So last week we went to the other side of our municipality, to the aldea of Quixabaj. We’d been working up to this trip for about a month, trying to talk ourselves into getting there. Thing is, the only way to arrive is in the back of a pick-up, winding through mountain roads and along ridges for 4 hours. When I say in the back of a pick-up, I don’t mean sitting. Sitting would mean the driver was not maximizing space, and they always maximize space around here. I kept thinking about how badly the trip was going to suck. Little did I know that getting there would turn out to be pretty much the easiest part of the whole trip.

On the way there I wore a long sleeve shirt, my sombrero, and sunglasses to keep the sun and dirt off as much as possible. As it turned out, most of the way was overcast. Standing in the truck wasn’t terribly difficult since the roads are so bad the driver can’t go fast. You get knocked around some, but not as much as if the truck were speeding right along. Also, in comparison to the micro-buses, in the truck you get tons of fresh air and nothing obstructs the view, which is pretty much always gorgeous. Sometimes awkward things happened, like the time I suddenly realized a women’s head was supporting my gluetous maximus. Once during the trip the ay

udante (driver’s assistant) yelled, “Ocho!” and I thought we were taking an 8 minute break, which is just a strange increment of time. But all these guys jumped off and started peeing in the bushes as the pick-up started slowly up the hill. It occurred to me to count, and there were 8 guys who jumped off the back of the truck, apparently the right number to lighten the load in order to climb the steepest hill of the journey. When we arrived in the village I felt relieved because the ride could have been a million times worse. The nurse had lunch waiting for us, and all the community leaders where there waiting for us to meet with them.

The leaders had arrived from all over at 8 am. They thought we were coming in a private car like we had the first time–would have been nice. The nurse informed them that we’d be there at 1 when the pick-up rolled in to town, and they decided it was easier to wait than walk home and back again. So we ate quickly and then went right into meeting with them.

Someone told me along the way that they speak more Spanish in Quixabaj than here in Temux. Let me tell you, that’s a big fat lie. Fletch’s Spanish is better than the community leaders. Once we realized they didn’t really understand us much, I kind of took over the meeting in the clearest, slowest, spanish I could muster. The problem was that, with every word coming out of my mouth I could feel myself getting more and more tired. I felt

like I’d literally been beat by a stick by the time I got to the question, “Where are we sleeping tonight?” In fact I’d essentially beat myself against the steel bar supports of the truck, thus the exhaustion and muscle sore tired. All the men looked nervously around the room, a silent, “uhhhhhh…” It only took them about half an hour–not exagerating–in rapid fire q’anjob’al to come to a decision. From there we decided we’d all meet at the health center at 8 am the next morning, and the health president would show us to our room.

Turns out, our room was a tienda, a little convenience store, where we got a piece of floor along with 3 migrant farm workers and two pick-up drivers. It was not cool. Luckily we’d brought our thermarests, but the five men didn’t come all at once, some came in smoking and talking loudly near midnight. I just kept thinking, from a security stand point this is awful. These men aren’t from town, so no one here can vouch for their character. They don’t know who we are or what we’re doing here, so basically we just look like rich gringos. Arrgh. It made it very hard to sleep. Then in the morning neighbors started showing up at about 5:30 to start purchasing things, coming in and out of the store like nothing was unusual. I was really uptight about the whole thing, worried about our belongings and our safety. I also hated that the only latrine available was like 5 houses away.

I couldn’t stand all the way up in it, nor did I dare to sit all the way down while in there. It felt like the floor could cave in at any minute, first of all. Second, they’d constructed it with some sort of metal support bar right under the toilet, and the thing was full of diarrhea poo, not to mention all the school papers pulled from some kid’s notebook that littered the floor smeared with what I’m sure was not mud. I hardly drank anything the night before in order to avoid using the bathroom as much as possible. I figured as long as we were going to be in the health center the next day, I could just wait until I got there. This was mostly affective, but a little uncomfortable.

