Tuesday started out a really benign day. We had a busy week last week, getting back into things here and going to town for meetings with the health center staff and the midwives. This weekend and the last two days have been pretty low key. We’ve done quite a bit of gardening and have been giving lots of greenhouse tours. I think people are mostly attracted by the fact that we seem to give out free cucumbers to people who stop by, and the gente like cucumbers. I’ve even been feeling really on top of our charla schedule. I’ve got the next month mapped out for both towns (who are not on the same schedule). Today, as the two o’clock hour approached, I headed over to the health center to start setting up benches and taping up posters, feeling pretty confident.
Last week we started a series of talks that address HIV and AIDS in Guatemala. For those of you who don’t know, it’s actually quite a problem here. Prostitution is legal; mysogny and having partners outside of marriage is pretty common (amongst men more so than women); sex and sexuality are very taboo; health education is pretty inadequate (that’s why we’re here!); and migrant work nationally as well as internationally is almost an institution. All of these things combine to make, well, a big mess. Thankfully, Peace Corps has a very comprehensive series of talks already worked out to explain what HIV/AIDS is, how it’s transfered from person to person, and how we can all avoid getting it. Yay! But it is a lot of information to give people all at once. And explaining the idea of an immune system and it’s subsequent attack and demise, to people who only months ago learned what germs and microbes are, is intense. It takes a lot of explaining, and because everything we say in our talks has to be translated into Q’anjob’al, we’re not the ones who can do the explaining.
Way back in March we took four people from Santa Eulalia to the Peace Corps training center to receive a training on how to teach HIV and AIDS in their community, so I thought PERFECT. We’ll just ask the teenage girls who translate for us in the community next door (one of them was with us in March) to come over to our village and translate for us here. Although Manuel and his wife (who are our neighbors) went with us, they’ve been absent for the last few months of talks. When we asked the girls about helping us, they were positively thrilled. They’re genuinely excited to spend as much time as possible with us and their enthusiasm makes them great, energetic translators. They met me at the health center to go over the information quickly before the charla. I thought, for once all the ladies will be happy that I’m not begging one of them to translate. The women filed in and took their seats, so we started off with a prayer, as they requested we do, and then I introduced the girls to the women of of our village and was just about to start the charla…
One woman from our village spat out something angry sounding in Q’anjob’al; her eyes were fierce. I was clueless. I looked at the girls who were eager a moment ago but now looked very worried. I was confused. Maricela said, “She says we have no business being here because we’re not part of the health committee and you two are the volunteers here. They said they should have been told in advance that we were coming and Manuel (the health committee president) needs to approve of us being here.”
I was missing something, “But you two are just translating. We invited you to help us tell them about this.” And I re-explained why I had invited Elisea and Maricela to our village this afternoon. There was a group of women talking back and forth furtively. I couldn’t understand them, of course. Women often hold their own conversations during the charla. I tried to ignore it and just start things up.
Maricela looked at me and said, “No. I don’t think we can translate. Maybe one of your translators from here can do most of the work and if she needs help we’ll just help her.” Maricela is incredibly sweet, and she was really trying to help get things going. The whole thing seemed so absurd to me; I think this is what it feels like to have an elephant in the room. I asked the jabbering women in the corner if there was a problem. The rest of the room just stared blankly at us.
“No, there’s no problem,” they said and went back to angrily discussing something.
It’s really annoying and unbelievably frustrating when you know there’s a problem but everyone tells you there isn’t and you can’t understand a word of what they’re saying! I looked at the girls for help.
“They’re saying that you two are here to work for this village and not for other communities, that we’re not part of the health committee here and that we don’t have any right to be here. They say Manuel should be here.” So there’s this thing that happens here where people emit strands of words which, as individual words, I understand completely, but, as a whole sentence, I can not comprehend the larger meaning of what they’re trying to say. The first claim struck me as outrageous, the second as downright rude, and the third thing, about Manuel, completely superfluous. WHAT WAS THE BIG DEAL?
So I asked the angry ladies AGAIN, “Can you please explain to me what the problem is?”
