Getting to know the gente

Throughout my Marketing training in the last few weeks, we´ve been learning basic techniques to be applied to our initial training projects (more to come later). In the last few days we’ve started to learn culturally sensitive, indirect ways to gather information that include asking simple questions about daily activities, inquiring about common problems and subtly planting suggestions. One specific method that I found very interesting entailed asking a community member to draw a map of the town. I’ve always found maps extremely interesting, such as those of the early conquistadors in the New World, so naturally this specific technique piqued my interest.

I returned home from a day of training to test the technique on my ever-willing test subject: Christián, my 5 year old host brother. The general idea of making the map of the town is to ask the subject to draw the entire community in one color and then ask them to mark assets and flaws with two different colors. In the case of Christián, I gave him orange, purple and green sharpies to make things interesting and asked him to draw everything in the community so I could “find my way around town.” He was more than happy to help me out.

Drawn on a scale proportionate only to relevance to his life, key points on his map included: his house, the three volcanoes, the meat vender we visit on Sundays, the central church, the police station, a friend’s house on the south side of town whose name he couldn’t remember, various trees around town, the basketball court where they play soccer and “la casa de los ladrones,” or the thieves’ house. Important things he neglected on the map were: recognizable friends’ houses, his school, the nearby river, the cemetery and any type of street markings. While I was guiding him through the process, I had to remind him that it was a map for my use in town, and not a drawing, but in general he complied with my request.

I thanked him very much for the “map” and drew my own conclusions from it. Succinctly, they were: 1) The house in which we live occupies 75% of the geographic territory of the our community, and 2) All of the thieves in town live in one house, very far from mine – which I’m sure the police very much appreciate :)

Additionally, I have been fortunate enough to learn the art of tortilla-making. Today our Spanish teacher, Eduardo, arranged a special lesson for us from a classmate’s host mother. It’s quite the art, I have to say. Believe it or not, it’s a lot harder than it looks, or, in my case, sounds. The process begins with about two pounds of corn grain, which have been removed of their membranes by a boiling process with salt and the mineral lime. The smooth grains are then sent through a grinding machine to make a mash – technology that is not present in all places, which leaves women to grind the corn into mash by hand, which takes 2 -3 hours. Once you have the mash, it is flattened out and refined with a milling stone. From there, small balls of mash are flattened out by slapping it between two hands – a sound that reverberates throughout the town, and to which I wake up every day. Then, round and flattened, they are cooked on a large clay stone that is heated over an open fire. A Guatemalan woman, like our gracious teacher, will prepare as many as 40 tortillas for each meal of the day for a modest sized family.

A woman’s tortilla making skills are an asset that often comes into consideration, it seems. And I’ll say this; my sad, dilapidated tortillas aren’t winning me any points with the locals. What’s worse, I was significantly outperformed by all three of my male site-mates. Oh well, I’ll have to find other ways of impressing the Guatemalans.

Until next time…

Localizing myself..

In the past few days I’ve had the chance to learn a lot about the local lore from my Spanish Teacher Eduardo. We have class almost every day for about 6 hours, and it typically consists of applicable vocabulary, cultural information and general conversation in Spanish and it’s been one of the highlights of my training thus far. One of our recent lessons detailed several accepted myths about local espantos, or ghosts. Eduardo told us three different stories, each accompanied with a report of a first-hand encounter with the spirit.

The first was about La Llorona, or the weeper, a woman from the colonial period who fell in love with a Spaniard and bore his child. After a short period, the man left the Guatemalan woman to return to Spain to marry someone of his own social class, a union which would be more socially acceptable. When the woman found out about his plans to leave she drowned his child in a nearby river. As legend has it, La Llorona has since repented and still regrets her actions, openly weeping near any body of water – be it a lake, river, brook or even the common sinks – pilas - found in almost every home. (This one made me particularly uneasy, because my bedroom faces the pila)

The second was a tale of a siren-type figure that beckons already enamored men to pursue her, usually appearing as a beautiful woman near the edge of a cliff or precipice. According to Eduardo, she encourages the men to follow her inviting beauty to their deaths. This one reflects on the traditional Mayan belief that physical beauty is not an admirable quality, and that it can be dangerous and deceitful to its admirers.

The third, and my favorite, told of El Sombrerón, a very short man of dwarf-like proportions who dresses entirely in black with a wide belt and a silver pistol at each side. But his distinguishing feature is his [comically] oversized hat –thus the name, El Sombrerón (Sombrero is the Spanish word for hat). From the description, he sounds like a Yosemite Sam, or Speedy Gonzales type of figure. The legend says that he appears at the window of young women with big beautiful eyes and long flowing locks. He bewitches them with his smooth guitar melodies until they fall into a trance-like state that keeps them from eating or drinking, leaving them to eventually die in their sleep if their condition goes unnoticed. According to Eduardo - and this is where the legend got a little strange even in mythical terms - El Sombrerón likes long-haired young women because he likes to braid their hair at night when they sleep. Yes, that’s right, braid their hair. He also likes to braid horses’ manes and tails, and to find your horse’s hair braided is a sign that you’ve been paid a visit by El Sombrerón. Although this one was so strange that I found myself laughing as Eduardo finished the story, I thought to ask my host mom, Aura, about it when I returned home from class.

When I mentioned the others, she merely laughed at the local superstitions just as I had earlier. But when I went on the mention that I had also heard the story of El Sombrerón, she got very quiet and told me straight-faced that she herself had had an encounter with the little ghost, to the point that she found the hair on her grandfather’s horse in tight little braids following the sighting. To ease her nerves, she immediately cut her own long hair while her grandfather got holy water from the parish priest to sprinkle all over the horse and throughout the entire house.

Good thing I chopped my hair off before I got to Guatemala, eh? I’m not sure how I feel about a short little man with a huge hat braiding my hair in my sleep.

Until next time..

Inaugural Entry

Today marks the end of my first week in Guatemala. It’s been really great so far; I’m dusting off my Spanish and really getting into the whole Peace Corps mentality.
I’ve been dispatched to a town about 2 hours from the capital city in the department of Sacatepéquez, comfortably situated between three volcanoes – one of which is active and emits smoke daily. I have yet to figure out if the red patches that are visible on the face of the volcano by day are running lava. For now, I’ll assume they are - because it makes me feel more extreme.
Here in our town, where half of the marketing group to which I belong is located, I’m living with a relatively modern family (Don Jaime y Doña Aurora). Despite all signs of modernity, the house is very Guatemalan, in that is more of a compound that is continuously entertaining additions to the piece of land inherited by the matriarch of the family. I can’t really tell where my house ends and the others begin because it shares a common corridor with the rest of the complex. Also, many people come in and out of the house, so much so that I can’t really tell who lives here and who doesn’t.
Thus far I’ve been waking up each morning to the dissonance of a few dozen neighborhood roosters and the slapping hands of local women making the days’ tortillas. While I could definitely do without the roosters (I have yet to eat any meat) I can’t bring myself to complain about the tortillas because the tortilleras have them fresh and readily available three times a day, for each meal.
We began our community based training on Saturday, which entails Spanish class with Maestro Eduardo in combination with grass-roots ventures with the families with whom we’re living. I’m still not quite sure what my specific project will be, but it definitely promises to be interesting and challenging – in that I have no agricultural experience whatsoever, apart from the inherent affinity for agriculture from having lived in Minnesota for 10 years.
I’ve already gotten several shots in series of about ten, and am taking various preventative medications –including one which is particularly unpleasant for Malaria. Although I haven’t gotten sick yet, several members of my training class have succumbed to various maladies, and I feel as though it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to me too.

Until next time..