Thursday, April 30, 2009

All Things Considered...

Well, I have arrived. It has been almost a month since we swore in and said good-bye to our fellow trainees and set out for our sites. So much has happened in the past month it sometimes feels like it’s been years since training actually occurred. I’ll try my best to describe Santa Apolonia in full but everything is so wonderfully new and stimulating I doubt I’ll be able to do this experience justice. After a fun and riveting swearing-in weekend in Antigua (where I spent about a third of my living allowance on good food and fun) Bethany and I said a final and teary good-bye to our host families and boarded the camioneta full of excitement and enough bags to supply a small nation…we were off.

Now let me try to paint a picture for you…
Bethany and I stepped off the bus in Santa Apolonia arms full of more baggage that two people can reasonable carry and lugged everything through this small town, all eyes on us, up the cobblestone streets until we reached the front of Bethany’s new house with a lamina gate. There we knocked on the tin gate and her host mom came to the “door”. As Bethany stepped inside to acquaint herself with her new home I stood in the gateway. I, with the help of my friend Jessica managed to find a host family but had no idea where the house was, had not yet met them nor had any idea of where to go. To be honest I wasn’t worried. I had spoken briefly on the phone with her and figured with such a small town every just knew each other. The conversation with Bethany’s host mom went a little like this

Me: “Hi Dona Norma, you don’t happen to know where Dona Julia lives do you?”
Norma: “Dona Julia who?”
Me: “I´m not sure.”
Norma: “Dona Julia…do you mean Don Julio”
Me: “No, I know it’s a woman.”
Norma: “Do you know her last name?”
Me: “No”
Norma: “Do you know about where she lives”
Me: “No”
Norma: "I think there´s a Julia that lives over there, she has a corn grinder, does she have a corn grinder"
Me: "I´m not sure"
Norma: "Ok well I´ll have my daughter walk you to her house"
Me: "thank you"

When I arrived at the house, no one was home. Suddenly, a young boy run up to me and said "are you the gringa?" I replied yes assuming both that he had one in mind and that he had said THE gringa as opposed to A gringa…and he ran away.While I was sitting in all my glory in front of the door, a woman with no teeth and a towel on her head came up to me and asked me what I was selling, I said nothing, she asked if I could give her money, I said no, she asked what I was doing here and looked in my bags, I tried in vain to tell her about Peace Corps and she asked how much money I made...I said the same as a new teacher and she said "poor thing" and walked away...As it turns out the little boy is my host brother and went to get my host mom from church...they showed me my room and her really nice house. She has a TV and nice kitchen and I have her recently married daughter’s room that has stuffed animals everywhere. Above the bed is a rapper guy giving a peace sign with the word NIGGA below it...there is also a picture of Sylvester the cat saying "To express my feelings is all I wish for" with hearts around him...Dona Julia is an incredibly sweet woman. She has a motor or corn grinder in the back that starts up at 5am, so I won’t be sleeping much, but honestly over the month I have gotten used to the constant rattle which is more comforting than anything. Recently I’ve learned that Dona Julia also “peels” chickens on the side so in the past two weeks I have woken up to sudden screeching shortly followed by…a sudden stop to the screeching. This isn’t as comforting as the corn grinder hum but I’ve grown accustomed all the same. At first the host family really didn’t know what to make of me. They asked if I was here out of obligation or because I wanted to and could not understand that I am here for two years. They still look a little surprised every day when I come home. We went and visited the grandma with a whole bundle of kids (I still don´t know who belongs to whom.) The grandmma´s name is Mama Chila and she is a everything you would expect a Guatemalan grandmother named Mama Chila to be. This often pensive matriarch with no teeth lives in a small compound with 2 sheep, 2 pigs, a dozen chickens a duck 3 dogs, a kitten and about a dozen grandchildren running every which way. The vast majority of the first day was spent playing with the increasingly growing number of children and answering questions that ranged from “Did you really come here by plane?” to “Do you like to share?” At the end of the first night I was exhausted.I went to sleep that first night and when I turned off the lights there were the glow in the dark one pasted all over the ceiling and I smiled....


