Charting a New Course

"You need a plan ... but don't become consumed by it. Winds change."

  -- Joseph Ehrhard 

In mid-January I was in planning mode. I met with the school director in my village to plan for the start of the school year. I outlined my six month plan to cover nutrition with my women's groups. I was anticipating the changeover of half the board of directors in the cooperative, hopefully providing an opening to work with the Agriculture Committee. I was contemplating starting a weekly Junior Master Gardener group and a GLOW camp (Girls Leading Our World) for Holy Week. I was plotting how to best use the rest of my vacation time.

As often seems to be the case in life, and in the Peace Corps in particular, events have torn my best laid plans to shreds. 

The Powers That Be came to Peace Corps Guatemala. After an urgent text message and email, volunteers from all over Guatemala assembled at an All Volunteer Conference in Quetzaltenango (aka Xela) in what felt like a tortuously slow motion scramble. 

Representatives from the national Peace Corps office in DC came and explained in compelling detail that crime and safety are of serious concern in the Northern Triangle of Central America, which has been called the "deadliest non-war zone in the world" (Christian Science Monitor). Surveys of Peace Corps Volunteers in Guatemala show disturbing trends in volunteers' sense of safety and rates of being a victim to crime. They explained that Congress was asking the Peace Corps pretty pointedly, "What are you doing in Central America?" 

We learned that PC Guatemala is not going to be shut down, but that major changes are on the horizon to manage risk here. The number of volunteers in Guatemala must be reduced drastically and immediately. Those scheduled to leave in March will leave in February. Those scheduled to leave in July will leave in March. Everyone in the country may take an early Close of Service should they choose to do so. The remaining volunteers in country will be condensed into the Central Western Highlands.

Since I live in Alta Verapaz (not in the Central Western Highlands), I was given the choice to either take the early COS or take a site change. Again.

At first the hardest thing to swallow was that I was among the volunteers who had to move. Sure, Guatemala is dangerous. Sure, the murder rate is startlingly high and the impunity from prosecution is sickening. But I feel safe in my site. Everyone knows me. It's a tiny place. I rarely leave my village, and when I do I have access to tourism shuttles and relatively safe bus lines. I spent several days in denial, mentally bargaining for an exception. Surely I could stay here to finish out my service. It took a sympathetic but firm response from my Country Director before I accepted that there was no Option C. I had to choose between going home and going to a new community within Guatemala.

I chose the Peace Corps as my means of volunteering abroad for many reasons, but a huge one was that it allowed me to spend two full years in a community. I felt that in sustainable development, it was important to commit to being somewhere long enough to really know the people, recognize the needs, and take the time to do things well. Having already taken a site change when my initial site placement did not pan out, another would mean my 27 months would end up being 3 months of training, seven months in Solola, ten months in Alta Verapaz, and then seven more months in an unknown location. That sounded exhausting, ineffective, and frustrating.

Yet, I didn't immediately close that door. I wanted to know what the site change might mean. I thought maybe I could be placed somewhere a little more like a job than the usual Peace Corps location. Maybe I could work with an international organization that already had a program in place and just needed help carrying it out. Perhaps I could spend the rest of my service solidifying my Spanish skills and getting a new flavor of work experience.

Once I got back to site, I tried to imagine a new path for myself in Guatemala. I couldn't muster much excitement for it. Going to a new site would overshadow the rest of my time in Alta and likely mean leaving my current site sooner than a COS would. Site development is a complex process even when not rushed, and there was no guaruntee of being sent somewhere I could hit the ground running, or even walking. Going to a site focused on something specific I wanted to get out of the experience rather than on what I could learn and then contribute seemed like a recipe for disappointment. It also runs contradictory to my approach to Peace Corps. A site change felt like a big gamble, but somehow I kept trying to talk myself into taking it. Somehow because I was more apprehensive about staying in Guatemala than going back to the US it felt like that was the bolder, better, or braver choice. Mostly I couldn't let go of my plan of serving my 27 months and finishing out with the rest of my training group.

