Dar-ing Vueltas

Another couple of weeks have flown by here in Guate and I’m continuing to stay pretty happy, healthy and safe. It seems like once again in my life I’m dar-ing vueltas. When I was in Ecuador, my host moms in Valle de los Chillos and in Quito would often take me on vueltas. I would get in the car without any idea of where we were going, what we were doing, when we would return, etc. Sometimes we would end up at the supermarket, the mall, the Panecillo, a park, Old Town Quito, etc. I just had to learn to be flexible and just go with the flow. That’s kind of how life is around here. Though classes and lectures are all planned out, sometimes things turn up and I just have to go with it. Also, I dar-ed my first vuelta with my host mom this past weekend and it was quite an experience. But more on that later.

First I’ll write a little about my family. It’s pretty challenging living with a family in another culture because there really are a lot of little differences that just make things more difficult to get just right. However, my host parents consider themselves to be more “American” than others in the country because they are always working, like Americans, which is certainly the truth.

My host mom, Doña Aura, has a typing school that she runs out of the house. She teaches five hour-long classes a day-three in the morning and two in the afternoon. In addition, she cooks and cleans and washes clothing (though just recently when typing classes started up, a “Señora”, or housekeeper, has been coming to help with these things). She enjoys talking and spending time with her family. She isn’t a huge fan of telenovelas, but I turned one on the other day and she got into it and started watching it with me. It’s pretty horrible, as is evidenced by its title (“Fuego en la sangre”), but it’s become a bonding activity for the two of us. I won’t even try to explain the plot because I came into it at a late point, but she will catch glimpses of it while making dinner and I’ll fill her in on the parts she misses. Sometimes I help with dinner, though lately I have been sick with gripe (a cold), so I have been watching and relating.

My host dad, Don Hilario, works for the Ministry of Education by day and at night he teaches math classes at a local institute. He only has a few hours off in between jobs and gets home quite late. He also works on Saturdays teaching classes at a university in Antigua, so he really isn’t home that often. As such, I haven’t really gotten to know him very well. When he does relax, he likes to read the paper, watch fútbol, watch the news.

I have three host siblings. The oldest, Valesca, finished her first year of university (I think) and now wants to study German or French. I don’t really know what she’s doing right at the moment because she hangs around the house a lot or spends time with her friends in Antigua. She really likes the whole Twilight thing (books and movies), showing just how far and how fast American culture (however bad it is) has spread. Then comes José, who is eleven. He goes to the colegio and enjoys bicycling with his younger sister. He just got a new guitar to take classes at school so it will be interesting to see how music lessons happen here. Education is much more based around memorizing stuff, so I’m wondering if music classes will be the same way. Then is Angela, who is nine (I think). She goes to the same school as José but is in Tercera Primaria. She likes animals a lot. She has a bird and when we had a chicken for a few days, she got really attached to it and named it Cuckoo.

Last but not least is the family’s dog, Luna. Last I wrote I was skeptical of the vet’s belief that she was suffering a phantom pregnancy. I don’t know how a trained vet would have missed it, but she had eight puppies on January 20th. They’re doing well and growing quite quickly. I wasn’t allowed to see them at first because my family worried that they would die if too many people saw them, but now I have and they’re pretty cute. There are two white ones that will probably be Dalmatians, one that is brown, and five that are black with a few white spots. My host mom still doesn’t know how the pregnancy happened or who the dad is, but she’s happy that Luna is all right. She just has to figure out how to give all the puppies away to good families (she doesn’t want to keep any, Angela and José want to keep them all). I’m contemplating taking one to my site with me, but it would be kind of challenging to figure out all of the logistics. We’ll see.

Now about Pastores. We learned a lot more about our community for a community analysis project we did for training. Pastores has about 14,000 people total, including all of the aldeas and barrios, but the cabecera (or head pueblo) where I’m living has 2,000 or so people. Everyone typically knows everyone else because people often live here throughout their lives (like my host parents), so it’s common to greet everyone you meet on the street with a buenos días or a buenas tardes/noches. I like how friendly the atmosphere is. The main economic activity here is boot making, which about 80% of kids learn at one time or another. There is also a pretty big farm near town where some people work, and there is a coffee beneficiary where another good chunk find employment. Then there are people like my host dad who work in Antigua because it is so close. We talked with the mayor, Miguel Lopez, one day and he said that finding enough employment for everyone was one of the biggest challenges, as are cleaning up the Río Guacalate that runs through town and finding enough water for everyone. The community has a higher-than-national-average literacy rate, but has a really weird disparity between men and women, in that there are a lot more men in the community than women. This is probably due to the emphasis on boot-making, which is only for men, but who knows. In all, the town is fairly well developed and despite my dislike for politicians, Miguel Lopez has done a lot-paving a bunch of roads, building courts and fields for sports, building schools throughout all of Pastores, etc. Apparently he is well-known throughout Guatemala for being a good mayor and he seems nice enough.

A few pretty interesting things have happened since I last wrote. We all took a trip into Guatemala City, though we really didn’t do much there. Peace Corps wants us to limit our travel to and around the city because it’s kind of dangerous. The safe places we can frequent are these giant shopping malls that really don’t make me think Guatemala, but rather Estados Unidos. The typical Guatemalan certainly can’t shop there, and neither can I on a Peace Corps budget. It’s pretty cheap to get there though, only costing around Q10 from Pastores, or a little over $1.