So we’ve based a number of our assumptions about Peace Corps on the wisdom of previous volunteers. We have heard that training is the hardest part and that is closely followed by the first three months in site. Training was tough, but the first two weeks here were equally challenging. The first week, Bethany and I decided it was important to settle-in a bit, get to know our families and our communities. Besides, all the children had exams and school was pretty inconsistent for the week. Given the following week was Semana Santa, we essentially had two weeks with no work other than that of acquainting ourselves with own wonderful town. That first week I spent the majority of mornings laying in bed, listening to the constant rattle of the corn grinder trying to peg exactly where everyone in the family was in the house and how best to manage myself accordingly. It is the first time that my host family had anyone living in their house much less a foreigner such as myself. Similarly, unlike my situation during training, I was free to set the terms of our interactions such as when I would eat, how much I would pay to eat, when I would spend time with the family, etc. The problem was, however, that I had no idea what those terms should be either. Though I tried to establish some sort of routine, what our agreement eventually became was “if you’re home and hungry, you’ll eat with us” which suited me just fine.

Those first two weeks there were always kids around to play with which occupied most of my time. Even when eating at Mama Chila’s house the kids and I get served first in the kitchen, and the adults get served second. I can’t blame them though, I play more with the kids and the only other twenty-three year old in the family has a baby that seems to constantly be breast-feeding, so I can relate more with the children who are in school seeing as how I just got out of school myself. The problem with being an only child, however, is I really have needed to learn how to play with kids. What I’ve learned is…kids are exhausting. We changed games almost every twenty minutes and after an afternoon I was completely exhausted with no new ideas. Sometimes I would retreat to my room saying I had to nap but a few minutes later I would hear the kids called calling my name quietly and feel so racked with guilt that I would just get up and go play. As such if anyone knows of fun and easy kid activities, PLEASE let me know! If will be greatly appreciated!

Dona Julia is a wonderful woman. Over time, Dona Julia and I have more or less gotten to know each other. I know and love her family, it is filled with extraordinary women who function like a well-oiled machine. Although this has gotten better with time, she sometimes still looks at me with the same face she used the first two weeks…like I was some exotic little bird that had flown into her house and she didn’t really know what to do with it.

My second week in site was filled with activity because of the holiday. Lent, as I’ve mentioned, is filled with activities but I came to learn that the same doesn’t apply for Easter. Maunday Thursday and Good Friday were huge celebrations with lunches, processions and everyone baking different kinds of bread and little work, but Easter was just sad did little other than mark the end of Lent which I found fascinating! Try as I might, the whole egg-dying and candy hunting traditions just don’t translate.

Regardless I was so relieved to have the opportunity to start work. That first Monday morning our plan was to meet our new counterpart, an amazing man named Romulo at 8:00am to discuss the plan for the coming months. I, being the over-anxious worker with slight type-A tendencies that I am was awake, dressed and had eaten breakfast by 6:45. Bethany and I arrived early, waited until 8:20 to see him, had a meeting that lasted until 8:40…and that was really it. That was our first day of work. Poco a Poco. As little as we did that first day, we managed to get a great deal accomplished and by the end of the week had been to a meeting with the directors from every school, had started getting paperwork ready for some water projects, and had visited two of the twenty-five schools.

Work is slow but sure as we are still trying to find our way to the schools by bus, foot or pick-up truck but I absolutely love going to the schools and getting to know the communities. On Thursday one school we visited made a point to mention to the students that we are not here to harm them or to steal children as the rumors often go. I guess all things considered I’d rather her mention it than not, but it still caught me somewhat off guard. Another school completely spoiled us by serving us arroz con leche, my favorite hot drink here and a tostada shell with cheese and tomato sauce. The schools are very welcoming and because it is our first month, we spend the majority of our time now walking room to room introducing ourselves to the students. It has really paid off though, as we walk we can hear the students call out our names and we’ve started to recognize the teachers when we see them in town. It’s small things like that which really make me feel like everything is going to be alright.

As for the community I feel like I am slowly settling in. Even the men in town have begun to say “Nos vemos seno” (We’ll see you teacher) as opposed to “Good-bye muneca” in a broken English accent. More importantly however, is that I have found comfort and friends in those around me. While Bethany is a constant source of reassurance, we also have a site-mate Ellen who works in the Rural Home Preventative Health program in Peace Corps. She is a wonderfully stable yet witty person who is trying to teach me chess and is so well-grounded in the community that I wonder if I’ll ever live up to her example. And in the habit of incessant listing, the other day I sat and made a list of everyone in town who are my friends and everyone who is a potential friend (something I never thought I would do.) With a goal of introducing myself to one random person every day, my list is consistently growing.

