It’s All Q’eqchi’ To Me

I have now been struggling to learn a Mayan language for a year. Admittedly, I spent five or six months working on K’iche’ and then in June switched over to Q’eqchi’. Moving from one language to the other felt how I imagine it would be to switch from Spanish to Portuguese after taking only one semester. The pronunciation is mostly (but not wholly) the same, the grammar is similar, and there are just enough vocabulary words that are the same to keep you confused. My first teacher had almost no experience teaching K’iche’ and so was long on patience but short on structure; my current teacher has been teaching Q’eqchi’ for over a decade and is long on structure but somewhat set in her ways. My class sessions are dominated by me filling my notebook with dictations from my teacher on vocabulary and grammar, but very little verbal practice. Still, living in the community gives me opportunity for practice and most of the fault for my slow progress is my own lack of discipline to study.

In the beginning, the most difficult thing for me was learning to distinguish between different consonant sounds, and to then be able to make them accurately. In Q’eqchi there are six different letters that can make a sound like a “k” to the untrained ear.

• Q – Sounds like you’re clearing your throat
• Q’ – A click in the back of the throat
• K – Sounds like a normal English “ck”
• K’ – A forceful sound off the roof of the mouth
• Y – Depending on where in a word it is, it may sound like the “cu” in “cue” followed by other vowels, or it may act like a normal “y”.
• W – Depending on where in a word it is and its relation to vowels, it may sound soft like the “w” in “bower” or it may sound like the “coo” in “cool”.

The next hurdle was vocabulary. As with the classic example of the many names for different types of snow in the Inuit language, I have found that there are many distinctions between types, stage of development, and preparations of corn that I never would have considered creating a new word for before. Likewise there are different verbs for “to carry” based on if it is done in the arms, on the back, on top of the head, or on the shoulders.

One of the areas I’ve mostly given up on is the myriad of terms for people in the family. For one thing, people usually don’t introduce themselves to me with any explanation for how they are related to anyone else, so I don’t hear the words used much. For another, it’s just confusing. In the US relationship titles are usually determined by the gender of the person spoken about (a female child is a daughter of her parent; a male child is a son of his parent, although cousin is gender neutral). In Q’eqchi’, relationship titles vary by the gender of both the speaker and the person spoken of (a female child is a ko’ to her mother, but a rabin to her father; a male child is a yum to his mother, but a alal to his father). In the case of siblings, titles vary by the gender of the speaker, gender of the subject and the age relation between the two. Thus, a girl’s older sister is chaq’na’ but her younger sister is iitz’inixq, while her older brother is as but her younger brother is iitz’inwinq. On the other hand, a boy’s older brother is as but his younger brother is iitz’in, and a boy’s older sister is anab’ but his younger sister is ch’ina anab’

There is also the inverse problem in which words I consider vitally different are lumped into one term in Q’eqchi’. For example, one verb, wank means to live, to have, and to be. You have to figure out which one is being used through context. More frustratingly, ajok means both to want and to need. Thus, I have no way of explaining, “I want to eat another cookie, but I don’t need to, so I won’t.” Nor, on a cold morning, can I complain, “I need to take a bucket bath, but I don’t want to.” I mean, really, how do you raise a child to understand the difference between wants and needs if there isn’t a distinction between the two in your language? 

For all my griping, I do like learning Q’eqchi'. I signed up for this, after all. I savor the little victories of making it through small talk when I meet a woman I know on the road. I like breaking out a new set of vocabulary words with my host family and seeing them exchange glances. “She finally learned ‘slow’ and ‘fast’!” their looks seem to say. When I can more or less follow where we are on the agenda in meetings, or I get the gist of what the people next to me in the microbus are saying, I congratulate myself. It’s been more than ten years since I was at this beginning stage with Spanish, so it took a bit to resign myself to being a true beginner again. Now that I can explain my travel plans to my host mother and set up a play date with my host siblings, I think I’m almost ready to graduate back out of beginner status. 

This Day in History

One year ago today, I got up at 5 in Sumpango, stuffed my cat in a tote bag, and stood in the back of  a packed bus for over three hours with my training host parents as they accompanied me over the crazily curving roads to my site in Sololá. I had just recovered from a violent food-borne illness, and was both eager and anxious to start the chapter of Peace Corps Volunteer as I left behind my status as a Peace Corps Trainee. 

Since then I have lived in four different housing situations with two additional host families in two departments and have spent over 150 hours studying two different Mayan languages.  I have worked in a school, a health post, in homes, kitchens, gardens, and a cooperative.  I have been in turns lonely, bored, eager, cynical, frightened, euphoric, determined, content, pessimistic, apathetic, inspired, and a host of other states of being.  I have improved my tortilla-making skills, my cockroach killing techniques, and my ability to endure being the center of attention.  I have made new friends in my Guatemalan communities, have strengthened Volunteer friendships, and been incredibly supported by friends and family from home through calls, cards, and even some visitors.

It is staggering to know that I have [only / a whole] year left.  
What the next year of service holds, I won’t pretend to guess.  
There’s only one way to find out!

