So Hot

Somewhere around 11am on saturday, I realized this would be one of the longest weekends of my life. This surprised me, because a wednesday night full of Stanley Kubrick films, folk music and beers, followed by a thursday morning full of deciding how best to translate a run-on sentence from Spanish to English (do I preserve the original run-on-ness, or my loyalty to the English language?) had convinced me that I was almost done with one of the longest weeks of my life.

So I slept in Saturday morning, arising at a luxurious 8:30am, and stepped out my door to greet the weekend. I had slept through breakfast, so I slathered peanut butter and honey on some tortillas. Thus fortified, I decided I would swim across the lake to Flores. I'm not big fan of swimming long distances, so I took my time, and it was wonderful. There's nothing like floating (almost) effortlessly in the middle of a lake, watching one lazy cloud hover above you. By the time I got to Flores, it was hot and I was a little tired. I caught a lancha back to San Miguel do get some reading done.

And so, at 11am I found myself sprawled in my hammock, a sweaty hand drooping over the edge to drop my dimestore Nostromo paperback to the floor. It was 39 degrees Celsius and still. For those of you not on board with the whole Celsius thing, that's outrageously hot. I melted in my hammock for a while, praying for a breeze, and then jumped back in the lake. Simply because it took a lot of time, and didn't involve sweating, I swam back to Flores. After 15 minutes of baking on the dock, having failed to finish my coconut ice before it melted all over my hands, I headed back. As I approached the San Miguel shore, I saw that my entire family had taken to the water in all manner of floatation devices. There was an alligator, an elephant, a dolphin, and a wedge of styrofoam. Happy to not be sweating, we all floated in the middle until, exhausted by treading, I had to return to shore.

Even the pig was hot.

The heat continued into sunday (and now that I've checked the weather, promises to continue all week). There was a family reunion in San Benito that afternoon, and I had been invited along with my family. I'll never pass up a chance to see how different places party, so I was onboard. We took a lancha around Flores to the opposite shore, and all the ladies did their nails on the way over.

After a short walk, we arrived at the field. There were two huge tents covering tables, an auxiliary grilling tent, and a stage, equipped with imposing speakers. I was pleased to see that I recognized many people seated in our immediate vicinity. We were a minority of the 200+ guestlist, but I had people to chat with and ask questions. The grilling tent began to expel prodigious amounts of carne, tortillas and cervezas. I hadn't seen anyone in my family drink yet, but they follow the Guatemalan tradition of drinking heavily when they do. I passed a table with 6 guys and around 50 empty beer bottles.

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Half of the speaker array - and there were girls dancing on tables as well!

The band cranked the speakers up to "non-consensual", and took it (and my hearing) away. There was dancing and cheering and periodic speeches. The band ran through their traditional set and started playing looney-tunes songs and other bits of americana. My favorite was their straight-count version of "In the Mood", played without any hint of a swing beat. At one point, they blew the power, and for a blessed 3 minutes they were playing at normal dinner-music levels, but some clever mechanic got the generator up and running again, and I headed for the grill tent.

The Tun family getting down and my Iraqi friend at the grill.

Walking around with my camera gave people an explanation as to why a gringo was wandering around this family gathering. There were several people who had been hired to record the event (one had a full-sized TV camera!), and I think they just assumed I was part of the film crew. At one point I was called over to the grill to take a picture of an uncle and the chefs, and we started chatting. All three of the chefs were Middle Eastern, from Iraq, Syria and Jordan. They were less interested in discussing any of the geopolitics that interest me than in getting me to have another beer, and try this slice of meat. Since everything else I'd had from their grill had been delicious, I took it, bit into it, and then noticed they were all looking at me. "What is it?" I asked, resisting the urge to spit it out. "Finish it" they responded. "Riiiight... no I'd rather know what it is right now". They were all eating it as well, so I figured it was something traditional (re: not poisonous) they expected would shock the sheltered pallet of an American. Willing to play the game, I took another bite, and tried to guess what it was. It had a weird gamey flavor that was vaguely familiar, which was very odd, since I've never (to my knowledge) tried grilled horse penis before. I try to accept potentially weird new foods for what they taste like, not where they come from, and though this honestly didn't taste bad, my stomach did a quick turn when they told me what it was, and I ditched the rest of it as soon as I left the tent. At least they gave me a fresh beer to wash it down with...

