Feria! Descanso! Fourth of July!

A ton has happened over the past several weeks. I guess I should start with feria, which was very alegre. Probably one of my favorite events of feria was the cross-dressing competition between about 20 guys from my town. Everyone in town attended and thanks to a guy that my site mate knew, we got seats in the second row behind the dignitaries. The guys providing the commentary for the show kept mentioning the three gringas in the front row, claiming we were Obama’s representatives. It was a really fun night for all. The first part was creative dress-the guys all wore homemade creations. One guy for example had this headdress with lots of wire covered in streamer sticking out with tissue paper flowers at the end, while another guy had an outfit made out of empty junk food bags. They all had to march down the catwalk in the center of the salon where the event was held and then danced in place on stage while the others entered. During the next part the guys were wearing traje, the traditional outfit of women in the area, most of them with their own twist (like pulling the skirt up higher than the women normally wear it). While wearing the traje the guys had to sing in the Mayan language of Kakchiquel, which they do not speak in this part of the country (they speak K’iche’, which hopefully I will begin to learn this month). So basically they were making up words to the songs and singing quite horribly, which was so funny. The last part was sportswear with a World Cup theme (yet again-they love their World Cup here), with a dance to some marimba music (there was a live marimba player there providing music for the show). The guy who I thought was the best won and the pageant ended after about 4 hours. For once though the hours passed really quickly. I will definitely catch the show next year.

The parades started on Sunday morning and went through Tuesday. The youngest kids, preschool through second grade, marched on the first morning. They were adorable, of course, and I saw a lot of the teachers and directors that I work with fielding the kids through the parade. Some schools had bands while others were just marching. It looked like a lot of work to keep all of the kids in line. Seeing all of the marching brought me back to my marching band days. The music wasn’t all that great or together because the kids were younger, but it was a lot of fun watching all of my schools march on by. The next day was the older kids so once again I saw a lot of the teachers and directors that I’m working with, and I could actually make out some of the tunes that they were playing, among which was “Wavin’ Flag,” the World Cup theme song that is everywhere down here in Guatemala. With my partner, I was invited to a lunch with the alcalde and all of the participants in the parade, so was had some estofada (beef and cooked veggies in a really good sauce with rice) and tamalitos. I ate everything except the beef and it was pretty rico. The next day was the parade of carrozas (spelling?), which were the floats that all of the queens ride on. There were tons of different queens and flors and misses, representing all of the different public and private schools (there are 15 public and a number of private), as well as different organizations, like CONALFA (something with agriculture?) and the firemen. The queens were dressed in really nice dresses and the cars the were riding in were decked out in balloons, flowers, streamers, etc. and all of the queens were throwing candy at the beginning, but by the time they rode by my house they were already out of candy. I kept looking for the cross-dressing winner carroza, but I don’t think he had one.

Feria also encompasses rides, food, people, concerts, dancing, games, etc. I went on the “carritas locas” (bumper cars) with my host siblings, which was fun, but the steering was kind of broken so we kept going in circles, which made me super dizzy. Then I went on the “rueda” (ferris wheel), which was super scary. When you picture a ferris wheel, you’re probably thinking of a nice, tranquilo ride, going in slow circles, a romantic ride perhaps. Well, not here. The rueda goes super fast and because it’s sketchy and feels like it’s about to fall over at any moment, and you can smell the gas that it’s using to move, and you could get stuck at the top at any moment. At least the big wheel wasn’t propelled by manpower like the kid’s wheel. There were several moments when I could picture the newspaper headline in my head: “Peace Corps volunteer falls victim to rueda at local feria.” I could also remember my mom in the U.S. warning me against fair rides because they didn’t always follow safety regulations. Despite the handlebar that kept moving up, despite the car almost flipping all the way over, despite the wood that is probably rotting away, I made it through and it was a lot of fun. I also ate some feria food (but nothing too sketchy-just the breadlike sweet snacks they had), heard some music, saw some coordinated dancing by a local troupe, played some foosball and old-school racing video games, and just walked around with my host family. There were so many people out and about. One thing I really love about Guatemala is the ability people have to just take some time away from working and just have fun. I mean, the entire town (more or less) shut down for a week, no school, no post office, no meeting with the mayor. Transportation was more crowded (and got super backed up when the parades were making their way through-they were pretty long parades), but no one was in a hurry. I pretty much just stayed in town the whole week. I’m excited for feria next year because I will probably march with some of the schools in the parade.

After feria was a descanso for all of the schools, so I had another several days off. I took a few shopping trips to Xela, went to see Toy Story 3 at the theater (great movie!), organized crap in the house, did a lot of cleaning, read. It was nice to have time off, but I was really bored after a few days. The weekend of the fourth though I headed off to the Peace Corps center for a conference for all of the volunteers and the Fourth of July party (on the third). It was nice to get out of site for a few days (I hadn’t spent time out of my site since I got here), but I am over Antigua (too expensive, too many tourists). It was nice to see everyone though, and I got to know a lot of people better during the few days there. I also got to visit my partners host family, all of whom are really great. We had a nice big dinner and I talked a bit with the host dad. I’ll be heading back soon again for Reconnect, which has some training sessions and K’iche’ classes. Back to Antigua, but I found a really cheap place to stay and I’ll probably eat some peanut butter sandwiches and avocado with Tortrix.

I also had my first site visit with my APCD (my boss from Peace Corps), which went really well. We had a meeting with all of the directors of the schools, a representative of the Padres de Familia of one of the schools, one person from each Centro de Salud where we are working, the supervisor, and two volunteer leaders. The directors were as pilas as always and participated in everything. They had some great role-playing skits, great questions, great ideas. I am so fortunate to have such a great group of people to be working with. In training they kept telling us how difficult the job would be, how people would constantly be letting us down, etc. but it is actually easy to work with most of the people I’m working with and they haven’t let us down so far. No one cancelled our visit without calling, everyone welcomed us with food and warm words, two infrastructure projects have fallen into our laps. There are challenges with both work and daily life, but nothing near what I expected. I’ll keep working with the schools with the diagnóstico to see what infrastructure and health programs they already have, and that will take me through to the second week of August. After that, we have a certification in late August and a few projects to work on, but who knows what else is coming up. I pretty much just have to live day by day because you never know what’s going to happen.

All in all, I am muy contenta with my site and my job. I never thought I would find a job that I really love, but I have, and I wasn’t even the one who picked it out. Somehow Peace Corps knew what they were doing when they sent me to Guatemala with Healthy Schools. I can’t really imagine myself doing anything else right now. I’m living the dream-well, my dream anyway. I’m not sure everyone would love battling giant spiders, playing with the niños, and communicating in a language that they still struggle with every day.

Enjoy the middle of summer! I will try to stay more focused next blog entry and write about something insightful. Hopefully my computer won’t refuse to work before then-it’s starting to get really temperamental.