“There’s no problem. It’s fine. They should just translate. Let’s begin the charla.” But, you see, things were not fine. There were some very unsettled people in the room, including the translators I had invited, and no one was talking to us about what was actually going on. I just wanted to start the friggin’ talk! The girls were refusing to translate. The angry ladies continued to say plenty of things they wouldn’t translate into Spanish. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. In any sort of conflict situation I immediatly assume I’ve done something wrong. I think I’ve interpreted something incorrectly, or made a bad joke or committed some social faux pas–I am the guest here, and they’re just acting according to their norms. I felt trapped when Fletch jumped in to tell me he thought the community just wanted to know that the girls were legit, and if he could run and tell Manuel what the problem was, or seemed to be, then Manuel could come explain to the community that these girls knew the material well and were just here to help translate. In the last few months, I’ve lost faith in Manuel. While he was really instrumental to our work in the beginning, he’s been completely unreliable and often intoxicated since late April, early May. But Fletch is always trying to counter my cynicism when it pops up, and sometimes he’s right. So I told him to go he thought it would help.
The feeling of entrapment just intensified in his absence. The girls were clearly upset and not about to proceed translating. Angry ladies continued to be angry and full of commentary they weren’t letting me in on. The rest of the room continued to stare blankly, until one woman stood up and said, “Can we just start the charla. There’s a meeting in the school after this that we all have to go to.” So I thought, ok, I’m taking directions from the people; she’s telling me what to do. Let’s just push forward. I started the opening of the health talk. The girls wouldn’t budge. I looked at the only one of the angry ladies who could speak both Spanish and Q’anjob’al and said, “Look, there’s a problem here. I have NO CLUE what’s going on. Could someone please tell me what the problem is? All I’ve done is ask for these girls to come help me translate this material because it’s new to all of you and they’ve already gone through classes on this subject.” Nothing. No one said anything. I just stared at them all, waiting.
Finally, a woman who is incredibly kind to Fletch and me at all times said, “Emily, I think everyone misunderstood. They thought the girls were here to give us their opinions about this subject. They didn’t understand that the girls are only here to translate.” I don’t understand why the girl’s opinions about something would cause such a hullabaloo either, but I explained in Q’anjob’al yet AGAIN exactly why I had asked the girls to come translate–yes, translate, as in regurgitate what I say so that it makes sense to people who don’t speak the language I’m speaking. Fletch came running back in. “Manuel will be here in a minute.”
Whereas before no one would talk to me, suddenly Fletch was telling me all that had transpired with Manuel, in English, Maricela was trying to tell me why she thought they shouldn’t translate, in Spanish, and one of the angry ladies was telling me that everything was just fine we should start the talk, in Spanish, as other angry ladies jabbered on in Q’anjob’al. I thought my head would explode. I cut Fletch off and let Maricela finish, then cut back to Fletch, then let the angry lady repeat herself. So we figured out, the ladies just didn’t want these young girls coming in and telling them what to do without being informed beforehand there would be outsiders at the charla, and Manuel understood what the problem seemed to be and was on his way to come straighten everything out in a minute…I thought?
Fletch and I, in one last, futile attempt, tried to explain that the girls were only here because we asked them to come, INVITED them in fact, and that they weren’t going to tell anyone what to do; they were only going to translate what he and I had to say. Was that ok? Fine. Could we begin the charla? Fine. Could we please now welcome our guests who were going to help us through today’s charla with a little applause (the folks here really like applause and I quite ignorantly thought it might change the mood to something a little more positive)? There was applause right as Manuel strolled into the health center.
“You’re all applauding me for being late?” he joked. Sometimes Manuel tries to be funny in ways I find amazingly irritating. So just as I thought we might finally start the talk (about 40 minutes had passed at this point), Manuel took center stage. “I have no idea what’s going on here. I can’t sanction this talk. We made a plan. I have everything written down in a notebook in my house. I was going to bring it, because that’s the way I am. I have it written down, but I left it at home. It’s somewhere. The plan said we were going to do these talks months ago, that I would be here, the nurse Lucia would be here, that the technician Aurelio would be here and that all the village leaders would be here. I have no idea what’s happening right now. They (he points to the girls) can’t just come in here without talking to me first. You can’t just do this. You haven’t told me for months what’s going on here.” He just kept talking, gathering steam. And, for the record, for months he has refused to show up for the health talks. Everything we’ve been doing has been plain to anyone who bothers to show up or who comes to our house to talk to us. He’s done neither. “I’m the president of the health committee. We have committees to make decisions here. We didn’t decide that these girls should come here today…” From across the room Fletch looked at me, dumbfounded, and said in English, “We just got sandbagged.” To which I responded, “And this is why I didn’t want him coming.”
