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—6th 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.
