My last image of San Pedro was an old, old man. Probably 70, with only a handful of teeth in his head, grinning ear-to-ear at the passing bus. He had a hoe slung over one shoulder, and a worn-down machete thrust into a leather strip tied round his waist. He wore spotted pants typical of indigenous San Pedro men, a red sash, a button-down, and old leather sandals on his dirty feet. That is my Guatemala.
On the bus ride to the City, Alisha and I sat 3-across in the seat with a father-aged man who was going to Santa Clara for the festival. He struck up a conversation and we talked for more than 30 minutes about Guatemala, the U.S., our work in San Pedro, the weather, whatever came to mind. About an hour after he deboarded, a snaggle-toothed old man in flamboyantly typical garb from Solola sat down and started talking to us on more or less the same topics. He didn't know us, we didn't know him, and we were carrying on a perfectly coherent conversation in Spanish. It's not the first time that that has happened, either. People come up and talk to us all the time, after they've figured out that we're not just tourists, and are here for at least a little while. That is my Guatemala.
I've learned a lot while I've been here - about myself and my abilities, about my Mennonite culture, about my American culture, and most importantly, about Latin American, specifically Mayan, culture and history. I've learned a lot about the U.S.-Latin American interactions here. A significant number of people that we have talked to either have been to the U.S. or want to go in the future, despite the atrocious manner in which they are treated by U.S. citizens, especially considering the new (and hopefully soon-to-be-overturned) Arizona law prohibiting the aid in any way of "illegal" immigrants and allowing for blatant racial profiling of anyone who appears Hispanic or is heard speaking Spanish. What a disgrace. With a few exceptions, I have only ever been treated graciously by Guatemalan citizens. There have been times when I've been at a bus stop in the country with only the vaguest idea of where to go or when the bus will show up, and someone has kindly pointed me in the right direction, explained the route or the fare, or even hailed a bus for me. Perhaps they understand what is to be discriminated against because of their appearance, race, or telltale indigenous accent. Why can we not extend the same grace and kindness to them, strangers, neighbors, friends that they are?
After spending 12 weeks in Guatemala, going back to the U.S. will be like diving into a big bowl of Jell-o. Difficult.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Día Final en San Pedro
Today was my last day in San Pedro, Guatemala. We are taking a chicken bus to the City tomorrow to meet up with the rest of the CASAS students. Friday is a free day for us, and then we all fly out at some point on Saturday. I should be back in the U.S. sometime on Saturday afternoon. I don´t really know how I feel about that. Part of me wants to be home, knows that it´s time to be home, can´t wait to see my family and friends and be back at Bethel and the Newton Medical Center again. But the other part of me wishes that I could stay here for longer. I feel like Spanish is just on the tip of my tongue, that if I stayed for just a few more weeks, it would be better. But I think I´ll always feel that way about Spanish.
We´ve had an interesting couple of days at the Clinic. I´ve been feeling like more of a hindrance than a help, tripping the doctors up, screwing up blood pressures, not really contributing in any useful way. I love it, make no mistake, the experience has been wonderful, but I don´t feel like I´m doing anything. That changed yesterday however, when a Japanese couple came in. The guy was in a pretty bad way - he had a parasite and a bacterial infection, was in a foreign country, didn´t speak the language, and was absolutely FREAKED out. His wife spoke English quite well, but no Spanish. So guess what I got to do!?!?!?!? TRANSLATE!!!!!!
I´ve also learned a few Tz'utujil words, such as "How are you" or "Good morning" from my friend Lorenzo at the clinic. So yesterday a man came in to Dra. Vico´s office, and immediately started speaking his native language to the nurse. Once they had figured out his problem, they both left, leaving the man and I to stare awkwardly at each other for a few minutes until he asked my name. I told him, asked his, and then asked how he was in Tz'utujil, which made his eyes just LIGHT up. He replied in kind, which of course I couldn´t understand. He was super excited that I had tried, though. Lorenzo always laughs at me when I say stuff to him in Tz'utujil. I´m sure my accent is just atrocious.
Today we had to say goodbye to all of our clinic friends and all of our friends at A.M.I. San Lucas, where we work in the afternoon. It wasn´t fun. I´ll miss them a lot. I will miss hearing Tz'utujil spoken everywhere. It is a beautiful language, though I understand none of it, and one that I will forever associate with Guatemala. I will miss the mountains, volcanoes, and drop-dead gorgeous Lake Atitlán. I will miss my parents, my sisters, and my brother. I will miss having thick corn tortillas straight off of the fire, and eating pan dulce every morning for breakfast. I will miss the panadería and the comedor where we have become regulars. I will miss the conversations that people strike up with us while we´re walking, and the kindness of the indigenous here. I will miss being able to speak Spanish most of all, though. It is a beautiful language, and I feel like I´ve advanced so far in my ability to communicate in another language. I also feel like I´ll lose a lot of that ability when I return to the U.S., and no longer have the chance to practice every minute of every day. Hopefully my neurons don´t let lose of their dendrites too soon.
We´ve had an interesting couple of days at the Clinic. I´ve been feeling like more of a hindrance than a help, tripping the doctors up, screwing up blood pressures, not really contributing in any useful way. I love it, make no mistake, the experience has been wonderful, but I don´t feel like I´m doing anything. That changed yesterday however, when a Japanese couple came in. The guy was in a pretty bad way - he had a parasite and a bacterial infection, was in a foreign country, didn´t speak the language, and was absolutely FREAKED out. His wife spoke English quite well, but no Spanish. So guess what I got to do!?!?!?!? TRANSLATE!!!!!!
I´ve also learned a few Tz'utujil words, such as "How are you" or "Good morning" from my friend Lorenzo at the clinic. So yesterday a man came in to Dra. Vico´s office, and immediately started speaking his native language to the nurse. Once they had figured out his problem, they both left, leaving the man and I to stare awkwardly at each other for a few minutes until he asked my name. I told him, asked his, and then asked how he was in Tz'utujil, which made his eyes just LIGHT up. He replied in kind, which of course I couldn´t understand. He was super excited that I had tried, though. Lorenzo always laughs at me when I say stuff to him in Tz'utujil. I´m sure my accent is just atrocious.
Today we had to say goodbye to all of our clinic friends and all of our friends at A.M.I. San Lucas, where we work in the afternoon. It wasn´t fun. I´ll miss them a lot. I will miss hearing Tz'utujil spoken everywhere. It is a beautiful language, though I understand none of it, and one that I will forever associate with Guatemala. I will miss the mountains, volcanoes, and drop-dead gorgeous Lake Atitlán. I will miss my parents, my sisters, and my brother. I will miss having thick corn tortillas straight off of the fire, and eating pan dulce every morning for breakfast. I will miss the panadería and the comedor where we have become regulars. I will miss the conversations that people strike up with us while we´re walking, and the kindness of the indigenous here. I will miss being able to speak Spanish most of all, though. It is a beautiful language, and I feel like I´ve advanced so far in my ability to communicate in another language. I also feel like I´ll lose a lot of that ability when I return to the U.S., and no longer have the chance to practice every minute of every day. Hopefully my neurons don´t let lose of their dendrites too soon.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Mi familia Tzu´tujil
August 9, 2010
I love my Tzu’tujil family. They’re so great. My father, Rafael, is a part-time pastor and full-time handyman. He’s like my dad in the U.S., fixing and building anything and everything. Next to Sarah, he’s the family member that I talk to the most, primarily because he’s the only one who translates their funny stories or jokes from Tzu’tujil to Spanish so that I can understand why Domingo is giggling uncontrollably. Maria, my mother, stays at home and keeps the house running smoothly. Her Spanish is only slightly better than mine, meaning that if I say a sentence in Spanish that is just totally garbled, Rafael sometimes has to translate, which is mildly embarrassing for both of us. She’s really great and cooks wonderfully. My older sister (I’ve always wanted one of those) is not prototypically Guatemalan in that she isn’t married. Most Guatemalan girls have 2 children by her age. She has had a long string of boyfriends, though, and a whole host of boy problems. We talk about them sometimes, and once in awhile she asks my advice, after which I tell her exactly what she knows she ought to do, but just needs to hear from someone else. Sarah says that my advice is good. Interesting, since I’ve only really had one boyfriend, a relationship which ended well, with very little drama from either party, so I’m not exactly the queen of relationship advice. Domingo, my brother (always wanted one of those, too, thanks Mom and Dad), has more or less gotten used to my being around. By which I mean, while he still doesn’t initiate conversations with me, he does start giggling when I say something mildly humorous or when I totally slaughter Spanish (sometimes one and the same), and will answer questions with more than one syllable. He’s got a really funny laugh, a high-pitched, honest-to-God GIGGLE. He’s a good guy.
This evening, there was a bit of a party for Rafael, a continuation of last night. There was tres leches cake. I had two pieces. Some more family came over, Rafael’s brother, his wife, and a son and daughter that live next door. During supper, they started talking about the arrival of a group from the U.S. that has come for four days to teach English to the community. My family thinks that’s all a big joke. Domingo starts giggling at any mention of it. They all know at least a few words in English, and I think Sarah speaks it at least a bit. So for awhile, we had this great mixture of Spanish, English, and Tzu’tujil running around the table, with everyone asking “Como se dice…,” “como se llama…” and then translating my translation into Tzu’tujil for better comprehension. Then they all started telling stories in Spanish, except right when the good part was coming, they’d start laughing and slip into Tzu’tujil, and so I never knew what was so funny!! They’re so wonderful.
I love my Tzu’tujil family. They’re so great. My father, Rafael, is a part-time pastor and full-time handyman. He’s like my dad in the U.S., fixing and building anything and everything. Next to Sarah, he’s the family member that I talk to the most, primarily because he’s the only one who translates their funny stories or jokes from Tzu’tujil to Spanish so that I can understand why Domingo is giggling uncontrollably. Maria, my mother, stays at home and keeps the house running smoothly. Her Spanish is only slightly better than mine, meaning that if I say a sentence in Spanish that is just totally garbled, Rafael sometimes has to translate, which is mildly embarrassing for both of us. She’s really great and cooks wonderfully. My older sister (I’ve always wanted one of those) is not prototypically Guatemalan in that she isn’t married. Most Guatemalan girls have 2 children by her age. She has had a long string of boyfriends, though, and a whole host of boy problems. We talk about them sometimes, and once in awhile she asks my advice, after which I tell her exactly what she knows she ought to do, but just needs to hear from someone else. Sarah says that my advice is good. Interesting, since I’ve only really had one boyfriend, a relationship which ended well, with very little drama from either party, so I’m not exactly the queen of relationship advice. Domingo, my brother (always wanted one of those, too, thanks Mom and Dad), has more or less gotten used to my being around. By which I mean, while he still doesn’t initiate conversations with me, he does start giggling when I say something mildly humorous or when I totally slaughter Spanish (sometimes one and the same), and will answer questions with more than one syllable. He’s got a really funny laugh, a high-pitched, honest-to-God GIGGLE. He’s a good guy.
This evening, there was a bit of a party for Rafael, a continuation of last night. There was tres leches cake. I had two pieces. Some more family came over, Rafael’s brother, his wife, and a son and daughter that live next door. During supper, they started talking about the arrival of a group from the U.S. that has come for four days to teach English to the community. My family thinks that’s all a big joke. Domingo starts giggling at any mention of it. They all know at least a few words in English, and I think Sarah speaks it at least a bit. So for awhile, we had this great mixture of Spanish, English, and Tzu’tujil running around the table, with everyone asking “Como se dice…,” “como se llama…” and then translating my translation into Tzu’tujil for better comprehension. Then they all started telling stories in Spanish, except right when the good part was coming, they’d start laughing and slip into Tzu’tujil, and so I never knew what was so funny!! They’re so wonderful.
San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan
August 8, 2010
This past weekend, I visited my friend Cassidy in the state of Huehuetenango. She’s living with a former BVSer, Todd, his indigenous (Mam culture) wife, Caty, and their 2 year old daughter, Yanna. I left at noon on Friday and took a bus to the Pan-American highway. The man-who-yells told me the fare to the Highway was Q50. On the return trip, I found out that it was actually Q10. Asshole. Thirtysomething transportation personnel are not the most trustworthy, especially if they’re on the bus lines, and ESPECIALLY if it involves a gringa. I arrived in Huehue at about 4:30, and met Cassidy and Caty. We took buses and a pickup to get to San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan, which is the town that they live near. Once we got to their house, it was close to 9pm. I hadn’t eaten but a couple of pieces of pan dulce since noon, and was just about to drop over dead. The house has no electricity, so everything is done by flashlight after the sun sets at about 6:30, so we made tortillas by flashlight and fire.
The next day, we went to a baby ceremony. The wife of one of Todd’s employees had recently given birth to a little girl. It is a custom in Mayan culture for the mother to go on bedrest for a certain amount of time. In San Pedro, she rests for 7-9 days. In Ixta, it’s 20. For the first 10 days, the woman is taken to the sauna in the house twice a day with her baby, and once a day for the next 10. This helps to form the mother-child bond, gives her body time to recover, and eases the transition between warm, squishy uterus to cold, hard world for the baby. Mercedes Vico says that this is a barbaric practice, and is really bad for their health. I’m not sure who to believe at this point – traditional Mayan culture that has been the same for thousands of years, or modern medicine.