As soon as we got to the health center on Wednesday morning I talked to the nurse, explaining “the house was rather full and we didn’t want to be a bother to the family if they already had so many people staying with them.” We asked the nurse if we could just sleep in the exam room, and she seemed to be cool with that. Thank God. Then we launched in to a 3 hour demonstration of our health talks for the community leaders. They seemed really skeptical about what we were planning on doing, so instead of inviting community members to the talks, it was a closed demonstration where, I guess, they decided they were ok. T

hey scheduled a community-wide talk for the afternoon.

You should know, it was raining from about an hour after we arrived until lunch time the nex time. When we told the leaders we’d probably need a room in which to do this, they seemed confused. Why not just do it in the yard of the health center? “What do we do if it rains?” we asked. They suggested maybe we could possibly if we really needed to perhaps use a room in the school? Literally, it ended in a question mark. OK, then, so we just hoped it didn’t rain.

We ran to get our stuff from the tienda where we’d left it, and brought it back to the health center before having lunch with the nurse. Then we laid down for a nap because she said, “They’ll probably be here at 4 or a little after since they said 3 o’clock.” She was right. We were so exhausted that we decided our strategy was for me to do basically all the talking and let Fletch be the props man, that way it would go as quickly as possible.

Our first charla, or health talk, in any new place is always about why people should practice preventive health and how it’s everyone’s responsibility in order to maintain a health family and a healthy community. We play a quiz game at the beginning asking true/false questions about healthy habits. Then we have a little skit that illustrates how one is better off financially if they practice preventive health because their family members don’t get sick as often which means they don’t have to buy medecines or pay for doctor’s visits and also they don’t miss days of work. It’s usually pretty popular. However, at the same point in the charla both during the morning and with the community I asked the question, “True or False, we should always keep our food properly covered?” Both times it was a man who got the question, and both times before responding to the question he said rather angrily annoyed, “Why are you asking me this question, that’s women’s work.” Both times I got to smile nicely at them and say, “Most of the time it will be women who are responsible for covering food, however if you, sir, grab a tortilla from the basket and neglect to put the napkin back over them you and/or your children could become ill because the flies contaminated the food. That’s why it’s important for men, women, and children to learn all of these things together.” Then they gave me a blank stare, and we moved on. During our skit the town drunk kept trying to participate and different people from the community would have to pull him back and tell him he wasn’t allowed to participate if he was going to come drunk. In short, it was a tough crowd. By the time it was over we were exhausted and relieved, and I was losing my voice for having to do presentations all day.

The leaders had informed us that afternoon that this would be our only charla while we were visiting this time because they all had a meeting about potalble water they had to go to, so they wanted us to just visit houses on Thursday. This is really tiring work, as I’ve explained in past posts, but we thought it best to do something rather than nothing. There were two men who were to meet us at 8 am to start house visits in the morning both to be our guides and translators. Before leaving for the evening one of them asked, “And what if it rains tomorrow? Should we still go?” I just kept thinking, “Do you really want us here? Because if we decide to do nothing tomorrow because of a little rain we are officially wasting our time!” I told him, rain or no rain, we were prepared to go on house visits. He looked a little disappointed with that response, but said good night and went home.

Let me say here, I sound frustrated throughout this post, and I was for much of the visit. I don’t think the people of Quixabaj are lazy or intentionally “wasting our time.” I truly believe they do desperately want out help. It is a function of the indigenous communities to be very timid, which affects their already limited capacity to communicate. It’s also worth noting that I am living in Guatemala, but I am American through and through. I find it difficult to maintain high expectations and attempt to maximize the way I use time. So I’m not trying to insult our hosts in Quixabaj, but rather paint a picture for all of you that depicts exactly why this was a frustrating experience.

