well this was supposed to be an update for August and Sept. but well I got carried away

Ok so the other day I updated on June and July…. So here we go with August.  After Ashley left in July, I got caught up on some of my other work, which is hard to do when we have teams here.  I go to San Pablo a couple times a week and work on our projects in this village.  San Juan and San Pablo are about 6 kilometers apart, but the two villages are very different.  They both are Tzu’tujil (one of 22 or 23 different Indigenous Maya language groups in Guatemala), but they are still very different.  They both speak Tzu’tujil, but even the Tzu’tujil langage varies between the two villages. 

Each village has their unique traje (as do most other indigenous villages in Guatemala)… the traje is the typical dress of the village.  Most men especially younger men now wear western clothes, but all the women still wear the traditional dress (though the younger ones have started wearing traje of different colors and designs than the traditional design of their towns).  The villages have developed very different from one another; San Juan seems to have more going for it and seems more hopeful.  The mayor of the town has put money into making the town look pretty (though I am not sure how much this actually helps the people living in the town), and the town is very clean and well kept up.   San Pablo on the other hand, did not have any sort of trash cans or waste collection until the beginning of this year.  When I first came here trash was just everywhere.  It is a better now, but there is still a ways to go.  Many people also do not have any sort of toilet or latrine and many also do not have running water. 

A majority of the people in San Pablo do not speak Spanish really at all and even more are illiterate.  The same is true in San Juan, though from what I have seen most of the younger people speak Spanish and people in general seem to complete more education in San Juan.  One statistic I read, said that 85% of the population of San Pablo is illiterate, and that statistic does not seem that far fetched to me.  San Juan has a panifcadora (bread making place), a couple hostel type hotels, Super Quic, a store that has just about everything in it (you can buy beans, eggs, cornflakes, cookies, school supplies, pots/pans, tools, paint, construction materials, giant pinatas, toys… just about anything you could think of), a market (the market is brand new, but most of the stalls are empty because I have heard the price is too high to rent one), Elenita’s… a comedor where local people eat and there are always a ton of people in it—it is delicious! (you get a choice of caldo de res (beef soup) or pollo dorado (fried chicken) for lunch, and eggs, beans, plantains, cheese, a mountain of tortillas and coffee with a ton of sugar in it for dinner), a bank, a more touristy type restaurant (I love it… on the pizzas they put queso kraft… (kraft american cheese)…. gross!), a couple internet places, even a computer “repair” place (although, I took my laptop there to look at and clean the fan…. And they couldn’t figure out how to get into the laptop…I said oh ya know what… I think it’s alright… so then Jimmy fixed it, but he messed up one of my speakers and didn’t tell me… just turned that one off!), a new library and even a doctor who has a “private practice” (though no one really goes to this doctor because it is too expensive).  San Juan is also working at promoting “eco” tourism in the town… and there are about 7 different women’s natural dye weaving co-ops in town.  (though one of my friends said that there are no tourists now… she said it has been 2 months since a tourist even walked in her store)

San Pablo, does not have many of these amenities, and from what I have heard the mayor is incredibly corrupt.  People in the town always tell me that he is illiterate… but I don’t think that is true.  But I do know that people who did not vote for him in the election cannot get jobs with anything run by the government, for example the public school, or the centro de salud (health center).  I know a very good teacher, and a nurse who works so hard for his community and neither of them can get jobs because they didn’t support the mayor in the election.  I guess it is public knowledge who you vote for, which is pretty scary.  As I said the town just started having a trash collection service, and I still don’t think this is the government who is paying for this.  San Pablo does have a library (though I have never been there to check it out),  a rotary club constructed a market, but it wasn’t being used, and now it has been turned into classrooms, for night school, literacy classes, and a semi-private, but lowcost private school….the public schools are well not the greatest environment to learn in so I have heard.  And the public schools in Guatemala only go through primary—6^th grade, if you want to continue in education you have to pay for a private school.  Thus if people do end up graduating from primary school, many do not continue their studies into basico (middle school), and far less complete diversificado (high school… where you learn a trade and usually have to travel to a different village to go to a diversificado). 

San Pablo does not have any bigger tienda type stores, and there is no market… sometimes women sell some fruits and veggies on the streets.  There is an Australian non-profit in town which has now set up a low-cost internet for the community to use and has computer classes for kids and adults in the community.  This organization has a lot of money… and the computers and internet they have are some of the best I have seen in Guatemala…. way better and faster than the internet in San Juan. 