Whether or not it’s good for either party, the family still has a big party after the 20 days, and we were invited. It doesn’t exactly fall under the “once in a lifetime” category, but it’s pretty darn close, especially for foreign visitors. We walked about an hour to their house and then sat around and talked for awhile. Then at noon they all squished into a little room in the mud-brick house, lit only by the door a single incandescent bulb, and two skinny white candles on the floor. It was surreal – all of the women and little girls in maroon traje, dark eyes glinting in the scant light, like something out of a National Geographic documentary, or something that someone else gets to experience. They sang a few songs in Spanish, gave a prayer, and then talked about Jesus at the temple in Mam for awhile, then translated it into Spanish. It seemed to be more like a church service than a celebration for the mother and baby (they took no part in it), but that’s not up to me, I guess. Afterwards, they fed us big bowls of super thick gravy with pieces of meat and bone in it. No utensils. That’s why God invented fingers. Messy business. When we finished eating (or in Cassidy and I’s case, when we were full), we hung out and talked some more. Cassidy and I were surrounded by a handful of kids, ages 4-12 or so, and they were all demanding the English equivalents for Spanish words, so we reeled them off, much to their giggling pleasure.
The next morning, we woke up at the ungodly hour of 4am and tried to gather our things by the light of Cassidy’s alarm clock (her flashlight died at an important juncture in my bathroom trip the night before) so that we could get the family’s booth set up at the market by 5. They sell a wide variety of products at their booth (venda), including baskets, pottery, güipiles (traditional blouses), cortes (traditional skirts), other textiles, plants, shoes, and a huge collection of herbs, tinctures, and natural medicines. It took about an hour to get the booth set up all the way, and by that time, the sky had gone from pitch-black to distinctly light and the neighboring booths were up and running as well. It was really interesting watching the market go from bare wooden booths and a complete lack of people to sell to, to a bustling social hub, filled with women in traje and men in cowboy hats.
After breakfast (bean-stuffed tortillas), Cassidy and I wandered around the market for an hour or so, eating food and looking at things. I had a large piece of soft bread, 4 fruits that looked suspiciously like sea anemones, and a serving of French fries with ketchup, mayonnaise, and green chili sauce (EXCELLENT, all of it). The market is pretty cool, but completely and totally PACKED. Walking down a street takes serious skill and a serious lack of personal space and/or regard for the personal space of others. Each little booth has its own wares spread out, is probably BLASTING Spanish music at full volume, and every 30 feet, someone wants you to buy two black grocery bags for one quetzal. Everyone is jabbering away in Mam, which to the untrained ear sounds exactly like Tzu’tujil, but Mam is softer and less “clicky.” Markets are the best place to encounter all that is culture.
I took a pickup truck for an hour and a half into Huehue (Q10 [$1.25]), a bus from Huehue to Cuatro Caminos (sort of a bus station where four major roads to major cities all meet – Q20 [$2.50]), another bus from Cuatro Caminos to Km148 (where the Pan-American meets the road to San Pedro – Q10) and then met the bus from the City to San Pedro (Q10). I love Guatemalan public transit (when they’re not overcharging me or leaving me in strange places with only the slightest knowledge of how to get where I need to be, that is). On the bus to Km148, the passengers were subjected to an absolutely godawful film about a werewolf. The sounds of screams, snarls, and general wreckage were a great background to the Josh Groban, Creekbusters, Open Road, and Glee! on my iPod. At Km148, I almost got on a shuttle bus with a drunk driver, but thankfully the tourists on board told me that I should most certainly take another bus. They were terrified, but I didn’t see any wreckage on my way home, so I guess it worked out all right.
These evening was the Pastoral Appreciation Night for our church. It was a LONG service, with lots of singing and such by the children. It was a big deal. Except that the guy who gave the sermon forgot my host father’s name. How embarrassing. It was also POURIING rain on the tin hoop building roof, making comprehension very low. I had also left my laptop to charge on the porch, which may or may not have kept out the rain. Consequently, I spent most of my time wondering how I was going to react to a fried hard drive. But it was ok. Sarah and I ran almost all the way home in the rain. Uphill. I told her that her family needs to attend a church that is closer to their house.
This past weekend, I visited my friend Cassidy in the state of Huehuetenango. She’s living with a former BVSer, Todd, his indigenous (Mam culture) wife, Caty, and their 2 year old daughter, Yanna. I left at noon on Friday and took a bus to the Pan-American highway. The man-who-yells told me the fare to the Highway was Q50. On the return trip, I found out that it was actually Q10. Asshole. Thirtysomething transportation personnel are not the most trustworthy, especially if they’re on the bus lines, and ESPECIALLY if it involves a gringa. I arrived in Huehue at about 4:30, and met Cassidy and Caty. We took buses and a pickup to get to San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan, which is the town that they live near. Once we got to their house, it was close to 9pm. I hadn’t eaten but a couple of pieces of pan dulce since noon, and was just about to drop over dead. The house has no electricity, so everything is done by flashlight after the sun sets at about 6:30, so we made tortillas by flashlight and fire.
The next day, we went to a baby ceremony. The wife of one of Todd’s employees had recently given birth to a little girl. It is a custom in Mayan culture for the mother to go on bedrest for a certain amount of time. In San Pedro, she rests for 7-9 days. In Ixta, it’s 20. For the first 10 days, the woman is taken to the sauna in the house twice a day with her baby, and once a day for the next 10. This helps to form the mother-child bond, gives her body time to recover, and eases the transition between warm, squishy uterus to cold, hard world for the baby. Mercedes Vico says that this is a barbaric practice, and is really bad for their health. I’m not sure who to believe at this point – traditional Mayan culture that has been the same for thousands of years, or modern medicine.
Whether or not it’s good for either party, the family still has a big party after the 20 days, and we were invited. It doesn’t exactly fall under the “once in a lifetime” category, but it’s pretty darn close, especially for foreign visitors. We walked about an hour to their house and then sat around and talked for awhile. Then at noon they all squished into a little room in the mud-brick house, lit only by the door a single incandescent bulb, and two skinny white candles on the floor. It was surreal – all of the women and little girls in maroon traje, dark eyes glinting in the scant light, like something out of a National Geographic documentary, or something that someone else gets to experience. They sang a few songs in Spanish, gave a prayer, and then talked about Jesus at the temple in Mam for awhile, then translated it into Spanish. It seemed to be more like a church service than a celebration for the mother and baby (they took no part in it), but that’s not up to me, I guess. Afterwards, they fed us big bowls of super thick gravy with pieces of meat and bone in it. No utensils. That’s why God invented fingers. Messy business. When we finished eating (or in Cassidy and I’s case, when we were full), we hung out and talked some more. Cassidy and I were surrounded by a handful of kids, ages 4-12 or so, and they were all demanding the English equivalents for Spanish words, so we reeled them off, much to their giggling pleasure.
The next morning, we woke up at the ungodly hour of 4am and tried to gather our things by the light of Cassidy’s alarm clock (her flashlight died at an important juncture in my bathroom trip the night before) so that we could get the family’s booth set up at the market by 5. They sell a wide variety of products at their booth (venda), including baskets, pottery, güipiles (traditional blouses), cortes (traditional skirts), other textiles, plants, shoes, and a huge collection of herbs, tinctures, and natural medicines. It took about an hour to get the booth set up all the way, and by that time, the sky had gone from pitch-black to distinctly light and the neighboring booths were up and running as well. It was really interesting watching the market go from bare wooden booths and a complete lack of people to sell to, to a bustling social hub, filled with women in traje and men in cowboy hats.
After breakfast (bean-stuffed tortillas), Cassidy and I wandered around the market for an hour or so, eating food and looking at things. I had a large piece of soft bread, 4 fruits that looked suspiciously like sea anemones, and a serving of French fries with ketchup, mayonnaise, and green chili sauce (EXCELLENT, all of it). The market is pretty cool, but completely and totally PACKED. Walking down a street takes serious skill and a serious lack of personal space and/or regard for the personal space of others. Each little booth has its own wares spread out, is probably BLASTING Spanish music at full volume, and every 30 feet, someone wants you to buy two black grocery bags for one quetzal. Everyone is jabbering away in Mam, which to the untrained ear sounds exactly like Tzu’tujil, but Mam is softer and less “clicky.” Markets are the best place to encounter all that is culture.
I took a pickup truck for an hour and a half into Huehue (Q10 [$1.25]), a bus from Huehue to Cuatro Caminos (sort of a bus station where four major roads to major cities all meet – Q20 [$2.50]), another bus from Cuatro Caminos to Km148 (where the Pan-American meets the road to San Pedro – Q10) and then met the bus from the City to San Pedro (Q10). I love Guatemalan public transit (when they’re not overcharging me or leaving me in strange places with only the slightest knowledge of how to get where I need to be, that is). On the bus to Km148, the passengers were subjected to an absolutely godawful film about a werewolf. The sounds of screams, snarls, and general wreckage were a great background to the Josh Groban, Creekbusters, Open Road, and Glee! on my iPod. At Km148, I almost got on a shuttle bus with a drunk driver, but thankfully the tourists on board told me that I should most certainly take another bus. They were terrified, but I didn’t see any wreckage on my way home, so I guess it worked out all right.
These evening was the Pastoral Appreciation Night for our church. It was a LONG service, with lots of singing and such by the children. It was a big deal. Except that the guy who gave the sermon forgot my host father’s name. How embarrassing. It was also POURIING rain on the tin hoop building roof, making comprehension very low. I had also left my laptop to charge on the porch, which may or may not have kept out the rain. Consequently, I spent most of my time wondering how I was going to react to a fried hard drive. But it was ok. Sarah and I ran almost all the way home in the rain. Uphill. I told her that her family needs to attend a church that is closer to their house.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
La Cesarea y Corupción
August 2, 2010
OH MY GOSH GUYS, I GOT TO SEE A C-SECTION TODAY!!!!!!!!! It was crazy. We had already had a HUGE day at the clinic. Alisha and I switched doctors this week, so I was with Mercedes Vico, the family practice doctor, and she was with Luis, the gynecologist. In my office, we had 29 patients, and worked until nearly 1:30, which is about 2 hours later than usual. A lady had come in earlier that day, and her water must’ve broken, because we knew all day that we would be doing a C-section when everything else cleared out. When the last patients finally left, things started moving pretty quickly. Everyone changed scrubs, donned masks, booties, and hairnets, the doctors scrubbed in, and Alisha and I squeezed into the operating room. The operating room at the hospital is probably the most beautiful place ever – a great juxtaposition of medicine and landscape. It has banks of windows on two sides, with the most gorgeous view of Lake Atitlán and the surrounding mountains and volcanoes. It was also incredibly hot in there.
Dr. Velilla started cutting and everything was going great. Then the anesthesiologist repositioned the overhead lights (the really important ones), and they went out. And refused to turn back on. The doctor had already cut down to the uterus, so there was really no turning back at that point. The closest the doctor has ever come to saying anything remotely resembling irritation occurred then. “Oh. My. God. No puedo ver NADA!!” was all he said, but he barely speaks English, so I feel like it carried a little bit more weight than normal. The backup flashlight (a giant Black-and-Decker job) also didn’t work. He kept cutting, mostly because there was nothing else to do, but he couldn’t see as well as he needed to. The nurse handed the flashlight over to me and told me to see if I could turn it on, which of course I couldn’t do any more than she could. While I was fiddling with it, Alisha hit my arm and told me to pay attention. I looked up and there was the baby’s head! Less than 15 minutes after we first opened the lady up, they had already popped the baby out like a slice of toast and handed her off to a waiting nurse.
At this point, another nurse showed up with a portable surgery light and got it positioned so that the doctors could see to suction and suture. But she is really short, shorter than me (up to this point, I had believed that impossible), so she had a tough time keeping the light steady. So they told me to go hold it, which meant that I had prime real estate on the suturing process. It also granted me the nickname “Statue of Liberty” for the next few days. The doctors were really great about pointing stuff out to us, like the Fallopian tubes and the different landmarks on the uterus and the ovaries and such, except that I had to hold the light (positioned at the patient’s feet) and try to see into the gaping hole in her midsection, all without violating the sterile field, which didn’t actually work out that great. And the whole time, my pants, which were about 3x too big for me, with sprung elastic in the waistband, threatened to succumb to gravity’s insistent pull, despite my best attempts at tucking them into my underwear. Also by the way, the O.R. scrub pants are white and thin. My underwear was brightly figured paisley. Classy, to be sure.
By the time the doctors finished stitching the patient up, they were completely covered in sweat. We wheeled her to her room (where she would stay for maybe 6 hours before going home) and got her positioned on the bed. We helped clean up a bit, and then left at nearly 3:15. We were both super pumped, and so decided to splurge a bit and visit “Tourist Town” for some food. The restaurant had great guacamole and free tortillas and AWFUL American music (Ice, Ice, Baby was just one of the many terrible songs that we heard).
Oooh, what a great day.