On Thursday morning at about 9 the two men showed up to begin the house visits. We stood around and looked at the sky. They discussed the likelyhood of rain. Then sure enough, it started pouring. It had rained all the night before. Then they started saying, “Better if we don’t go while it’s raining. You two should go in the health center and wait. We’ll come back when it stops raining.” I tried to assure them our jackets were water proof and we thought we should probably just go anyway. “No, no, you should go in the health center and wait until it stops raining.” So we did. I sat down and started reading, but couldn’t help but notice that although they’d said we needed to come inside and wait out the rain, they stood out in the road for the duration of the downpour. When it stopped raining, they came in and sat down. Their question, “So what should we tell these people? Which ones are you guys going to build stuff for?”

That’s when we realized that in spite of the very thorough job our counterpart from the main health center had tried to do to explain everything to these folks–in q’anjob’al even– they didn’t get it. We aren’t building anything FOR people, we’re only building WITH them, and even that we’re not allowed to do until our second year of service after everyone has recieved a years worth of health charlas. Thus we sat with these men for over an hour trying patiently and methodically to explain the goals of our project to them, again. And at the end they asked, “So what are we going to do when we go to these houses today?” I said, “We’re going to tell them who we are, what we’re doing, and invite them personally to the health talks we’ll be giving when we return in November.” (We explained to the leaders the day before that we will give them a months notice before we come and in that time they should arrange a schedule for us so that we can use our time more effectively. Though I’m not sure they understand the concept of “effective use of time.” I’m not saying these people specifically don’t get it, rather I think it’s a country-wide problem.)

Once we thought they pretty well understood the goals for the day we set off to visit the agreed upon 5 houses before lunch. We were going to take a break and then go out for more houses afterwards. What really happened was that we visited 13 houses in a row before we stopped. We thought we were going to die by the end of it. Our tour guides seemed quite tired as well, but they just kept pushing us into one house after another.

The conditions of these homes were dismal to say the least. Out of 13 we saw two that had sanitary infrastructure (cement floors, improved stoves, one had a latrine). The other 11 were houses made of wooden planks, huge gaps between them, dirt floors. The bedroom was usually a separate structure from the kitchen, which is better than nothing, but they were right next to one other. In the bedroom there were bed legs made out of tree branches stuck into the dirt floors and wooden planks covered with a few blankets for the bed. Usually the room was lined with these beds to accomodate everyone in the family, so between 5 and 12 beds I would say in the family bedroom. The kitchen room was usually right next door, constructed with the same materials, but with smoke billowing out of all openings and gaps because everyone cooks on open fires. Most people did not wear shoes and many of the children had visible skin diseases and/or distended bellies. So the reason this experience was tiring was not for the sheer number of houses, but also the emotional effort of seeing family after family living in such conditions. And these people tried. Just about every house had things as neatly put away as one could in their conditions. Their dirt floors are swept off with branches for brooms every day. They all thanked us for coming and said, “We’re just very poor here, and we’re so far away from things. We’re always forgotten.” And the worst part, they’re thanking us for nothing. We have actually done NOTHING for them at the moment. It made me so sad.

When we finally finished the visits we had just enough energy to scarf down lunch, then we both passed out asleep for an hour. The guys never did come back to get us for more visits after lunch as they’d said they would. Instead, the nurse took us to see the two wells that are the source of water for the 200 homes in the area. On the way back we ran in to one of our guides, Bernebe, who looked a bit sheepish when we saw him, like he’d been caught. We asked him if he was tired, and though he looked exhausted he said he was not, then changed the subject. He explained that, thankfully, the springs never dry up all the way, but in the dry season when the water is extremely low, women start lining up at 2 am to fill their water jugs for the days cooking. He mentioned that they town leaders have discussed trying to get help with a water tank project that would pull the water up the mountain and then distribute it to the houses in tubes. Novel technologies, my friends, wow. Fletch asked him to show us where the highest point in the village was so he could start drawing out diagrams for a local water specialist we worked with during field based training, and coincidentally our second tour guide lives right next door to highest point in town.

