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!