August 4, 2010
Every so often, Dr. Velilla goes on a tear about the state of things in Guatemala, which is very informative. Evidently the Guatemalan government does absolutely nothing to facilitate the entry of necessary medication and other supplies into the country. Guatemala doesn’t have any way to manufacture the drugs or what-have-you, and the only facilities are laboratories and such for processing tests. As such, everything must be shipped in from Europe and the U.S., which is obviously a BIG problem if the government decides that holding everything up at the border is the flavor-of-the-week. And that particular flavor-of-the-week isn’t just of the week, it seems to be more or less the status quo. The Guatemalan incumbents seem to be intent upon keeping their population sick and poor, refusing to do anything to improve the lifestyle or quality of life for anyone except the richest citizens (incidentally, their supporters). Corruption is a BIG problem here – if a politician isn’t bribed to do his or her job, you can bet your boots he or she won’t do it, or at won’t do it to a satisfactory level. Consequently, those who live in the poorer barrios (and much less, the slums and squatters) are pre-prepped for disaster, such as when Agatha roared through. However, in the richest zones of the City, the lights never go out, the water never runs out, and the streets are paved 2 or 3 times per year. By keeping their citizens poor, sick, illiterate, and ignorant, the Guatemalan government can essentially do whatever the hell they please, without incurring the wrath of the majority of the population, all the while keeping that majority in a state of constant fear and under constant repression.
One of the biggest problems in the less-developed countryside, at least medically speaking, is the abundance of medical quacks. Several times per week, if not every day, a woman will come into Dr. Vellilas and say “So-and-so up on the mountain told me that I have a tumor on my ovary that needs to be removed, but it costs Q12,000 ($1500) so I just wanted to be sure” or “So-and-so on the volcano said that I was pregnant but then the baby died.” Both of those cases have happened, along with an abundance of others, equally sad. The woman didn’t have a tumor, and the other’s baby was still alive and hopping around in the womb like a Mexican jumping bean, by the way. But sad as it may seem, the vast majority of Guatemalan health-care providers are in it for the money and the prestige, and may or may not legitimately know anything about medicine, and may or may not extort their patients and play off of their trust in the medical profession as a whole.
Machismo is also an extremely big issue, both at the clinic and in Guatemala as a whole. Machismo is defined simply as “male-dominated society,” and is incredibly prevalent in Latin America, if not the majority of the world. At the clinic, one of the most oft-seen cases of machismo involves the treatment of STDs. Women come into the clinic with an some or other STD, Dr. Vellila prescribes a treatment, and also gives them additional doses for their husband. After the woman leaves the office, however, he looks at us, shakes his head, and says that the husband will never take the pills, that it’s always the woman who bears the brunt of his visits to prostitutes, and that “it’s always the woman’s fault.” We’ve also both seen cases where a couple will visit Dr. Vellila for a gynecological issue (OBVIOUSLY a problem with a WOMAN’S body) and the husband does all the talking. The doctor may even directly address the woman by name, and she still sits silent and unresponsive, while her husband prattles away about the level of pain she is experiencing and the nature and duration of the problem. Because obviously, he knows.
OH MY GOSH GUYS, I GOT TO SEE A C-SECTION TODAY!!!!!!!!! It was crazy. We had already had a HUGE day at the clinic. Alisha and I switched doctors this week, so I was with Mercedes Vico, the family practice doctor, and she was with Luis, the gynecologist. In my office, we had 29 patients, and worked until nearly 1:30, which is about 2 hours later than usual. A lady had come in earlier that day, and her water must’ve broken, because we knew all day that we would be doing a C-section when everything else cleared out. When the last patients finally left, things started moving pretty quickly. Everyone changed scrubs, donned masks, booties, and hairnets, the doctors scrubbed in, and Alisha and I squeezed into the operating room. The operating room at the hospital is probably the most beautiful place ever – a great juxtaposition of medicine and landscape. It has banks of windows on two sides, with the most gorgeous view of Lake Atitlán and the surrounding mountains and volcanoes. It was also incredibly hot in there.
Dr. Velilla started cutting and everything was going great. Then the anesthesiologist repositioned the overhead lights (the really important ones), and they went out. And refused to turn back on. The doctor had already cut down to the uterus, so there was really no turning back at that point. The closest the doctor has ever come to saying anything remotely resembling irritation occurred then. “Oh. My. God. No puedo ver NADA!!” was all he said, but he barely speaks English, so I feel like it carried a little bit more weight than normal. The backup flashlight (a giant Black-and-Decker job) also didn’t work. He kept cutting, mostly because there was nothing else to do, but he couldn’t see as well as he needed to. The nurse handed the flashlight over to me and told me to see if I could turn it on, which of course I couldn’t do any more than she could. While I was fiddling with it, Alisha hit my arm and told me to pay attention. I looked up and there was the baby’s head! Less than 15 minutes after we first opened the lady up, they had already popped the baby out like a slice of toast and handed her off to a waiting nurse.
At this point, another nurse showed up with a portable surgery light and got it positioned so that the doctors could see to suction and suture. But she is really short, shorter than me (up to this point, I had believed that impossible), so she had a tough time keeping the light steady. So they told me to go hold it, which meant that I had prime real estate on the suturing process. It also granted me the nickname “Statue of Liberty” for the next few days. The doctors were really great about pointing stuff out to us, like the Fallopian tubes and the different landmarks on the uterus and the ovaries and such, except that I had to hold the light (positioned at the patient’s feet) and try to see into the gaping hole in her midsection, all without violating the sterile field, which didn’t actually work out that great. And the whole time, my pants, which were about 3x too big for me, with sprung elastic in the waistband, threatened to succumb to gravity’s insistent pull, despite my best attempts at tucking them into my underwear. Also by the way, the O.R. scrub pants are white and thin. My underwear was brightly figured paisley. Classy, to be sure.
By the time the doctors finished stitching the patient up, they were completely covered in sweat. We wheeled her to her room (where she would stay for maybe 6 hours before going home) and got her positioned on the bed. We helped clean up a bit, and then left at nearly 3:15. We were both super pumped, and so decided to splurge a bit and visit “Tourist Town” for some food. The restaurant had great guacamole and free tortillas and AWFUL American music (Ice, Ice, Baby was just one of the many terrible songs that we heard).
Oooh, what a great day.
August 4, 2010
Every so often, Dr. Velilla goes on a tear about the state of things in Guatemala, which is very informative. Evidently the Guatemalan government does absolutely nothing to facilitate the entry of necessary medication and other supplies into the country. Guatemala doesn’t have any way to manufacture the drugs or what-have-you, and the only facilities are laboratories and such for processing tests. As such, everything must be shipped in from Europe and the U.S., which is obviously a BIG problem if the government decides that holding everything up at the border is the flavor-of-the-week. And that particular flavor-of-the-week isn’t just of the week, it seems to be more or less the status quo. The Guatemalan incumbents seem to be intent upon keeping their population sick and poor, refusing to do anything to improve the lifestyle or quality of life for anyone except the richest citizens (incidentally, their supporters). Corruption is a BIG problem here – if a politician isn’t bribed to do his or her job, you can bet your boots he or she won’t do it, or at won’t do it to a satisfactory level. Consequently, those who live in the poorer barrios (and much less, the slums and squatters) are pre-prepped for disaster, such as when Agatha roared through. However, in the richest zones of the City, the lights never go out, the water never runs out, and the streets are paved 2 or 3 times per year. By keeping their citizens poor, sick, illiterate, and ignorant, the Guatemalan government can essentially do whatever the hell they please, without incurring the wrath of the majority of the population, all the while keeping that majority in a state of constant fear and under constant repression.
One of the biggest problems in the less-developed countryside, at least medically speaking, is the abundance of medical quacks. Several times per week, if not every day, a woman will come into Dr. Vellilas and say “So-and-so up on the mountain told me that I have a tumor on my ovary that needs to be removed, but it costs Q12,000 ($1500) so I just wanted to be sure” or “So-and-so on the volcano said that I was pregnant but then the baby died.” Both of those cases have happened, along with an abundance of others, equally sad. The woman didn’t have a tumor, and the other’s baby was still alive and hopping around in the womb like a Mexican jumping bean, by the way. But sad as it may seem, the vast majority of Guatemalan health-care providers are in it for the money and the prestige, and may or may not legitimately know anything about medicine, and may or may not extort their patients and play off of their trust in the medical profession as a whole.
Machismo is also an extremely big issue, both at the clinic and in Guatemala as a whole. Machismo is defined simply as “male-dominated society,” and is incredibly prevalent in Latin America, if not the majority of the world. At the clinic, one of the most oft-seen cases of machismo involves the treatment of STDs. Women come into the clinic with an some or other STD, Dr. Vellila prescribes a treatment, and also gives them additional doses for their husband. After the woman leaves the office, however, he looks at us, shakes his head, and says that the husband will never take the pills, that it’s always the woman who bears the brunt of his visits to prostitutes, and that “it’s always the woman’s fault.” We’ve also both seen cases where a couple will visit Dr. Vellila for a gynecological issue (OBVIOUSLY a problem with a WOMAN’S body) and the husband does all the talking. The doctor may even directly address the woman by name, and she still sits silent and unresponsive, while her husband prattles away about the level of pain she is experiencing and the nature and duration of the problem. Because obviously, he knows.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Coban
August 1, 2010
This past weekend, I took Friday off from the clinic and traveled to Coban to meet up with a few of the CASAS students. I left San Pedro at 6am, and took a wildly careening chicken bus to the capital. Then at 1:30 or so, Joseph and I took a city bus to Zone 1 to get a bus ticket to Coban. We knew that the bus left at 2, so we were practically running through Zone 1 to get to the station, which we didn’t actually know the location of. But we got there with 2 minutes to spare, so it was all good. When we got to Coban, we walked through the town’s mall, searching for the blonde hair that was Patrick, Scott, and Roxanne. After finding them, we called Rob Cayhill, whom we had met on Free Travel, who gave us the name of the town that we were to meet our host for the night. After asking two or three taxi drivers about the destination and receiving only blank stares, we eventually had to have Rob come and get us and drive us to the town. He talked about the cloud forests and related issues for the duration of the trip. That guy has an absolute passion for the cloud forest and its preservation and the people that deal with it. It was great.
Once we reached the town, we took a pickup truck (standard mode of transportation) to another little village. It was dark and we were standing in the bed of a pickup with a welded-on cage and going uphill and crashing over potholes. It was an experience, for sure. When we finally got to the next town, the boys stayed with one family while Roxanne and I walked for another 20 minutes or so, downhill, on a slippery clay trail, with a flashlight and a cell phone light to guide us. We were staying with an indigenous Kekchi family in a tiny little village in a valley surrounded by mountains. It was very beautiful, but we didn’t know that until morning because at that point, it was completely and utterly dark. The family that we stayed with had 2 young sons, 12 and 8, and a grandmother. The father and the boys spoke Spanish, but the women did not. They also had two turkeys that had shouting matches and a rooster that was very concerned that someone should sleep late, and crowed about every 10 minutes, starting at 12am. We went to bed at about 9pm, and soon discovered that the beds had no mattresses, and were basically rattan mats covering a bare bedframe, with a few blankets thrown on top. And there were fleas. I slept about an hour that night, I think. I’m not complaining (too much, anyway), because that’s how people live, and I feel like I shouldn’t whine about a different way of life. It was a great experience. For one night.
The next morning, we woke up (if we had ever gone to sleep) at 5:45 to eat breakfast and then head into the cloud forest. Our 12 year old host brother took us to a spot where we met up with our guide, the boys and also Karen, an Italian girl who was staying with the same family. We hiked for about an hour and a half to get to the actual cloud forest. Once we were in, we took a trail that wound through the forest, up and down the side of the mountain. Our main purpose was to try to see the resplendent quetzals that are reasonably common in that area. Evidently though, the quetzals didn’t get the office memo that there was to be a meeting. We could hear them scurrying down the hallways ahead of us, slamming doors, peeping furtively through keyholes and door cracks, and we occasionally caught glimpses of their shadows flitting ahead of us as they ran for cover. Roxanne saw a flash of green that was a tail feather, and we all heard their calls, but that was about it. I knew that they wouldn’t be scattered around like clowns at a rich kid’s birthday party, but I guess I thought that I’d be able to see one really well and take a great picture of it. We hiked out of the village (2km STRAIGHT uphill, 4km downhill) and then hung out in the city for awhile. Roxanne, Patrick, and Scott work in a Mennonite school called Bezaleel that is a 20 minute bus ride, 20 minute walk out of Coban, so we spent some time there getting stared at by the students. The majority of the students live there, only returning home twice over the course of the school year. Patrick helps teach English and Roxanne and Scott help with P.E., math, and music.
That night we met the Cayhills again at a Cuban restaurant for supper. They work with an NGO program that does things with cloud forest ecotourism, and have been in Guatemala for something like 9 or 10 years. The parents speak more or less fluent Kekchi, and since their kids go to the public school in Coban, they are completely fluent in three languages. They also know just about everybody in town, I’m absolutely convinced. And everything about Guatemala – we’ve plied them for information more times than I can count on the two occasions that we’ve met, and they always have an answer. They’re so cool. I have too many positive role models in my life, is that bad?
