Last night was my first night back in my own room since my trip to Minnesota! I might have mentioned that my host parents decided it was the right time to invest in fixing up my half of the house, looking at it as an investment for when their kids will live there, so the walls, ceiling, and floor were completely redone in my room over the past two months. When I left for Minnesota, all of my room’s things got crammed into my little kitchen and my bed on its side in the hallway, while I slept in an extra bed in the main part of the house. It was stressful for a while living in the TV room that leads off to all the other rooms in the house. Meaning that I wake up when they get going in the morning at 5, and was often trying to fall asleep at night with someone working late at the table in the next room, who would then have to pass through my room to go to bed themselves. Also meaning that my bed was the couch for watching TV. I think to some people that sounds terrible, and some people are thinking, that doesn’t sound like a big deal at all… and you’re both right. In a certain sense, it was fun to live in the central hub, because I always knew what was going on and because the family didn’t shy away like they tend to when I hole myself up in my own room to get work done. I think we bonded more since everyone felt as though Molly was really another family member now. And I learned to a great extent how to deal without much privacy. But it was tricky not having private work space (which might speak to the lack of a blog update till now), and with family members constantly around there was no lack of distractions. I feel as though I’ve gotten very little done at home lately, apart from laundry. (Haha, yes the flea saga continues, but I shan’t dwell on that here. :) Some photos of the process: when the construction had just begun...
The finished product when it was still bare...
And now I've moved in! Isn't it just lovely??But I have to admit that not getting work done may have to do with how busy life has been in the last month. September 15th is Guatemalan Independence Day, and here in Toto there were parades and bands and torch-bearing runs. It’s also the only day my good friend Patty from San Antonio, my training town, has off work. And you know what she decided to do with her only day off? Get on a speeding, overcrowded, noisy bus and come the 4 twisting, uncomfortable mountainous hours to visit me in Totonicapán. (For a few hours, then get in a bus again and make the same trek home the same day!) What a friend! First we watched out for Ixchel and José Arnulfo in the parade with their respective schools, and lots of other cute kids and interesting costumes and floats:
José Arnulfo, my 16-year-old host brother lookin' sharp with his classmates :)
A cool Mayan-Heritage-focused float... there weren't all that many of these actually, I think parades here are so influenced by the North American concept of parades that I see more kids dancing in converse sneaker uniforms and hear marching bands playing American pep band tunes. So this was cool to see.
I liked the flag they're carrying here, because it bears the four colors that represent Mayan cosmovision: they are the "People of Corn", and there is red corn, black corn, yellow corn, and white corn that grows here. These colors represent the blood, black hair, tan skin, and white bones from which Ajaw (the Great Spirit) composed the body of the first human being. Cool, huh? 
Toto's Feria was almost cancelled this year due to Swine Flu. So I think somewhere in the negotiations with the Bureau of Health to let the show go on, it was decided that every school would carry Public Health Education statements and tips on avoiding H1N1 contagion. This banner reads "The H1N1 Flu is an illness of the Respiratory Passages" and the lesson went on from there. Haha.And after all that, Patty and I caught a microbus up the mountain and did the trek to my house - the above picture is Patty on said trek up through the cornfield plots my family has on the mountainside.
We arrived in time to help Arnulfo make the last preparations for lunch, who also had the day off (Emiliana, however, who is a teacher, had school-related responsibilities like the kids). Patty and I started making the tortillas... and I was doing better than Patty! She finally gave up after struggling with the same ball of corn tortilla dough for about 15 minutes, and I told her not to worry about it: when I first came to Toto I couldn't turn out tortillas either because the dough has a different thicker consistency and sticks to one's hands more, making it harder! She laughed and I'm not sure if that comment coming from someone who just learned to make tortillas nine months ago was much consolation to someone who´s been making them three times a day all her life. Haha.
Eventually everybody arrived back home from their various Independence Day festivities just as lunch was ready (Chicken in Orange Marinade, a la Molly et Arnulfo!), so we took a photo of the happy occasion:
Not long after Independence Day starts the lead-up to Toto’s Feria. This is like County Fairs in the States, but instead of separate fairgrounds, the central city blocks just fill up for two weeks lined with covered vendors’ stalls and mobile restaurants who come in from all over the country. There were, however, two designated areas for all the mechanized rides that moved in for the occasion: the bus terminals and taxi stand. (You can see why traffic might have been a doubly complicated issue for those 2-3 weeks, with transit not possible downtown and public transit seriously inconvenienced even at the margins.)
Hugo, my 8-year-old host brother, enjoying one of the miniature, hand-operated ferris wheels...The most distinctive feature of Feria is the food. The streets were absolutely bursting at the seams with rosca vendors – a rosca is a type of sweet bread that looks like a pretzel but is round, and very crunchy. (You have to douse them in coffee or hot chocolate before eating, says I.)
