Swearing-In

I woke up and realized that today was the day: I officially become a Peace Corps Volunteer when I raise my right hand and solemnly swear to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to uphold my duties as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Kind of a strange oath given the job description, but it's the same one Joe Biden swore in on, so why not us?
I packed up the last of my things, pulled the sheets off my bed and stuffed them in my backpack, and walked out of my room for the last time. I crossed the small lawn to the kitchen where the hot water for the coffee wasn't going to be hot in time, so for the first time my host mom and sister-in-law let me just take a few sweet buns without coffee to dunk them in. A pretty big deal, that.
The time had come for hurried goodbyes - I stood and walked around the table to put my arm on my host mom's shoulder, as is customary here (hugs are not). I said once again how thankful I was to her for how well I was cared for and welcomed into the family routine, and was sorry to have to leave and find a new family to live with now in Totonicapán. She said it was never a bother and, as she started to cry, thanked me for always eating whatever they prepared for me, and for coming with to pray for her sick father, and for always being polite and greeting everyone. I started to cry too.
After more last-minute parting gifts of bread and fruit for my journey, I walked down the hill through town to my best friend and fellow volunteer Brittany's house, where she and her host parents were waiting for me. Together the four of us in our nicest clothes boarded the chicken bus to Antigua, where the Peace Corps was waiting for all the new volunteers and their host families to take us to the US Ambassador's house in Guatemala City. On that bus, on both American and Guatemalan minds were thoughts of the big changes today was bringing. While my host family couldn't accept the honor of attending the Swearing-In Ceremony at the Ambassador's house due to tending to the sick grandfather, most other host parents were present, riding the bus with their respective Volunteers for probably the last time. We've lived with these families for three months, and some bonds have been formed. But unlike the other host families on the bus that morning, Brittany's host parents, Don Enrique and Doña Maria, have never hosted any Americans before, much less been to any ambassador's house. I think they were a bit more excited but also more nervous than the rest.
The Ambassador's house was beautiful, as is I suppose to be expected. The back lawn has space for maybe three large games of croquet, plus gardens everywhere, a fountain, tennis courts, and a pool. Don Enrique asked me if my house in los Estados Unidos was like this one. I laughed out loud at the thought, then apologized for laughing and explained reality in America.
There was much speech-making in Spanish, and I realized how far we've all come in three months that none of us have any trouble at all anymore understanding what's being said. We took our oath as prompted by the Ambassador, and then one by one were called up to receive our diplomas. (Diplomas? Really? I completed the Peace Corps training... that doesn't feel like it really merits a diploma, but whatever floats their boat...) Figures that the one day I will probably ever wear a dress in Guatemala, the wind picks up when I go forward to get my diploma and have my picture taken with the Ambassador, and I end up pulling something like a Marilyn Monroe moment. :)
There was much picture taking and snack eating afterwards, and soon the idyllic day had to come to and end when the bus returned to take us back. Goodbyes were long and often tearful; promises were made of phone calls, pictures in the mail, and future visits. Man, if moving away from our host families is this hard after three months, how will I possibly handle leaving my new community after two years? We're officially Volunteers now, and we head out to those new communities tomorrow morning, to begin what will be our lives for the next two years. These changes, all the goodbyes recently said and all the hello’s in the near future, prompt a lot of pondering about friendships and the ties that bind us to the hearts of the other people in our lives. How will I do at maintaining those ties into my hazy future? Lots of changes mean lots of questions.

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

The adventure begins! Ha, you might have thought it began three months ago, but last week represented rolling up my sleeves and getting started in my “site” community. The bad news first: my site is real cold. On a beautiful sunny day, it might get to 65 or 70 degrees. Most of the time it's in the 40s, at least now in the winter. Let me remind you that the heat sources are nonexistent or only in the kitchen. But I just tell them I'm from Minnesota and I'm already used to the cold... and even if that's a lie, I'll GET used to it!!
I started today learning K'iche' which is the indigenous language in my new site, a village near the city of Totonicapán. I visited for a week and learned from the older gent who's our park guard how to say things like Good Afternoon and Food and How Are You? My head is reeling from all the other things I learned how to say today, but hopefully it'll help with my projects. Even though almost everybody also speaks Spanish, I'm sure a few sentences in K'iche' would work wonders with local school kids, working with the staff in my park, teaching K'iche' names for birds and trees to visitors who come to visit, etc.
For now, it's hard saying goodbye to my fellow trainees-soon-to-be-volunteers (we swear in and move to our sites this Friday the 27th!) and to my training community. I've been living with this host family in a pueblo near Antigua for almost 3 months, and tomorrow is my last day with them - it's hard trying to find words to say goodbye! I presume I'll go a little out of my way to visit them when I come back through this area to the Peace Corps/Guatemala Headquarters (for In-Service Training, for Reconnect, for occasional Medical evals, etc.) because I'd like to check in on their lives. But to be honest, I'm really excited to move and get started on my new projects in my new home! Wish me luck!

