The area we live in is gorgeous. There are mountain springs everywhere, rushing down to the valley floor to meet up with the river. There are rolling corn patches, called milpas, sprinkled all up and down the mountain side. There are big green spaces on the slop down the valley where the grass has been trimmed by all the grazing sheep, and huge grey black rock breaking through the green landscape, and sprouting flowers out the top. It is beautiful in the sun and mysterious in the fog. One day as it was preparing to rain, the clouds moving through the valley curled up and over just like the swirls around the stars in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. To put it mildly, we’re stoked about the scenery. And we could almost sing Old MacDonald substituting q’anjob’al words for all the farm animals. We might not know a lot, but we do know that. We try to take hikes every other day, both to familiarize ourselves with the area as well as to familiarize the locals to our presence. In this way, we count hiking as part of our job. We’d really like to run, but gringos walking is strange enough for the moment. Running will come later.

Thankfully, while the kids in our home area are still pretty wary of us, a smile can win them over much more easily than the kids in town. adults have all heard about us if they haven’t actually met us, so they aren’t shy about greeting us and asking questions about what we’re doing here, really (because they’ve heard rumors), and how we like it here etc. They always seemed surprised when we tell them we’re going to be here for two years. But all the families we’ve met have received us warmly. Sometimes the receptions have made us a little too warm:

In order to get to know people and, at the same time, take a mental survey of housing and sanitation conditions here, we’ve taken to going out about once a week with the nurse to meet families and let them get to know us. It’s pretty customary of people here to offer food and/or drink to visitors, and it is incredibly rude of a visitor not to accept what they’re given. If one must refuse the offering, he or she has to produce an elaborate string of polite excuses, sometimes downright white lies to get out of eating.

The first day we went out, winding our way down into the valley. At the first house we visited the nurse took us to meet a young girl who lived alone with her father. The girl spoke no Spanish, which is one of the biggest reasons the nurse goes with us, but the girl felt bad that she couldn’t communicate with us, so she made us an entire lunch to make up for it–soup, tortillas, and atol–that were all really good. We probably spent two hours with her, talking through the nurse about our work for the next two years. When we finished eating, we moved on to the next house. It was a nice family who’d just celebrated the opening of their big house, constructed, of course, with remissions money from the US. We were introduced to the family and shown around the house. Then the mother asked if we wanted to take a seat and have some atol. The nurse, who was as full as we were, did the politely excuse routine by explaining that we just ate a huge lunch and we’d love to come back another day for atol. I just wanted to keep walking because these folks have an affinity for these ridiculously short chairs so you sit with your knees above your hips and after not too long your butt goes numb. So we moved on to another house a little further down in the valley. The woman happened to be the sister of girl who’d made us lunch. She provided us with a cup of corn atol before we had a chance to make up excuses, so we sat on her short chairs and drank it. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not. This atol was nothing but hot mashed up corn in water. I wish I could have taken a picture of Fletch’s face when he had to choke it down. It was not pleasing to the palate but filling, and that’s the main reason I think they drink it. Luckily his back was to the woman when he took his first sip, and after that he braced himself.

These visits are kind of funny because we never know what we’re going to be presented with, but we have to go on repeating the same information over and over and over. We moved on to the fourth house just a little farther down the valley, coincidentally a third sister to the previous woman and the first girl. The family lived right next to the father’s carpentry shop and since the power had gone out he was pretty excited to talk to Fletch as he did speak plenty of Spanish. Ironically, he learned Spanish while working in the US with Mexicans. Again, before we had a chance to refuse, his wife ran off, baby strapped to her back and made us some mosh–thankfully this drink tastes pleasantly of cinnamon and sugar. However, when she began filling these huge glasses, we tried to ask for just a little, and she dumped out a few drops before handing a big glass of mosh with sweet bread. We had no choice but to sit on their short chairs and polish everything off. By the end of this visit, I thought I might actually be ill. My legs were sore from hours of short chairs, and we worked our way so far into the valley we had to walk all the way back up to our house while our sides felt like they were going to bust. I was so uncomfortable I really couldn’t do anything but chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all and take deep breaths in and out, persistently workig my up the hill. When we finally made it home I had to lay down until all the food digested. Ugh, I hate that feeling.

The second time we went out we decided in advance to visit fewer houses. Unfortunately the first house served up the grossest thing we’ve had to eat so far, even grosser than the roasted dragon fly with salt and lime I ate, but that story comes later. There was a woman who didn’t seem like she wanted to talk to us at all when we first got there. However after an uncomfortable period of standing awkwardly out in the sun, she invited us in. She did not speak any Spanish either, but once we made it into her kitchen she had a million and one questions for us. While we were talking she decided to fix lunch, a soup of boiled cabbage with cow belly. The boiled cabbage was like chocolate cake compared to the cow belly, which looked hairy for the filia clinging to the rubbery pieces of fat. I mumbled under my breath in English to Fletch, “You know you have to eat that, right,” pretty insistently. All he could mumble back was, “You owe me big time.” His first idea to get it down was to swallow it hole, but he ended up gaggin, or choking, I’m not sure, and almost threw up. I managed to make the pieces smaller with the edge of my metal spoon. I don’t know how the nurse did it, but in solidarity we all three choked it down. After we left the woman’s house the nurse thanked us for eating the soup. She said she’d never eaten that before either. I sincerely hope we never have to eat it again.

This is the other story I promised:

So our first day going to Sunday market, we were pretty beat in the crowded micro-bus on the way home, lazily staring out the window when we realized there were kids all along the road, the entire way home, wielding long tree limbs with knarls of thin branches at the top. We saw them batting at the air with them, and I was so tired, at first I just dismissed Fletch’s curiosity about what I assumed was purely coincidence. Now I feel pretty ridiculous, literally scores of children batting these tree limbs in the air all through the countryside…just coincidence. A day or two later we met someone we could ask. The nurse explained to us that the kids were out hunting dragonflies, or turewex as it’s called in the local dialect. The dragonflies seem to alight in unison when it first warms up in the morning, and during the peak heat of the afternoon. We’ve never seen them fly down the valley, rather they shoot upward staying almost the same distance from the ground the whole way, so kids stand uphill and whack them out of the air. As soon as they locate the fallen prey, they twist its wings up so it won’t fly away as the swats usually don’t kill them. The kids collect their prizes in baseball caps, sweaters, or sometimes just their mouths. The nurse’s 9 year old son, Ronald, came to teach Fletch how to hunt them properly, so they went and joined a group of kids on the hill down from our house. The little girl who caught the most that day was keeping them, twisted wings and all, between pursed lips until her collection grew too numerous and she balled them up in her sweater. She caught 8 in total. We were told that normally the dragonflies taste best when roasted (which burns off the wings) and sprinkled with lime and salt, but some impatient (or perhaps terribly hungry?) children will eat them as is when they catch them. A good source of protein. Our friendly nurse roasted a few up for me at the health center in town so that I, along with the ladino (i.e. not Mayan, not raised in the country, way too civilized for such a thing) health workers could try them. Fletch refused. He’s basically had enough of being forced to eat gross food, and since he had a choice he opted out. Thing is, I was just too curious to chance pass me by, so I ate it to the screams of one of the city girls. It tasted a little fishy actually, perhaps because they breed in or near water at the bottom of the valley? As the spanish would say, menos mal (less bad), that Fletch didn’t try them since he absolutely hates fish, among sooo many other things.