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.

Happy 4th of July!

As I write this I sit upstairs in an Antigua hostel, on a sheetless bed, listening to the hostel owner scold his reticent child for making noise during their movie.  I am the only patron at this hostel, and it's nice.  Thursday, Friday, and Saturday this week I spent in Antigua with somewhere in the range of 200-250 fellow PCV's, who flocked to the Old City for the annual All-Volunteer Conference and Fourth of July Party--the only Peace Corps condoned all-volunteer events of the year.  Thus these few days were abnormally social, a bit overwhelming at times, not to mention full of yummy American food (grilled veggie burgers--I almost cried), overpriced beer, and drunken Gringos dancing.  Needless to say, also exhausting, so yesterday I stowed happily away to Monterrico to spend my 4th of July holiday on the beach with some close friends.  Despite being slightly overcast (afterall it is winter/the rainy season) the beach was wonderful, and even though I won't be watching any fireworks tonight, I spent my holiday jogging barefoot on the beach, laying poolside chatting with Lizzy and Kyle (two of my all-time favorite people, I will add), and slurping down banana licuados while watching the waves.  Not too shabby, if you ask me.

Tomorrow I'm off and back to site where I'll be jumping right back into work and scrambling to get things done before the end of the month when I'll be returning to Antigua for Mid-Service Conference shortly followed by a 10-day visit by Mom, Aunt Cass, and Emma--my very first visitors!!

On the Peace Corps experience, circa month 15

Another busy week has come and gone.  Between meetings, charlas, and Dia de Maestros (Teacher's Day) festivities, I've been keeping busy.  This past week I also hosted two Youth Development trainees/soon-to-be volunteers--Craig and Brady--so they could see what it's like to be a volunteer, ask questions outside of formal training, and get away from their host families and Spanish classes for a few days.  Besides pulling my thoughts back to the three-month hell that was Pre-Service Training, their few days here in my site forced me to reflect on my experience thus far--my life, my work, and my view of Peace Corps as an organization--and make me realize how much has changed in the past 15 months.  If nothing else, it takes a LOT to get to me these days.  My idea of a satisfying "social life" has changed from bar-hopping in Chicago with friends to sitting in a dirt-floor shack eating steaming-hot chicken soup without silverware, or coloring with Crayolas in my kitchen with 4-year old Dilan.  I find myself jumping up and down at the smallest of successes.  If I don't have tortillas for a few days, I crave them.  I will pretty much eat anything, cow stomach included.  I often wear the same pair of pants three days in a row.  It's now a battle for me to finish 2 beers in one night.  Showering is not a daily event.  However, I still love a good cup of coffee and I will still go to great lengths to satisfy my sweet-tooth.  I still get lonely and miss having a boyfriend.  I still can't bring myself to sit on latrines or seatless toilets; I am now an expert hoverer.  I still check Facebook far too often.  And I still have bad days in which I stay in bed, watch 1990's rom-coms on my Macbook, and eat junk food.  ("You can take the girl out of America…")

What's to conclude of all of this?  Life is good.  People are adaptable creatures.  Having the proverbial "Peace Corps experience" is worth the fight it takes to get there.  And perhaps most importantly, Peace Corps is a trade-off.  A give and take.  Jump through your fair share of bureaucratic hoops, give up a great deal of your freedom/individuality, become a number/statistic, be Flexible, Enthusiastic, and Patient and in return what do you get?  You get the amazing opportunity to immerse yourself in a culture on the government dime, gain valuable ground-level job experience and work skills, and be able to identify yourself with a reputable organization that has been positively changing the developing world for 50 years.  This, all while knowing you have the world's best healthcare and security to fall back on if you need them.  Oh, and 24 vacation days a year?  It's hard to beat that in the U.S. job-industry.

In a few words, I can't complain.  I mean I can complain, but I really shouldn't.  Because I'm really very lucky to be where I'm at, and life is good.

Estela

Photo courtesy of Jareau Hall

Host country counterparts.  They can make or break your service.  Without them, forget about getting anything done.  As volunteers, we are change agents; we're here to act as catalysts for the changes that host country nationals already envision for themselves.  Without HCNs, the idea of sustainability is lost.  Unfortunately, however, I've found that many of my counterparts that I was assigned to work with are little more than totally useless.  That's not to say they're anything but extremely hard-working, smart, and capable people.  But despite these facts, they simply don't possess the time, desire, or commitment (or perhaps combination of the three) to work with me and get things done.  As a PCV in a community of thousands of Guatemalans, I have to choose my battles.  If Director X, after several meetings in which I've thrown out ideas, resources, and advice, still can't find the time to get the school's library up and running (despite the 200+ donated books graciously secured by previous volunteers rotting in boxes beside her desk), why should I keep trying?  I'm not going to waste my time pulling teeth when I could be better focusing my attention on projects that may as well be driving themselves. 