Most of the people in San Pablo live in houses built of adobe with a dirt floor.  As I said the other day it is the rainy season now… and it just rains all the time.  I was walking through San Pablo in a downpour the other day feeling sorry for myself getting all soaked wadding through the muddy, dog poo rivers in the streets, but as I looked in to some of the houses I immediately realized how good I really have it.  I can go back to my little casita, which is simple and authentically Guatemalan, but which has a concrete floor, the roof doesn’t leak, water does not enter under the door (at least not yet), I have running water outside, a toilet and a shower, a gas stove, and I can afford to buy purified drinking water, food (fresh veggies and fruit… meat… if I wanted to buy the meat that hangs in the market with flies all around it), gas for my stove.  I don’t have to go up the mountain and collect fire wood and degrain the corn to grind up to make tortillas to eat with a little salt and herbs for dinner.  As I was pasearing through San Pablo in the rain and I looked into the houses, I saw many women sweeping and throwing buckets of water out of their houses from the rain that entered in.  And I cannot imagine all this water mixed with the dirt floor in their houses.  It was so cold; my feet were freezing from the cold rain that soaked my sandals.  But when I got home I could take rinse my feet in hot water and put on dry clothes, climb into my bed and drink a nice cup of tea.  But despite all this I never hear people complaining of the rainy season.  Everytime I talk to people in the towns and say… I am so tired of the rain I can’t wait for it to end, they laugh at me.  When I ask, do you like the rainy season, people don’t respond with yes or no, they say that they need the rainy season for the crops and everything.  And then I say oh yes I know that of course but if you had a choice, which do you prefer the rainy or the dry season… but they still just answer that both are necessary.  I think that I, as well as probably most people from the U.S. and other such countries, think of things in how they relate to ourselves and how they affect us.  Even if I know that the rainy season is important for the crops, the forests, the lakes, I still know that for myself I prefer it when it is not rainy, though it is of course necessary.  But when I say things like… I am so ready for the rain to be done… (or something like that in Spanish)… people just laugh at me or look like I’m crazy, because even though they have to scoop the water out of their houses with buckets, it is just part of life and part of the seasons, and is neither good or bad, but it just is. 

June and July recap

Oh man so well let’s see it has been quite a while since I have written in my blog… people keep reminding me of this… so here is a little recap of what I have been up to lately.  And I shall then later add some things that I wrote in my journal before when Ash was here to give better descriptions.. I have been a slacker at writing in both my journal and my blog lately…. I really need to work on this!  But yeah so here is what I have been up to….

 

Well let’s see I don’t know where I have left off… but Ashley (my sister) was here with me for two months this summer… and I miss her very much.  We had such a wonderful time together… we braved the tropical storm with Jimmy and Holly, worked quite a bit on the clinic.  I must say that the volunteer construction teams we have had since Jimmy Ashley and Holly have had it soooo much easier.  We now have an ayudante who works when we have teams… so Francisco and the ayudante do more of the sifting sand and mixing of cement.  With Jim, Ash, and Yoli (Holly) we had to mix and sift all of our own concrete… and it was a lot!!! Since we were stuccoing Styrofoam walls.  And Francisco and I were kind of fighting at the time so well yeah he was not going to help at all with the sifting and such.  By the end of the week we couldn’t even mix anymore, we just would start laughing whenever we tried.  Plus… we had to carry all of the cement across the field… 100 pound bags of cement! 

            But yeah so after this week, we traveled up to Semuc Champey and Coban and saw lots of cool sights up there… then Holly and Jimmy left and it was Ashley and me.  We worked a lot on doing the community health needs assessment, which I am still currently working on… now I am trying to go around and figure out how I am going to start interviewing individual families in the community.  We also had an ALAS family planning clinic which we organized.  We helped out here and there with a bit of reforestation and such.  And got ready for the next team in July… this team was from University Park UMC in Dallas, Texas.  We worked at the clinic to finish up concreting the tops of walls which I will add a description of later… it was quite interesting, and got the rafters ready to put up the ceiling.  The ceiling is ¼” plywood and little 1X2 boards along the seams and across the middle to make 4×4 foot squares.  I kind of wish we had used thicker plywood, but well it is working allright.  The best part is that we had to paint the ceiling white, since it is plywood.  Now for some reason, Francisco thinks that it is necessary to cut ANY kind of paint with either water or paint thinner… and no not just a little bit of water to make it more manageable, we are talking half water half paint.  I kept telling him no, the volunteers are not happy painting with water… but he wouldn’t listen to me… and everytime I came back with another bucket of paint from the store… before I could even turn around… he had mixed in the water!  Finally the last bucket I convinced him to not add a single drop of water and he finally listened.  We ended up putting like 4 coats of paint on the ceiling.  But yeah… we finished the ceiling and it made it sooooo much cooler in the clinic… before it was like an oven.  We also got some more of the Styrofoam walls stuccoed… they require 3 different coats of stucco with different mixtures of sand and cement. 

