what decade am i in?

A word here about lynchings:

Vigilante justice is the most common and to be truthful, probably the most effective, form of castigating criminals in Guatemala.  Especially in very rural areas like mine, where there is not a police station for miles around, when someone steals, kills, rapes, extorts, kidnaps, cheats, etc, the community gets together and takes matters into their own hands.  I have heard that there are a variety of Mayan punishments that get employed, like forcing the criminal to walk through town several times carrying large stones, but the only form I have ever heard of or seen in my area is a good old-fashioned lynching.  

Yes, lynching.  That's right, we're in 2009, here, folks.  

The affair generally begins with the alleged criminal being seized from their home in the middle of the day.  From there they are beaten, often with whips or rubber hoses.  Then gasoline is poured on the offender and he is burned alive.  

The most recent case of this happened in my little corner of the Land of the Eternal Spring about a month ago.  Two young men were extorting a family for money in another town.  When the police got wise, there was a shoot-out on main street, in which one innocent bystander died.  The two men from my pueblo escaped unharmed and fled to a community in my town.  Later that day, they met an untimely end at the hands of justice-seeking community leaders.  

The general consensus of the people in my health center was a shrug followed by, "Pobrecitos, but they should have known better."  As recently as last week, several men from within the health center were threatened by community leaders.  As a result, they had to leave town.  

Now, before you go dismissing an entire people as barbarians, I should remind you that lynching is not all that distant from many of our own communities.  And unlike in many of the race and sexual orientation hate crimes in our nation's past, I would say that in most cases here in Guatemala, the criminals seem to be guilty the majority of the time.  

Furthermore, lynchings here are rarely hate crimes.  They are a form of seeking justice in a society where the murder conviction rate is in the single digits, and where security is everyone's top concern.  Who can say that if a family member was brutally murdered, raped or even simply had all their possessions stolen from them, they would not be tempted to take matters into their own hands if the offender walked free?  Of course, that begs the question of whether the vigilantes are really seeking justice or only vengeance, but that is another matter.

Many have speculated that after a thirty-year civil war, preceded by centuries of bloody clashes with the Spanish, what you have is a society that reaches for a gun to deal with its problems before all else.  But with a corrupt government and a broken judicial system, who could blame them?  

Better governance and less poverty are the only solutions to this problem.  

good help is hard to find

Hi Everyone!  It's been so long since my last update.  Here's some of what's been going on:  

In Service Training:  

My old cohorts from Rural Home Preventive Health (my program, for those of you who don't know), reunited for a week of extra training at the Peace Corps office.  This was surprisingly useful!  First, we worked on our technical skills like mixing cement, laying bricks and measuring for stoves, working with older volunteers who are actually completing projects.  The depressing thing was, the old-timers work with and NGO that is less than selective about the families they help.  Because of this, we built better stoves for families that already HAD  better stoves and latrines for families that already had flush toilets!  The benefit of working with such an NGO?  Money.  They have the means to actually DO projects.  The drawback?  Not being able to personally evaluate and select the families.  Our program is the opposite:  no money, total control over the families.  

The rest of the week we learned how to recruit health promoters, make tire gardens, and raise money from the states.  It was great to see my my friends again.  Many of them are having the same problems I am.  Another gratifying thing was that my boss actually admitted that our program has some problems.  It felt good to hear that he understands that.  

Thursday and Friday, the Peace Corps put on a great workshop for us and our Guatemalan counterparts about how to teach HIV/AIDS prevention in our sites.  Here's where things get interesting.   I walked into the Peace Corps office Thursday morning ready to participate in the workshop.  There, sitting alone at one of the picnic tables with a wistful, slightly angry expression, was my counterpart's mistress.*  Oh, no, I thought.  What's she doing here?  I found my counterpart, who will from now on be referred to as Sleazy C, at another picnic table, joking around with some some other men.  "Good morning, C,"  I said.  "How are you?"  

"I'm fine,"  he answered.  "Listen, I need to ask you something.  Since the Doctora couldn't make it, I brought someone else to attend the workshop.  Do you think that's ok?"

"Well...is she a health worker?" 

