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.