I realized that what was holding me here was pretty much pure stubbornness, and that made the decision. On February 1, I called my program director and told him I am heading to the States at the end of March. Time to close out this life chapter as best I can and to look inside for what I will bring to the next.

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!

Chipi Chipi [The Famous]

I got out of bed one night to head to the latrine.  I blearily made my way outside into the intense quiet and for one heart-leaping moment, I was convinced it was snowing.  In the glare of my headlamp I could see gently falling flecks swirling around my head.  Of course, I was comfortably standing outside in shorts, a tank top, and rainboots, so that explanation didn’t hold water.  It dawned on me that this new precipitation – not quite fog, mist, or drizzle – was the Chipi Chipi that the Verapaces are so famous for. 

The rainy season seems to be transitioning out of its roaring phase in which the clouds open up and pound down on the tin roof with a force that makes hearing one’s own thoughts a challenge.  This new mood of soundless wet creeps in and out of the valley and leaves laundry damp even when hung safely under the eaves.  This gentler phase is welcome.  It means the pathways are drying out into solid ground once more, and I no longer fear an involuntary slip-and-slide experience on my way between my house and the road. 

It does signal that dry days are probably not far off.  I need to begin to monitor how well the rain fills my water tank.  In the months to come I may wistfully think of the days when my laundry wouldn’t dry once I reach the point that water is not readily available for laundry on a whim.

Call it Middling

On August 11, 2010, I left the US for Guatemala. One year ago.


We usually talk about the Peace Corps as a two year commitment, but really it is 27 months. So now that I have reached the one year mark, I feel a little strange. Like I´m going into halftime in a sporting event, or intermission at a theater. I´ve been counting up how many months I have been here each step of the way, and now I´ve been here a year, but have more than a year to go. In November I´ll head to my Mid Service Conference and I suppose my mental clock will start ticking back downward… only 11 months to go… 8…. 3…. Etc….


I don´t want to seem like I´m counting the days in any sort of ¨get me out of here¨ mentality, but because this experience has such a defined timeline, it´s hard not to note the passage of time. I hit six months in country and thought, huh, that went fast. I hit six months in my site in Sololà and thought, shoot, I haven´t made it very far. Now I´ve been in country a year and all expectations or benchmarks have been smashed, so I don´t know what to think.


In some ways these next three months are like the turn of the tide. I feel I am in stasis… things are not coming closer nor pulling farther away. Unlike intermission and half time, things will not be standing still in my site… indeed I am busy dawn to dusk and hope to make a lot of progress on some tangible projects as well as relationships, language skills, and the rest of intangible things that add up to be development work. Still, mentally, I think I am now going to disengage from counting down or counting up the months, weeks, and days. Here I am. I might as well be here. I think I´ll call this the Middling Season.

With

I feel as though the dam has broken on my enthusiasm. What I thought had drained away in a drought, I had actually carefully walled away in a big cistern. When I saw no natural spring in my Sololá community, I bottled up my own motivation and eagerness in anticipation of rationing it out to bolster my resilience for the next year and a half. I did so out of fear and in response to a situation that seemed impervious to all my attempts to plant seeds of relationships, knowledge, development, and community.

I feel reborn. I feel refreshed. I feel renewed.

My first two days in site were spent with Wendy (as my site mate is known in our community), learning the ropes of local transit, checking out my housing options, and being introduced to a few key friendly faces. The next two days I was flying solo, as Wendy had to travel to Guatemala City to pick up a friend from the U.S. I arranged my things in my temporary quaters, I went with my counterpart Andres to his house to meet his family and admire his crops, and I successfully navigated getting to Coban and back for my first Q’eqchi’ class.

Tuesday, my fifth day, was shaping up to leave me at loose ends. Irma is Wendy’s counterpart, an impressive translator, and currently in the running for Guatemalan I most want to be like when I grow up. On Monday evening, she was looking at my calendar for June and asked where I would be for the last day of May. I had no answer. She mentioned she wouldn’t be coming in to the office (where I am living) because she and the other members of the cooperative would be out at a project packing bolsas (bags) to plant coffee. I asked to tag along, and she immediately arranged for Filomena me to walk out to the community where the work would happen. Filomena was among the first people I had met upon arrival, was the first to greet me in Spanish, and her calm broad smile made me categorize her immediately as a good egg. I felt I was in good hands.