Manuel is a master of theatrics. We used to appreciate how he could make people enthusiastic and excited. This time we didn’t much appreciate it. His hands were flying, his words were emphatic. Fletch had worked his way across the room and whispered, “It’s pretty clear to me that this talk isn’t going to happen today.” I couldn’t have agreed more, so I interrupted Manuel as he was doing a wonderful job repeating himself, making himself out to be a victim of exclusion, making us out to be people who were trying to step on his toes or somehow threaten him. I apologized, to everyone, for wasting so much of their time. I told them that there was clearly a problem that I did not understand and that this problem would not be solved today and for that reason we’d just start the health talks next week at the regular time once everything was cleared up. I asked for their pardon and told them they were all free to go to the meeting that was beginning at the school, and I gathered up my things to go.
Manuel took off again. He was speaking in Q’anjob’al, pointing at the girls, pointing at the air, thumping his heart. Fletch and I stood there waiting for a second, thinking he was going to wrap things up. He was off another diatribe regarding all the work he’d done to bring in these volunteers from Peace Corps, and how this meeting did not have his permission to take place and these girls were not invited. “Let’s go,” Fletch said. Manuel was being manipulative and insulting. I honestly felt he was treating us like pet dogs. We interrupted him to excuse ourselves and say good-bye, and then we walked out. We left him to his theatrics. I was shaking I was so upset, and I was so embarrassed about what had just happened even though exactly what had happened was not clear to me. I was about to cry when a group of women, all of whom had followed me out, came to shake my hand and say good-bye as they do at the end every health talk. “Good-bye Emily. Please don’t be sad. There was a misunderstanding in there. Not everyone is upset. Don’t be sad or you’ll make yourself sick. We’re very sorry about what happened. Please don’t get sick.”
Fletch interrupted, “The girls are still in there, what should we do?”
“Go get them out.” I told the women thanks as they continued to apologize and warn me that, if I got too upset, I would get sick. They were all in agreement that getting upset was very bad for my health I said my goodbyes and went back to the house. I walked in as Fletch was making tea for the girls who were both in tears. I sat down and started apologizing to them because I felt, surely somehow this was all my fault. I mean, I did invite them to come help me.
Now that the girls weren’t in front of the women, little by litte they started to tell us in detail what people had said to them. And once we were away from the pressure situation, we began to understand a mess of things. Just then Lina, our host mom, came knocking. She was with her daughter who’d been at the health talks and had left just before we walked out. “Masha told me they were abusing two girls down at the health center. Are you all ok? What happened?” The girls explained the situation, since they obviously had a much better handle on what’d gone down. Lina listened to them, and in the end she apologized on behalf of the community. She said the women who started the problem are women who are known around town to start problems, and that the woman who first insulted them is known to be Manuel’s girlfriend (I thought, my that’s a nice little catty touch), so they were obviously in cahoots about this mess.
We really love our host family. They’re such quiet but adament supporters of us and our work. Lina showed up at just the right time to say just the right thing. I’d apologized to the girls for so unwittingly dragging them into a trap, but I think it helped tremendously for them to hear from a female adult community member. She was of the opinion that what had happened to them was an embarrassment. She added, “And I’m going to go tell them that it’s all THEIR fault if any of you get sick. If any of you become ill it’s on their heads for causing all these problems.” Briefly I thought, you know my body has a tendency not to work properly in this country; I wonder what kind of madness would ensue were I to suddenly have the flu? The timing would be comic, but I’m not sure I want to witness that…apparently sadness/stress as well as the cold will make you ill in these parts.
Lina left and we finished talking things over with the girls. We pulled out the last bit of a pie to give them, basically trying to cheer them up anyway we could think. Most of our friends and neighbors love to try anything we cook up. The pie and tea and all our talk eventually coaxed some smiles out of them. We offered to walk them home, because we honestly weren’t sure if someone would insult them yet again if they were walking out of town alone.
