Second Day

On our second day, our village decided to help us get whatever “stuff” we needed to make our stay more comfortable. After looking at our budget, we decided that the only big stuff we really needed (wanted?) was a mattress for the bed frame they gave us, and a propane oven. Yep, that’s right: a propane oven. Most Peace Corps volunteers go cheap and get a propane stove top deal that looks like the gizmo you use for car-camping, but we figured that in two years, we’d really be happier if we could cook lasagna, homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, carrot cake, chocolate chip cookies, pizza, garlic bread, baked potatoes… wow, i can’t believe i just typed all that. And how hungry I am for real food. This morning, we were invited to breakfast with one of the village leader’s family, and we were served a mysterious orange porridge with egg in it. I managed to gag it down with aplomb, but that only heightens my craving for real food.

We actually had no clue where to buy these things, or even how to get them to our remote village, but Manuel (one of the village leaders) said he just made a call to a buddy that ran a microbus route, and requisitioned the vehicle and driver to take us wherever we needed to go. He also said don’t worry about the cost, we’d work it out later. So, we hopped in the microbus with Ricardo and his dozen paying passenegers, dropped them off at Santa Eulalia (40 mins away) and continued another hour to Soloma. He and his assistant spent about half their day helping us haggle with bed salespeople and appliance dealers, then loaded our stuff, and brought us back again. Here’s a picture of our Guatemalan moving van.

Third Day- The Chuj

Today we went to town to buy a propane hose and regulator valve. When we went to hook up our new oven yesterday, we discovered that when you buy a propane oven in Guatemala, that tiny detail is not included in the deal. Who’d have thought. Also, it’s not like the nice hookup you get with your gas grill back home… The gas cylinder has what looks like a giant bicycle tube stem, and the regulator just clips onto it. When you wiggle the regulator, gas hisses out. I would be really worried about us being blown up or suffocating in our sleep, but the way the wind howls between the boards in the walls of our house, gas buildup is not a concern. Despite all this, I was able to cook our first real meal tonight, a cause for much celebration.

But what I really want to talk about is bathing- something we haven’t done yet. No one in town has a shower. Instead, they all use a chuj, a sort of Mayan sauna. The tradition predates Columbus, and likely goes back to before Christ. The chuj is a small adobe building about 6 foot by 8 foot, and 4 feet high. It has one tiny door 2 feet wide and 3 feet high, with a fireplace inside. The overall effect is like a wood fired pizza oven, for cooking people.

We got our chance to try it today. Lina, wife of Nas Palas, fired it up for us (pun intended). Once the fire in the fireplace died, we were allowed to stoop low and crawl inside. The interior is dark and cramped and mysterious, and everything is black from years of smoke. But most importantly, it’s HOT. That’s a good thing, because this part of Guatemala is cold and damp in a fierce way that reminds me of Scotland.

Once inside, we sat naked upon a wooden platform near the fireplace. Two buckets were already there ready for us, one cold and one scalding hot. By mixing the two into a smaller hand bucket (called a guacal), you can mix up a temperature that is comfortable and bathe by pouring the water over yourself. Emily threw some water on the rocky fireplace, and giant clouds of steam erupted. Lina yelled something from outside, and the only word i caught was morir. I figured she was warning us not to accidentally kill the fire with too much water. Turns out, she said something like “don’t pour so much water on the fire, or you will die from overheating.” Nice.

Due to the cramped quarters, we had to help each other with the bathing, but in the end, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. In fact, we’re now talking about making ourselves a chuj when we return to the US.

Local Technology

This place is full of contrasts. We don’t have latrines or phones, but our neighbors have Satellite TV! This is how they keep up with their soap operas. Indoors, they have a rack of gear to run it, including power filters and other nonsense. Notice the ubiquitous barnyard animal posing in front…

Here we have Emily learning how to do laundry old-school from Reigna, one of Nas Palas’s daughters. That concrete sink thing is a pila, and I’ve spoken of them before. The water comes straight from a tube out of a nearby stream, and the waste water just runs out of the bottom and back into the stream. The picture at the right is of the soap flotsam collecting about 10 yards downstream. One of our jobs here is to try to explain to them why this is bad.

These two ducks (or pech, in Q’anjob’al) live at Nas Palas’s house. If you click and enlarge the picture, you can see they have tiny red strings tied to the backs of their heads. I was baffled by this so I asked someone about it, and they told me it was medicinal. “It is to prevent disease?” I asked, trying to clarify. Yes, it is to prevent mal de ojo. Ummm… for you that don’t know, thats “the evil eye”. You know, when someone looks at you (or your family, or your animals) wrong and it causes them to get sick and die. It was a common belief in medieval Europe, and I’d heard that it still cropped up in backwaters Guatemala. Now I know. Oh, and the person that told me this is an assistant nurse!

Here we have Nas Palas himself, applying fertilizer to his corn. He pokes this stick into the ground at the base of the corn, about 4 inches, then his daughter comes along behind him and drops a handful of chemical fertilizer granules into the hole, and covers it. They progress through the whole field this way (no machines here, folks). He showed us his sheep corral where they make natural fertilizer, but everyone prefers to use the chemical stuff even though it’s expensive. Simply put, it’s easier and less messy. The shame is that in the long run it will have damaging effects on their ecosystem.

General Niceness

The people here are EXTREMELY nice to us. Besides the welcome we got when we arrived, people are always dropping in with food, or to chat. When we are out walking, people hail us form their porch and invite us for tea, or a snack. Even when we are in one of the two tiny stores, the owners just hand us a bag of chips or cookies for free… and we can’t refuse any of this, becuase it would be rude in this culture not to accept hospitality. Three different families have already told us they’d do our laundry, and we feel guilty about that, so our only way around it is to let them do it, but we help along side of them. We being Emily, i mean. 🙂 We haven’t heard a word about rent so far, so I went to talk to Manuel and Nas this morning- i don’t want to unfairly burden Nas’s family with our housing needs. Turns out, the villge leaders decided that we can’t pay rent. Because if we did, then it would cause envy and discord among the town due to one family getting our rent money. So, the entire village is absorbing the cost of our housing.

It all reminds me of a movie I saw a long time ago about these explorers in a jungle, and they stumble upon a long-lost native village. The villagers see the white explorers and think they are gods, and treat them exceedingly well… give them the best hut, let them sit in the King’s chair, give them all the food they can eat. But, near the end of the movie, it comes out that another thing you do to Gods in their culture is throw them into the volcano. I keep wondering when we’ll meet our volcano.

They are going to a lot of trouble to have us here, i really hope that we can do enough good that it’s worth their while.