Friday, August 21, 2009

The Adventures of Don Juan Casanova Burns

Well, that last post was a little sad and depressing so I am going to write now about some of the happier aspects of my first week in Guatemala and at the training site. Such as, I am the hottest thing to come through this town in some time.

OK, I’m going to back up and tell you a little bit about the town and its culture. For security reasons, I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but it is a town of about 5,000 to 10,000 mostly Mayan/indigenous people. This is a small town. There are, as far as I know, only two restaurants in the whole place. Still, it feels urban because of its relatively narrow streets and robust street life and pedestrian activity. Also, there have to be easily 100 corner stores (of which our house is one). Combine the small size with the highly-used social spaces of the plaza, street, corner stores, tortilla makers and the bus and this means that everybody knows everything about everybody and gossip spreads ridiculously fast. One morning, I decided to help out selling bread in the corner store before I went to class. About 15 minutes after I started, a classmate came to the store on her way to class. She said, “Oh, I heard you were working this morning so I decided to stop by.” Apparently, news had already spread that the gringo was selling bread and had reached her house, which is about 5 minutes away, before she left. As I said, news travels fast in this town and your business is everybody’s business.

Guatemala is a conservative country, rural and indigenous areas even more so. This manifests itself in a lot of ways with respect to gender relations. Generally, single men and women don’t just go walking around town in pairs. Combine this with what I said earlier about gossip, and what that practically means is this: if you walk around town with a girl, within a day everybody in town will think that you and said girl are novios (boyfriend and girlfriend) and treat it as accepted fact. Having a novia when you’re as old as I am (22) is a serious thing, too; there aren’t so many men and there certainly aren’t many women my age who are not married yet. There is an important caveat, I think, and that is that if I walk with a gringa classmate, it should be OK because everybody knows that gringos do weird things. But do that with a girl from the town, and I think we would have an item on our hands.

So you can imagine the dilemma that I felt when I got repeatedly asked out by girls to pasear, or go for a walk. It might be fun to get to know them. But having a novia after a week in town isn’t necessarily the best plan. Especially for a town where I will only live until the end of October. And if it doesn’t go anywhere, everyone will know. And will that hinder my ability to work in town and integrate into the culture? Probably there is some culturally appropriate way to proceed, but I have no idea what that is. And in any case, it seems like the cultural boundaries are being stretched anyway – it isn’t common for a girl to straight-up ask a man out. It’s a complicated situation.

There is also the question of, “How much can I really have in common with a person with only a sixth-grade education?” Women’s education levels vary a lot, but that seems to be about the level that a lot of women I meet have (or less). Over my time in Peace Corps, I certainly hope to be surprised with more positive responses to that question, but for now it remains open. We all know how enamored I am of the world of ideas and intellectualism.

These are all dilemmas I’m going to have to sort out pretty soon, but as for now it’s pretty cool to be the town heartthrob and celebrity. Also, it’s pretty cool that by doing something as simple as selling bread, I can meet lots of people and get to know the community in a fun way. There’s no dilemma there; I’m going to keep doing that for some time.

Darn! Living in a Third World Country is Hard

I’ve been here in Guatemala for nine days now, but it feels like a few months in some ways. There’s something about changing your setting so drastically that makes the experiences you had just a few days or weeks ago seem very distant.

Not that I haven’t tried to recreate those experiences from Los Angeles or Las Vegas, though. It might seem like a no-brainer to you, but I’ve been surprised at how hard it has been to live here without the physical comforts of the U.S. I thought that I would be much more challenged emotionally than physically (although I am still only about 1% into my time here, so how can I really say anything?). To be sure, one of the values I am working on cultivating is independence from material and physical pleasures. I’m just learning that that’s going to be hard.
When we first arrived in Guatemala, we stayed for a couple days with introductory families near the Peace Corps office. I stayed with a pretty rich one, as far as Guatemala goes. That wasn’t too hard. But then I moved to the training town where I’ll be living until the end of October. I’m by no stretch of the imagination living with a poor family (again by Guatemalan standards, remember that international agencies say that 80% of the country lives in poverty and 66% in extreme poverty). The family owns a bakery and corner store, both of which are part of the house. They employ eight people in this work. I have electricity and running water (even a shower!). I have the luxury of living in a house with a concrete roof. Most houses have corrugated tin roofs, which can make quite a symphony in rain. Per Peace Corps regulations, I’ve been given my own room. But even this plush living situation did me in.

I’ve always prided myself on being able to eat anything. My motto has always been, “I’m going to eat it, and then you can tell me what was in it.” Well, on Saturday night, my first night in the town, my host family gave me an innocent-looking tamale which they had received as a gift from another family. I ate it and then had a great discussion with my host mother and one of the girls that works in the story until late at night. (Note: this post is about to get a little gross. I apologize in advance, but this is the stuff of Peace Corps.) Everything seemed great until about 3:30 am, when I awoke with a bad case of diarrhea. I tried to go back to sleep, but I would be consistently woken by ever-worsening episodes of the aforementioned condition. At about 4:55 came the worst episode of all, punctuated by a couple of bad vomits. In the middle of this episode, promptly at 5:00, some very loud music started playing right outside. A man was playing keyboard, singing praise songs and speaking voiceovers proclaiming our great privilege to be able to worship God. He also proclaimed God’s deliverance of people from their jails, from the things that bind them in this world. I later found out that the sound was coming from the speakers that hang on top of the town’s Catholic church. Sitting inside the shower (because that’s where the toilet is, there isn’t a bathroom), I couldn’t tell if the song rang hollow or was perfectly placed and reassuring. One thing that’s for sure is that it made the whole scene seem completely surreal. And there I had my first thought that Peace Corps just might be too hard for me. Our training director had told us that we would have moments, perhaps many, in which we would want to pack up, call it quits and go home. As many as 1/3 of people that make it to Washington, D.C. do leave before their time is up.