Apparently being here a year doesn’t mean we’ve got anything figured out. Talking as we walked ourselves home, we realized that everything that transpired at the charla came out of things that had been bothering us for a while. For one, Manuel has become increasingly unreliable over the the last few months. However, he’d managed, without us really noticing, to appoint himself “Keeper of the Gringos”. It was to the point that we hadn’t really communicated with any other town leaders in quite a while.
We need to change this, so our next task is to set up a leaders’ meeting to inform them that we now have less than a year left, 11 months and counting. We will outline what things we hope to accomplish and try and garner their support for projects and ideas. Whatever they decide not to support will not be pursued. If we can’t get the computer center set up, we’ll hand the computers off to another volunteer who’s had more success and can use them in his project. If the town doesn’t want to work for a health infrastructure project, we won’t try and push it. If they do want these things, then we’ll figure out which leaders are going to help us achieve our goals.
But why were the girls attacked? How did that all come about? Manuel’s feeling of entitlement as our keeper and recipient of our charity is apparently a shared sentiment amongst at least a small portion of people from our community. While Fletch was working with the health committee here to organize and complete the paperwork for a Small Project Assistance grant from USAID, there were some strange comments made to him. Apparently people from our village had heard that the neighboring community, where we also give weekly talks, was going to do a project with us as well. This irked them. Someone somewhere along the line had (MISTAKENLY!) informed them that because we live here, this community is the only community that will benefit from any projects we might have to offer. Fletch addressed this issue. At the time the women weren’t pleased with his answer. I was not at the meeting, and some of them moved that I be called in to explain to Fletch what the problem was, because he was obviously not capable of understanding them. I guess they were right; he didn’t understand them. But I couldn’t have helped him any, as their complaints were so strange to us that neither of us understood what the problem was.
It seems they think we are keepers of a magic box of money, and if the neighboring community gets to have a project it’s only because we’ve taken part of the money, that they feel is rightfully theirs, and given it up to the neighbors. This is not the case at all. We don’t have any money! USAID does. The amount of money our village would receive does not change. If they receive a grant, they get X amount of dollars regardless of whether their neighbors get to do a project or not. End of story. But since we have not been able to explain this to them in a way they understand it, they think we’re cheating them. But they like us, or at least they have to be nice to us if we have a big box of money, right? So the girls, who were from the community that was stealing this communities money, got to feel the wrath of some bitter ladies.
We were talking through all of this, walking home and it reminded us of a visitor we’d had this past weekend. Last Thursday we got a call from a woman named Eulalia, who works with a man named Don Livingston, and she wanted to know if she could come see the latrine we’d built with Don Marcos. Don Livingston is an RPCV (returned peace corps volunteer) who worked in Huehue in the 70’s. He’s still involved with lots of work going on in Guatemala, and he wanted to know more about this latrine. When Eulalia showed up, she brought with her a man named Rafael and his sister Maria. I was expecting a couple of ladinos, but it turns out Rafael and Maria are from Santa Eulalia and they both speak Q’anjob’al. Maria has lived in New York City for the last 22 years, sending home money so that her brothers and sisters could go to school. Eulalia is from the town Don Livingston worked in as a volunteer. We spent much of Sunday afternoon talking with Eulalia, Rafael, and Maria. Eulalia and Rafael were excited to meet more volunteers, as Don had made a very positive impact on their lives. Rafael holds something like 2 1/2 university degrees, the most recent one he’s working on is in Political Science, and he directed the conversation towards development and Guatemala.
He asked us, “Have you heard the joke about the Japanese lobsters and the Guatemalan lobsters?” We had not. “A chef wanted to prepare some lobsters and he had some Japanese lobsters and some Guatemalan lobsters. He put the Japanese lobsters in a pot, put the lid on it, and weighted it down with sacks of grain. He knew that the Japanese were tricky enough that they would all work together and could escape from the pot if he didn’t weigh the lid down. Then he threw the Guatemalan lobsters in a different pot, but he knew he didn’t even need to put a lid on it at all because the Guatemalan lobsters would just keep pulling oneanother back down into the pot, so none of them would escape.” This “joke” struck us pretty fuerte, potentially very offensive. I would have felt bad about listening to such a joke if it hadn’t been a Guatemalan who told it. But in examining what had transpired at the health talk, this seemed to describe the situation perfectly. Heaven forbid a single family here raise itself out of poverty above the others. There is such a strange contrast in this culture, between lending your neighbors a hand when they’re in need but using that same hand to drag them down if you perceive they’re getting ahead of you.