And peanut sellers flood the city from all corners of Guatemala, it seems… I’d estimate there were easily 30 tons of peanuts in my city in huge 200-pound sacks, being sold from every street corner downtown. And the last very distinct Feria feature are the dulces típicos that also line the streets: sugar whirls and bricks of shredded coconut available all colors, candied figs and yams, peanut and pumpkinseed brittle, various cookies and biscuits, and bricks of nougat, marzipan and apple, all glinting from their shiny wrappings. (That was a surprisingly hard sentence to write – I’ve never tried thinking of how to describe or name all of those things in English before!) I decided to start buying and sampling early on, because there were so many I had to try but NO WAY could I do it all in one sitting!
All of this was leading up to the actual day of celebration, of course. The music concerts in the central plaza had started way back on the 19th but the actual Feast of San Miguel Arcangel of Totonicapán was the 29th of September. In the buildup to the feria there were all kinds of other events and parades, including a half-marathon right here in Toto! (which was on the same day as another ½ marathon in the capital and therefore not many people showed up for the Toto half, and therefore I placed 7th in the women's bracket! Woohoo!) I did roll my ankle three days before the race, but Emiliana's brother is a naturopath of some sort, and through some very painful massage of my ankle, it was pretty much fine the next day, without using any ice! And afterwards my friend Don Nico (park guard and my running buddy), his family, and I went and walked around Toto to enjoy the Feria.
And on the very day of the Feria, we went to visit Arnulfo’s house.
My host dad comes from a more modest background, his mother not having gone to school and his sisters probably having received little. So when we go to visit his family in his parents’ house there’s usually not much of the conversation I understand since they speak k’iche’ and never learned much Spanish. The last time we went to visit was Semana Santa, Holy Week, and I felt like the elephant in the room because I was so different and didn’t know what was going on most of the time. Part of the problem, I later guessed, was that they were all in traje, the corte and huipil that the women wear. So this time… this time, I decided to wear traje, to bring a game to play like cards so we wouldn’t all just sit around bored with them just looking at me the whole time, and to try out the little k’iche’ I know with them. Maybe they’d get a kick out of the gringa’s efforts…? It sort of worked. But mostly only my host mom and siblings played cards with me; I also think it was far stranger for them to see a gringa in corte! Haha. Poco a poco, little by little we’ll get used to each other.
(A side-story to the Arnulfo's family visit: the knife we found there didn't have enough of a blade to slice the chicken we were going to make for lunch, so the grandma cleaned off the machete, and Emiliana and I went to work dressing the 15 lbs or so of chicken with the machete... classic!)
... and this is also an excuse to show more pictures of me in traje! I bought my own last week too. When I wear it, I'll put up more photos!
And in the midst of all this Feria hubbub, I’ve been trying to get a little work done in my park! And at the end of every workday, I’m getting more and more able to identify the progress I made that day and the goals for the projects I have. There have deveinite bumps in the road as far as work is concerned, but overall I love my job. We’re installing a library of ecological books and resources, we got some educational materials printed finally, I’m working on generating a birdwatching tour working to further the training of area youth as guides, and we’re designing interpretive signs for all the stations on our trail. Outside of work in the park, the natural resources board of the Communal Mayors’ Association, called the 48 Cantones de Totonicapán, and I have designed a program working with community leaders toward developing a regional trash management system. I’m well into my k’iche’ classes (although still not near conversational), and take them along with my 14-year-old host sister Ixchel – it’s fun! And while I don’t get to be in the classroom teaching (environmental education in the village school was something I had been pushing for this 2nd semester June-October, but it never happened), I’ve been “working” in the classroom in Minnesota! :) (helps to have a Spanish teacher for a sister, right?) Even though I don’t actually get to be there with her students, Michaela and I have been coordinating on how to integrate lessons on Guatemalan culture into her classes, through letters and activities I write. It’s fun for me, although the time it takes for a letter to arrive from here in an obstacle.
Other than that, I have lately been rediscovering that life here can be fun... I've been visiting other Peace Corps Volunteers and Guatemalan friends in the area with the free time I am garnering out of my schedule. One rainy day I went to have breakfast with a friend from training who lives so close to me, but I had never even been to her town. We sat three of us PCVs just chatting for the better part of the day as the rain came down sipping chai tea (a luxury imported good) and it seemed awfully healthy to do that now and then. Here's to finding rhythm in life. Hope you're enjoying yours.
Molly! I love how vivid your posts are! You are a very talented story teller.
ReplyDeleteI miss you very much but I love to hear about your life.