Well it’s probably about time I updated everyone about my first 2 1/12 months at site. I will also talk about what happened during the big Semana Santa celebrations.
In Peace Corps, the first months at site are for integration into the community, strengthening communication skills, and getting accustomed to the way your work/life will function for the next two years. Volunteers have told me that the first months at site are definitely the most trying. The best way I can describe it is as a rollercoaster. You don’t know when your ups and downs will come or how long they will last. It isn’t uncommon for volunteers to be depressed then be incandescently happy, all in one day.
I am the first volunteer from the ecotourism program at both of my sites. I have never met another volunteer that had two sites… (--more work, traveling back and forth between sites) (++I can choose which site I feel like working at). I just had my first site visit from my program director and it really helped my counterparts with organization and what direction we should take our work in.
ABOUT MY SITES
Paxtoca
I am working with Association nicknamed “AQX”. Their whole name is k’iche—“ Q’ Aq’ Al Xikin”. My program director calls them the asociación de jovenes (association of young people). They want to make Paxtoca into a model for other towns as an environmentally responsible community while preserving and salvaging what is left of the Maya k’iche culture.
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| Association Q' Aq' Al Xikin |
All the way on the right is the president Dionisio. He is also a director at a nearby school and rarely shows up for meetings. The man standing up all the way on the left with the baseball cap is Damaso. He is the vice president and is the one that always works with me every time I visit Paxtoca. To the right of him are the three people who I am closest to and see the most often. The women are his sisters and every two weeks they have a women’s cooking/nutrition class that meets up. Usually I meet up with them and cook or do a workshop with them.
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| Easy to get good shots when you are comparatively a GIANT |
One of the main projects Paxtoca wants help with is making the mountain behind the town into an ecological preserve where tourists could come and pay to go on guided hikes to the mayan alters and waterfall.
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| Hike to the vista, waterfall is in the background |
The only problem is that many different people in the community currently own it. We are planning to have a meeting with the property owners to discuss signing a possible agreement for land use and also a sanitation plan for their bark beetle problem. They did not seem happy when I told them we have to cut down all infected trees and the surrounding trees, and then reforest the area with white pine. If we cannot get the owners to agree to the park then we will just have to give up and focus on my secondary projects with trash management and environmental education.
San Andrés Xecul
This is where I live! It is on the other side of the valley from Paxtoca and also nestled at the base of mountains. But it is much larger than Paxtoca and the town even has a municipality. I work there in the office of the environment.
My primary project here is helping with community-based tourism. Currently many French, Spanish, and American tourists come (sometimes in the bus loads) and take pictures of our famous church and then leave. San Andrés Xecul has never made any money from tourism. They already have the tourists, amazing things to offer, and a fair amount of advertising. Just no structure or motivation! I really hope to get something started this year because we are on the cover of this year’s edition of lonelyplanet. Amazing. Icon of the Western highlands of Guatemala.
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| Cover of the newest edition of lonelyplanet |
We have been trying out different possible cultural stops around town. I will write more about them in detail when we have made concrete decisions, which is proving to be more difficult than I imagined. The population is all indigenous and are very wary of foreigners. For example S.A.X. makes a ton of different colored candles for all the Mayan ceremonies that take place so we wanted to make one stop a candeleria but they do not trust us. They think that we are going to bring people that want to steal their candle making process and put them out of business.
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| Two sisters playing on the family faucet |
So much culture here! There are so many Mayan alters and almost every afternoon you can find at least one person doing a Mayan fire ceremony either in the mountains or somewhere in the cornfields. Behind the muni (municipality) is forest with a trail that leads up to a large Mayan alter. The hike takes about an hour to get up and would be a great for all the young tourists that live in the Spanish schools in Xela. Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala and about a 40 minute bus ride from my S.A.X. and a 20 minute bus ride from Paxtoca.
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| Fire ceremony: El Calvario in San Andrés Xecul |
My secondary projects here will also include trash management and environmental education. There is absolutely no system of trash management currently. Just many sad looking clandestine dump sites. On the road out of town there is a large dumpsite with a sign 10 feet before urging to take care of your environment and keep it clean. The largest dumpsite I’ve seen is constantly burning. During the day there are always women and children rummaging through the garbage breathing in the toxic fumes.
I have been training for a half marathon that will be in July in Antigua. But I sure do miss the clean air in Seattle (I would have never said that before). The many small burning piles of trash along the street mixed with all the exhaust fumes are not pleasant. And I always have a rock in my hand in case on of the many street dogs decides to try and snap at me.
Everyone burns their trash, buries it, throws it into a river, or dumps it at one of these sites because they do not know about other options. I think one of the most important things would be education about the harmful effects of trash (especially burning all that plastic!), how to separate and organize the trash, and setting up a center where people could bring their recycling in turn for some quetzales($).
I have also been working a lot with a Swiss NGO, Helvetas. They are so great. Because of them my office has computers, desks, disaster preparedness equipment, and two tree nurseries. All new this year. They have given environmental education books to all the students and hundreds of teachers as well. The 24th of this month I will meet with a representative from Helvetas. We will plan days for workshops with the teachers where I will teach them technical vocabulary/concepts and how to use the material in the classroom. I also hope that we do some reforestation projects because we have over 2,000 baby trees waiting and it is one of the best months for it.
FUN STUFF
Semana Santa
Guatemala is famous for their extravagant Easter week celebrations. The largest in Latin America, people from all around the world come to see the processions. The largest celebrations take place in Antigua but I decided to stay around my site to see how the locals celebrate.
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| During this week there is an overabundance of this traditional Semana Santa sweet bread |
A fellow volunteer in San Cristobal (closest town over) invited me to a pre-procession prepping party at his friend’s home. I was expecting to maybe work for a couple hours. What I now know is that preparing to make alfombras (carpets) for the processions is an all night process! First we had to sift all the sawdust. Then we laid out tarps and made piles of fine sawdust that we died and hand mixed for a long time. We had a fire going the whole night to heat the boiling water for the dye. We even got to make smores :)
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| Making Orange |
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| The finished colors |
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| After laying the foundation we started with the patterns |
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| Our slightly rain-damaged, but finished alfombra |
Our alfombra was just one of many littered throughout town. Later in the day the procession marched through town, destroying one alfombra after another. Below are a couple other alfombras.
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| Notice all the fruit hanging from the arc |
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| Flower Butterflies |
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| I still don't understand. |