Two weeks ago on our way home from Antigua, the bus stopped in Soloma along the busiest street in town on market day. There was a family announcing something over a loudspeaker to the passing crowd. I couldn’t understand most of what was said, but it was something about a young man and being stuck in the U.S. or maybe he was killed in the U.S. and they were taking up a collection for his family? I was concentrating hard on picking out the words I could recognize and staring absently mindedly out the window as a crippled, middle-aged man was bobbing along down the street. He had some sort of leg and foot deformity. He didn’t so much walk as thrust himself up and forward then catch his weight on his better foot and propel himself forward again. So he really did seem to bob as he moved along. He was wearing two unmatched black shoes, neither shoe had laces, and the sole of the shoe on his bad foot was peeled back and bent under the rest of his shoe as he moved along. His pants were worn out and torn and he had on 4 layers of ratty sweaters and a tattered cowboy hat. He was concentrating on something in front of him. I watched him walk by the family calling for a collection. He bobbed right on past them three or four steps, then stopped. He turned around, bobbed two steps back, dug deep into his pockets, and with a smile that turned up all the wrinkles on his tanned face, he handed them two twenty-five cent coins. Then he turned and continued on his way. I was crying before I knew what happened. I thought, this is beautiful Guatemala. I felt somehow privileged to have witnessed such a humbling scene.
But then, in my own community, people I considered to be our friends insulted and tore down two teenage girls who I’d invited to help us out. It’s true that I’m generally really proud of this community, but for the first time since we arrived, I felt embarrassed by them. Eulalia talked to us on Sunday about reverse racism and sexism. That is, if I were to go with her into a remote community where neither of us were known but they knew we were medical personnel, everyone would take my arm first and say, “Welcome, doctor,” even though I only have a degree in Spanish Literature and she really IS a doctor. She’s a local, so if one of us is superior to the other, it’s obviously me (this has happened to me in real life except I was with male Guatemalans). Likewise, if she were to go into the town with another a man whether or not he was Guatemalan, it would always be assumed that the man was the doctor. Racism and sexism are so engrained here that those who would be regulary victimized by it use the same concepts to degrade or victimize still more people. The last time we brought in guests to help with our health talk, they didn’t insult them and run them out of the community. No, they threw a party for Robin and Elena. How do we even begin to combat such attitudes?
Rafael’s sister, Maria, was only here on a month-long visit from the states. She’d brought her 3 children: 12, 7, and 3 years old. She wants them to know where she comes from and to see how she grew up and to know that people are still here living in poverty. She said, “I want them to see how lucky they are that I can give them money and we can go to Toys R Us on the weekend.” She told me she spent $300 on luggage fees to bring all of her children’s old clothes and toys to Guatemala. She says she does this every time she comes, and she gives things out on her visit as she sees people in need. At one point during our conversation she said, “It used to be, I don’t know if it’s still like this, but it used to be that when someone died, the families were too poor to have a funeral, but their neighbors and extended family and friends would come to the house, each one with a handful of corn or firewood or leaves for tamales, and together everyone would make the funeral. Is it still like that here?” And from the funerals we’ve witnessed so far, that does seem to the be case. There is a term in Q’anjob’al, jilq’ab, which means to lend a hand, to offer work or help to someone in need. It’s so much part of their culture that it’s written into their language. Later in the afternoon I cringed as she began to hand out one quetzal bills to the curious kids who came peeking into our house. I kept thinking about it as I was making dinner and they were all long gone. I don’t think it’s the same thing, her handing out one quetzal bills and me, if I were to do it, handing money out to the kids. She’s from here. These are her people. She speaks the language. She’s like a benevolent aunt that comes visiting and lets the kids buy sweets with her money. She understands poverty in a way I do not. I think it’s different. Would the kids see it as all the same? I don’t know. She’s just lending a hand to everyone she meets on her way.