Joseph and I shared a room at a Coban hostel that night ($6/night, even my parents can’t beat that rate!) and then hopped on a bus to Guatemala. During the trip, we watched “Brother Bear,” which is arguably the worst Disney film ever, and then, inexplicably, a Beatles photo montage set to Hispanic music. I have no idea. We got off at the right stop in Zone 1, and then hopped on a city bus to the main highway in the city. Except that the bus turned off of the main highway and went somewhere else. We kept riding, hoping that it would turn back or something… but it didn’t. We ended up in Zone 19 of the city, which is COMPLETELY unfamiliar territory – we’d never been there, never heard of any of the landmarks, never seen any of the bus numbers, and had no idea what was going on. Thankfully, the lady sitting next to me was really nice, and told us what the deal was. So we got ourselves straightened out, and next thing we knew, we were saying goodbye to each other while I hopped on a bus for San Pedro.
But it doesn’t end there, no, of course not! I asked my bus driver if he was going to San Pedro and he said yes, so I didn’t worry. Then the bus stopped, and he was like, “Ok, you people going to Sand Pedro, get off!” And I did, and it was definitely NOT San Pedro. It was nowhere. And the guy-who-shouts on the bus was like, “Yeah, go across the road and take a microbus, bye!” and hopped on the bus and left. Turns out I had taken the wrong bus, and ended up in roughly the right area, but still had 2 hours of traveling by microbus, pickup truck, and tuk-tuk before I ended up where I needed to be. And as soon as I arrived, the bus that I SHOULD’VE taken showed up in the city square. Damn.
It was an adventure, and it was great to see some of my CASAS friends again, as well as hear how they’re doing, visit their service sites, and also see more of the landscape and people of Guatemala.
This past weekend, I took Friday off from the clinic and traveled to Coban to meet up with a few of the CASAS students. I left San Pedro at 6am, and took a wildly careening chicken bus to the capital. Then at 1:30 or so, Joseph and I took a city bus to Zone 1 to get a bus ticket to Coban. We knew that the bus left at 2, so we were practically running through Zone 1 to get to the station, which we didn’t actually know the location of. But we got there with 2 minutes to spare, so it was all good. When we got to Coban, we walked through the town’s mall, searching for the blonde hair that was Patrick, Scott, and Roxanne. After finding them, we called Rob Cayhill, whom we had met on Free Travel, who gave us the name of the town that we were to meet our host for the night. After asking two or three taxi drivers about the destination and receiving only blank stares, we eventually had to have Rob come and get us and drive us to the town. He talked about the cloud forests and related issues for the duration of the trip. That guy has an absolute passion for the cloud forest and its preservation and the people that deal with it. It was great.
Once we reached the town, we took a pickup truck (standard mode of transportation) to another little village. It was dark and we were standing in the bed of a pickup with a welded-on cage and going uphill and crashing over potholes. It was an experience, for sure. When we finally got to the next town, the boys stayed with one family while Roxanne and I walked for another 20 minutes or so, downhill, on a slippery clay trail, with a flashlight and a cell phone light to guide us. We were staying with an indigenous Kekchi family in a tiny little village in a valley surrounded by mountains. It was very beautiful, but we didn’t know that until morning because at that point, it was completely and utterly dark. The family that we stayed with had 2 young sons, 12 and 8, and a grandmother. The father and the boys spoke Spanish, but the women did not. They also had two turkeys that had shouting matches and a rooster that was very concerned that someone should sleep late, and crowed about every 10 minutes, starting at 12am. We went to bed at about 9pm, and soon discovered that the beds had no mattresses, and were basically rattan mats covering a bare bedframe, with a few blankets thrown on top. And there were fleas. I slept about an hour that night, I think. I’m not complaining (too much, anyway), because that’s how people live, and I feel like I shouldn’t whine about a different way of life. It was a great experience. For one night.
The next morning, we woke up (if we had ever gone to sleep) at 5:45 to eat breakfast and then head into the cloud forest. Our 12 year old host brother took us to a spot where we met up with our guide, the boys and also Karen, an Italian girl who was staying with the same family. We hiked for about an hour and a half to get to the actual cloud forest. Once we were in, we took a trail that wound through the forest, up and down the side of the mountain. Our main purpose was to try to see the resplendent quetzals that are reasonably common in that area. Evidently though, the quetzals didn’t get the office memo that there was to be a meeting. We could hear them scurrying down the hallways ahead of us, slamming doors, peeping furtively through keyholes and door cracks, and we occasionally caught glimpses of their shadows flitting ahead of us as they ran for cover. Roxanne saw a flash of green that was a tail feather, and we all heard their calls, but that was about it. I knew that they wouldn’t be scattered around like clowns at a rich kid’s birthday party, but I guess I thought that I’d be able to see one really well and take a great picture of it. We hiked out of the village (2km STRAIGHT uphill, 4km downhill) and then hung out in the city for awhile. Roxanne, Patrick, and Scott work in a Mennonite school called Bezaleel that is a 20 minute bus ride, 20 minute walk out of Coban, so we spent some time there getting stared at by the students. The majority of the students live there, only returning home twice over the course of the school year. Patrick helps teach English and Roxanne and Scott help with P.E., math, and music.
That night we met the Cayhills again at a Cuban restaurant for supper. They work with an NGO program that does things with cloud forest ecotourism, and have been in Guatemala for something like 9 or 10 years. The parents speak more or less fluent Kekchi, and since their kids go to the public school in Coban, they are completely fluent in three languages. They also know just about everybody in town, I’m absolutely convinced. And everything about Guatemala – we’ve plied them for information more times than I can count on the two occasions that we’ve met, and they always have an answer. They’re so cool. I have too many positive role models in my life, is that bad?
Joseph and I shared a room at a Coban hostel that night ($6/night, even my parents can’t beat that rate!) and then hopped on a bus to Guatemala. During the trip, we watched “Brother Bear,” which is arguably the worst Disney film ever, and then, inexplicably, a Beatles photo montage set to Hispanic music. I have no idea. We got off at the right stop in Zone 1, and then hopped on a city bus to the main highway in the city. Except that the bus turned off of the main highway and went somewhere else. We kept riding, hoping that it would turn back or something… but it didn’t. We ended up in Zone 19 of the city, which is COMPLETELY unfamiliar territory – we’d never been there, never heard of any of the landmarks, never seen any of the bus numbers, and had no idea what was going on. Thankfully, the lady sitting next to me was really nice, and told us what the deal was. So we got ourselves straightened out, and next thing we knew, we were saying goodbye to each other while I hopped on a bus for San Pedro.
But it doesn’t end there, no, of course not! I asked my bus driver if he was going to San Pedro and he said yes, so I didn’t worry. Then the bus stopped, and he was like, “Ok, you people going to Sand Pedro, get off!” And I did, and it was definitely NOT San Pedro. It was nowhere. And the guy-who-shouts on the bus was like, “Yeah, go across the road and take a microbus, bye!” and hopped on the bus and left. Turns out I had taken the wrong bus, and ended up in roughly the right area, but still had 2 hours of traveling by microbus, pickup truck, and tuk-tuk before I ended up where I needed to be. And as soon as I arrived, the bus that I SHOULD’VE taken showed up in the city square. Damn.
It was an adventure, and it was great to see some of my CASAS friends again, as well as hear how they’re doing, visit their service sites, and also see more of the landscape and people of Guatemala.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
El Doctor y La Doctora
July 27, 2010 Tuesday
On the scale of relative awesomeness, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are in the category of “defies description.” They are SO COOL!!!! They were born and educated in Spain, then decided that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives in the field of medical missions. They’ve been to France, Honduras, Rwanda (during the civil war) and finally settled in Guatemala, where they’ve lived for the past seven years. They have five children, a psychologist, criminologist, reporter, medical student, and one more (I forgot what she does, but it’s pretty cool), and they toted the kids with them when they traveled around. They said today that their youngest was something like 4 months old when they visited Guatemala the first time.
I haven’t had too much of an opportunity to talk to Dra. Velilla, but her husband, Luis, is the doctor that I’ve been tailing for the past week and a half, and occasionally we get the chance to talk between patients. As previously stated, he is a gynecologist, which, for a guy, is practically taboo in Latin America. Evidently when they first showed up, he had a lot of trouble getting the lady patients to trust him and unveil their private bits. But it helped that the town we’re in, San Pedro, is situated in an area of relatively open-minded people. Across the lake, it’s a completely different story. There’s also a fair amount of “quacks” that practice medicine on the lake, and evidently they’re real idiots. We had a woman in yesterday who was pregnant, but one of these nincompoops told her that the baby died, so she came to us to have another look. Her baby was fine, alive and bouncing around in her uterus like a jumping bean. Evidently cases like this are far too common.
The maternal mortality rate in Guatemala is the second-highest in Latin America, after Haiti, since many women give birth in the home after days and days of labor with the aid of a midwife, or with one of these quacks on hand. Sarah told me that all of her cousins had been to other doctors, and had had a horrible birth experience, but that my other sister, Manuela, had gone to Dr. Velilla and it had been a much pleasanter experience (as pleasant as it can possibly be to squeeze something that size out of something that size, anyway). At the office in San Juan, they told us that the clinic had dropped the maternal mortality rate to almost zero. That’s hope, right there.
Suffice it to say, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are living the life, one day, I hope to lead. Except for the children. Five is a lot.
On the scale of relative awesomeness, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are in the category of “defies description.” They are SO COOL!!!! They were born and educated in Spain, then decided that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives in the field of medical missions. They’ve been to France, Honduras, Rwanda (during the civil war) and finally settled in Guatemala, where they’ve lived for the past seven years. They have five children, a psychologist, criminologist, reporter, medical student, and one more (I forgot what she does, but it’s pretty cool), and they toted the kids with them when they traveled around. They said today that their youngest was something like 4 months old when they visited Guatemala the first time.
I haven’t had too much of an opportunity to talk to Dra. Velilla, but her husband, Luis, is the doctor that I’ve been tailing for the past week and a half, and occasionally we get the chance to talk between patients. As previously stated, he is a gynecologist, which, for a guy, is practically taboo in Latin America. Evidently when they first showed up, he had a lot of trouble getting the lady patients to trust him and unveil their private bits. But it helped that the town we’re in, San Pedro, is situated in an area of relatively open-minded people. Across the lake, it’s a completely different story. There’s also a fair amount of “quacks” that practice medicine on the lake, and evidently they’re real idiots. We had a woman in yesterday who was pregnant, but one of these nincompoops told her that the baby died, so she came to us to have another look. Her baby was fine, alive and bouncing around in her uterus like a jumping bean. Evidently cases like this are far too common.
The maternal mortality rate in Guatemala is the second-highest in Latin America, after Haiti, since many women give birth in the home after days and days of labor with the aid of a midwife, or with one of these quacks on hand. Sarah told me that all of her cousins had been to other doctors, and had had a horrible birth experience, but that my other sister, Manuela, had gone to Dr. Velilla and it had been a much pleasanter experience (as pleasant as it can possibly be to squeeze something that size out of something that size, anyway). At the office in San Juan, they told us that the clinic had dropped the maternal mortality rate to almost zero. That’s hope, right there.
Suffice it to say, Dr. and Dra. Velilla are living the life, one day, I hope to lead. Except for the children. Five is a lot.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Santiago y La Primer Iglesia Bautista
July 24, 2010, Saturday
The San Pedro girls (Brittany, Menan, Alisha, me) visited Santiago this morning, meeting up with the Santiago girls (Angela, Chelsea), and later joined by two EMU nursing graduates (Steph, Libby) who were down from the City for the weekend. Once again, we got stiffed on the price of a lancha ride (We know full well that it’s Q8, but the tourist price [which applies to us] is Q20), and even though we tried to argue (for like, 10 minutes) we still ended up paying a round-trip of Q30, which is still almost double, though marginally better, I guess. We rode on the top of the boat, and the scenery was gorgeous. It was a rare clear day in Guatemala, and the sky was SO blue.
This weekend was the anniversary celebration for Santiago, so there was a big celebration in the center of the city. It was like Taste of Newton (or for you CC readers, Piotique) and a county fair combined, with a dash of Mardi Gras for pizzazz – Ferris wheels, carousels (powered by hand), arcade games, markets (tourist and local), ice cream vendors, and brightly-dressed indigenous men, women, and children running everywhere in a state of high excitement. It was great. We met Chelsea and Angela at the big Catholic church, and then ate dinner with them at a small “comedor,” where it took an ungodly amount of time to get our food ordered. For dessert, we retraced our steps a bit and had some chocolate layer cake and carrot cake (yes, Dad, I thought of you) at a tiny little restaurant. The other girls decided to walk through the market a bit more, but I decided to go back to the church and creep on people with my camera (can’t resist a good excuse to indulge my inner National Geographic photographer!). So I hung out in the churchyard for quite awhile, taking pictures of the dances, parades, and the general hubbub of it all. There was a dance that dramatized the conquest of Latin America by the Spaniards, danced by a bunch of men and boys who wore masks and gold clothing. Inexplicably, there were also cow masks. A few times, a short parade wound through the square, women holding candles, men playing instruments, and four men at the back carrying an effigy of Saint James (patron saint of the town) on a frame. And periodically, a cannon would go off, telling the whole world “WE’RE THE MOST AWESOME TOWN EVER AND WE’RE HAVING A FREAKIN’ PARTY RIGHT NOW AND DON’T YOU WISH YOU WERE US?!??!!!!!!!!” Magical.
