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.