Maybe I should ask Pedro, our teacher, what the Q’anjob’al word for envidia is? Envidia refers to a destructive kind of jealousy. The word is Spanish, and I don’t know if there is an equivalent in Q’anjob’al. I never thought about it until now. I felt certain that what happened with the girls was a manifestation of this envidia. Nas Palas’s visit in the evening confirmed this. Fletch and I were trying to do some yoga and enjoy some privacy for the rest of the evening. It was getting dark out, we were tired of everything. We both had stress headaches. We were underwhelmed by the knocking at the door, and pretty relieved to find Nas and Reina on the other side. He apologized for not having come sooner; he’d been occupied with a family meeting. He said Lina had told him something had happened and he wanted us to tell him the story. We took turns explaining things. He sat listening, patient and intent, pausing for a moment in silence when we finished our story.
Then he started in, “I don’t have the exact words to express in Spanish what I’m thinking. I’ll try, but you know I’m not that good with Spanish. I just want to apologize for what happend today. It’s just that, well, this is the way our people are sometimes. This is why we’re an underdeveloped country and we’ll always be an underdeveloped country. People just don’t understand. I hope that you two will not be too upset or sad about what happened.” He also expressed his concern about our health, were we to get very upset. “I want you to know that Manuel is nothing. He can not do anything on his own in this town. Who does he think he is, an ambassador? He didn’t do all the work to bring you here. He didn’t put up any money for your arrival. If there is one person who worked to get you two to this town it was Don Simon.” Jaime and I looked at each other; we love Don Simon. This piece of information wasn’t surprising, but it was somehow reassuring. “Manuel has all sorts of family problems, and he had no right to say the things he did. I am going to go talk to him. I want him to tell me his story, and then I’m going to regañar him (that word literally means ‘to correct’, but when Nas said it, taking into account the look on his face, I translated it to something like ‘rip him a new one’). No one in this town can accomplish anything alone. I think you are both right, and we need to have a meeting with all the leaders. We will work this out. Manuel has this idea, this list of people who are going to receive projects, only the people who come to the charlas, and he’s going to the leave the rest of the town behind. He wants things for himself. This committee he made just wants things for themselves. I’ve talked to Don Simon about this, and I know we haven’t had time to come talk to you two, but we think that this list isn’t right. We can’t just give projects to some and leave the rest of the people behind, and we definitely can’t take something for ourselves first.” Whether it’s lifting people up or tearing people down, I think the great focus here is that everyone remain equal.
Fletch said to me quickly in English, “I just figured out starting about ten minutes ago, why Nas won’t sit down and talk to me about building the latrine here.” We’ve been trying to talk to Nas about adding a composting latrine to our (his) home since we finished Marcos’ latrine. Every time we bring it up he says, “Mañana, mañana, hombre. No hay prisa.” (Tomorrow, tomorrow, man. There’s no hurry.) There actually is prisa, as far as we’re concerned, because we feel the clock ticking. But Nas does everything slow and steady. He’s not going to let us build a latrine here, even if it’s for our personal use so we’re not contaminating the river, until other people in town have seen some material benefits from our presence first. He doesn’t want anyone to accuse him of using our presence for his own personal gain. After all, someone already poisoned 4 of his sheep in the middle of the night after we moved into part of their family compound. [note from Jaime: I wrote that post a year ago, but somehow it never got published. So I just published it today; sorry.] It was an afternoon and evening of lightbulbs binging on over our heads, or like someone was in the background singing PeeWee Herman’s “Connect the dots LA-LA-LA!”
I find that hope and despair are common bed-fellows. I wanted to end that sentence with here, but it’s really not just here. I think sometimes my focus is short-sighted from working in such a small area. It’s probably that way everywhere, good and bad intentions constantly butting up against one another. There are people who only want to help themselves; and there are people who want to help anyone they can; and there are people who fall all over in between those two camps. I don’t know what it all means. How much good are we really able to do? How much are we really helping anyone? Or are we just sort of fighting to keep things neutral?
Nas confirmed Fletch’s suspicions and continued, “I just want you to know that the women who started these problems have a reputation in town for being troublemakers. They and Manuel are leaders, but they’re bad leaders, constantly stirring up the people and keeping them agitated. They aren’t the majority here. There are a lot of people who want you here. We’re glad you’re here and we’re sorry this happened. You two just rest. Just rest, and we’ll talk tomorrow.” And with that he excused himself.