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!
Showing posts with label sites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sites. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Field-Based Training
This past week we Municipal Development Trainees visited northwest Guatemala for our Field-Based Training. This was an opportunity for us to go out and see current Municipal Development Volunteers to find out what kinds of things they are doing, what successes and failures they’ve had, and what their lives are like. It was also a big opportunity for all of us Trainees and our Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) to get to know each other better. Our APCD is the one who places us in our various sites, so it’s important to get to know him so that he’ll be able to place us in a place that’s comfortable for us with coworkers that we can get along with and a job that matches our skills.
We visited five Volunteers’ sites and passed through another one. Though they’re located in the same part of the country, they are all very different. They ranged from very hot to pretty cold, almost exclusively Ladino to a famous Mayan town, Todos Santos Cuchumatanes, which is the only town in the country where men still wear traditional dress. By the way, their traditional shirt and pants are awesome – I can see why they wear it there. If I lived there, I would definitely try to wear them too. Some of the sites were quite developed, communities with lots of remittance money or close to cities that generate jobs, and one was 5 hours from the nearest city, accessible only by very windy dirt roads, where you couldn’t buy purified water. Generally, though, living conditions were pretty nice. One volunteer even had an apartment that would be considered modern and good in America. The term “Posh Corps” is sometimes applied to places like Eastern Europe, where Volunteers live pretty well. The volunteers’ living arrangements weren’t Posh Corps (except for that one, maybe) but they were a far cry from the living in a hut without any kind of water or electricity that the name Peace Corps conjures. We Muni volunteers have it easier than others, too. We work in municipal offices, so we have to live in the municipal cabeceras, as they are called. Guatemalan municipalities are really more like American counties than cities (at least if you are from the West Coast, in New England there exist “towns” that are more like these municipalities) in that they cover large swaths of land and there are a number of distinct communities within them. Generally there is one large town, the cabecera, which is the municipal seat, and a bunch of aldeas, or villages up to three hours away from the cabecera. Volunteers in other programs, especially agricultural ones, often work and live in aldeas, which are generally poorer and more indigenous than the cabeceras. They also have many fewer amenities, generally.
Some of the more interesting projects we’ve heard about: starting a radio station and/or hosting a municipal radio show, building a library or getting it stocked with books, painting maps of the world/country/department/municipality on blank walls, improving municipal grant-writing, a million different types of trainings and guidance for women’s groups and community development councils, budgeting issues, conducting a census, doing serious GIS analysis in order to inform municipal decision-making and strengthen their project proposals.
The guessing game about who goes to what site has begun in earnest. Our APCD was always dropping hints and asking questions about what kinds of things we liked/didn’t like: hot/cold, Ladino/Maya, first volunteer in a site/second/third, women’s office/planning office, close to Antigua/close to a city/isolated, community participation work/planning office type work, etc. All of these questions and hints which were given out to some trainees pretty much put us into a frenzy toward the end of the week. Unfortunately, we won’t know anything more until October 8th, when they announce the sites where we’ll be placed.
This week we got to do a lot of the bonding which we would’ve done had we had the old setup of training – everybody lives in the capital city and meets up every day for class. That was nice. It was especially nice for me to spend more time with men, since I’m in a training site with only women and often times I spend more time with women anyway. I think we’ll have to wait to see where we are all placed until I find out who my closest friends are going to be, but now I have a much better base with a lot of the training class (and some of the current volunteers). Our hang out time was very American, going out to eat tacos, Domino’s, fried chicken, cake, etc. We even got to have some beers which is a luxury seldom afforded here, and got to dance in a bar once. Hooray for getting to have a little American bubble.
We visited five Volunteers’ sites and passed through another one. Though they’re located in the same part of the country, they are all very different. They ranged from very hot to pretty cold, almost exclusively Ladino to a famous Mayan town, Todos Santos Cuchumatanes, which is the only town in the country where men still wear traditional dress. By the way, their traditional shirt and pants are awesome – I can see why they wear it there. If I lived there, I would definitely try to wear them too. Some of the sites were quite developed, communities with lots of remittance money or close to cities that generate jobs, and one was 5 hours from the nearest city, accessible only by very windy dirt roads, where you couldn’t buy purified water. Generally, though, living conditions were pretty nice. One volunteer even had an apartment that would be considered modern and good in America. The term “Posh Corps” is sometimes applied to places like Eastern Europe, where Volunteers live pretty well. The volunteers’ living arrangements weren’t Posh Corps (except for that one, maybe) but they were a far cry from the living in a hut without any kind of water or electricity that the name Peace Corps conjures. We Muni volunteers have it easier than others, too. We work in municipal offices, so we have to live in the municipal cabeceras, as they are called. Guatemalan municipalities are really more like American counties than cities (at least if you are from the West Coast, in New England there exist “towns” that are more like these municipalities) in that they cover large swaths of land and there are a number of distinct communities within them. Generally there is one large town, the cabecera, which is the municipal seat, and a bunch of aldeas, or villages up to three hours away from the cabecera. Volunteers in other programs, especially agricultural ones, often work and live in aldeas, which are generally poorer and more indigenous than the cabeceras. They also have many fewer amenities, generally.
Some of the more interesting projects we’ve heard about: starting a radio station and/or hosting a municipal radio show, building a library or getting it stocked with books, painting maps of the world/country/department/municipality on blank walls, improving municipal grant-writing, a million different types of trainings and guidance for women’s groups and community development councils, budgeting issues, conducting a census, doing serious GIS analysis in order to inform municipal decision-making and strengthen their project proposals.
The guessing game about who goes to what site has begun in earnest. Our APCD was always dropping hints and asking questions about what kinds of things we liked/didn’t like: hot/cold, Ladino/Maya, first volunteer in a site/second/third, women’s office/planning office, close to Antigua/close to a city/isolated, community participation work/planning office type work, etc. All of these questions and hints which were given out to some trainees pretty much put us into a frenzy toward the end of the week. Unfortunately, we won’t know anything more until October 8th, when they announce the sites where we’ll be placed.
This week we got to do a lot of the bonding which we would’ve done had we had the old setup of training – everybody lives in the capital city and meets up every day for class. That was nice. It was especially nice for me to spend more time with men, since I’m in a training site with only women and often times I spend more time with women anyway. I think we’ll have to wait to see where we are all placed until I find out who my closest friends are going to be, but now I have a much better base with a lot of the training class (and some of the current volunteers). Our hang out time was very American, going out to eat tacos, Domino’s, fried chicken, cake, etc. We even got to have some beers which is a luxury seldom afforded here, and got to dance in a bar once. Hooray for getting to have a little American bubble.
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