Our serendipitous dinner with our second tour guide deserves it’s own post. Suffice it to say that when Nicolas Tomas invited us in to sit down, Bernebe disappeared. We’re guessing he went home to rest.

We went home after that and right to bed since the only trasportation out of town leaves at 3 am. At 2:30 we were up backing our bags, and we were the 3rd and 4th people on the truck. It was raining so they’d covered the cage with a taurpalin and we were all to pile in underneath it. We were much more fortunate than the people after us. I got the wheel well to sit on and Fletch was against the back of the truck sitting. The other 20 some folks piled in with their bags and babies and stood, squished together as close as they could go. I was glad to be sitting where I could flap the taurpalin to bring in some fresh air. The whole mess was a rather heavy combination of unpleasant scents: mud, woodsmoke, morning breath, overripe oranges, and messed baby pants. The smells were our only details as it was so dark we couldn’t see at all, just smell and feel things. There were two babies right next to me, one that rested in the curve of my neck for most of the ride and the other that swung in its sling for a headbutt every time the truck rocked. That was preferable to when one of the babies switched positions with their mother so that their messed pants flew in my face at every sway of the truck.

I was pretty calm for the first 40 minutes or so as we rolled out of Quixabaj, trying to keep my body big and not be crushed by the all the people around me. As we crawled along slowly I could hear the truck’s tires crunching wet cravel, straining not to slide over the rocks as we headed down hill. Suddenly the truck lurched so far to the the passenger’s side, right where i was sitting, I was pretty convinced we were going over. The truck stopped to everyone’s squeals and screams, then eased its way out of the trench that threatened to tip us. I just kept thinking, if this truck goes over they’re all going to crush me. At that point it became difficult to remain calm, the situation almost unbearably clausterphobic. I started some deep breathing to help me stay calm prevent throwing up. It took me well over an hour to relax. It gradually became lighter under the tarp.

There’s this point closer to Santa than Quixabaj where the road is abruptly reduced to one lane. It’s while the road is on the ridge, and a landslide has washed the other half of the road away. There’s nowhere for the truck to skirt to the side of the road because the narrow lane is the only flat space, landslide on one side, steep mountain sloping down the other. It had been raining for the better part of three days and nights, and as we discussed after the trip both of us were praying that this would not be the day the rest of the road would go. When the rain lightened, men at the back started to peel the tarp forward and stand all the way up, until it got to me. Although the woman next to me looked right at me and said, “Don’t stand up,” I stared right at her as though I didn’t understand and stood straight up out in the open. The fresh air was heaven. We went right over the landslide bit as we were looking out the top. After that I relaxed most of the way. We made it back to Santa at 7 am, took a bus halfway to our town and walked 45 minutes in the rain to reach home.

The problem with underdeveloped countries is that they’re already so far behind they spend most of their time reacting to problems that have suddenly come up. The majority of their citizens spend most of their days worrying about making sure they have food and shelter. That’s why preventive health is something pretty outside of their paradigm because it’s proactive instead of reactive. But it affects everything. What they should do is close the road between Quixabaj and Santa for a week or so. Guatemalan men are some of the most bad-ass laborers I’ve ever seen. I know they could have a small bridge up in no time. Instead, what will most likely happen is that, one day, probably not terribly unlike the day we crossed the landslide, the road will give way, the truck will plummet, and quite a few people will die. Then they will fix the road because it’s the only way to and from the tiny string of villages in that part of the municipality. It’s so frustrating and sad, but true. That’s just they way they work.

Friday we busied ourselves with cooking delicious food and cleaning. Our family lit the chuj for us when I told them the last time we’d bathed was the day before we left because there was nowhere to do it in Quixabaj. We slept for 12 hours and on Saturday I felt like I’d been pummelled. The morning was so bad I ended up bawling my eyes out, going back to bed, and waking up for Saturday morning Take 2: Done With Quixabaj (for now).