Workin' Day and Night

After the novel I wrote last time I’ll try to keep this entry shorter. Overall things are going quite well for me up in Salquil Grande. Returning from my Honduran adventure I knew it would be a challenge to get back into the swing of things and reassert myself in my work. You lose ground every time you’re out of site.

In recent months I’ve been doing more nutrition related work. We’ve been growing a lot of beets in the family gardens we’ve made. This is a new crop for these families and one day one of the women I’ve been working with – Dona Catarina – asked me how to prepare beets. I figured this was a good segue into cooking demonstrations and we made veggie burgers together with her harvest. I shared this recipe with Dona Juana, the PROMASA madre lider in Salquil.


Mmmm beets

Dona Juana frequently gives cooking demonstrations to the PROMASA beneficiaries and she took my recipe and ran with it. Together with Dona Catarina we made veggie burgers with groups of women and over a series of demonstrations one week, Dona Juana gave the demonstration to all 200 PROMASA beneficiaries in Salquil Grande. I’m proud that this recipe had caught on and I’ve been experimenting with other recipes since. In addition to cooking demonstrations I’ve been giving integrated farming presentations. I’m still making gardens with families with underweight children. This month I hope to begin my work with at least 10 new families.


Making veggie burgers


The new group of Food Security trainees arrived August 11th; exactly one year after my group did. I was asked to help out with training so I went down to the Peace Corps office in Santa Lucia for three days and gave a presentation on gardening and helped the trainees make tire gardens. It was funny being with them while they go through the same training that we all went through a year ago. I actually went through training twice in a year including Togo (that’s 5 months!) so I know just how miserable it can be at times. Last year I was the sole male in a group of 7 Food Security volunteers but this group is evenly balanced, 5 guys and 5 girls. Thankfully no one cut themselves making the tire gardens. I’ve a feeling they’ll make good volunteers; they seem very knowledgeable and comfortable in country after only 2 weeks.


Trainees cuttin' tires


I have a great relationship with my host family at the moment. We still watch a lot of movies together. Most recently I showed them all the Scream movies. I’ve always enjoyed that film series, except for dreadful 3rd. The first Scream was damn good in my opinion. A very clever film. When I was in Santa Lucia helping out the trainees I bought a bunch of movies, including all four of the Scream films. I figured it would be a nice scare for my little siblings. And it was. The youngest ones sat with their hands close to their eyes to shield them in case anything scary happened. My oldest host brother absolutely loved this.
When he sensed something scary was going to happen, Miguel, the youngest, would run out the door. He would wait there and then peak his little head back in. Then fearing something frightening was coming he would run back out. This happened over and over again. He’d run out come back in then run out again. By the end of all the movies they were quoting the killer, asking “What’s your favorite scary movie?” in a raspy voice (in Spanish of course).


Xhun and Miguel

The kids are a lot of fun to joke around with. They help keep me sane and other times drive me insane. But they definitely keep me entertained. In fact earlier today I was listening to music and looked over and there was my little brother Xhun in the doorway wearing a shirt that read “Social Butterfly” and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Workin’ Day and Night”. He cracks me up. Xhun is a very bright 11 year old. In fact he’s in classes with older kids. Tuesday is market day in Salquil and after picking up supplies I always pass by the family store in the plaza to visit Xhun. He’s usually just sitting there bored. Last time I came by he was whittling a drum stick. I’ll sit with him for about a half hour and sometimes I’ll teach him geography. He appreciates my typing skills so he will have me type up his homework for him on the family’s Smith-Corona.

I’ve started giving English classes to my family. It used to be that during dinner they would ask me how to say certain words in English, but now things are more formal. After dinner my host father, my youngest sister and my two younger host brothers will pull up desk chairs before a dry erase board and I’ll teach them English. It’s difficult but I’m enjoying it.
And speaking of teaching, I’ve begun a new project: a school garden. Earlier this week I gave a small presentation, sort of an intro to gardening to a class of about 50 students, ages 13-14. Not only did they impress me with their knowledge but I impressed myself with my ability to conduct a class in Spanish. We’re going to make a garden come next week. I’m not a hundred percent sure how well this will work, making a garden with 50 some children. I imagine it’s going to be a mess but I think it’s great that I’m working with kids. Doing agricultural work with them is just as important as it is with adults and from the knowledge they displayed in our first session together I’m confident in their abilities. We’ll see how this garden turns out come Monday.

Over the past few days I’ve been collecting animal waste for composting purposes. The Guatemalans probably think it’s funny when they see me shoveling cow shit into a sack or hauling buckets of goat piss. I’m glad I amuse them. It’s messy work but I’d much rather be outside getting my hands dirty than sitting in an office typing away on a computer (as I’m doing now). Maybe part of me is still a kid who likes playing in the dirt.

