Lynchings and bedbugs

There have now been two lynchings in my village since I arrived a year ago.  Luckily I've been out-of-site both times and was thus spared having to witness any of the events or aftermath thereof.  This past Thursday, six people were violently lynched up in a neighboring village.  The 5 men and 1 woman were apparently caught (or accused of) stealing peppercorn crops and Q3,000 in cash from a local's home.  A mob of 2,000 villagers went after the accused, tied them up, stoned and beat them, then shot them to death and threw them down a mountainside.  Word to the wise: don't go stealing other people's pepper crops in Guatemala.

These lynchings demonstrate perfectly that self-policing is still an integral part of rural Guatemalan culture and living.  Without a police force or other authority to help control crime (due to past issues with corrupt police forces, people here don't trust law enforcement officers), villagers are left to solve their own problems, and lynchings are a surefire way of issuing a public message that criminal behavior will not be tolerated.  In everyday village life I see this same kind of self-policing on a much smaller (and nonviolent) level: women from the women's group like to look at the attendance list and publicly denounce those women who have been consistently missing meetings; schoolchildren are able to solve conflicts between themselves without the involvement of the teacher or other school authority; in business transactions people always wait to pay until the product is in their hands, and at school teachers announce students' test and homework grades to the rest of the class.  In a country where people don't have insurance, can't afford lawyers, and often go unpaid for months despite working under contract, you can't expect them to trust the system to take care of them.  In America we sue each other; in Guatemala they fight it out with each other.  Considering the amount of persecution that the indigenous people of Guatemala have experienced in the (recent) past, particularly at the hands of the military and police forces, I can't say I blame them for taking matters into their own hands.  In a country where "machete" is both a noun and a verb, civilian violence of this nature is only to be expected.  It's just a bit ironic that all of this happened the week before I begin a life-skills unit on "Violence" at the local school. 

In other news, for the past 4-5 months I've been waking up with itchy welts all over my body.  At first I thought mosquitoes, so I re-installed my mosquito net to make it extra mosquito-proof and no change.  Then I moved houses, with no change.  Bedbugs were always at the back of my mind, but due to a combination of denial, busyness, and apathy, I never did any investigating to prove that hunch either way.  Due to a major storm yesterday, the village's power was out (again) and by 7:30pm I resolved to turn in for the night, cuddling up in bed with a book and my headlamp.  Bedbugs usually strike in the dead of the night (2-4am), when it's the darkest and their victims are in the deepest stages of sleep.  The power outage and resulting pitch-darkness must have thrown their little nocturnal timers off, because at around 9pm I started itching all over.  I put my book down and shifted my headlamp to investigate and quickly found several bedbugs crawling for cover between my sheets, already engorged with my blood.  I grabbed some toilet paper and started smashing them, each time causing them to explode and leave a nice little polka dot of (my) blood at the kill site.  I soon found more underneath my pillows and crawling up the sides of my mattress.  Full-blown bedbug infestation.  Awesome.  I slept on the floor last night, although have not yet developed a long-term plan.  I'm going to pay a neighbor to boil my bedding (my pots aren't big enough) and hopefully get a hold of some plastic sheeting to seal off my mattress.  Because honestly, if it weren't for the fact that they are sucking my blood nightly and causing me to live in a perpetual state of itchiness, I'd let the buggers just hang out.  But I refuse to be their nightly meal, and will therefore begin my fight.  I'm going to "go to the mattresses" Godfather-style, literally.