My Site Assignment

About two weeks ago, I moved into my home for the next two years (hopefully) in the western highlands of the country.

What’s it like? Well, for one, it’s cold. Probably not exactly what you were thinking Guatemala would be like, right? But I am at over 8,000 feet elevation, which accounts for the cold. The site also has the unfortunate situation that at least during the rainy season, the fog from the coast rolls in around 11:00 am and it gets cold and wet quite fast. The rainy season is ending, but the coldest months are ahead, so we’ll see…it’s time to aguantar (withstand it).

Also, it’s Ladino (that is, mestizo or what you would normally think of as Latino). It was a surprise to me, after my positive experience in a Mayan town in training, to be placed in a Ladino site. I thought that I would do better than some other volunteers in the very conservative society that is much of indigenous Guatemala. But fate, God or my APCD (or maybe they’re all the same) had it planned that I go to a Ladino site. It was a huge culture shock especially, after months of just seeing traditional corte, or ankle-length skirts, to have my Women’s Office director show up to the Peace Corps office in high heels and some pretty darn tight pants. A big, but easy change from the light forearm pat to greet women to the kiss on the cheek. Riding around with teenage boys now entails some catcalling and a lot of hilarious attempts to ask for girls’ numbers. I’ve had to make some adjustments, but generally they’re easier ones to make – Ladino culture is in general more similar to U.S. culture than Mayan culture is, though the differences can definitely be exaggerated – everybody is Guatemalan, everybody eats tortillas and beans, and everybody is really some kind of mix between indigenous blood and European blood. The easiest adjustment of all was the non-adjustment: that is, not having to learn a Mayan language. Some Volunteers are very excited about learning their Kek’chi, Q’iche, or Mam, but I have to say that speaking Spanish is just fine by me. I can’t imagine how lonely I would feel if I couldn’t communicate with the people at all.

I work in the municipalidad (muni for short, it means city hall) of my municipio (municipality, although it might help you more to think of it as a county with lots of separated, smaller communities within it) with three offices at once: the OMP (Municipal Planning Office), OMM (Municipal Women’s Office), and UDEM (Municipal Economic Development Unit). My OMP consists of two young guys: a coordinator (21 yrs. old) and a technician (21 yrs. old). The OMM is actually vacant; the coordinator I mentioned earlier actually stopped working there the day I arrived. And the UDEM is one woman (25 yrs. old). We’re small and inexperienced, but are a fun team together, and our all being about the same age helps quite a bit. I would definitely say that I am getting to be pretty decent friends with all three.

Up until now, work has actually been quite busy. Four things have been happening:

1. Our current city hall is old as crap and pretty dingy. Also, I don’t really have any space to work. So it’s getting demolished and a new one will be built in its place over the next year. This means a lot of packing stuff up and moving it. Hooray for manual labor! One of my most fun and challenging activities so far was buying boxes to pack stuff in for the move. In Guatemala, you don’t go to Kinko’s and order yourself up a whole bunch of boxes. Instead, you go to all the market vendors and ask them if they have any empty boxes of plastic cups, eggs, Corn Flakes, margarine, etc. that they don’t plan on using and you negotiate yourself a price. Then you take your numerous cardboard boxes and haul them around the city until you can get them on the bus back home. In a certain way, it definitely was fun.
2. As I mentioned, city hall is going bye-bye. But there was a controversy as to where the new city hall should be built. Some said that it should be constructed such that the central plaza could be made larger so that it could hold town gatherings. However, the mayor and city council had already submitted the plans and received approval to build the new city hall on the same grounds as the old one. In an interesting meeting, the two sides debated it out and the mayor and his supporters won, although there were some allegations that the mayor had recruited his supporters from the outlying communities to come to the meeting and drown out the opposition. In any case, my opinion as an urban studies major (which translated into Spanish means much more like urban planning or urban designer) was solicited by my OMP coordinator on my very first morning on the job. (Not that I was able to voice it.) Then in the afternoon, I elaborated a ridiculously fast 3-hour urban design of the central park taking into account the assembly’s decision to build the new muni on the site of the old one. Again, the tough part has been getting the authorities to pay attention to it and get behind it.
3. I believe I described before that Guatemala has a very progressive system of community councils that supposedly identify and formulate projects that they consider important. These groups are called COCODES at the community (neighborhood, village) level and COMUDES at the municipal level. Working with each of these groups is the main focus of my OMP work. The COCODES have to be re-elected every two years, and the time has come to reelect them before Christmas. So we’re working hard to hold 17 community assemblies in the five weeks before Christmas, teaching them about the function of the COCODE and holding elections to form them. Eek!
4. Unfortunately, there have been some personal problems between a city councilman and a member of my host family which erupted into a fistfight last week. Some people think that it has to do with the controversy about the new muni building, but it actually wasn't. This has put me in an awkward position in the muni, but I’m trying hard to stay out of the drama and cultivate relationships with the city councilmen.

That’s the update on life. Exciting to be a real Peace Corps Volunteer, starting to cultivate the relationships that count for real!