Grilled slice of horse dong.

The ProPetén Foundation

Liza Grandia, one of my professors of international Development at Clark, gave a talk on the history of the ProPetén Foundation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars a few weeks ago. It's a quick summary of the organization's objectives and origins, for those who might be interested.



I'm busy this week, just got back to work after a lovely spring break climbing pyramids and volcanoes with this great girl who came all the way down to Guatemala to hang out with me.

Old news and last week's pictures

First, the old news. Last spring, while I was traveling in Europe, I caught sight of a newspaper headline featuring Guatemala. The picture on the front was so outlandishly spectacular that I assumed that this was a Flemish tabloid, and that if I opened it, I would find pictures of batboy. Since I can't make heads or tails of Flemish, I walked past.

I found that picture today - and it's not a fake story. In 2010 a huge sinkhole opened up in Guatemala city, in the aftermath of Hurricane Agatha.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/01/guatemala-sinkhole-is-mas_n_595877.html

Northern Guatemala's limestone base makes sinkholes, or cenotes, common geological features of the forest. I haven't seen any yet, but I'm hoping if I make a trek to one of the Mayan sites we'll come across some. Guatemala city, where this monster formed in 2010 has no limestone base. Instead, the area is riddled with volcanos, and the buildup of ash over the centuries creates a similar situation where water-saturated pockets can collapse.

It looks like something out of an alien movie, where they shoot lasers into the earth to unleash volcanoes or something.

The pictures I'm putting up today are from last week, when I drove to Sayaxche to visit a community where we've run a chile farming project. The Chiles weren't dong very well in most of the fields, and I spent a lot of time taking pictures of the various problems and ailments the plants demonstrated. On the way to one of the fields, we crossed the stream where the locals bath and wash their clothing. We're in the dry season here, so it was predictably low, but the grey water was particularly unappealing.

The surrounding forest was strewn with bags of the chlorox they use to wash their clothing in the stream, and the water was clearly poisoned beyond use. The real fun came when we sat down to lunch with some of the community leaders. When three representatives of the community development organization that has been helping out communities for the past 18 years comes to lunch, the conversation topic most often brought up is what this community needs. Over and over again, they brushed aside their difficulties with the chiles, and the remarkable poverty this town lives in, and focused on water. They need it. During the wet season, their wells fill up, but now that it's getting dry, only one well still provides water. During the summer, they have to buy water from other towns, an hour's walk. Unfortunately the solution they were proposing was to get access to a river flowing just a short walk across the border of a national park. While it was close, and could provide the water the community needed, one look at the bleached stream they already had access to was all we needed to shoot down that idea, and express just how strongly we felt about them crossing into the park.

We discussed the placement of the wells, and the effect access to water would have on the chiles and on the families' budgets. We proposed the idea of tanks to collect and store water, which other communities have used to great effect. There's an organization solely dedicated to water needs in Petén, which helps communities obtain and install these tanks. Unfortunately, this community isn't well organized enough to win a project. It's not effective or fair to start a water project in a community if everyone who will benefit isn't ready to contribute. They're working on the organization factor - they worked with ProPetén's World Bank Economic Diversification project (where they got the chiles), and I remember the wrap-up meeting for that project. The representatives came dressed in traditional Q'eqchí garb and it was their first project working with any sort of organization. They might have a lot of work to do, but hopefully they'll get there.