After breakfast with my future host family (starting in July, after the construction project to give me a room gets completed), I was walking toward Filomena’s house and she met me on the path as she came in search of me. We chatted comfortably in Spanish for about half an hour on the walk out to the other community, as my eyes darted between admiring the scenery, dodging hitting my head on cardamom and coffee branches, and trying not to trip on the uneven path.

Immediately on reaching our destination, I was drawn into Irma’s house and given a place to leave my things. Next thing I knew I was sitting on a small flattish rock shoulder to shoulder with a group of women crouched around a pile of sifted dirt as we stuffed small black plastic bags to be used as containers for coffee plant seedlings. Around us there were boys, perhaps 10 year-olds, shuttling the filled bags from the circles of women to young men working on a shallow trench to hold the bags upright in lines running across the hillside. The older men worked further up the hill to transplant seedlings into the bags and water the ones already transplanted. The older boys were kept busy shoveling dirt onto a wooden frame with screen on it to sift the soil, which two other boys would shake back and forth while chatting idly.

The whole process threw my thoughts back to the fall semester in 2005 that I spent in Oaxaca, Mexico. Some of my favorite memories from the whole experience surrounded very similar bags, which we were using for a reforestation project. The language was different, the purpose was different, but my experience of it was the same in all the important ways.

We worked together companionably, smiling and laughing over the repetitive and mindless work. Few of them speak any Spanish (and fewer speak it well) and I know only a few words in Q’eqchi’. Still, I felt included. When we took a mid-morning break, Filomena made sure to bring me a mug of fresca (a sweet fruit drink… in this case probably mixed from a powder) and also passed along a banana that another woman wanted to give me. One girl kept an eye out for me any time we broke the circle to move to a new pile of freshly sifted soil. If I hesitated even a moment she’d catch my eye, smile, and pat my designated rock in an invitation to join back in. After lunch the women who had shared my circle stopped by Irma’s kitchen door to collect me as we walked back to the workspace.

I heard my name mentioned several times in any given five minute period, as people tried to remember how to pronounce it, and commented on my bag filling skills. Often my name was followed by peals of laughter, and I just chose to take it as inclusion without needing to know what the joke was. At some point I’m pretty sure two women were commenting on my lack of love handles (after one tried to grab for them), and when Irma and I took a turn at the sifting station there was laughter about how we looked shaking the wooden frame about. When it threatened to rain, they were concerned for me (I had forgotten my rain coat, but then, none of them had any rain protection either) and suggested I go take shelter. When I refused, we all giggled as we scrambled to fill as many final bags as we could before the rain really set in and the dirt turned to mud.

We waited out the rain, sipping on more drinks, and they thoughtfully provided me with more fresca, knowing I don’t drink coffee. When there seemed to be a break in the weather, the crowd dispersed and eventually Filomena and I took our leave of Irma to make our way back. Halfway there the rain started up again, harder than before. I made it home wet through to the skin, my back sore from hunching over a dirt pile all day and with streaks of dirt and mud all over me. But I was perfectly content.

It was not a day in which I taught anyone anything important. It was not a needs assessment or a community action survey. It was just a group of people coming together to get something done, working with each other, talking with each other, laughing with each other. I learned some new friendly faces, and many of them learned my name. Perhaps this seems a small victory, hardly worth commenting upon. But I have spent months feeling acutely how lonely it can be to be in a crowd, how it is possible to work in the same space as someone yet not work with one another, how two can eat at the same table but not be sharing a meal. I have travelled the same space without travelling with those around me.

The months ahead will have challenges. I will search for purpose; I will be confused by the language; I will be short of patience with myself and those around me. There will be days that I am exhausted by being watched by all and wish for the anonymity of living in a city or at least being an unremarkable community member. For now, all I want to do is to unleash my flow of enthusiasm to meet the hospitality I have been offered. They are small gestures, yes, but I am deeply grateful for each and every one.