Sarah took me to a church service for youth (15-25) tonight. It was great. We started by singing a few hymns, the louder and more off-key, the better. Bonhoeffer would have turned over in his grave, I’m sure. Then they prayed a bit, sang a bit more, and then the youth pastor (I think?) stood up and delivered a message. It was from Matthew, when Jesus healed the leper. And I could understand it all! Except I had to pay REALLY close attention – if I spaced off for even a second, or a truck went by in the street outside, or something or other occupied my attention, I would lose an entire sentence or important piece of information, and have to start all over again! Afterwards, we all had coffee and “pan dulce” (sweet bread) and talked. Well, THEY talked, anyway. And laughed, and teased each other. I couldn’t understand a word of it, it was all in Tzu’tujil, but it made me miss the camaraderie of my Bethel friends. And the service was so nice – no one was screaming “IN THE NAME OF JEE-ZUS!!!” or casting out demons willy-nilly, no one was falling on the floor in ecstasy, and everyone remained calm and collected for the duration of the service. A nice change, for sure.
July 25, 2010 Sunday
I washed my clothes today and hung them to dry on the upstairs porch. That was fine when I was just living with a pair of old people, but now I have a brother. It’s like, “Hello, brother-who-is-the-same-age-as-me, I’m just going to hang my brightly colored panties on your porch, ok?” Yep. Oh, and it was just Sarah and Domingo and me at the house this Sunday – turns out my dad is a pastor at a church on the coast, 3 hours away, and he and my mom won’t be back until Monday.
We drove to a beach near San Juan for a baptism service today. We ended up sitting like 3’ from the edge of the lake, where the ground was like a sponge. It took a wet backside for me to figure out that sitting on my sandals was a good idea. They sing a LOT here – like 10 songs, no joke. Anyway, once they dunked the three candidates, the service was over, and Sarah was like, “Ok, nos vamos!” And we left. No standing around and talking, no “fellowshipping,” just “let’s go.” It was a bit strange – I’m used to hanging out at church for at least 20 minutes after the service has ended.
I laid in the hammock on the porch (beneath the clothesline containing my brightly-colored panties) and read Dante’s Divine Comedy for a couple of hours. I’m pretty sure that I don’t agree with that guy’s theology AT ALL, but it’s an interesting historical read, for sure. In the afternoon, Alisha and I kayaked across a section of the lake, maybe a mile both ways, I’m not sure. It was really gorgeous – a few clouds, the lake surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, scenery one always sees in magazines, but never actually visits. Well guess WHAT?! I’m visiting it.
The standard church service was at night. Again, lots of singing, lots of prayer, but no shouting or demons. The other churches in San Pedro say that the Baptist church is “frio” because they don’t applaud or shout or anything like what the Pentecostals do. I’ll take “frio” over mass hysteria any day. They had several choirs of children, young people, women, and a choir (who made an attempt at four-part!) who sang several more songs. The sermon was over the Lord’s Supper and life after death… I think so, anyway. To be quite honest, I was thinking about how to arrange my dorm room at Bethel.
The San Pedro girls (Brittany, Menan, Alisha, me) visited Santiago this morning, meeting up with the Santiago girls (Angela, Chelsea), and later joined by two EMU nursing graduates (Steph, Libby) who were down from the City for the weekend. Once again, we got stiffed on the price of a lancha ride (We know full well that it’s Q8, but the tourist price [which applies to us] is Q20), and even though we tried to argue (for like, 10 minutes) we still ended up paying a round-trip of Q30, which is still almost double, though marginally better, I guess. We rode on the top of the boat, and the scenery was gorgeous. It was a rare clear day in Guatemala, and the sky was SO blue.
This weekend was the anniversary celebration for Santiago, so there was a big celebration in the center of the city. It was like Taste of Newton (or for you CC readers, Piotique) and a county fair combined, with a dash of Mardi Gras for pizzazz – Ferris wheels, carousels (powered by hand), arcade games, markets (tourist and local), ice cream vendors, and brightly-dressed indigenous men, women, and children running everywhere in a state of high excitement. It was great. We met Chelsea and Angela at the big Catholic church, and then ate dinner with them at a small “comedor,” where it took an ungodly amount of time to get our food ordered. For dessert, we retraced our steps a bit and had some chocolate layer cake and carrot cake (yes, Dad, I thought of you) at a tiny little restaurant. The other girls decided to walk through the market a bit more, but I decided to go back to the church and creep on people with my camera (can’t resist a good excuse to indulge my inner National Geographic photographer!). So I hung out in the churchyard for quite awhile, taking pictures of the dances, parades, and the general hubbub of it all. There was a dance that dramatized the conquest of Latin America by the Spaniards, danced by a bunch of men and boys who wore masks and gold clothing. Inexplicably, there were also cow masks. A few times, a short parade wound through the square, women holding candles, men playing instruments, and four men at the back carrying an effigy of Saint James (patron saint of the town) on a frame. And periodically, a cannon would go off, telling the whole world “WE’RE THE MOST AWESOME TOWN EVER AND WE’RE HAVING A FREAKIN’ PARTY RIGHT NOW AND DON’T YOU WISH YOU WERE US?!??!!!!!!!!” Magical.
Sarah took me to a church service for youth (15-25) tonight. It was great. We started by singing a few hymns, the louder and more off-key, the better. Bonhoeffer would have turned over in his grave, I’m sure. Then they prayed a bit, sang a bit more, and then the youth pastor (I think?) stood up and delivered a message. It was from Matthew, when Jesus healed the leper. And I could understand it all! Except I had to pay REALLY close attention – if I spaced off for even a second, or a truck went by in the street outside, or something or other occupied my attention, I would lose an entire sentence or important piece of information, and have to start all over again! Afterwards, we all had coffee and “pan dulce” (sweet bread) and talked. Well, THEY talked, anyway. And laughed, and teased each other. I couldn’t understand a word of it, it was all in Tzu’tujil, but it made me miss the camaraderie of my Bethel friends. And the service was so nice – no one was screaming “IN THE NAME OF JEE-ZUS!!!” or casting out demons willy-nilly, no one was falling on the floor in ecstasy, and everyone remained calm and collected for the duration of the service. A nice change, for sure.
July 25, 2010 Sunday
I washed my clothes today and hung them to dry on the upstairs porch. That was fine when I was just living with a pair of old people, but now I have a brother. It’s like, “Hello, brother-who-is-the-same-age-as-me, I’m just going to hang my brightly colored panties on your porch, ok?” Yep. Oh, and it was just Sarah and Domingo and me at the house this Sunday – turns out my dad is a pastor at a church on the coast, 3 hours away, and he and my mom won’t be back until Monday.
We drove to a beach near San Juan for a baptism service today. We ended up sitting like 3’ from the edge of the lake, where the ground was like a sponge. It took a wet backside for me to figure out that sitting on my sandals was a good idea. They sing a LOT here – like 10 songs, no joke. Anyway, once they dunked the three candidates, the service was over, and Sarah was like, “Ok, nos vamos!” And we left. No standing around and talking, no “fellowshipping,” just “let’s go.” It was a bit strange – I’m used to hanging out at church for at least 20 minutes after the service has ended.
I laid in the hammock on the porch (beneath the clothesline containing my brightly-colored panties) and read Dante’s Divine Comedy for a couple of hours. I’m pretty sure that I don’t agree with that guy’s theology AT ALL, but it’s an interesting historical read, for sure. In the afternoon, Alisha and I kayaked across a section of the lake, maybe a mile both ways, I’m not sure. It was really gorgeous – a few clouds, the lake surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, scenery one always sees in magazines, but never actually visits. Well guess WHAT?! I’m visiting it.
The standard church service was at night. Again, lots of singing, lots of prayer, but no shouting or demons. The other churches in San Pedro say that the Baptist church is “frio” because they don’t applaud or shout or anything like what the Pentecostals do. I’ll take “frio” over mass hysteria any day. They had several choirs of children, young people, women, and a choir (who made an attempt at four-part!) who sang several more songs. The sermon was over the Lord’s Supper and life after death… I think so, anyway. To be quite honest, I was thinking about how to arrange my dorm room at Bethel.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Dos Meses en Guatemala
It´s been two months since I arrived in Guatemala. When I first arrived, I could speak Spanish, but only enough to articulate my most basic needs, and even then it was a stretch. However, I thought that after a summer, I would be fluent in Spanish, though. That hasn´t happened. I still have trouble understanding a few things in conversation, and oftentimes have to ask the speaker to restate the question or use different words. In the clinic, I can understand very nearly everything that the patients say, even if I don´t understand the physiological or medical reason behind it. I can also respond in a fairly coherent manner when asked a question, or some such. I´ve learned a lot about the culture, too. The history, the culture and dress of the individual groups of indigenous, the Latin American culture in general, religious expression, justice, peace, and violence in Guatemala in particular, and most importantly - how to choke down food that is gross!
This morning, there was another birth in the clinic! It was a lot quicker and less bloody than the previous one, and I didn´t have to leave or anything! It was so exciting. And I talked to the lady a bit, too, and was able to help with a few things, mostly just handing the nurses things, but still, I´m being useful! The gynecologist has also started letting me write out the lab orders for some of the tests we do, which is interesting, and forces me to pay attention a bit more.
Two months down. 3 weeks to go.
This morning, there was another birth in the clinic! It was a lot quicker and less bloody than the previous one, and I didn´t have to leave or anything! It was so exciting. And I talked to the lady a bit, too, and was able to help with a few things, mostly just handing the nurses things, but still, I´m being useful! The gynecologist has also started letting me write out the lab orders for some of the tests we do, which is interesting, and forces me to pay attention a bit more.
Two months down. 3 weeks to go.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
San Pedro de la Laguna
July 19, Monday
Oh my goodness guys, I am SO EXCITED!!! My host family in San Pedro, Atitlán is SUPER awesome!!!
Ok, so our day began less than well – we all had to say goodbye to each other before we left for our different service locations, and that kind of sucked, because it was like a prequel of the goodbye that we would have to say at the end of the summer. Then about half the group piled into the van (no sitting four-across this time!) and drove to the bus station, where we got on a “chicken bus” (reincarnated Blue Bird) for a four hour, extremely bumpy, I-had-to-go-to-the-bathroom-the-entire-time, very uncomfortable trip. It was pouring down rain when we arrived in Santiago, and we promptly disembarked into an ankle-deep puddle. Then we needed to get down to the docks for a “lancha” (ferry) ride to the other side of the lake. So Alisha and I took a tuk-tuk (taxi sort of thing) for Q20, and Menan and Brittany took one for Q6. Guess who just got ripped off? When we arrived at the docks, the next lancha to San Pedro was chock-full of people. The pilot kept trying to get us to ride, saying that there was room, but there certainly wasn’t, not for four gringas and their bags. So we waited for an hour and a half for the next one. They charged us Q20 each. The indigenous ladies looked scandalized when the pilot told us that, but we couldn’t really argue – what choice did we have? The lake is miles and miles wide, and none of us are great swimmers.
We arrived in San Pedro and waited in a little restaurant for someone from the clinic to show up and claim us, which eventually, they did. They took us to our houses, introduced us a bit, and then left. I was super terrified – what if I got a weird family? But they are so nice! They’re indigenous Tz’utujuil, so their Spanish is SO much easier to understand, since they learned it as a second language, same as I. Makes me feel like I’m absolutely AWESOME at Spanish, like my ability to communicate has risen exponentially in the last 36 hours. The mother, Maria, hangs out at home (and sews stuff with a TREADLE machine! How cool is that?!) and the father is a pastor (not Pentecostal, I hope. Had enough of that). They have three children – Manuela (She is married, with a little 3-year-old boy, Mofito (?)), Sarah (23 and awesome, studying piano on the weekends), and Domingo (15 days older than me. So far, he hangs out and watches CNN in Spanish. Better than Fox, I guess. He’s also just graduated as a music teacher. They don’t waste time here). Sarah and I went up to the second story, and they have the most incredible view of the lake ever. They’re on a bit of a hill at the back of town, so we could see the majority of the town. We talked up there for 20 minutes or so, and then walked around town for about an hour. She took me to the clinic, which is in a church basement, and then we went to the very top of the belfry (except there isn’t a bell. I don’t know what you call it, then), from which we could see an AMAZING panorama of practically the entire lake, surrounded by 3 volcanoes, a jillion mountains, and clouds EVERYWHERE. It is so beautiful here, just gorgeous.
Supper was great – Manuela came by with her son, and everyone was there except for Domingo. The first question Manuela asked me, after my name, was “How do you like the Arizona law?” Haha. Awesome. My Spanish vocabulary is not adequately advanced to be able to express just exactly what I thought about the law. They talked at great length about violence and such at supper, half in Tz’utujuil, half in Spanish, oftentimes switching languages mid-sentence. I’m not sure if they did it on purpose or not, but it sure was funny. I felt kind of bad, about to burst out laughing as they talked about all the horrible things that are happening in the city. They also taught me a few words in Tz’utujuil. Turns out that “moon,” “sun,” and “chili” sound exactly the same. They don’t think so, but I certainly do.
