It’s not easy being ridiculously un-green
There are little things I fail to understand more than the celebrations that occur in Guatemala. Being an incredibly Catholic country, there is some sort of fiesta every weekend, usually related to a huge moment in the life of Jesus that occurred no where near the time that the festival is occurring (See: Convite a.k.a. drag fest).
I guess the most recent festival was somewhat appropriate in the moment. Being Lent, every weekend there is a “procession” of some sort in a different town, as well as a huge one in Antigua. These processions consist of a bunch of people dressed in purple robes carrying a huge platform on their shoulders with some depiction of a moment in the life of Jesus. Generally a mass of people slowly follow this slow moving parade that lasts roughly 6 hours until they finally return to the church. There’s also a band. And people waving incense balls which make me nauseous.
This past Sunday it was Pastores’ turn. This procession was especially interesting because it consisted of all the houses lying on the parade route making “alfombras,” or basically decorating the street in front of their house where Jesus would pass over. Picture massive amounts of pine needles, cut flowers and leaves, along with a variety of paper decorations ranging from flowers to sheep to angels. (Un-green point #1: massive waste of greenery and destruction of natural environment.) The street in front of my house was one continuous strip of greenery, although some people used colored woodshavings to make really intricate designs. People spent the whole day making these in the blistering sun while simultaneously “watering” the sidewalk and their creations for the entire day. (Un-green point #2: It is ridiculous to me how much water our community wastes. They’re currently repaving the highway up the road from us, which has consisted of over two weeks of just dirt road that they daily “water” to prevent the dirt from flying up everywhere, which it does anyway.) Some houses even decorated their streets with vegetables. One particularly creative one cut carrots and beets and made them into flowers, but many just strewed mangoes, watermelon, and avocados across their display. Let me point out that the ultimate purpose of these displays is to be completely destroyed by the passing parade. (Un-green point #3 and Abby’s BIGGEST pet peeve: WASTED DELICIOUSNESS! My friend’s house had an entire bucket of delicious avocados that they just placed on their display to be trampled and squashed.)
Now, it may be because I wasn’t feeling spectacular yesterday, but I pretty much walked around ranting about how stupid the whole thing was. Very culturally sensitive of me, I agree. So let’s try to put it in a different light: this is technically a display of their offerings to God, and a lot of children ran after picking up flowers, and possibly the fruit although I didn’t see it. Either that or some street dogs got a fabulous lunch of guacamole.
Anyways, I apologize for being so absent lately. As it’s the end of training all of a sudden everything seems to be moving light speed. We spent several days visiting other volunteers which was fabulous. It made me realize that after training we will actually become real people again that are allowed to stay out occasionally after dark and maybe even go out dancing. My group helped out with a workshop some of the volunteers were giving, and it was especially fun to make fools of ourselves singing health songs to a bunch of professional teachers.
Since returning from that, time has just flown. We had two workshops with the teachers at our school and on Friday visited some of the homes of our students, which I must say was quite the shocker for me. Our school is tiny but most of the kids come clean and they’re pretty good with their healthy habits, so for some reason I didn’t expect quite the poverty that we saw. One family slept 4 kids and 2 adults in one bedroom. I will say that the most ridiculous thing that I’ve discovered about developing countries (or whatever the pc word is for it nowadays) is that no matter how impoverished and underfed families are, they always seem to have a TV and big sound system. Every house we went into proudly showed us theirs and encouraged us to spend some time watching, which we politely declined.
My big mistake of the day came at the third house when I asked the woman that was showing us around “Is your husband working?” She proceeded to break down sobbing and told us that her husband left her with six children for another woman. NICE ABBY. Now you may think “it’s not your fault Abby, you didn’t know!” but the reality in Guatemala is that this is not an unusual situation, and it’s kind of a known social grace not to ask about the husband if you don’t see him around. Lesson severely enforced, I guarantee it will not happen again.
In other big news, our fate has been decided for us. We now know our partners and sites, which means that all the tension and fear is over, mas o menos. I was very pleased with my partner, but unfortunately we got one of the sites that neither of us had any desire to go to. I will not lie, I did not take it too well and may have shed 1 or 2 (or broke down sobbing) tears, but since then I have made my peace with it and actually gotten excited. So, for the next two years I will be living in ******** in Chimaltenango (roughly an hour from where we’re living now). Here’s some little known facts about *******:
******* is a majority Mayan town, with the maternal language being Kaqkchiquel (which I will speak after two years, even if the majority of the people I’m working with speak Spanish anyways). The Zona Urbana (main city of the municipality) consists of roughly 7,500 inhabitants with around 23,400 in the entire municipality (and we’ve been told we can move into some of the surrounding aldeas after the first 3 months). The major economic activity is agriculture (insert excitement here. Two years of farming! And public health of course…). We’ll be working with 17 schools in the district, one of which was already certified as a healthy school by the current volunteer who’s ending when we swear in.
So, after a 1.5 page b*tch fest in my journal about my situation, I made a huge list of positive things and I’m actually really excited about where I’m going, despite my incredibly close proximity to probably 25 other volunteers. This week we go visit our sites and figure out where we’re going to live and meet our counterparts. Super exciting slash terrifying. Let’s just say I’m incredibly excited to no longer have someone else making all the important decisions in my life. It’ll be nice to make some choices for once.
I’ll be back in a week, hopefully…
and sorry about the lack of pictures, I didn’t have time last night to upload them onto my flash drive and today I have the asientos (i.e. diarrhea) so am not in the mood to spend too much time on the internet and am more eager to get back home where I can lie in my bed, drink lots of fluids and watch GLEE all night long…and pack