"Well...she's not, you know, employed by the Ministry of Health...but she's sort of a 'community health worker.'"

And so it came to pass that C tried to get the Peace Corps to pay for his mistress' hotel room, lunch, and two days of technical training.  Needless to say, my boss stepped in and refused to allow it.  The worst part was, someone from my health center could have really used that information.  Instead, it was a wasted opportunity for invaluable education and training pissed away by a womanizing jerk.  

Sigh...something's got to change...soon.  

*If you're wondering how I am sure it is his mistress, don't.  He has no shame about the fact that his wife and children live in another town and he keeps a girlfriend in my site.  

culture matters

Today when I was getting on the bus going back to my village, I passed a young boy and his father, and asked the boy when the bus was leaving. He answered me, and then stared uncomfortably at me, then began whispering to his father in Mam. Now, I can't understand much of the Mayan dialect, but there's one word I know very well--"shnool." Shnool is a word for women outsiders. Mostly in Guatemala it is used to refer to women who are of Spanish descent more than indigenous descent. It's not a nice word.

I turned around and addressed the young man, who was still staring. "Actually, I have a name. My name is Emily. Better that you use my real name--this word, shnool, it's an ugly word, don't you think?"

He seemed embarrassed, and his father tried to tell me a story about how shnool is not actually a bad word, when I know well and good that it is.

Confronting people when they talk about me behind my back, using words they think I don't know like Gringa or Shnool, has become a way of expressing my frustration. You would think that after seven months living in site, people would be used to me, and would refer to me using my name, and not an ethnic slur. You would be wrong. Just the other day a small child ran away from me in the street, clinging to his mother's apron, asking her to protect him from the "kidnapper." And I'll never forget the day when a baby who could not even walk, who viewed me from the vantage point of being strapped on his mother's back said "'nool" as I passed.

I know that confrontation is not the Guatemalan way. It's a society where indirect communication is the norm, tempers are held in check and to be considered enojada, or an angry, ill-tempered person is a strong insult. But I spend so much energy trying to be culturally sensitive all day, this is the one indulgence I allow myself.

When it happens, and it's mostly with children, I stop what I'm doing and approach them. Sometimes they run away, but most of the time they stay. I introduce myself, and tell them that words like shnul are not nice words. I ask them their names, and I try to remember them for next time. Does it work? Not really. But it allows me to let off some steam and maybe, just maybe, to integrate a little more into the community.

why?

There's been a lot of anxious hustle and bustle at the health center this week based on a new statistic that is out. Last week we suffered our first maternal mortality this year.

Can we organize the midwives and do a seminar on how to prevent a death like this? Who should visit the family to find out what went wrong? Are supervisors from the Ministry of Health going to come investigate our health center?

The mother who died was only sixteen--practically a child herself. In the past, women knew that the most dangerous thing they would do in their lifetime was to give birth. But over the past 100 years, maternal mortality rates have dropped dramatically, even in countries like Guatemala.

I wonder: Did she know the danger she was in when she felt her labor pains? Had she spent her pregnancy eagerly anticipating a new baby, or was it a time filled with anxiety about how she would feed and clothe her son, much less survive the birth? Did she get to see him at all? Or were her last moments a delirious blur of worried faces due to blood loss?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Nor do I know the answer to a more profound asking of "Why?"

But I think it has something to do with the social and economic factors that lead up to an uneducated sixteen-year-old to give birth in a non-sterile environment (a tiny home with dirt floors) with an incompetent midwife. When it comes to poverty, all the issues are interconnected--health, education, wages, family.

Consider her son. He will now be deprived of the most nutritious food available, breast milk. This is an enormous disadvantage. His family might not be able to afford powdered milk or formula, putting him at great risk for malnutrition. Because it's so hard to sterilize baby bottles, he's also at greater risk for many diseases, including the diarrheal diseases that are too often fatal to poor children here.

Socially, his father, if he was involved at all, will not be able to spend much time at home as he will spend his days farming. There's a good chance he'll go to be a migrant laborer, either in the fruit and coffee plantations on the coasts or all the way to the US. Without the proper love and discipline of a parent, he will be at greater risk for dropping out of school, and becoming a teenage husband himself.

