¡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…