In any case, after the song, I did get better. I stumbled around for a while in the house trying to find some purified water to ward off dehydration and eventually got it. For the rest of the day, though, I remained without energy, with head and stomachaches, and with some lingering diarrhea. The people around me prescribed all sorts of remedies, none of which seemed like the “take some medicine with a corporate pharmaceutical-sounding name” remedy that I have been used to in the United States. Many of them were really useful. None of them were like other remedies which you hear about across the world which have to do with curses and witches and such. The weirdest I got was, “Get up early, those who get up before dawn usually live to be 100.” I’m not trying to bag on these beliefs, but when you are sick all you want is the comfortable. So eventually I did take my Peace Corps-provided American medicines. I couldn’t, however, take that long, luxurious hot shower which all of a sudden now became a memory from America that was firmly implanted in my mind. Since then, I’ve been kind of sick on and off with gastrointestinal issues. It’s going to take a little while for my stomach to get used to the new conditions of food in Guatemala.

One remedy that my host family insisted on (and which I didn’t follow much) was to stop being sad and instead start laughing. At night, once I felt better, I had a long conversation with my host mother and one of the shopworkers, and I found out that they are incredibly sarcastic and funny people who are always laughing. I also found out that they each work from 4 am to 10 pm six days a week and hardly ever sleep. How could this be? How could they be the ones laughing and I be the sad one? Even though I think my sickness was a good excuse to be sad, I think they had a great lesson there for me. A 108-hour work week to live in conditions worse than 99% of Americans, and they find so much to laugh at in life. It is really impressive. The patience I have seen from the people of this country is just incredible. One woman was stitching a traditional cloth that would take several months of 6 am to 6 pm days to finish. I have a lot to learn.

I have a lot to learn because Peace Corps is hard. So said our training director, and between the sickness, the work that our Municipal Development training coordinators are giving us, and the book I’m reading, I am realizing this in a fuller sense than I could have before I got here. A word about the book: it is called Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen and it is the inspiration for the title of this blog. To me, the title carries both the meanings of “the poor, living” (in the flesh, as opposed to abstract; also, surviving, creating, enjoying, defeating the odds) and of “I am living without money.” The book is considered by many to be the best description of the Peace Corps experience; however, it is from the late 1960’s so it is a bit dated. If I can make it, this is the kind of experience that should form me well.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Setting Up Me

Well hello and welcome to my blog. It means a lot to me that you are visiting this blog. Little did you know that by doing this you are in fact helping me achieve one of the three goals of the Peace Corps - to help Americans develop a better understanding of foreign people and cultures. In return for your generosity, I´ll try to thank you by keeping this blog interesting. I´ll try to focus on ideas, impressions and relationships rather than the minutiae of my day-to-day schedule (which at times will be rather boring). Hopefully then, you can accompany me in the project of cultural exchange and interaction which I am on even if you can´t be on the ground helping people here in this beautiful country of Guatemala.

I want to set out for you some of my personal goals for the 27 months that I will be "living poor," as well as encountering the "living poor" in the rural communities in Guatemala.
Goals:
1. To become the person I want to be. I have several ways of expressing this: to live out my convictions (thus the title "living poor" - this in opposition to the "abstract poor" which I´ve studied to death at Brown. Now I can be meeting with real people and experiencing real life, interacting with humans instead of with theories), to follow the example of Jesus as best I can in my life, or to develop and practice certain values in my life.
I made a list of some of these values. You are all welcome to ask me to make sure that I am cultivating these values.
a. From accomplishment-focused to "being"-focused
b. From dependence on material and physical pleasures to independence from them
c. From idea- and task-focused to relationship-focused
d. From independence to dependence on God
e. From self-centered to other-centered, to compassion
f. Patience

2. To become a part of my community. I could write so much on this, but my internet cafe time is running out. Suffice it to say that this is a requirement of liberation theology and Christianity in general, to be incarnational - that is, enter in to the same reality of those that you are trying to help. We don´t help with paternalism from a comfortable distance but rather through proximity establish trust and a sense of brotherhood with others. We follow the example of Jesus who mucked it up with regular working folks and even outcasts of his community. Not to mention that this goal is the biggest feature of the Peace Corps´ methodology, essential to success in other areas, and something which the Peace Corps trains you well to do.

3. To help out the town at my site. Much more to come on this later. I´ll be putting a lot of energy toward helping out in whatever way I can, of course, but I am also trying to be realistic about what I can really accomplish. It is likely that whatever I am actually able to do will come in the second year of service, so I won´t expect much from the beginning of service.

Well, I am in the town of the Peace Corps office and am at day 2 of living in Guatemala. Many days lie ahead, but I hope that these goals to guide them! Again, thanks for reading. Feel free to comment or hold discussions. Like I said, you are a part of this Peace Corps mission.