Poverty is a giant, indescribably ugly circle.

found in translaton

Sometimes the most enjoyable things about being a Peace Corps volunteer have nothing to do with service.

When I feel most in demand and capable to help people, and also when people seem the most grateful for my assistance are the times when I can provide an accurate and immediate translation for someone in need.

Once a man came into the health center looking for me. He heard there was a bilingual American working there. He had recently come from the United States and needed to fax his old job an authorization for his brother to pick up his last paycheck. He dictated, I wrote and he signed the document. In that moment, I knew that I was better able to help him than anyone else in the whole village.

My old host mother from training is an orderly who takes care of a sick American living in Guatemala (Don’t ask me why). She would occasionally ask me to write down things to help her communicate with her patient. In our last “lesson” she asked me, “¿Como se dice ‘trague’ en ingles?”

“Swallow,” I told her, and wrote out sua-lo.

“¿Y para decir, ‘tome”?”

“Drink.”

“¿Y, ‘haga popó’?

I paused for a minute. My host mother was asking me how to ask someone to have a bowel movement. Defecate? That didn’t seem right. Too formal. Take a poo? Too casual. Slowly, I wrote down “Poop.” I looked at it again and erased it. In its place I wrote “Please poop.”

A group of medical missionaries (the non-aggressive, Presbyterian type) has been in a town called Jacaltenango for two weeks. Since none of the doctors speak English, PCVs in Jacal recruited their peers to translate for the doctors.

I spent all day Monday in dentistry room, where locals with an acute need for extraction came to see an American dentist.

“Tell her it’s normal to feel shaky after having four teeth pulled.”

"Tell him this will prick a little."

"Tell her she'll feel pressure, but she shouldn't feel pain."

"Tell him I love Jesus."

In doing so, I realized that I was really no less of a tool than the syringe, mirror or gloves that the dentist used to do her job. What’s more, I discovered that I loved it. For the first time in a long time I felt in demand, useful, and like I was providing a real service to people in need (things I hoped I would feel on a regular basis as a Peace Corps volunteer).

here he comes...

An image of a saint in our town's parade.

I think this might be Saint Gaspar (or San Gaspar), our town's patron saint. Wasn't Gaspar one of the three Wise Men? It looks like this guy could be a wise man, with his scepter and his giftbox. And even a saint is not fully dressed without a moral, one of the bags that everyone, men, women and children use to carry stuff.

and a happy new year...

After a marvelous week at home for Christmas and a bittersweet return to the land of the eternal spring, I spent New Year's in Antigua with some Peace Corps friends.

This New Year's has got to be one of my best New Year's.

I think there is a lot of pressure on this holiday to do something "cool." It's the holiday to go out to a hip bar or a nice party in a sparkly dress.

To ring in '09, I split a bottle of a delicious Tempranillo Granacha with a friend at our hotel, and went out after on the Arch street in Antigua. It was packed with people--enough to be exciting, but not so many that you couldn't move at all.

To move right under the Arch, where the action was, we formed a chain and snaked through the crowd like a train.

For the midnight countdown, we looked up into the sky where fireworks were exploding right overhead. They were so close that little pieces of string and dust from the explosives kept falling into our eyes and hair.

At midnight, they set a big metal sign on fire. Each letter spelled out a message welcoming the new year and encouraging the crowd to drink Gallo beer. They burned for about a minute before extinguishing themselves.

I just made it back to my site today. It was a beautiful day, and I distributed some of the gifts that I picked up for my loved ones here. I'm happy to not be traveling anymore, but I'm more determined than ever to accomplish my goals and make a difference here.

Here are a few New Year's resolutions:

To update this blog once a week

To take a great photo once a week

To spend less and save more

To visit my other Huehuetecos

To study Mam every night

To put more time into my charlas BEFOREHAND

To be more zen and roll with the punches more (and to say "these people" less)

As a post script to this post, I would like to say that my last resolution was just tested. As I was writing, two little boys opened the door to my room (from the adjacent storage room that the local government uses) and started speaking in Mam to me. Annoying? Kind of. But I kept my cool and was able to respond to them in their language. Bring it, 2009!