            Ashley worked with the medical part of the University Park team… I was so very proud of her.  She translated for Linda a nurse who was seeing patients like a doctor.  We both just really loved Linda, she is an amazing nurse and really just reminds me so much of our Mommy.  But Ashley was so unsure of herself, but she did such an amazing job at translating.  The group had said that they had more Spanish speaking medical providers than they in fact did… so Ashley stepped up and worked as a translator and was phenomenal!  For every doctor, pharmacy, intake, dentist, etc… we have to have two translators… one from English to Spanish and another from Spanish to Tzu’tujil.  It is a lot to coordinate!  But yeah we had medical clinics for two days in San Juan, two days in San Pablo, and one day in Santa Clara.  The group stayed in Pana and had to take a boat every morning which was a little crazy… and Ashley and I stayed at JoAn’s and prepared all the lunches for the teams which was a lot of work… lots of people to feed including all the translators and everything. 

            But yeah after the team, Ash and I had a crazy trip to Mexico to renew my visa… maybe I’ll talk about this more later… but yeah it was crazy and the boarder guys are all pretty corrupt.  Then we came back and got to relax and hang out a couple days before she left me.  She had a little birthday party for me.  We had our typical dinner… which we ate pretty much every night while she was here… prepared on the little hotplate.  But it was delicious and we had all the extras… such as rice, refried beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots, guacamole, limes, homemade tortillas (homemade by us), and lots of hot sauce… mmmm the best.  And for desert we made well tried to make a pudding cake.  We made chocolate pudding from scratch….Mommy had sent us ingredients in the mail such as cornstarch.  And then we tried to make somesort of a graham cracker crust and cook it on the stove… the peace corps oven.  But yeah Ash did all the finishing touches and it was just the cutest little pudding pie I had ever seen! 

            Then Axli (which is how someone spelled her name here and I absolutely love) left… and I was alone again.  But I have made other friends since then who come and go so it has been pretty fun.  For my birthday, Ana and Francisco made me a beautiful lunch of caldo de marsicos (fish soup… but so much more than just fish soup… it is quite an experience) and it was a really special day… maybe I’ll explain this more later.  Next time I write I will describe August and September… but my wrists are tired from typing now… and it looks like it wants to rain… and it is a big muddy river outside of the internet… so I shall write more another day! 

Francisco´s Cake

Oh my I am just so filled up on rice and orange soda, I cannot even describe it!  Ariel, my friend here in San Juan and kind of roommate now, and I made a cake yesterday for Francisco (the albanil—foreman of the clinic) because today is his birthday.  This cake was pretty incredible, and I have some good fotos of the process.  We made a carrot cake (well from a box… but we did add in extra carrots) and we had wanted to make it in the solar oven, I just got one and am excited to try it out… but as has been the situation for the last couple weeks now… there was no sun today… not even a little peek of sun through the clouds this morning which we are usually blessed with.  I am really ready for the rainy season to be done… everyone keeps telling me that it doesn’t really rain in October, and I am like um well it is October 4^th now and this is the rainiest it has been yet.  Yesterday I got caught out in the rain and I had these books that I am borrowing from this guy here in town, so I ran to the store and bought a piece of plastic to tie around my neck.  Yesterday the whole day I wore this plastic and my big black rainboots.  Ariel said that we are starting to look pretty chapin (which means Guatemalan) but not chapina… which is the word for a girl Guatemalan… yes I dress kind of like a man going to work in the fields… they wear these same black boots and always have this piece of plastic tied around their neck covering only their backs.  People look at me pretty funny sometimes…. I don’t know how the women always look so put together when they are wading through rivers running down the street that go at least up to mid calf.  But yeah sometimes I just have to wear this stuff… I am sick of being soaking wet. 