I feel welcomed. I feel wanted. At last, I feel I am with.

Bittersweet

Any move, any transition is generally a mixed blessing. Usually we are moving toward something better (or at least think we are), or we wouldn't be moving at all. I am very excited for my new site in Alta Verapaz. I am excited about my new host organization (a coffee and cardamom cooperative), I am excited about my new site mate, and I'm thrilled to be going somewhere that (reportedly) is very eager for a volunteer and is ready to engage in food security work. 

As much as I'm happy to be looking forward, there are things that I am sad to be leaving behind in my site here. Here are some of the big ones, in no particular order:

1. Warm-Cool-Cold.
   I have been living at around 2400 meters in elevation since moving to my aldea here in Sololá, and I love it. In the months between November and February I found ice in my pila a handful of times, drank lots of hot tea, and generally bundled up as soon as the sun went down. I like that the cold keeps the spiders small(ish), the mosquitoes few, and the scorpions nonexistent. I sleep well under a sheet, two thick blankets, a coverlet, and a cat. The days have been warm when sunny, cool when cloudy. All of this suits me just fine. I figure you can always add more layers of clothing, but there are only so many you can take off (particularly in a conservative country like Guatemala). My new site will probably be more on a Hot-Warm-Cool spectrum of weather, and will be considerably wetter than where I am now. So, maybe all of you imagining me in a tropical locale may actually be correct once I move.
   
   
2. The Highway.
   This sounds odd, I know, but it's a huge benefit living right by the highway. I know I've not expressed a lot of enthusiasm for travel around here, particularly by way of Chicken Bus. What it has meant for me is that I can take day trips on a weekend to visit three friends from training in Sumpango, who are all scattered along the highway within about 2.5 hours of me. The four of us have been able to gather at least once a month, and have benefited from all the joking, venting, and stress relief that can bring. It also means I can take a quick shopping trip into a city on just one bus, instead of needing to transfer several times. Trips to the PC office are doable in a day, just 2.5 hours away. My new site will be much more remote, but that has advantages, too!
   
   
3. My Cottage.
   It has been such a luxury having my own little space that where I can clean, cook, work, relax, exercise, laugh, cry, be alone, and entertain friends. I've managed a nice nest here, with a few decorations on the inside and beautiful views on the outside. My cottage has been a little oasis for me, where I can control things (other than occasional bug invasions) in the midst of a situation in which most things felt far out of my control. I am moving to A.V. site unseen, so I have a temporary housing arrangement in the the Co-op building while I choose between three options that all need some finishing touches before I can move in.
   
   
4. The Internet.
   I have been utterly spoiled by fairly fast, fairly reliable internet here in my house. For the most part, if there is power, there is internet. I Skype with friends and family at home, keep up on national and world news, and watch the occasional funny video clip. I'm not sure if I will be able to get internet service in my new aldea at all, and if I do it will be substantially slower. I will still have the opportunity to use internet cafes more than once a week. I predict more book reading and guitar playing in my future, and that's a good thing.
   
   
5. Familiar Faces.
   I can't claim that I have developed any real friendships here in town, but I do have the comfort of familiarity here. I see the same people in the street, and they usually smile and respond to my greetings. There are the girls that work in the little shop nearby that learned my name, and tease me about my purchases. There is the town nurse, who has been warm and friendly. There are the truck drivers who look out for me. Over in the pueblo I have my site mate and my K'iche' teachers, the students and teachers at the Junior High. I know I can and will develop such relationships in my new site (and hopefully much stronger ones besides), but it will take time.
   

So, I am trading out conveniences and familiarity for a new experience, yet again. I think I'm getting a good deal out of this trade, though. If I am able to dig into the social life and work of my new community, I'm sure I will hardly notice giving up a few comforts. Except the heat. I get cranky in the heat. Oh well... here goes!