The Big News!

Hello folks! The big day finally came: after over two months of training and waiting for the verdict of where I'd be spending the next two years of my life, the Peace Corps has officially (finally) decided to send me to serve for two years in the province of Totonicapan! I know that doesn't mean much to anybody reading this email, and you might ask why it matters so much in a country the size of Ohio. Who would be waiting with bated breath to hear where in Ohio they'll be working for the next to years? Does it really matter?
Well, I'd like to submit, no offense to any Ohioans, that Guatemala has a bit more diversity to offer - in in topography, in climate, in language, in ethnic heritage, in dress, in flaura, in fauna... things change drastically every 30 kilometers or so!
That said, I am happy to report that... well, I'm really happy! I've been assigned a great site, one I've visited before, with everything I had been hoping for in a site. For anyone who's been reading the last few posts, this is in fact the site I mentioned really liking. It's funny, I was hoping I'd get it, had a dream I got it, and out of all 16 of us trainees I was placed there. What luck! or fate? ha, who knows. Coincidence or not, here are the things I'm excited about: I really liked the projects the current Volunteer has, the park is beautiful and has the biodiversity to be one of Guatemala's primier bird-watching hotspots, I'll be pretty close both to the famous Lago de Atitlan and to both the cities of Totonicapan and Quetzaltenango, and my focus will be both environmental interpretation in the park and environmental education in the village school. The point is to increase sustainable ecotourism in the community-run park, scientific study in the park, and local understanding of the resource they literally have in their backyard. Thankfully, my impression from visiting is that the people in my small Quiché pueblo really value their forested areas. And they're interested in starting up cultural tourism projects too, a big bonus for this trainee who's spent almost all of her training working in cultural tourism (Quiché is the ethnic heritage of Rigoberta Menchú, and one of about 24 in Guatemala, by the way).
Watch, I write all this now as a naive and optimistic trainee... I'll try and censor any emails in the future as things get real frustrating, as I'm sure they will. :) What's really funny is, in the dream I had about being the volunteer in El Aprisco, I also dreamed I had no idea what I was doing, and got lost in the park, and suddenly couldn't understand anyone or speak their language. So, how much do i really want this to be a "dream come true," eh? All of those things have a real possibility of happening, especially the language thing, since only about 1/2 to maybe 3/4 the population speaks Spanish - everybody speaks kiché as a first language. Bring on the extra language lessons!
I move to my new site in 2 weeks. Now it's time for last days spent with my training host family, and last opportunities to hang out with the other trainees who have become my best friends here. The luxury of having a bunch of fun Americans nearby is coming to an end, and I'm preparing for two years on my own. I mean, I guess that's exactly what I did when I was preparing to leave the states over tow months ago.. Peace Corps likes to take baby steps toward cutting you off. :) haha, kidding. I'm excited for the whole immersion experience all over again - who doesn't love making cultural faux pas, language bloopers, and laughing till your sides hurt at... yourself?
Thanks for reading, wishing you days equally filled with laughter.

p.s. my park has lodging facilities, and is near Totonicapan, which is a big city, so anybody interested in visiting Guatemala in the next two years, within easy distance of Quetzaltenango and the Lago de Atitlan, PLEASE START CONSIDERING IT!! :)