Their house is nice, too. I wasn’t really afraid of roughing it – pit toilet, bucket shower, whatever, I can deal for 3.5 weeks – but I am definitely not roughing it here. I have my own room, with my own bathroom (!!!!!) and HOT WATER!!!!! And there is no parrot here. Thank God. And they make their own tortillas here, how awesome is that? Suffice it to say, I am very, very happy with my current situation.
We’ll be visiting the clinic tomorrow. I have no idea what I’ll be doing, but I hope it involves scrubs, because I’d rather not have bought them for nothing. Plus, scrubs are just cool, though they lend a bit of an androgynous air to the wearer.
July 20, 2010
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I watched a birth today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was crazy. A lot more blood than I had expected. The response of my treacherous body was to start sweating a lot and get light-headed, gosh darn-it. But I saw the most important parts, and that’s all that matters. I’ve also seen more vaginas today than I ever have in my life.
My work at the clinic started today. There are two doctors, husband-wife duo, that work there – one is a Gynecologist, one is a General Practitioner. They’re both from Spain, so they have that sort of lispy, spitty Spanish. I’m working with the gynae for now, and he is super cool. He takes the time to explain the cases to me afterwards, and is really great with the patients. We started at 9 or so, and finished up at almost 2. Alisha and I spent a good half hour wandering around San Pedro, looking for a place to eat. After we found one, we took a tuk-tuk to San Juan, a 10 minute drive away, and spent another 20 minutes looking for the doctor’s office there. Then we met the other two girls, and got everything straightened out. After we arrived at the office, we were told that there was nothing to do there at the moment, but we’re having a meeting with some schoolchildren, want to come? We didn’t have any better ideas, so we took another tuk-tuk BACK to San Pedro. We visited a school and talked to 8 children, ages 13-17 or so about sexuality. Whole-body sexuality, what makes a person who they are, not just the private bits. The kids were so great, very mature about the whole thing. We were VERY impressed. Sounds like this will be more or less the norm – clinic in the morning, office in the afternoon.
Sarah and I went to a church service in the evening. There was a lot of singing at the beginning (the louder, the better!), then a message, in which the pastor would say something, and then translate it into Tz’utujil, which made the service really hard to follow, because there’s still a couple seconds of disconnect in my brain following a change in language. Then we prayed for about 20 minutes, corporate prayer, which is really interesting to listen to.
On the way home, Sarah and I talked about the Tz’utujil in San Pedro. The entire town (13,000) is indigenous, with the exception of 100 or so tourists at any given time. The vast majority speak Tz’utujil and Spanish, with only the very oldest speaking only Tz’utujil, and only the very youngest children (younger than 6) speaking only Spanish. Quite a few also speak English out of necessity, due to the large number of tourists here.
Oh my goodness guys, I am SO EXCITED!!! My host family in San Pedro, Atitlán is SUPER awesome!!!
Ok, so our day began less than well – we all had to say goodbye to each other before we left for our different service locations, and that kind of sucked, because it was like a prequel of the goodbye that we would have to say at the end of the summer. Then about half the group piled into the van (no sitting four-across this time!) and drove to the bus station, where we got on a “chicken bus” (reincarnated Blue Bird) for a four hour, extremely bumpy, I-had-to-go-to-the-bathroom-the-entire-time, very uncomfortable trip. It was pouring down rain when we arrived in Santiago, and we promptly disembarked into an ankle-deep puddle. Then we needed to get down to the docks for a “lancha” (ferry) ride to the other side of the lake. So Alisha and I took a tuk-tuk (taxi sort of thing) for Q20, and Menan and Brittany took one for Q6. Guess who just got ripped off? When we arrived at the docks, the next lancha to San Pedro was chock-full of people. The pilot kept trying to get us to ride, saying that there was room, but there certainly wasn’t, not for four gringas and their bags. So we waited for an hour and a half for the next one. They charged us Q20 each. The indigenous ladies looked scandalized when the pilot told us that, but we couldn’t really argue – what choice did we have? The lake is miles and miles wide, and none of us are great swimmers.
We arrived in San Pedro and waited in a little restaurant for someone from the clinic to show up and claim us, which eventually, they did. They took us to our houses, introduced us a bit, and then left. I was super terrified – what if I got a weird family? But they are so nice! They’re indigenous Tz’utujuil, so their Spanish is SO much easier to understand, since they learned it as a second language, same as I. Makes me feel like I’m absolutely AWESOME at Spanish, like my ability to communicate has risen exponentially in the last 36 hours. The mother, Maria, hangs out at home (and sews stuff with a TREADLE machine! How cool is that?!) and the father is a pastor (not Pentecostal, I hope. Had enough of that). They have three children – Manuela (She is married, with a little 3-year-old boy, Mofito (?)), Sarah (23 and awesome, studying piano on the weekends), and Domingo (15 days older than me. So far, he hangs out and watches CNN in Spanish. Better than Fox, I guess. He’s also just graduated as a music teacher. They don’t waste time here). Sarah and I went up to the second story, and they have the most incredible view of the lake ever. They’re on a bit of a hill at the back of town, so we could see the majority of the town. We talked up there for 20 minutes or so, and then walked around town for about an hour. She took me to the clinic, which is in a church basement, and then we went to the very top of the belfry (except there isn’t a bell. I don’t know what you call it, then), from which we could see an AMAZING panorama of practically the entire lake, surrounded by 3 volcanoes, a jillion mountains, and clouds EVERYWHERE. It is so beautiful here, just gorgeous.
Supper was great – Manuela came by with her son, and everyone was there except for Domingo. The first question Manuela asked me, after my name, was “How do you like the Arizona law?” Haha. Awesome. My Spanish vocabulary is not adequately advanced to be able to express just exactly what I thought about the law. They talked at great length about violence and such at supper, half in Tz’utujuil, half in Spanish, oftentimes switching languages mid-sentence. I’m not sure if they did it on purpose or not, but it sure was funny. I felt kind of bad, about to burst out laughing as they talked about all the horrible things that are happening in the city. They also taught me a few words in Tz’utujuil. Turns out that “moon,” “sun,” and “chili” sound exactly the same. They don’t think so, but I certainly do.
Their house is nice, too. I wasn’t really afraid of roughing it – pit toilet, bucket shower, whatever, I can deal for 3.5 weeks – but I am definitely not roughing it here. I have my own room, with my own bathroom (!!!!!) and HOT WATER!!!!! And there is no parrot here. Thank God. And they make their own tortillas here, how awesome is that? Suffice it to say, I am very, very happy with my current situation.
We’ll be visiting the clinic tomorrow. I have no idea what I’ll be doing, but I hope it involves scrubs, because I’d rather not have bought them for nothing. Plus, scrubs are just cool, though they lend a bit of an androgynous air to the wearer.
July 20, 2010
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I watched a birth today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was crazy. A lot more blood than I had expected. The response of my treacherous body was to start sweating a lot and get light-headed, gosh darn-it. But I saw the most important parts, and that’s all that matters. I’ve also seen more vaginas today than I ever have in my life.
My work at the clinic started today. There are two doctors, husband-wife duo, that work there – one is a Gynecologist, one is a General Practitioner. They’re both from Spain, so they have that sort of lispy, spitty Spanish. I’m working with the gynae for now, and he is super cool. He takes the time to explain the cases to me afterwards, and is really great with the patients. We started at 9 or so, and finished up at almost 2. Alisha and I spent a good half hour wandering around San Pedro, looking for a place to eat. After we found one, we took a tuk-tuk to San Juan, a 10 minute drive away, and spent another 20 minutes looking for the doctor’s office there. Then we met the other two girls, and got everything straightened out. After we arrived at the office, we were told that there was nothing to do there at the moment, but we’re having a meeting with some schoolchildren, want to come? We didn’t have any better ideas, so we took another tuk-tuk BACK to San Pedro. We visited a school and talked to 8 children, ages 13-17 or so about sexuality. Whole-body sexuality, what makes a person who they are, not just the private bits. The kids were so great, very mature about the whole thing. We were VERY impressed. Sounds like this will be more or less the norm – clinic in the morning, office in the afternoon.
Sarah and I went to a church service in the evening. There was a lot of singing at the beginning (the louder, the better!), then a message, in which the pastor would say something, and then translate it into Tz’utujil, which made the service really hard to follow, because there’s still a couple seconds of disconnect in my brain following a change in language. Then we prayed for about 20 minutes, corporate prayer, which is really interesting to listen to.
On the way home, Sarah and I talked about the Tz’utujil in San Pedro. The entire town (13,000) is indigenous, with the exception of 100 or so tourists at any given time. The vast majority speak Tz’utujil and Spanish, with only the very oldest speaking only Tz’utujil, and only the very youngest children (younger than 6) speaking only Spanish. Quite a few also speak English out of necessity, due to the large number of tourists here.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Voy a Salir a la Ciudad!
Today is my last day with my host family. Tonight will be spent with the CASAS students, watching a movie and eating pizza, I believe. Then on Monday, we’ll all be splitting into small groups and heading out to different service placements in Guatemala and El Salvador. I will be in San Juan, Atitlán, very close to the town that we visited last weekend. It is beautiful there, and I am looking forward to it very much. Three other girls will be joining me, and we will be working with a local health clinic. I’m ready for a change of scenery. A month and a half spent with a family who is not your own, with parents who are not your own, in a house that is not your own, with no siblings, is just a bit of a stretch. And the city is getting a bit old. Cities aren’t really my thing - too crowded, too many black clouds of exhaust.
Our last day of classes was Friday. It’s wonderful to have everything over and done with. Each language/literature class presented a small project – a song, a comic drama, readings, etc. In the afternoon, we all spoke for about 5 minutes on a selected topic that we had each written a paper about. We went to get ice cream to celebrate.
Church this morning was pretty rockin’. For 2½ hours. There were about 25 people there, an increase of at least 25%. Another Sunday, a few more spirits cast out. Turns out it’s practically requisite to fall on the ground if one has had a demon cast out. I still don’t know what to think about that. Is it legit? Or is it a placebo effect, a result of the high level of energy and social expectations stemming from a guy shouting prayers in your face and throwing purified water and vegetable oil all over you? Does one have to believe in evil spirits and/or the casting out of such before the casting out actually “works”? Or can anyone and their dog have a demon cast out of them, whether they like it or not? The sermon was about Jesus as a sacrifice, and how various OT ideas related to him. The scriptures actually formed a coherent idea, which is kind of rare.
I may or may not be incommunicado for the next several weeks. I don't know the Internet situation in San Juan, but I almost certainly won't have regular access. But don't worry - I haven't fallen into a sinkhole, drowned in a tropical storm, or been fried by a volcano... yet.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Que Paso' con los Seres Humanos?!
What is WRONG with the human race?! Seriously, who decided way-back-when that it was ok to kill another person in vengeance, subjugate women, and dominate “strange” cultures? As a Biology major, I realize that there is an evolutionary reason for all of this – survival of the best fit, and all. But as a Religion major, I feel like there should be some sort of philosophical counter-argument. I feel like violence can’t possibly be the best way to solve problems, and cannot understand what could possibly cause someone to raise a hand in violence against another person. Is there any hope for humanity, or are we all just going to kill each other for inane, asinine reasons?
For the past 6 weeks, the CASAS students have undergone a crash course in the long history of violence and conflict in Guatemala, including (but certainly not limited to) massacres of the indigenous by the Spanish in the 1600s, subsequent repression and destruction of the Mayan way of life and spirituality by the Catholic Church, continuing discrimination against the Maya that culminated (and supposedly ended) in the 30-year civil war between the 70s and 90s, and increased violence in the last few years. Today’s lecture capped it all off, though. We were visited by two women lawyers from the organization “Sobrevivia” (Survival). Their pro-bono lawyers work primarily on behalf of victims of sexual violence, both of men and women. Machismo and violence against women is ridiculously high in Guatemala. “Femicide” is the term usually used – crimes against women simply because they are women. Women have been killed, beaten, raped, tortured, beheaded, nearly 2,000 cases of murder last year, all filed under “crimes of passion.” The lawyers gave us several examples of cases – three little girls, one raped, all with their throats cut with machetes; a woman beaten nearly to death with a rock and with all major facial landmarks cut off, simply because she filed for a monthly $75 in child support; an American missionary who sexually abused 40 indigenous 8-10 year old boys – that they had fought and won in the last several years. It was disgusting. I wanted to cry. WHAT WOULD COMPEL SOMEONE TO DO THAT?! I know that there are shining examples of kind, gentle, compassionate individuals who have touched the lives of thousands of people, but sometimes, I’m just so overwhelmed by the amount of violence by human beings against other human beings. I don’t understand. I will never understand.