School Daze: Junta Directiva

A Junta Directiva is like a board of directors. Among the first things I saw in my first week of observation in school was the process of electing the Junta for each grade in the Básico school (which was also each classroom, essentially a student council).

Political geek that I am, their method of voting was curious to me. The kids shouted out names of classmates in a verbal nomination process. No one needed to second the motion; say a name and it gets on the board. Then each person nominated was written on the board and numbered. As soon as there were as many nominees as positions on the Junta, nominations stopped.

One student went around the room asking each classmate to vote verbally, and then would call out the number across the room for another person to tally on the board. They were told not to call out names, just numbers. But since the whole room is watching and listening, it’s not like that creates any secrecy. It’s a time consuming process as well. The person with the most votes becomes President, the next gets VP, then Secretary, Vice Secretary, Treasurer, Vice Treasurer, and after that Delegates. There was no sense of tailoring the person nominated to the role... they just went straight down the line of titles. During a parents meeting later, the parent Junta Directiva (I think something like the PTA) was chosen the same way.  

Why it's done this way, I don't know. They could easily have done a show of hands for each nominee and counted. They could have asked people to write their preferences on a slip of paper. They could have dropped beans into a jar for their preferred candidate. As it is, it means that those voting toward the end of the process can see who is ahead. It means everyone knows who is voting for who. Perhaps it's something about valuing each person's input that they vote one at a time? Perhaps it's important to vote publicly? But if that's true, why use the numbers? Clearly (and per usual), I have more questions than answers.  

F.O.M.O.

-noun.  (family slang)

[foh-moh]

abbr. Fear of Missing Out

The condition or syndrome in which the sufferer is seized by dread at the prospect that something exciting, enjoyable, important, or simply unrepeatable (read; anything of interest at all) might happen in her or his absence.  This can lead to paralysis during a decision making process, decreased enjoyment of whatever the patient is actually doing (due to chronic worry or attention to distant events), or choosing to do things against one's own inclination to ensure nothing happens without the sufferer's knowledge (i.e. staying awake far past feeling wakeful and cheerful simply because others are still awake and talking).

I think of FOMO sort of like the common cold.  Sometimes it lingers like a cough that just won't leave: it saps the enjoyment of a choice long after the action is taken and it's too late to go back, leaving the sufferer with regrets or at least pangs of what might have been.  Sometimes a quick bout is all there is, like a sore throat that never really turns into anything worth staying home from school or work over.  In those cases, I find a momentary pause before a decision, but never look back once launching.  In many cases, I find myself caught in paralysis by analysis, gripped by FOMO, unwilling to make any choice for fear the other would have been better.  I manage to make the choice eventually (perhaps painfully slowly to many outside observers), and generally have no long lasting ill effects.

I used to think FOMO was a common disease that struck all people.  I supposed some people came down with FOMO more often than others, but pretty much everyone got hit with it on occasion.  While this may still be true, I definitely have a predisposition to it; whether of genetic or environmental origin I do not know.  In recent years I have encountered several friends who look at me blankly when I try to describe my symptoms. They say, "just do what you want to do," or, "whatever choice you make is the right one, because that's the one you live," or, "follow your heart."  Turns out, some people have immunity to FOMO.  Because for me, it's a matter of wanting to have both choices.  It's also a matter of wanting to make the right choice.  My heart becomes hard to follow because it is so eager to experience it all that it is stretching in all directions attempting to not miss a thing.

During the (long, long) process of applying for the Peace Corps and deciding whether it was a good mutual fit, I was seized by FOMO on and off.  Once I accepted my invitation to Guatemala, I definitely had a spell where I was so concerned with all that would happen in the US while I am gone that I had a hard time seeing the exciting things that I will get to experience while I'm gone.  Things that my friends in family in the US will miss out on (childish inner voice says, "so there!").  Now I am set to get on the plane to start my adventure a week from today.  I am still feeling a little torn; I will miss at least five weddings of close friends this fall.  But mainly, I am feeling like it's time to set sail.  

Once I get through all my packing and errands, that is.  *gulp*