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.