So… we could not cook the cake in the solar oven… and well although cooking a cake on the stove is fun and worked out for Ashley and I, we decided that it would be easier since we had two cakes to cook it in the oven… yes I do actually have a gas oven in my new casita.  Ok… so we cooked the cake in the oven… it was a little lopsided, but no not quite like your cherry birthday cake Ashley that we made in Varsity.  But yeah… so then we decide that we will take the cake out of the pans and make a little layer cake and be all fancy.  So, we decide the burnt up comal that I have to make tortillas is the best surface for the cake.  However the cake didn’t want to come out of the pan… so well we had some craters in the cake… Oh but before this, we went to the store to find stuff to make icing.  Now the first idea was to buy the little container of Betty Crocker icing which has been sitting on the sheves of the store since I moved here.  It moves around the store always on a different shelf.. but it is always there.  There used to be another can of frosting, but Ash and I bought that for the stove cake we made… as we were putting it on the cake, we realized that it was about a year expired… but I don’t think anyone got sick:J  Ok, so the icing has disappeared off the shelf…did someone buy it?  Ok, next plan… we will make our own cream cheese icing!  So we find the cream cheese… and from what I can remember powdered sugar is what you use for a cake.  So we look at Super Quic the store that sells everything…. Yes pretty much anything… food, school stuff, plastic, tools, paint, computer stuff, toys… but no they are out of glaze sugar (pronounced like glass… took a while to figure this out).  So well we decide to pasear around to the other tiendas and the market to look for glaze sugar… and no luck… everyone pretty much laughs at us for thinking that we could find powdered sugar in San Juan.  When we ask at one store if anyone would have it… we get this answer “No muy vende aqui in San Juan”  that is a new use of the word muy for me…thinking maybe that is not correct but who knows… So yeah well we buy regular sugar which every tienda has PLENTY of…. Sugar is well a staple here.  I was buying food for a family here… we are trying to get one of the kids strong enough so that he can go to Spain and have surgery… and I buy corn, beans, rice, oatmeal, milk, this milk supplement drink stuff, salt… and lots of sugar!  But yeah, so anyways we have our sugar and cream cheese. 

Back to the house to make the icing.  So… we decide that to get the granuals out of the sugar we should cook the sugar with water… well this was quite a process… but yeah I guess it somewhat worked, and we added the cream cheese and essence of vanilla…not quite sure what that is for quite a large bottle it costs about 25 cents (US).  But yeah, it works out well, but well we don’t have enough to cover the whole cake in layers and such… so how are we going to stretch this icing???… well we added some water and powdered milk and more sugar… and now we have very liquidy icing… so what can we use to thicken it… why not corn flour which we use to make tortillas.  So yeah we add some of that and it has a weird tortillaish taste… well we add more of other stuff and end up having an interesting icing which tastes kind of strange but we figured they are used to eating tortillas and corn all the time so well maybe they will like it.  So we ice the cake and put the layers on top… and well it looked kind of like a disaster.  With craters in the middle pieces falling off the edges and two very different sizes of cakes.  How can we make the cake look somewhat edible??? Well we do a bit of surgery try to bring the cake back to its original form… then to fill in the craters we put banana slices on top of the cake and in the craters.  Then to make this look a little more natural and presentable, we melt up some chocobanano chocolate… really weird consistency choclatey stuff that they use to make chocolate covered bananas…. And we drizzle this over the cake.  Then to top it off, we take these little chocolate chip cookies we found at the store and make an F on the cake for Francisco…. And we cut off a piece of a candle and stick it in the middle.  Now here is a Guatemalan birthday cake. 

 

So… next we head over to Francisco and Ana’s house to bring the cake.  But before we can sing happy birthday and eat the cake… we have to put on the Guatemala birthday mix CD and set off some fire crackers, meanwhile I made a couple tortillas with Ana… I am getting better at them… but mine still are a little funny shaped and kind of fat.  Now we are ready for the cake… so we sing happy birthday, and all eat the cake.  So Ariel and I get up to say our goodbyes cause it is about lunch time, and they say no no you are staying to eat lunch with us… oh yes yes we have enough we made lunch for you too.  So we get a delicious meal of chicken pepian and rice cooked with carrots and quisquil.  And… of course our tortillas.  Now whenever I eat there they always give me the hugest portion of food… and then Ana and Julia just eat a little plate of food.  And of course here you have to finish all your food.  Its really good food…. But it is sooo much.  And Ariel doesn’t eat meat so she asked for a plate without chicken and she got the hugest plate of rice I have ever seen!  I think that it was seriously a whole bag of rice (a pound) just for her on her plate.  It was pretty incredible!  And she actually finished it all off…very impressive.  I tried… but I just couldn’t finish all the rice… I think I got all the chicken… but its so hard to tell on those bones if you got it all… I know what a special treat it is to have chicken… so I try really hard to get it all… but it’s a struggle… luckily everyone eats with their hands and licks their fingers for napkins so I never have to worry about offending anyone with my bad table manners.  But yeah, so both of us now are so incredibly full, but it was very delicious and such an honor for them to invite us to stay for dinner.