My group also held a party for our families and Spanish teacher a week and a half ago, which went over pretty well. It was the first time anyone had done as much in the community and the families were really excited to get to see each other in an informal setting and eat some food prepared by the gringos. We held the party in a trainee’s backyard because it really is a backyard with grass instead of concrete. His family set up a couple of tents and we used the grill to cook up some hamburgers, hotdogs, and grilled pineapple in addition to the pasta salad, chips and guacamole we also had. The atmosphere was probably best set when, after the hot dogs appeared to be sufficiently cooked, one of my compañeros decided to be the first to eat a hot dog and ate the whole thing despite the fact that it tasted strange. We soon found out that the hot dogs were all wrapped individually in plastic, despite all being wrapped together in an outer plastic shell, and that we had been cooking the hot dogs with plastic still intact. So my compañero had eaten hot dog enclosed by burnt plastic. His stomach troubled him for the next couple of days, but at least our families and Spanish teacher got a really good kick out of it. We also had games for the families, which they took to really well. One was called Elefantes y Girafas, which had people making elephants or giraffes with the people next to them as quickly as possible. Once the mero, mero (or boss of the game) called out someone’s name, the people on either side of them had to quickly make elephant ears or giraffe legs, with the slowest person being called out by the boss. Then we played Gato y Raton where one person as a mouse was being chased by another person, the cat, while everyone else stood in a circle and either allowed the mouse to go through or kept the cat from getting to the mouse. Then we played El Rey Pide… where one person asks two groups to bring him things, and the fastest group to provide it gets a point. Throughout the games, lots of funny moments brought some host parents to roll on the ground laughing. I have to admit that it was pretty fun and we all got to know each other better.

Also interesting was the day my host mom, sister, brother and I walked our chicken down the street to the abuela’s house. My host grandmother has a chicken “patio”, where she has a few hens, a few roosters and a duck. We had a chicken, Cuckoo, in the back of our house for a few days, but it was making a big mess so my host mom decided to bring it to her mom’s house. So we took off one afternoon down the street in a little parade, complete with the chicken at the back with her leg tied to a string, being led by Angela through a few streets to the abuela’s. We got it into the “patio” and the roosters, which are apparently mean and like to pluck feathers from other chickens, started picking on Cuckoo. Everytime there was some squawking from the patio, Angela would run over to make sure Cuckoo was all right. It was pretty cute. The chicken is still alive and is getting along better with the roosters now, though I’m not sure how long until cuckoo becomes lunch. Just the other day I had lunch at the abuela’s and we had pepian with chicken, though Cuckoo was spared that time.

And last but not least, the vuelta. For the past several days I’ve had a pretty bad cold. When I get a cold, I am always blowing my nose, sneezing, coughing, etc. So I was pretty miserable. After getting home from classes one afternoon, I mentioned that I wanted to use the internet, but my host mom was like “Pero no quieres dar una vuelta,” (But you don’t want to around?) to which I of course replied that I could use the internet any day. I asked “Adonde vamos?” (Where are we going?) to which my host mom replied “Vamos a dar una vuelta” (We’re going around). We drove the short fifteen minute drive into Antigua and were soon lost among the streets in search of a cake shop because the younger kids wanted a treat. The cake shop wasn’t where it used to be so my host mom decided to drive around and look for it. Luckily, as we were driving, she spotted her neice, who pointed us in the right direction. The car parked, we walked to this shop with some delicious looking cakes and pies. My mouth was watering and I was already thinking of which piece of cake I would get if I was getting one when my host mom ordered two pieces, paid the guy, and left the shop. I considered getting out some dinero to buy my own, but deciding that that would upset my host mom (who already worried that she wasn’t feeding me enough, which wasn’t the case), I accepted my cakeless fate and made a mental note so I could come back sometime. We then headed off to another aldea, San Felipe, where my mother stopped to buy me some atol from a roadside stand. Atol is a warm drink made from rice, corn, or plantains. This was atol blanco, made from white corn. I’m not supposed to have street food (Peace Corps policy-it makes sense), and I said as much to her, but she told me that it was boiled well and would not make me sick (which probably also made sense, but it was still a little sketchy). So I took the offered cup and took a sip and found it to be really salty. It was also burning hot. I took a few sips so that it wouldn’t spill as easily and we sat down. Her atol must have cooled down more quickly because she kept drinking it, while mine stayed boiling hot for quite a long time. Meanwhile, there was a lot of dust where we were, which aggravated my cough and after coughing for a while, she told me I should sit in the car. I was there for a while waiting for her to finish some food she had bought from another vendor and when everyone else got into the car, we headed back to Antigua to pick up Valesca. The city is really pretty at night, with lights in the trees in the central park and the cathedrals all lit up. We drove around there for a little while and then finally headed home. Vueltas always turn out to be adventures, and this one fortunately did not later involve stomach issues due to street food. Now I know where to get some good cake (to add to this really good cookie place, Cookies Etc., that a former volunteer opened, which sells fairly large cookies for Q2.50, or 30 cents or so). I still don’t know exactly where I’m heading with this whole Peace Corps thing, and I won’t know where my site is or what phase until March, but I’ve learned to just be patient and flexible and things will turn out alright.

As I was typing this, I started writing a lot of things in Spanish, so I will apologize here for my Spanglish. It’s great that I’m thinking a lot more in Spanish than in English, but I’m afraid my ability to use the English language correctly is suffering.

That’s all I have for now. I will probably write about a typical day (or week) of life in Pastores (and around), maybe about food. If there’s something you want me to write about specifically, let me know and I will try to write an interesting and informed blog on it. I’m always looking for new ideas.
I hope everyone is also staying happy, safe and healthy. Here’s to hoping the gourndhog sees his shadow (that means spring comes sooner right?) and that cold winter ickiness is over soon. As for me, the past couple of days have been really nice, spring-type weather, with a bit of heat today, so I’m enjoying life a little more because of that.