Humanity is overrated. I’m going to be a rainbow.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Lago Atitlan
July 11, 2010
This weekend we visited the towns of Santiago and Panajachel, both on the shores of Lake Atitlán. The lake is beautiful, completely beyond description, in the most non-cliché way possible. It is absolutely gorgeous, in an absolutely non-Kansas way. Kansas has its wheat fields, its ruler-straight roads, its grain elevators, and its wonderful farming culture. Lake Atitlán and the surrounding area has a huge, beautiful lake surrounded on all sides by rounded mountains, completely covered in trees and tiny “campesinos,” where families use terraces to their best effect, and grow a huge variety of vegetables in an impossibly small space. Atitlán has several different Mayan cultures, each with their distinctive dress and language. Santiago contains the largest population of indigenous Tzutuhil, but across the lake in Panajachel are the indigenous Cakchiquel, and twenty miles up the road lives still another group of Maya, and all of them are completely different from the Q’iche that we met in Chichicastenango. The cultural diversity is astounding.
We visited Panajachel on Sunday morning, and wandered through the market. At this point in our trip, the only difference between the markets are in the names of the towns on the woven bracelets and in the styles of guipiles (women’s traditional blouses) available for sale. The vast majority of Guatemalan (or indeed, Latin American) markets are the same. There are a couple of simple rules for all of them:
1 1. It is best to not look or act like a tourist. Inquiring loudly about an object in English is the surest way to look like a tourist. So is blond hair, blue eyes, pale (and/or sunburnt) skin, and a large camera. Unfortunately, I am stuck with the last four characteristics.
2 2. Don’t look interested in anything unless you actually plan to seriously consider purchasing it. Pointing at merchandise is a strict no-no. If a vendor begins to show you their merchandise, decide as soon as possible whether or not you really want it, as to avoid a long and awkward trail of “no, gracias, no, gracias, si, es muy bonito, pero no quiero” (no thank you, no thank you, yes, it’s very pretty, but I don’t want it) as you try to make a hasty but graceful exit.
Gringo spotting” is also a really fun game. Gringo spotting entails trying to spot the most obviously obnoxious tourist in the whole market. Whether it’s the inappropriately dressed young American teenage girl (short denim skirt, belly-baring top, flip-flops, Paris Hilton sunglasses), the church mission group (every last one wearing homologous, brightly colored t-shirts with cute Spanish slogans or Bible verses), the vacationing family (the parents, loud and sunburnt, the mother wearing a tank top [not what the designer had in mind], the father wearing a “Gallo” t-shirt, dragging their whining son behind them, taking rude, personal-space invading photos of “the locals,” and inquiring in loud English [for better comprehension, obviously] “how much does this cost?”), gringo spotting is a good way to pass the time, and a great way to see the most stereotypical American culture.
We learn tomorrow what our service placements will be. We’re all a little stressed over it – we leave in a week, and have only a vague idea of what our destinations will be. That also means that the “school” portion of our summer is almost over, and we’re pretty happy about that – we’re getting just a tad bit burnt out on classes. Unfortunately, every class has at least one fairly good-sized project due in the next five days, and we’re all scrambling to finish them in time and still do the topic justice. We’ve also been pretty nostalgic, remembering when we first all met each other, the first time we met our host families, “that one time when…”, and the fact that many of us will probably not see each other again, despite the fact that we have all grown so close over the past 6 weeks through our shared experiences. It’ll be a pretty charged week, I think. Very full. Of everything.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Los Autobuses
Guatemalan buses are the craziest thing you’ll ever see here. Except for four people and a baby on a motorbike, speeding down the main highway. But buses are the more prevalent. There are a whole bunch of numbered buses (retired Blue Birds for the most part) that run up and down the main highways and circle all of the zones. I take one bus to and from school, #203, a trip that lasts about 20 minutes if there’s no traffic, but several of the CASAS students take two buses, with a trip totaling over an hour.
On every bus, there’s a driver and the man who shouts. The driver squeezes into impossible spaces and drives erratically with jolts and sudden stops. The man who shouts does just that – shouts. At the top of his voice. At each stop, he shouts about the next stop, or the main stops on the line. As people get on, its “Al fondo, al fondo, vamos por atras, por fav, por fav!” “To the back, let’s fill the middle, please, get going!” The man who shouts also collects our money and shoves people onto the bus if necessary. Nearly every morning, the buses are packed. Jam packed. People are packed in like the overused sardine cliché. There are usually people hanging out both exits, sometimes with only one foot and one hand actually attached to the bus. Picture an ordinary school bus with two people in each seat, and three people wide in the aisle. In the aisle, that’s right. In that 2.5’ wide aisle. Three people across. If one is sitting, there’s usually a man’s crotch pinned to one’s shoulder. If one is standing, there’s usually a tiny indigenous woman that comes up to one’s armpit clinging desperately to the seat back, and/or one’s backpack is precariously close to giving another passenger a nosebleed or black eye. Woe betides if one needs to get off at the next stop and one is in the middle of the bus. That requires extensive maneuvering, rude shoving, cursory “permiso, permiso”s, and finally, nearly falling off the bus as everyone shoves everyone else to get off. As a result of riding the buses every day, twice a day, I have a highly altered sense of personal space. It’s at about zero. There are a lot of legitimately good-looking guys on the buses, though, and that’s a plus.
This weekend, our group is taking a much-anticipated (and very tardy) trip to Lake Atitlán, a famously beautiful place south of the city. The following week will be our last with our host families before we move on to the service component of our time here. We haven’t been assigned yet, but my two choices are a medical clinic in Santiago, Atitlán and a medical clinic in San Salvador, El Salvador. Medicine in Spanish. It doesn’t get any better.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Venio' Cassidy McFadden!!!
Cassidy McFadden, one of my friends from Bethel visited Roxanne, Ruthi and I at the seminary yesterday! She’s staying in Huehuetenango with an indigenous family, and decided to come see us in the City for a few days. It was wonderful to see her again. We ate supper together tonight and last night, and she got to see some of the sights in the city before she leaves tomorrow morning.
This afternoon the CASAS group visited the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFGA). The foundation’s primary work is to disinter many of the mass graves of the people killed by the government during the civil war in the 70s and 80s. Before they can dig up any of the graves, a formal complaint must be launched by the families of the victims, which often leads to court testimonies. Once they figure out where the graves are, they begin excavations. Sometimes the bodies are laid out nicely, with clothes and shoes and all limbs intact. Sometimes the bodies are simply tossed into the hole, with bullet or machete wounds or bone breaks or fractures or obvious signs of pre-mortem torture. Sometimes body parts are found in big plastic bags full of disarticulated bones. It can take anywhere from 2 months to 6 months to figure out the identity of a victim, using dental records, DNA from family members, and matching the missing people with government “kill squad” records.
Once the victim has been properly identified, there is a lengthy government court case, which make take years, before the remains can be returned to the family and given a proper burial, with all of the accompanying ceremonies, much to the relief and sadness of the families. Often, the families didn’t know what happened to their husbands, wives, or children – they only knew that one day, the army swept down on their town, and that was the last they saw of them. One of the saddest things I have ever seen was the rows and rows and rows of cardboard boxes filled with bones of the victims of government violence. Rows and stacks and rooms full. Hundreds of boxes, all with a name, a town, a processing date, and an FAFGA identification number, just waiting for their court cases to come through.
A bit of background – in the 1970s, there was a series of governmental overthrows, which began a series of guerilla attacks. The guerillas often hid in indigenous mountain towns because it was safer there. When the army figured that out, they began carpet-bombing the little towns, staking out, conducting random sweeps, trying to kill all of the guerillas. The guerilla force was about ten times smaller than the national army, but due to a long-standing racism against the indigenous people, the army had “lots of trouble” controlling the guerillas, giving them a reason to continue their genocide against the Maya. Kidnappings, murders, torture, rape, massacres became part of daily life. This lasted for about twenty years, and continues on a lesser, more hidden scale today. The majority of the Guatemalan people know little, if anything, about the civil war. It was “way up north,” and citizens who didn’t live there knew nothing of it, since the government controls most of the media outlets here. My Spanish professor didn’t hear about it until she went to college in 2003, twenty years after the fact! Tens of thousands were killed, and almost no one knows anything about it. Sometimes I feel like I know more Guatemalan history than the average high school educated Guatemalan, which is really sad for both parties.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Mercados de Guatemala
July 4, 2010
I was going to get on Skype tonight and talk to people, but no one was on. It took me five or ten minutes to realize that it was the 4th, and that everyone was out watching fireworks and roasting hotdogs. Oh yeah…
My host father took me to a market yesterday to get some vegetables and such for dinner. Guatemalan markets are super awesome. Not the stupid touristy ones, where all you can buy is blankets made in Chinese sweatshops and shipped over and/or shirts that say “I Heart Guatemala.” Those don’t count. I mean REAL Guatemalan markets, the ones where candy-colored bras and superhero-patterned underpants are sold next to piles of strawberries and bundles of cilantro and bags of herbs and spices with neatly rolled tops. Markets where one can find anything under the sun except for condoms, and I’m sure that if one looked long and hard enough (immature snicker, sorry Mom), those could be found as well. Markets where the best (and only) way to sell ones wares is to SHOUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE ABOUT JUST HOW FRIGGIN’ AWESOME THEY ARE!!!!! Markets where raw meat is just hanging out, minding its own business in the window of a tiny butcher shop, live chickens are for sale, everybody haggles for everything and nobody really gives in on the price. Markets are awesome.
We also went to a mall. That was a change. They’re super proud of their malls here, and it shows – there are like 10 in one square mile, and that is only a bit of an exaggeration. One of the stores that we visited was called “Carrion.” Contrary to its name (which would signify a sporting-goods store), it was a clothing store. My parents didn’t get my sarcasm when I told them that “dead animals” is a great name for a clothing store. Sarcasm doesn’t translate very well. Couple that with my utter lack of facial expressions and monotone voice, and my personality falls flat a LOT. I’m pretty sure they think I’m the most boring person ever.
On a completely unrelated note, my host father’s uncle died this weekend. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do about that. “Sorry your uncle died?” I’m not good with the comforting-people thing, or the empathy thing, and in situations like this, that is more than a bit of a problem.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Tikal y Belice
June 30, 2010
This past 7 days has been our week of free travel, a bit of a break between the first and second months of classes. It was great. Roxanne and I were joined by Ben Hoover (Goshen) and Joseph Spory (EMU/Hesston) for our trip. We left the City on the 23rd at 9pm, taking a night bus to Flores, where we took another bus to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. Tikal is amazing, 3,000 years old, abandoned for unknown reasons long before the Spanish showed up. There are 6 major temples, each over 100 feet tall, as well as numerous marketplaces, plazas, dwellings, etc. Two of the tallest temples were “subir-able” (climbable), and emerged above the canopy, giving a spectacular view for 10, 15, 20 miles of absolutely flat Guatemalan rainforest. We also saw lots of wildlife – toucans, two kinds of monkeys, coatis, parakeets, and lots of others. It was SO hot though – we’ve been spoiled by the beautiful weather in the City (nearly never more than 75F). It was probably 90F there, and humid as all-get-out. We were all pretty gross by the time we got back to our hotel (Gringo Perdido [Lost Gringo – wonderful name]), so we hopped in the lake for a bit.
The next day it rained off-and-on all day. Turns out Tropical Storm Alex was making an appearance. We walked down to a nearby restaurant to watch the U.S. lose to Ghana in the Cup. We viewed the game with an Argentinean, two Guatemalans, and an absolutely gorgeous Belgian girl who were all for Ghana. Very multicultural. We swam in the lake more or less for the rest of the afternoon. We had met a Mennonite couple earlier in the day, also staying at the hotel, so we hung out in the lake and talked to them and their children while it absolutely flat-out POURED. Their names are Rob and Tara Cayhill, with children Nathan, Peter, Jonathan, and Ruth, all between the ages of 12 and 18. They were very helpful, and ultimately caused us to change our lodging in Belize, in favor of cheaper accommodations, which ended up being a good choice. They work in the Coban rainforest, protecting quetzals and such, and invited us up to see some. We are SO going.
Sunday was a definite low point. We had to get up at 4:15, but due to the storm, there was no electricity, and EVERYTHING was wet. Roxanne and I gathered our things by the light of my iPod nano screen. We took a bus through Belmopan, Belize, to Belize City, then hopped on another bus and backtracked back through Belmopan to Dangriga, where we waited an hour for a water taxi for a 45 minute ride to Tobacco Caye. It was very hot and humid and we were all pretty tired and quite grumpy. The first thing I noticed about Belize was “the men are so TALL!” The people in Belize, on the coast anyway, are descendents of African slaves brought by the English, and while they aren’t any taller than guys in the U.S., I’ve been used to the short little Guatemalan guys here, with whom I can usually see eye-to-eye. They are known as the Garifuna, and they speak Kriol, a mixture of several African languages, French, Spanish, and English. As it turns out, Belize was colonized by the English, much to the chagrin of the Spanish and the Guatemalans (who still kind of consider Belize “theirs”). They declared independence in the 70s or something, but remain a commonwealth of Britain.
Tobacco Caye is about 25 miles off the coast of Belize (we don’t know for sure, just taking the approximate speed of the boat and the approximate commute time and figuring it). It’s about the size of a football field, all less than 10 feet above sea level, and squashed full of no fewer than 8 little resorts, beach chairs, docks, palm trees and hammocks. But we were practically the only people there, which was kind of awesome. We stayed at a little hotel called “Lana’s on the Reef,” recommended by the Cayhills, and run by Lana herself, a sweet little Garifuna lady who may or may not have been slightly off her rocker. We shared a room with the boys to save $20/night. The fan only worked for about 2 hours during the night, which sucked, but the food was good and there was chocolate cake, and that’s really all that matters.
