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…