I've met two individuals in my time here, neither of whom were in that list of people assigned to me by Peace Corps, who have made my work here so enjoyable, so easy, and so rewarding, that I often find myself resisting the urge to bear-hug them.

Estela Xi Cul.  She started off as the translator and coordinator for the Tz'ib'al women's group.  She has since become my good friend, go-to person, and personal idol.  As a poor indigenous Guatemalan woman, Estella represents a most-inspiring anomaly.  She's ballsy, sarcastic, a go-getter, and a natural leader.  Somehow between tending her store and taking care of her three children and husband she manages to play the role of community leader without, of course, being acknowledged as such by anybody besides myself.  If I have a problem, no matter how complicated, she will solve it.  For example:

One of the women from the women's group stopped by my house and invited me over for the following day.  I must have been distracted with something because I accepted her invite without getting the woman's name or house location (there are 38 women in the women's group..I unfortunately still don't know all of them).  So the following day I go up to Estella's house and tell her "Estella, I know this is a bit weird, but one of the women from the group invited me to her house today and I don't know where it is.  I don't know her name either."  After laughing at me for a minute or two, she broke into problem-solving mode, and within 30 minutes of investigation (in a village sans cell phone service, I would like to point out), had walked me over to Doña Carmen's house just in time for lunch. 

Or take last week.  On Monday, the day after Nola died, I was up in Tzibal meeting with the woman about a sand purchase we were making for the pilas.  Estela managed to be the first and only person to immediately understand the implications of Nola's death for me.  At the beginning of the meeting Estela interrupted the women's typically giggly gossip (I had just announced why Nola wasn't with me) and scolded the women for being insensitive about my dog's death.  From what I understood from her Q'eqchi' tirade, it went a little something like this: "To Gringos, dogs are like children.  That's why Seño Hannah was always carrying the dog around like a baby, and bathing her, and giving her filtered water.  She was a good mother to that dog.  Therefore you all need to be sensitive and nice to the Seño, because she is obviously very sad.  Do you want to make her cry?  You shouldn't bring it up for a while because it will make her sad.  The dog was her company, she is here living on her own, all alone, especially since Yaro's left.  You need to be her friends now."  After the meeting she made me stay over for lunch during which she told me she understood I must be sad, just like she was sad about her oldest son (who two weeks previously had fallen into a large pot of boiling water and just returned home after 15 days in the Coban hospital burn-unit).  "Bad things happen to us, and nobody knows why…it's hard being a parent because things happen to your children just like with my son and your dog.  That's why you're sad, isn't it."  "Even though Nola was your compania here, I'm your friend so you're not really alone.  Now here, eat another tortilla." 

She's such a kick-ass woman.  Because take away the indigenous dress, the dirt-floor house, the language barrier, and stick Estela in corporate America, and she'd still kick ass.  I'm sure of it.

Dear Mom

Happy birthday Mom!  I ate a piece of cheesecake in Coban for you.  It was delicious. 

Enjoy your day!

Love,
H

Dear Bridget

Bridge!

Feliz cumpleaños a ti! 
Enjoy your day, girl.

xoxo,
H

Rest in peace, Nola

"Be strong, Hannah. This is part of what it is to be a human being," my neighbor and friend Olga assured me as I wrapped Nola in a sheet and handed her to the man who, for 10 quetzales, was to go and bury her.  To a Guatemalan, my crying over a dog is hard to understand.  Dogs die here everyday.  What's more, people die here everyday.  Death is a part of life here, and people treat it as such.  Things happen, puppies get sick and die.  It's all just a part of life.  Even Dillon, Olga's 4 year-old son, who for the past two weeks has shown up at my house daily to play will Nola, didn't shed a tear.  He just quietly asked me if I could lift the sheet so he could see her face.

When I arrived home from a meeting in Coban yesterday, I found Nola curled up in her usual spot on my stairs in a pool of bloody vomit.  In a few short hours she had gone from being a happy, energetic, spunky little puppy to an anorexic and non-responsive one.  It being market day, I rushed her over to the Agroferia where Jaime, the veterinarian, could take a look at her.  He told me it could be parasites, hepatitis, parvo virus, or that she could have swallowed a tooth or bone.  He sold me canine antidiarrheal and gave her an antibiotic shot in case of hepatitis.  He told me he could bring more antibiotics within 15 days.  I took her home, and as the hours past she got worse and worse.  I've never felt more helpless...all I could do was to make her comfortable, try to force fluids down her throat, and wait.  By morning, less than 24 hours after her first symptoms, she died quietly on my floor, most likely from extreme dehydration. 

Nola's death has been one of the true tragedies of my experience here.  Not only because she was my pet, my companion, and my first puppy, but because she represents so many other chucho puppies that suffer and die similarly miserable deaths in this country.  And I couldn't save even one. 

Nola, I will miss you.