The next morning we rented snorkel gear and messed around inside the reef, just off the shore of the caye. It was like watching “Finding Nemo” (except without the talking fish and the sea turtles) or a National Geographic documentary (without the helpful droning of the narrator). We saw all sorts of fish, brain coral, fan coral, normal knobbly coral, and a spotted MANTA RAY!!! I was like “please don’t stab me with your tail-thing! My name isn’t Steve Irwin, don’t hurt me!” Turns out it was harmless, according to a Garifuna guy cleaning a fish on the dock, who overheard my excited/panicked shouting to Ben. I also poked a sea anemone and swam through huge schools of tiny fingerlings. We all got fantastically sunburnt (yes Mom, I did put on sunscreen. SPF 50). We decided to go home the next day, mostly because we ran out of money, but that was really pretty ok. We felt like we’d gotten our money’s worth out of the trip.
We left the Caye at 5am on Tuesday, hopped on a bus to Belize City, barely made the 9:30 bus to Flores, and arrived in Flores at about 2:30, with the bus to the City leaving at 9pm. It was a fairly doable wait. We ate dinner, played cards, learned card tricks from a Guatemalan policeman, and chatted for a couple of hours with Cassondra, a GLBTQ protestor from the Pilson District in Chicago (last year’s Interterm class visited Pilson). It somehow came up that we were all Mennonites, so there were the standard Amish/Mennonite/ideology questions, which helped pass 3 hours or so quite easily. We arrived back in the City at about 6:15, and Joseph and I got sort of a bit lost trying to find our way from Zone 1 to our stops on the Periferico, but we made it, so that’s all right. It’s pretty hard to recognize my bus stop coming from the other direction. But I got it right and Joseph didn’t, so the poor guy had to wander around on the wrong highway in the rain for 45 minutes, trying to find a house that didn’t exist. Oops.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Enfermedad II
Well, turns out, my previously unsurpassed method of ignore-it-and-it´ll-go-away doesn´t work on bacteria. After 4 days of no appetite and general malaise, my host mother finally made me go to the doctor. They ran a couple of tests and got a prescription and Q200 later (about $24US), looks like I´ll make it to next week. Which is great, since this coming week (starting tomorrow) is our free travel week. Our CASAS group has split into two smaller groups based on common interests and destinations. Roxanne and I and two boys will be taking a night bus to Flores, Guatemala, and then spend the day at Tikal, which are THE Mayan ruins. We´re super excited. We´ll have another day in Flores, and then we´ll take the bus to Belize and spend 2.5 days there. Then it´s another night bus home, and we should arrive at about 7 in the morning, with classes at 8:30. Should be a great trip!
Monday, June 21, 2010
Enfermedad
June 20, 2010
In my limited experience with awfully experiences, the worst has to be being sick and not being at home. It sucks hardcore. Add to that the fact that I’m in a foreign country and attempting to speak a different language, and it’s downright rotten.
My weekend started out great – our Spanish teacher wasn’t able to make it to class, so Roxanne and Ruthi and I had a free day. We hung out in the break room, watched the World Cup, and talked theology. It was wonderful. Then the Goshen boys started singing hymns for the Spanish teachers, and we all ended up joining in. There are a few things that my camera cannot capture, and that was one of them. The community of four-part, and the joy that they had in singing for us, and the joy that we all had in listening was just beautiful. I ended up going to bed SUPER early that night (6:00 – Sarah Unruh, Anna Voth, you are NOT allowed to laugh) because I was feeling a bit under the weather, and was just going to take a nap. It was a very long nap. Until the next morning.
The next day, most of us headed to the old capital city of Antigua. We took a bus up windy roads, with lots of slam-on-the-breaks stops and pedal-to-the-metal starts. My stomach decided that it didn’t take kindly to such maltreatment, but kept the grumbling to a minimum until we reached the city and started walking around. Then it decided to disgorge its contents in the gutter outside of an old convent. Gives a whole new meaning to “driven to your knees by the wretchedness of your situation.” I dragged myself through the rest of the day, taking lots of breaks and drinking lots and lots of water. Antigua is really pretty – all old buildings, and no new glass-and-steel ones. I also went to Roxanne’s brother’s soccer game. They make up 3/5 of a men’s team, and they won the game, barely. It was outstanding, 4 men against 5 in the first half because one of their guys didn’t show up. They were tied at the end, so they all took turns kicking goals while the opposing goalie did his level best to block them. I don’t know what that’s called. Sudden Death, maybe? It was very interesting – the field was TINY – about the size of a basketball floor.
Today (Sunday) was the worst, health-wise. Church (where I witnessed the casting out of an evil spirit, according to Jaime. Not sure what to think about that. I’ll probably go with the timeless words of Aquinas), and then off to celebrate Father’s Day and their son-in-law’s birthday at their daughter Sulemma’s house. They had steak and rice-and-beans and (my all-time favorite) tres leche cake, and I couldn’t eat any of it. I spent most of the four hours sitting on the living room couch, fielding questions as to my health and bowel movements, and trying to convince my mother, her daughter, her husband, my father, and the maid that NO I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO EAT OR DRINK, JUST LET ME SUFFER ALONE!!! But we finally left, and I feel like I crashed the party a bit. One the way home, I got super homesick. I have never gotten homesick in my whole entire life ever, so it was a new experience. I just wanted my mom and dad and my house and my bed. It was awful and I don’t want it to happen again. Definitely what one would call “a valley.” So I watched “Up!” and read some past quotes pages and now I feel much better, at least mentally.
Sorry, that was super long and kind of whiny. On the bright side, in Antigua, a few of us had a 20 minute, reasonably in-depth conversation with a super granola expatriate from the U.S. and his friend, a boy of maybe 10 who was selling bracelets. It was about the Cup of course. That’s nearly all anyone talks about. I also talked with Jaime for about 30 minutes about tornadoes. The conversation ended rather abruptly and awkwardly when I decided to try and be smart, rather than culturally sensitive, telilng him that tornadoes were caused by rising and falling columns of air and such, and were not actually “the will of God.” Oops.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Esperanza
June 15, 2010
Today I discovered that my Spanish teacher Marta is quite possibly one of the most amazing women that I have ever met. We managed to get off on some tangent or other in our literature class (it happens a lot – we’ve found that it is an effective tactic to keep from reading about some boring literature theme) that eventually lead to her talking about her personal life for at least an hour. She grew up in a house that reeked of “machismo,” the oldest child, with three younger brothers. By the time she was 12, she realized that she was treated different than they, obliged to do housework AND work in her father’s carpentry shop. She called her father out on it, beginning an argument that lasted until she left the house 7 or 8 years later. When Marta told him that she wanted to study literature in college, her father said “No, you’ll do something useful. Be a secretary.” She complied, because at that time and in this culture, there isn’t much else to do. At this point, I’m not exactly sure what else happened in her life. She finished secretarial school, was a secretary for awhile in the governor’s office (I believe), and then decided that she had done what her father wanted her to do, and now it was time for her to do what she wanted to do. So she went back to school to specialize in literature, and it was there that she met her husband – a Mennonite from Georgia who taught U.S. history in a school for children of ambassadors and diplomats and such. They are now married and have two boys, 6 and 9. In her house, there is not a trace of machismo – her husband cooks and helps care for their children.
Marta’s story is the polar opposite of most Guatemalan women’s. Young girls are raised in strongly masochistic households, are taught the status quo from their similarly dominated (and quite possibly abused) mothers. They haven’t a trace of self-esteem or sense of worth. Eventually, they find a guy who has money, a nice car, nice clothes, who may be a total douche, but hey, he’s got money and that’s all that matters. They think that he’s a nice guy, wouldn’t abuse her like her father did her mother, and for awhile, that might be true. But then he might hit her once. Once is permissible, she thinks. He was angry, it was my fault, he didn’t mean it, he’ll never do it again, he was sorry afterwards, he said that he loved me, the excuses are endless. But it happens again. And again. And again. And eventually, without a thread of self-respect left, she becomes her mother, raising her daughter in a similar atmosphere as she was raised, submitting to her husband’s abuse, ill-educated, completely devoid of hope. Thousands of women are killed each year in “passion-related murders.” Murdered by their own husbands, in other words. The cycle of violence, hopelessness, and machismo is very nearly endless. Women like Marta, who are able to break out, are few and far between.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Iximche y Chichicastenango
We visited the Iximche ruins and Chichicastenango this weekend. Iximche (ish-imm-chee) is a site which was still inhabited when the Spanish showed up in the 1500s, 700 years after Tikal was abandoned for whatever reason. The ruins were really interesting – there was a ball field, three or four temples, and several streets and low walls scattered around. I had lots of fun taking pictures, as always. We then moved on to Chichi, an indigenous village of the Q’iche people. Q’iche is one of the four largest indigenous groups, with its own language, style of dress, and customs. About 25 years ago, there was a genocide initiated by the government against the Mayans, resulting in a large amount of widows and orphaned children, as well as loads of emotional and psychological damage. On Saturday morning, we visited the Chontola widow’s cooperative, run by women whose husbands were killed by the Army and who had lacked means to care for their families. We spoke with the president of the cooperative, dona Maria, about her experience. She spoke only in Q’iche, so the founder of the organization translated her story from Q’iche to Spanish, and then our professor translated from Spanish to English. It was a lengthy process. Dona Maria’s husband was killed by the PAC, which was a group of village men who ended up being informants for the army. He was killed by men who were once friends or at least acquaintances. The other women had similar stories – husbands killed by the Army, killed simply because they were Mayan, simply because they were different. The government tried to justify the actions, telling the public that the Mayas were in cahoots with the guerilla forces that were against the government. But in reality, at least according to everything I have been told and have read, is that the government really just wanted to exterminate the Maya and needed an excuse. They could have brought the guerilla fighters under control very easily, they greatly outnumbered them. But they didn’t, simply because it gave them an excuse to kill more of the Maya. It is one thing to hear about genocide from afar, but quite another to sit 10 feet away from a woman who was directly affected by it less than 30 years ago. We also met a handful of adorable little Q’iche children who had been displaced by the flooding two weeks ago. They taught us a few phrases in their language, all of which we have forgotten. Q’iche is a more guttural language than Spanish, with very few similarities. It sounds a lot like a cross between German and the “click” languages of Africa – very different than anything I have heard before.
All said, it was a very interesting and beautiful cultural experience.
The World Cup has also started. I watched the opening ceremonies with Jaime on Friday, and the CASAS students and some of the teachers continued watching the game when we arrived at the seminary. We also saw the game between the U.S. and England while we were at the widow’s cooperative, including England’s goal in the first 10 minutes of the game. How embarrassing.
Friday, June 11, 2010
La Maldición de la Remolacha
I thought I had escaped the curse of the beets. Nearly every day, my fellow students regale each other with stories of how they had to choke down cold beets or cold beets in cold beet juice or cold beet soup or warm beet soup or beets with eggs. And I privately snickered at their misfortune, because beets are so gross looking, with their vile, red, gelatinous, congealed-blood appearance, and I had not been forced to choke them down. And Victoria almost always serves really good food for supper – frijoles, “chapín” food with unpronounceable names, grilled cheese sandwiches, Mexican food, rice, soup… But it was not meant to be. This evening, Victoria asked me if I would like a boiled egg. I love boiled eggs. So I said yes. Thank goodness I only said I would like three. Because in a few minutes, there appeared on my plate three tostadas drowning in beet juice, topped with beets mixed with lettuce stained red by beet juice, and the finish it all off, a bit of a boiled egg, sadly marked with that malevolent liquid that is beet juice. Ugh. And those awful beets stared up at me with their spiteful little eyes, daring me to choke them down, knowing that I had to, because Victoria was in the kitchen with me. Ugh. I hate beets. It’s the texture. I can eat anything, so long as it’s not slippery, slimy, or with that weird texture that is peculiar to squash. Beets are just gross. But I ate the darn things, rewarding myself with a bit of boiled egg for each laden tostada that disappeared from my plate.
On the bright side, we visited a museum with my literature today. It was very interesting – lots of pottery and replicas and Mayan carved stones – everything one expects in a museum. The other classes went to the zoo, and it was packed with thousands of little Guatemalan boys and girls on field trips. I was jealous of the other CASAS students, because zoos are just AWESOME. Jealous until I heard that they had essentially been the walking, talking gringo exhibit, openly gawked at by all of the children. Then I was thankful for my nice, quiet museum trip. We are quite a novelty here, with our light hair, light skin, blue eyes, and strange clothes. Add to that the fact that we obviously do not speak Spanish with any degree of fluidity, and we may as well hang a giant flashing sandwich board around our necks, proclaiming “WE ARE FOREIGNERS!!!” Oh well. I don’t really mind the turn-and-stares or the point-and-laughs. It’s all part of the experience, along with the beets and the impenetrable literature and the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute language barriers and blunders. I love it.
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