Getting to Know You

After a few months of actually living with my host family, things are progressing well, though not without a few bumps in the road.

I have to say that as the younger of two, I now have more true empathy for older siblings than ever before. When the kids embraced me into the family, they did so without any concept of personal space or private property. My limited Q’eqchi’ skills reduced me to the vocabulary of a toddler with a new infant in the house. Without any verbal subtlety at my disposal, I was reduced to a lot of “ink’a!!” (no/don’t) and physically removing them from my room, or my belongings from their hands. Their eagerness and interest went a long way toward making me feel welcome, but also made me want to scream at times. When they lined up outside my window to called my name at three second intervals for ten minutes or so, I quickly learned they had nothing to tell me and nothing to show me (and I certainly wasn’t able to tell them anything), but just wanted my attention. This was endearing to a point, and then quickly tore my nerves to shreds.

Almost immediately after moving in I began a ritual around dinner time with the older two kids. Most nights I bring in some copy paper and crayons and we color before or after dinner. As my Q’eqchi’ classes progressed I was able to learn to say things like “play later” and “rest now”, which didn’t seem to register with the kids, but was enough for Clementina to step in and help place some boundaries. Now the moment I’m in sight during the day, the kids eagerly ask when we will color again. So, now we have a nearly daily play-date that helps channel all that energy and that acts as reinforcement for my new vocabulary words, too. It started out with all of us drawing separately, but we soon developed the habit of asking each other what to draw. Eventually I noticed that Heidi is quickly frustrated by drawing, so I’ve also started sketching the outlines of something and having her color it in. Freddie wanted in on that as well, although his confidence in drawing is stronger. I suppose kids demand equal treatment the world over.

On nights I get home in time, I also try to help make the tortillas for dinner. I use the word “help” a bit loosely, since the overall quality certainly suffers, and I’m not sure I even speed up the process much. But, it’s a nice way for me to hang out with Clementina, and she gives me tips here and there and points out when I manage to turn out a pretty good one. We laugh at the misshapen ones, and talk through the schedule for the next day so she knows if I’ll be around for meal times. Usually we get in past where my Q’eqchi’ and her Spanish will let us understand one another, and then we just wait for Mariano to get home and help translate. Often I will have tried several means of miming or drawing what I mean, and by the time we get things cleared up I feel I have played some combination of Pictionary and Gestures.  

I’m definitely learning to savor simple joys.

Some afternoons when I come home from errands or work I will pull out the chairs from my room and line them up on the walkway outside my door. The kids and I sit down and watch the world go by. Inevitably one of them will start crawling under the chairs while the rest of us pretend not to know where the crawler is. Simple games have simple grammar, and that works just perfectly for me. Now and then I’ll make a batch of popcorn or share out some apples or mandarins and we all munch away happily exclaiming about how tasty everything is. Even carrying water from my water tank to the pila on laundry days is a chance for the kids to feel helpful and included while we all troop around with buckets of water, shouting to hurry the next person back to the spigot before ours overflows.

So.  

Fill my cup and let it overflow. 

Alta Verapaz Family

The first weekend in June, I had to choose my destiny for where to live in my aldea. After visiting the two options available to me, I settled on one and we arranged for them to build a new room on the end of their house where I could live. The Peace Corps fronted the money for the construction, and I will deduct that for my rent until the loan is paid back. That’s not a very common solution, but in the case of my site there are no homes with extra rooms that meet the requirements for the Peace Corps, and the families don’t tend to have enough capital to construct a room on their own.

Once I had settled on my future host family, I began going to their house to eat breakfast and dinner. Cooking often would have been difficult with my belongings scattered across the cooperative, mostly still in boxes. Plus, I saw this as an opportunity to start getting to know the family right away.

                                                           

My new “host father,” Mariano, is a little younger than me. He turned 26 at the end of July, and is a kind, shy man, who does speak Spanish but lacks confidence and uses confusing grammar. Still, he is good natured about it and we make it work, chuckling and giggling when we run out of ways to explain things and get lost in our own conversations.

My “host mother,” Clementina, is 23. She is extremely quiet and speaks no Spanish, but has a sweet smile and a talent for cooking tasty things with a pretty limited range of ingredients. She makes the best tortillas (and nearly the biggest ones) I’ve encountered in Guatemala.

I have three host siblings: Freddie, 6; Heidi, 4; and Gladys, 2. They didn’t have much of a shy period, and moved into play with me pretty quickly. While I was still commuting to eat with them I would become a human drum set before and after meals. What started as my attempts at patty-cake turned into simply banging on me in various places to see what sounds I made. At the time they spoke no Spanish and I spoke no Q’eqchi’, so basic smiling and patting one another was enough to build a friendship.

My favorite moment during June with my host family has to be when Wendy and I goaded Mariano into trying to tortillar (shape the tortillas with his hands). He had been observing Wendy and my mediocre attempts at copying Clementina, and felt free to teasingly criticize our technique. When we realized he’d never done it in his life, we returned the teasing mercilessly until he crossed the gender divide to prove his mettle.

In some ways our triumph in getting him to try it was marred by the fact that he seems to have much more natural talent for it than either of us do.

