Here I sit in our house by the warm fire, trying to regain feeling in my fingers after working outside in the wind and mist and bone-chilling cold. Thank god the firewood guy came today, we were one day away from being totally out. But today, I am going to tell a tale of warm, a subject dear to my heart lately.
We celebrated the new year by visiting a fellow PCV in the south of Guatemala. You see, much of Guatemala is not the chilly two-miles-up mountainside we live on… it’s steamy jungles and banana plantations and sunny beaches. You know, what most people think of when you say “subtropical central america”. Our friend Kaying lives in one such site, and here’s what you see from her back porch.
After dropping off our stuff at her house, we took a stroll. Notice the jungle hillside in the background covered with houses. See that line where the houses stop? That’s the border of a banana finca, or plantation. Much of lowland Guatemala is banana or coffee finca, worked by the locals during the harvest. The conditions are pretty rough and the pay is low, but it’s a living. I heard an interesting statistic the other day: about 70% of the land in Guatemala is owned by about ten families*.
Eight of us in total showed up at Kaying’s house to usher in the new year. Most of the volunteers were from Youth Development, the other program that did training along with us Healthy Homes people. It was nice to hang out with them, since we don’t work with the same branch of government and don’t get to see each other as often now that training is over. The one other Health volunteer besides us was Dan, who has been in the blog before and is a pretty interesting guy. He’s really well integrated in his town: besides being the goalie for their soccer team, he is also in a heavy metal band. They play covers of American songs, and he’s the only guy in his town that speaks English, so he got the job. Maybe his huge white wig helped? Heh. He also mixes some mean dance beats, so he was in charge of rocking the New Years Dance.
Kaying’s house is enormous: about four times the size of ours, indoor plumbing, kitchen, two levels, concrete block. The best part? She has a room in her basement she doesn’t even use. That became our dance hall. Motivation and enthusiasm can go a long way when funds are short, and with a little decoration the venue was a huge success. New Year’s Eve passed with a flurry of dancing, a box of fireworks, a touch of champagne, and Lady Gaga.
The next day we all slept in, Peace Corps style. After a little breakfast, everyone spontaneously decided that the beach would be a good place to start the year off right. Emily and I had not yet been, and it was only about 2 hours away. The problem: transportation is erratic for the holiday. But as luck would have it, Kaying’s landlord owns a microbus! A little haggling and 450Q later, we had a chartered there-and-back trip to the coast.
The coast in Guatemala has many things you’d expect in a tropical beach: bathwater-warm water, big surfable waves, sand so hot your feet burn. What’s different about it, though, is reaching it. After our driver haggled with some guy to park the bus under his coconut tree, we hiked across a bit of sandy scrubland, between some random thatched huts, and emerged at a weird water crossing. The scene reminded me of a UN video of refugees crossing a river in Africa: kids in ragged clothes paddling people across in clapboard boats while others took off their clothes and held them in bundles over their heads as they waded across in droves. We paid the kid 2Q each to paddle us across, then reached the main beach.
What first caught us off guard was the amount of people. There were HUNDREDS of Guatemalans all enjoying the holiday with their families. But the funny thing was, we only had to go a few hundred yards down the beach to find a pretty open area. You see, Guatemalans LOVE to be together. They all bunch up in one place, leaving the rest empty. They think it’s “mas allegre“, more happy, if people are all scrunched together. Put a bunch of Americans in one place, and they will spread out as best they can to maximize space between themselves, using up all the space available in the process. And that’s just what we did, farther down the beach.
The sun was fierce, so we set up a little sun shelter with driftwood and sarongs, and spent most of the day splashing or sunbathing or reading. It was a pretty fantastic way to spend the first day of the new year.
* I will have to fact-check that statistic when I get around to writing “the book”.
As we were resting and chatting back at Kaying’s house, my eyes fell upon various things on her walls. You know, the typical stuff you’d expect of someone living in a foreign country for two years whilst doing a challenging job for no pay: pictures of friends and family, pages torn from a Spanish language textbook, postcards of interesting art, reminders about meetings with village leaders. It was like a candid look into someone’s inner workings. Right next to the front door, I saw a handwritten note that I found moving. It said:
Why I Want to Stay
- Worked hard and sacrificed to be here
- Nothing waiting in the States
- Fulfill my goal of working with Peace Corps
- Unfinished project, potential to make accomplishments
- Continue with my PCV friends
- Test of who I am and what I am capable of
- To be more.
She saw me reading it, and was a little embarrassed; she explained that she went through some tough times a while back and was thinking about going home. Thing is, I think we all have. Yet we somehow manage to hang in there and get the job done.