Mi Vida en la Posada San Miguel

I’ve been to a lot of birthday parties in the past two weeks. Marta (the matron of my hotel home), then Leslie (the office secretary) and this weekend, two of Marta’s grandsons. I’ve gotten pretty good at “happy birthday” in Spanish. Their version is actually pretty similar to ours (some even sing it in English – one of the weirdest cultural importations I’ve ever seen), except that they add another verse. This verse is my favorite, because it goes “Ya queremos pastel! Ya queremos pastel!” which is best translated as “we want cake already!”. Guatemalans have some pretty solid birthday traditions - both in the sense that I approve of them, and that they stick to the tradition pretty closely.

The birthday starts at about 5:00am, with a round or two of fireworks. If you’ve never been woken up by explosions, there is no comparable experience. Nothing is less pleasant or more likely to send your recently-relaxed body into adrenaline-pumping terror-response mode. I’ve experienced this on three separate mornings, and each time I instinctively jammed my head under my pillow, not yet awake enough to register anything but fear. It’s a hell of a way to start your day.

After that, things get better. They have a family party in the evening, with their entire family. In a culture where 10 kids is not uncommon, families are large. Marta bakes cakes, (along with selling cheese, dispensing free medical advice, cooking, running a hotel, remodeling said hotel, to keep herself busy since she retired from the hospital, selling cosmetics, and selling gold), and the day before the kitchen is full of huge golden rectangles of delicious-smelling cake – enough to feed the army of relatives. The traditional birthday dinner is tamales. Marta also explained how they’re very easy to make for hordes of people. Incidentally, they’re also delicious. Combined with the Monterey Jack cheese some blessed soul in Wisconsin decided to export down here, they are perfect. This was the first real cheese I’ve found in this country, the first real cheese I’ve eaten in the past two months. Glorious.

In accordance with their song, the cake comes out with dinner, not after, and then it’s piñata time. Christian’s birthday (he turned two) this weekend had three piñatas, Buzz Lightyear, Woody and Jesse. By the end, the three looked like victims of a zombie attack – newspaper entrails falling out of candy-less guts, limbs torn off… the scramble for candy was pretty intense – I myself was caught up, reaching for sweets and lollipops in a competitive atmosphere that resulted in a 60-year-old aunt snatching a lollipop from my grasp, something we both laughed about afterwards, but in the moment – woah, was she playing to win.

It’s been nice, being involved with the family that lives in and around this hotel (I realized at the parties just how many of the neighbors are family). Getting to know Marta and Oscar has been an experience. They’re both Puro Maya, pure Maya. Not Q’eqchí either (one of Guatemala’s largest indigenous population, and the one that’s migrating from the south up into Petén), they’re Maya Itzá, descendents of the original inhabitants of Flores, and Lake Petén Itzá, and they’re obviously proud of that. Oscar is very laid back. He runs his boat to Flores a few times a day, bringing passengers if there are any, he fishes, and he directs the work crews remodeling the left side of the hotel. He worked for ten years bringing archeological teams to Mayan sites deep in the jungle, and know lots of stories and myths.

Marta runs the hotel and deals with all of her relatives, and tells me just what is wrong with everything in the world. She’s serious, but good natured enough that it’s not annoying. Once she realized I was actually interested in how she cooked things, and why she did things a certain way, she started explaining everything. The fish she made for dinner is good because of all the vitamins she knows it has, and she makes sure not to add any of the processed seasoning – only onions and tomatoes go into her broth, and so forth. She’ll explain why she does something, why it’s better, and why the gente (the people) don’t do it the way she does. The gente are her constant foil, and they seem to include just about anyone who isn’t Puro Maya. The Ladinos living in Petén, the Q’eqchí immigrants, the people in the towns, the people in the country… really anyone. The gente generally don’t do things the way they should be done because they’re uneducated, or they’re lazy and don’t like to work, or they just don’t know how things should be done. To say she’s prejudiced is only fair, but it’s also fair to say that she’s at least half right. A lot of the things she does – avoiding unhealthy expensive processed foods, preferring the home-made and natural, making use of natural resources and her own medical training to take care of those around her, and her sense of the sort of work it takes to get by in this world are admirable, and the situation in Petén would be better if more people were like here. The gente, though, she could give them a rest.