1.) I could teach English, 2.) I could help out at CFCA (Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, an organization that matches U.S. sponsors with needy children and elderly people throughout the developing world and has offices in San Lucas), or 3.) I could work with the health promoters.

I feel conflicted about teaching English here because I feel that it is not a very helpful skill for kids to have here. It is not improving their quality of life. If anything, the children here should be working on their Spanish, since it is, after all, their second language and will be the most useful to them as adults in Guatemala. Finally, I think that the reality of English language instruction in such an impoverished setting is that most of the students who learn English in school will never have the opportunity to use it.

I’ve looked into volunteering for CFCA, but it would basically be a desk job. The work would be mostly translation, translating letters that North Americans have written in English to the children or elderly person they have sponsored, and interpreting for meetings when sponsors visit Guatemala. While my free translation services would surely be helpful to this organization, it doesn’t get me excited the same way that the health promoter system does (anyone who took an NU SESP class with me will understand why).

The health promoter system is a grassroots, community based system that gives impoverished, rural communities access to health care. Each community around San Lucas has one or more health promoters, people who come from the communities themselves and are trained to identify and treat common illnesses, monitor community members with chronic illnesses, and serve as a link between each rural community and the parochial clinic.

Working with the health promoters seems like the most interesting and exciting opportunity for me, and I've talked to some of the health promoters about starting a family planning education project, which is a very exciting prospect for me. I need to do some reading and research on this idea, so I'll probably have a more concrete update for you all in the coming weeks...