Cartas de Lejos: Pilas for Tzibal-Thanks!

Five weeks and counting. As the immediateness of my departure becomes a reality to my local counterparts, they've started, like me, to evaluate my time here. From day one, locals have taken me under their wing. As the resident gringa in a village of indigenous Guatemalans, they wanted to make sure I was safe and content during my stay. I was their gringa and if something happened to me, if I was unhappy, or lonely, or sick, it would be their fault, their public shame that they didn't take better care. Now that I'm leaving they're looking back to see how they did, self-evaluating by evaluating me. The result is a daily commentary on how I've changed in the eyes of the locals I live and work with. "You know how to walk now," Estela and Carmen told me yesterday, as we trudged up a rocky mountain trail to a baptism. "You know how to eat Kak'ik now," Margarita told me as we sat in the wooden shack on a log-bench, eating hot caldo and tamalitos. "You really like our culture now, don't you" my student Any told me as she looked around my room at the local weavings and tapestries I have hanging on my walls and covering my tables. As I find myself immersed in the utter chaos of wrapping up my service, writing up lackluster technical reports of my work over the past 20 months which often leave me with that pit-in-the-stomach feeling that I didn't accomplish enough, this commentary has made me feel a little bit better somehow. In many ways I feel that what's important isn't how good my time here looks on paper (because you can make pretty much anything sound good or bad on paper, let's be honest) but how it's viewed by the people in my community. And if that's measured by the fact that I can now walk up a mountainside wearing traje, rubber caites, and toting a banana-leaf of leftover meat, then I'm going to take that for all it's worth.

So I begin here an exercise of reflection, wrap-up, and evaluation. What have I learned, how have I changed, and what have I "accomplished" since arriving to site 20 months ago? I'll start by recapping one of the projects from which I learned the most, and for which I still owe a great big thanks to those of you back home who made it all possible.

The pila project in Tzibal took over a year of creativity, patience, and many many meetings. There were hiccups, there was a bit of "winging-it" on my part and theirs, and there were a lot of delays. But at the end of it all, we reached our principle objectives: to provide 38 women with pilas, to build local capacity to use and maintain the pilas, and to empower the participating women through the planning and implementation of a small community project.

This project started way back in the fall of my first year, in September 2010. I was meeting weekly with the women doing cooking classes in hopes of forming a women's group and making some local friends. After one of these classes Estela, the leader she is, announced that the women had gotten together and come up with an idea. She proposed the project to me, hiked me up to Carolina's house where they showed me how they washed clothes with a rock and slab. I was sold. We wrote up budgets, a timeline, a Peace Corps Partnership grant, and waited. Meanwhile I continued meeting with the women and did talks on household budgeting, healthy food prep, and environmental awareness.

Finally in March, 2011 I went back to site after the State of Siege and the money came through. But the exchange rate had changed and so we raised more (remember this?) Soon after, the first truck of pilas rolled up the rocky path to Tzibal. The pilas were hauled laboriously to the women's houses, one by one. Roofing sheets were purchased and distributed. The cement "planchas" or platforms were made by husbands and brothers and cousins of the women. Drainage ditches dug, filled with rocks and charcoal to prevent groundwater contamination from soapy water.

The project, as hoped, was very much facilitated by the women's group. They organized a buying committee which went with me to get price quotes and purchase materials. They organized the distribution of the materials (which was a significantly complicated task due to the pilas weighing so much) and checked in with me on their progress. The women have become stronger as a group and more involved in the community (the women's group played a huge role in the bottle school construction, from collecting and filling bottles to putting in the bottle walls). The project wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy. But in many ways, it went along in the spirit of sustainability that we PCV's are always hoping for. At the end of the day these pilas weren't a hand-out to be taken for granted. The women worked long and hard for them, which assured me that pilas were something they needed and wanted. The project built local capacity and brought the community together. It is more their "logro," their achievement, than it is mine. And that, if nothing else, I can be proud of.

Thank you to all of you who donated to this project. A very special thanks to the Flossmoor Community Church's Outreach Board for their generous support, undying patience, and for agreeing to fund this project through thick and thin. Because of your support, 38 rural Guatemalan families now have pilas to wash their clothes and dishes in, and most importantly have had the experience of planning, designing, and managing a community project. I could not be luckier to have been able to share this experience with them.

Bantiox eere!!

(Q'eqchi': thank you!)