I have slowly formed some comfort activities and daily activities that makes existence here more habitual than fleeting and I think has helped me settle into home-life here all the more. A couple of times a week, the three gringas, Bethany Ellen and I all go to Dona Paula’s for chuchitos (a tamale-like item made of the corn masa filled with red sauce and a piece of meat) and a glass of arroz con leche, which, close to dusk when it starts to turn cold, is the most delicious and comforting substance ever. Not to mention, Dona Paula and her incredibly cute daughter definitely made my friend list. It is so comforting to just sit, eat and talk to them and whoever else happens to come sit with us.

I am thrilled to have such wonderful site mates. Bethany and I are functioning incredibly well in the schools, complimenting each other remarkably well, especially in the speeches that we are instructed to give on spot. My other site mate, Ellen, is teaching me chess and has become my running partner (much to the shock of everyone that knows me as the die-hard aquatics fiend I am.) Though to be honest we do have a tendency to retreat to the comforts of Ellen’s house for a movie now and again, we also have a habit of going on our aldea walk. This hour-long stretch through some of the rural communities is uniquely refreshing and comfortable at this point.


I have slowly started learning the tricks involved in successfully washing my laundry. Though Dona Julia was sure to point out a few key things to this success,. Primarily, I bought the wrong soap (the one I bought gives you blisters.) Secondly I finally mustered up the nerve to ask where outside I can hang my ropa interior to dry. I was driven to ask this because the first time I did laundry in my new home, I didn’t want to display my pantaloons for the world to see but I soon realized that keeping wet underwear on a towel in your room only causes them to mold, not dry. I also learned there is an art to getting all the soap out of clothes, a technique that took many demonstrations and many observed (and scrutinized) practices to accomplish. Ultimately, try as I might I can’t get the idea of color-grouping my clothes out of my head (a concept that my host family thinks is hysterical.) As much as I hated doing laundry in the States, I seem to really enjoy it here, partly because it’s a good exercise-related stress reliever and partly because I get to do my “wax on, wax off” impression with soapy socks. This, however, my host family doesn’t appreciate, I think because there’s the lack of Karate Kid reruns on TNT in this country.

I also have grown into a comfortable habit of family Sundays at Mama Chila´s house. All the family usually gathers, I eat lunch first with all the children then while we go and play all the adults (including my 23 year old host sister who is a new mom) sits to eat. I really love Sundays at Mama Chila´s house, mainly because it is routine and a known and something I can count on to actually happen during the week. We usually eat really delicious carne asada or hilachas and I usually retire to the house shortly after for a long nap. I am really hoping this is something I can continue after I leave the host family living situation because the whole ´gather around the stove´ lifestyle that occurs on Sundays really appeals to me.


All things considered I have come to this conclusion…
Whether from the wild dogs or my own bed I have managed to catch fleas, my digestive troubles seem to be never ending, my bag was stolen while I wasn’t looking and I have never been happier. That is a good thing.




Food for Thought:
One afternoon when I went to Mama Chila´s for lunch, I brought photos from home to show that I am, in fact, a real person with a family and have not just been exiled from my own country. Mama Chila in all her wisdom, didn’t say a thing while looking at the pictures and I had begun to wonder whether I had made the right choice in bringing them or not. After she had finished she had three very astute and amazing observations…
The first when looking at a picture of Mom, Dad and I at the ranch…
1) “You really look like your Mom but you have your Dad’s smile. They are really young.”
The second after looking at a picture of Jon and I at the ranch…
2) “Your boyfriend is really hairy, why does he have so much hair?”
(I would like to note that the men here have very little body hair)
The third while looking at a picture of the aspens changing with the Rockies in the background…
3) “Isn’t it a shame that we will die and never know this place.”

1 comment:

  1. Joanna - you are so amazing! I do not think I would be able to adapt as well as you have! I LOVE reading your blogs. One thing that has always impressed me with the people in "3rd World" countries - is that they seem to have their priorities straight..... they take the time to sit & visit & build relationships with each other. Where as , we take time to run around , being busy & not taking time for each other! From reading your blog, it sounds like you are finding the same thing.
    You take care of yourself!! Remember , I am praying for you and love you tons! Aunt Janet

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