Cowboys, Chickens, Knives, & Aggies

Man have I been bad about updating my thing. I’m curled up in bed right now because my stomach is being difficult. It’s raining outside (shocking) and I’m listening to Mule Variations because Tom Waits feels right. This is the perfect environment for writing and it has definitely been wayyyyyy too long since I’ve updated this thing. Two weeks ago was our field based training. We spent the week visiting towns and volunteer sites in the state of Jalapa, in the eastern part of the country. The Oriente (as they call the east) is populated with Ladinos. People are much more open compared to the people of the Occcidente (the west) which has a more conservative, indigenous (Mayan) presence. Probably my favorite part about the east is that all the men wear cowboy hats. They are worn all over the country but they’re much more prevalent out east. You’d see a group of four men talking in the park all gathered around wearing their white cowboy hats, jeans, and boots. I bought a cowboy hat in Antigua and I can’t wait to wear it to work.


I'm a baaaaad man


Our base was Mataquescuintla, the pronunciation of which I butchered continually throughout the trip much to the chagrin of my Spanish instructor. We stayed in Mataquescuintla but during the day we would travel up into the scenic mountains that surround it to visit smaller communities. Our first day we visited a volunteer (that one of us will be replacing) in her beautiful mountainside village. They grow a lot of coffee there. I don’t drink coffee, I made it through college without drinking coffee, but something tells me I’ll be a coffee drinker before I leave Guatemala. It’s seriously like water here. Babies begin drinking coffee at 6 months which is absurd to me. I tried to explain to my family that I don’t drink it but they just can’t wrap their heads around it. On numerous occasions they’ve brought up how weird it is for someone not to drink coffee. We’ll see what happens. Right now my only vice here is Coca-Cola. It’s so delicious because they use real sugar here, not artificial like in the U.S. Anyways, I digress. It felt so nice to be in a rural area. The slower, friendlier lifestyle.

I’d say there were two real highlights of the trip. The first would be our presentations and how much of a disaster mine was. A women's group had requested presentations on certain agriculture related topics. My topic was tire gardening. There are really only two difficult parts of teaching tire gardening: cutting and then flipping the tire inside out. My presentation went relatively well until we got to those two steps. I had a nice icebreaker and a group activity that conveyed the theme but then came the hands on part. The cutting of the tire part wasn’t too terrible. Tires destroy knives and when I cut into it my knife’s locking blade collapsed on my hand (cuts #1 & #2). The real problem came when I flipped the tire inside out. I had practiced and knew that flipping a tire inside out isn’t exactly easy so I grabbed the tire and immediately threw my strength into it. It worked but it was an old tire and in my haste I had failed to avoid the exposed steel cords that reinforce the sidewall. This resulted in patchy cuts #3-6 on my left hand and slitting my right thumb open (cut #7). At first I didn’t notice the cuts but when I touched my one of my posters as I was presenting it left some blood. The cuts weren’t serious but I was worried about my thumb. Needless to say the end of my presentation was accompanied with nervous laughter from the audience which wasn’t sure how bad the cuts were. I finished presenting and immediately doused my hands in antiseptic. Tires tend to be a little dirty. With the exception of the scene I created, I was pleased with my presentation. The women responded well and got involved in the cutting process.


Tire flippin'


The second highlight of the trip was our vaccination session. I’ve received probably 20 + shots in the past two years and it felt nice to dish out some of my own even if it was just to chickens. I have to say they are much better patients than humans. If someone tried to give me a shot on the back of my neck with a needle almost as long as my face you’d probably hear something close to Steve Martin’s car rental outburst in the Planes, Trains and Automobiles.


No he didn't get a sucker or a bouncy ball.


Speaking of doctors and shots, I don’t know how much press it got stateside but last week’s release of the Guatemalan Syphilis experiments in 1940s certainly got a lot of press here. If you don’t know what I’m talking about it was recently revealed that as part of a U.S. government sponsored medical experiment U.S. public health doctors deliberately infected Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients and soldiers with syphilis in the mid-1940s. Not surprisingly it was carried out by the same immoral doctor who was in charge of the Tuskegee Experiments. Terrible, terrible stuff. Anyways, I hope that this recent revelation will not complicate my service here as an American volunteer.

On a lighter note, we were translating our résumés into Spanish today and I came across something funny. On my résumé I have “farmhand” written as my position at Poplar Ridge Farm where I worked during the summer of 2007. According to my dictionary the word for “farmhand” in Spanish is “peón” from which the English “peon” is derived. I will not be listing my job title as “peon.”

Hmm what else has happened? We went to the city to see a speaker from Texas A&M give a presentation on adult education methods in agriculture. That was pretty neat but sitting there with a name tag that had the Texas A&M logo above my name I couldn’t help but think of my mom and how she would feel if she saw me wearing that. I’m sure the Longhorn in her would not approve. Our tech trainer is a Texas A&M grad and I think he just enjoys calling us all Aggies. The rain got so bad that I finally bought some rain boots. My BluBlockers are making my world a brighter place, I feel like I’m walking around in bizarro world whenever I put them on, Zach. We had our last school presentation today which comes with some relief. Our class was quite a handful.

Training is winding down; we swear in as volunteers on the 29th and then it’s off to our sites for the next two years. We find out where we’ll be serving next Thursday so count on a post about that. If you’re interested and you happen to have a map of Guatemala handy I can tell you this much about our potential sites: 3 sites are located in the state of Quiché (not pronounced like the French cuisine), 2 in Jalapa, 1 in Chimaltenango, 1 in San Marcos, 1 in Sololá, and 1 in Zacapa. So I will be living in one of those states for the next two years.