Freddie got in on the fun, too.

Although living with a host family again after such a long amount of solitude in Sololá inevitably involves adjustment, I was and am pleased as punch that this is the new family I get to live with.

The three kiddos. Their mom is camera shy, so no picture of her for now.

School Daze: Getting Started

In the middle of January, school started. Ela works with Junior High aged kids in the next town over. I’ve more or less agreed to do team teaching with her. I was particularly interested in helping out with the Home Ec class as a means to teach nutrition, which fits right into my program of Food Security. On the first day of school I also said I would give one afternoon a week to meet with whoever was chosen to teach English, since the person who had taught English last year took a different job and was not going to be replaced. None of the other teachers speak English. So, I planned to work with three age groups on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Week I:

On the first day of school, a Monday, we had an all school assembly. Everyone crammed into a classroom to review the rules and introduce the teachers (including yours truly). The kids were told not to come on Tuesday, so the teachers could get things straightened out. By that I mean deciding on a course schedule and which teachers would teach each subject. Apparently teacher planning days before the school year begins is not a norm here.

The next day some Mayan Justice was handed down on an apprehended thief (in this case, just some public shaming). So, the teachers went to watch the spectacle.

On Wednesday there was still no schedule, so they went by last year's schedule. Theoretically. They were doing it by memory, and not everyone's memory lined up. Ela and I used the day to do introductions with the kids. She already knew most of them, but they each stood up and said their name for my benefit. Generally they were quiet and didn't enunciate much, sometimes talking from behind their hand. Side conversations were rampant with the other kids, leaving me unable to distinguish 80% of the names, so Ela repeated each name loudly and clearly afterward. In the end it felt a little futile, since my mind is not a steal trap for names after hearing them once and it took a lot of time. On the other hand, we had nothing planned for the class period, so…

After all the names, Ela gave a little monologue of her advice for the kids as the year starts. She lamented the attrition rate. Of 36 kids from 2nd Básico last year, 20 advanced to 3rd. Of the 76 from 1st last year, about 45 made it into 2nd. Some of this is drop outs, some is people being held back to repeat a year. There were also some new faces, so I imagine others chose to go to a different school, since there were some transfer kids coming in. 

Next she warned them against romance, since apparently the congress is considering outawing noviazgo (dating) in the schools, with expulsion as the consequences. How all this is defined or enforced seems unclear. Regardless of whether that ever makes it onto the books, she blames early marriage for a lot of the attrition, and laid on a heavy guilt trip about how many hours their parents work in the sun to afford to send their kids to school.

Finally, she forbid the kids from speaking K’iche’ in class. Anyone caught speaking K’iche’ will have to write lines (in Spanish) as punishment. On the one hand, I get that they’ll never get good at Spanish if they’re not forced to use it consistently (that’s how any foreign language goes). On the other hand, part of me cringed as she told them that K’iche’ is fine at home but it will never get them anywhere in life and will only lead to discrimination against them. How true that is, I don’t claim to know, but it made me think of the many languages already lost around the world and mourn a little.  

Week II:

Ela had volunteered to teach English, and rearranged the schedule so most of the English classes would be on Mondays and Wednesdays when I would be there anyway. That would be fine, except it means I miss out on the bulk of Home Ec classes, which had been switched to Tuesdays (when I take K’iche’ and cannot get to the school). 

Ela and I only work Monday-Wednesday, so when we arrived on the next Monday, we still didn't know who we would be teaching at what times.  Apparently there was no way to communicate that to us between Thursday and Monday.  (Cell phones?  Anyone?)  As we looked at the schedule, it became clear we were scheduled in multiple places simultaneously.  We pointed the issue out, and it was resolved the following week.

Monday, we made things up on the spot in the classrooms, because we hadn't known who, what, or when we would be teaching. Not all the kids had desks, so we lost some class periods looking around for seating in storage, cleaning it off, and getting it into the classroom. We also spent some time electing the Junta Directiva (student council) for each grade.

Week III and Beyond:

By the third week, things were settling into a rhythm, of a sort. At least we started in on content.

The school didn’t know when exams would be or when each quarter would begin and end (apparently that's decided at a national level). Even if Ela been interested in sitting down with me for long range planning, it would have been a challenge. 

We did a diagnostic quiz on the English level of the kids, and the 3rd year and 2nd year students didn't know anything from the previous years' curriculum, so we started everyone on the first year stuff. Home Ec consisted of dictation.  

My inner camp counselor was screaming to get these kids out of their desks and doing activities. Happily, Ela is excited to work actual cooking into Home Ec, and we made Jam last week. One small step, but a good one. Despite my best intentions not to be sucked into actually being the English teacher and making sure to just provide support, I'm essentially taking over that class on the days I'm there. We'll see how well I can ease back out of that, and if it's worth the effort. I learned yesterday that exams for the quarter are probably only two weeks away, so we'd best figure out what we can test the kids on.

I love having scheduled things to do each week. I love working with kids again. My direct communication skills are being challenged and honed as I negotiate just what my role will be.  I am learning tons about how the education system works here, and while I see many hurdles, I am glad this is becoming part of my daily work.