Nobody can ever call you lazy again

My apologies to parents, grandparents, and other types who follow this thing regularly for my delay in getting this next post up. Forgive me – life in the last two weeks has scarcely given me the time to breathe, much less write a blog update!
So I left off reflecting on our week of travel and on how my future site might compare to those we visited, wondering what my destiny will be. Let me start off by saying, I still don’t know – we find out our site assignments this Thursday (yes, we are all biting our nails and crossing our fingers. Kinda complicated, those two activities, when done at the same time.)
But when writing that last post I had no idea what was in store for me in the two weeks that followed, and that I would have absolutely no mental space left for pondering future sites. When the four of us trainees living here in my town (Brittany, Jaime, Maria, and I) arrived back to work in the Municipality (e.g. Mayor’s office – the local government) from the training trip, we discovered that our Muni staff had taken our idea of a small afternoon Cultural Program, tailored to the students in the Spanish schools in Antigua and designed as an income-generation project for the women’s cooperative they’re working with, and had absolutely run with it.
Now, on the one hand this was really inspiring: after a few team-building or needs-identification workshops and inspirational speeches we had given, our Muni staff and the leaders of the women’s group decided to go for the gold: they opted to attempt a 2-day Cultural Fair, complete with Mayan ceremonies, traditional mayan dance, a few bands, and whatever else they could get on such short notice. The women’s cooperative would have their tables of woven goods out for sale, and agreed to sell food and a few other activities (like lessons on how to hand-make tortillas, grind your own coffee on the grindstone, get dressed up in the traditional garb and have your photo taken, etc.).
On the other hand, this whole “running with it” honestly felt more like a runaway train. It was not what we had proposed and it seemed way too big and risky, but we couldn’t stop it. All we could do was “damage control”!! The problem: right now, nobody comes to this town, hence the problems with low sales of the women’s textiles. So, with nine days of advance warning, how do we promote the hell out of this Cultural Fair to get people to take a new interest in a little pueblo outside the incredibly enticing city of Antigua? Risk #1 of a project this big and this last-minute was that nobody would show up, the women wouldn’t sell anything, and everyone would feel cheated. Risk #2, people come but the event is so last-minute that it’s slapped together and shoddy, and our town’s big debut therefore becomes its poor reputation henceforth. Risk #3, in getting so excited about such a big event, the Muni would blow a load of money to offer free public performances, only to realize after the fact how their budget maybe couldn’t handle it. And the Risk scenarios went on. We presented them all, and the Muni still wanted to go with it, so: Go with it we did. We promoted like crazy – cranking out promo fliers to hang all over Antigua, fliers in all the chicken buses coming through town, personal stops in all the language schools in Antigua (somebody go right now and open a Lonely Planet Guatemala to the Antigua section and count them for me: there’s tons!!), a radio ad and radio news clip (uh, including an impromptu interview of yours truly – can we say fumbling over her words in a 2nd language?), ads in the newspaper, a commercial on Cable TV, and public loudspeaker announcements. Did I mention promotion was my job?
That doesn’t even begin to cover all the details of the Fair, all the meetings with the Muni staff and with the women’s group, trying to settle logistics, plan pre-Fair training sessions, etc. Our trainer was I think experiencing a mix of being impressed by us, and being utterly stressed out by what he considered a bad, bad, very bad idea of our Muni. It was he who labeled it Mission: Damage Control, i.e. our job was just to mitigate the possible negative outcomes.
So how did it go? It was fun. Sure, it was stressful, not nearly as many tourists came as we had hoped for, not many women sold much of their textile inventory, the muni staff seemed to disappear and leave us Peace Corps people on our own, and a few of the performers cancelled on us. But the food sold, the performances were quite popular, most of the women sold at least something, and the visitors who did come enjoyed it. It will remain in my memory as a busy but colorful, musical, anything-but-boring couple of days. Gorgeous weavings hanging covering the walls in every direction, the smell of tortillas and chile-spiced food in the air, marimba music spilling out into the central park, women chatting and laughing together over their bounties of wares to sell, and little girls dressed in beautifully woven patterns chasing each other among their mothers’ skirts. Community-based cultural tourism creating sustainable income generation and preserving Mayan heritage – that’s what this is all about, folks.
Yes, we will have to deal with some disappointment, since the women came in with unreasonably high expectations about how lucrative this would be. But I think they get that this is about starting something, about planting a seed and nurturing it till it becomes a fruitful endeavor. I just pray their hearts are still in it and willing to continue in this vein of projects with the Muni’s support now that we Peace Corps Trainees are basically at the end of our time working with them.
I have to say, I’m pretty dang proud of the four of us for pulling off an event of this caliber in 2 months (but really 9 days). Now that I have time to breathe, write a blog post, and even think about my site assignment this Thursday, I wonder if my work in my future site will have its moments of being that stressful and busy, over 10 hours working every day. And whether I’ll be able to handle it on my own, instead of with three other trainees and our trainer there to help out. One of my fellow PCTs said to me on Saturday, “You know how Valerie [another PCT] said when you join the Peace Corps no one can ever call you selfish again? Pretty sure nobody can ever call you lazy again, either.” Truer words were ne’er spoke.
p.s. pictures coming soon!