Una Semana

Peace Corps Compound



This journal (I hate the word blog) will certainly be hard to keep up with since so much can happen in just one week! I guess because everything is still new and different, I just want to report it all... Anyway, Wednesday was market day here in San Bartolomé and that was pretty exciting. Every pueblo has their market day in which vendors and farmers from the surrounding area come to sell their goods. They have a huge amount of used American clothes to sell as well toys, junk, beautiful Guatemalan-made goods, more junk, and food.
Let me tell you about the food... The vegetables and fruits are wonderful with some I have never heard of before. They also sell meat. I had an idea in mind of what I might see at a market and reminded myself that I should be prepared for anything. We passed through the indoor part of the market and were making our loop around and were just passing the meats, and I noticed the usual; cow stomach, livers, and various other body parts. As I walked by I happened to glance to my side and see a pair of eyes looking at me... Just eyes, nothing more. A pair of gooey Cow's eyes staring at me from the center of a metal plate. Our language teacher later explained that sometimes people drop the eyes into a glass of orange juice and swallow them in 1 gulp as this is supposed to help maintain good vision. MMmmm

Some art from my bedroom.

I also learned how to "tortillar" which means, to make tortillas. This is a pretty amazing process. Doña Rosa has corn hanging to dry. When it comes time to make tortillas she removes the kernels and takes the corn up to the neighbors where they have a mill to make it into cornmeal. Then she mixes a huge bowl of cornmeal and water and kneads it by hand until it turns to dough. Then you take a small ping pong ball sized ball in your hands and begin patting it back and forth between hands until it flattens into a tortilla, then you slap it on a metal pan over the open stove. It was really cool to make but I had trouble spending so much time in the old kitchen with its open stove since it was so smoky. But in the end, it was worth the burning eyes.
I am really enjoying the time I get to spend with Doña Rosa. She is such a funny woman and has a very big heart. She has been great to talk with to practice my Spanish, and it's really coming along day by day. One things that is difficult is that so many common words they use are different than what I have learned in Spain so even though I have a pretty good vocabulary, I have to learn all new words to integrate myself here. Some words have completely different meanings and some are down right dirty. For example, one word that they use all the time in Spain is "coger" which means to catch, to take, to get/grab etc. So you would say "I'm going to catch the bus, grab my book, take my jacket, etc". But here, that word means, "to screw" (or worse). And so I have been really consciously trying to obliterate that word from my vocabulary even though I am so used to using it. Unfortunately I slipped up, and while talking to Doña Rosa I used the naughty word when trying to say I was going to go grab my camera. So I really said to her, "I'm going to screw my camera"... She sort of just stared at me a moment as I stumbled to correct myself, and then she laughed and I laughed and life went on.

Bird's eye view of my house

Last night I was telling Rosa how much I admire the traditional attire that the Mayan women wear here. She took me in her room and showed me all the many skirts (cortes) and blouses (guipiles) she has and even had me try some on. It was really fun and I showed her which were my favorite patterns and she said, "Well good, then you can wear it tomorrow." This caught me a little off guard... I mean I love the clothes, but maybe not to wear out. As it was, I am here in this tiny town as one of 5 Americans who stand out as the only "gringas" (white girls) around. I thought it might be pretty silly for an obviously non-Mayan me to be wearing a very tradition indigenous outfit. But Rosa insisted and so I felt I couldn't say no. So the next morning she dressed my up like a lady doll, starting with the blouse, then the skirt wrapped around, then a very VERY tight belt tied around 3 times. Honestly I was flattered, and honored she wanted me to wear these special clothes, but I just wasn't so keen on going out in public with them. Also this was a day we had to meet with our entire project group in another pueblo so everyone would get to see my beautiful indigenous threads. I finished my breakfast with Rosa and headed out the garden gate to meet the other girls in my group. I could barely take a deep breath because the belt was so tight on my ribs. At one point I had to sneeze but my attire would not allow it... I immediately felt eyes on me as I walked down the street. Almost everyone was smiling or chuckling as they passed and said good morning. I felt better when I finally met with the group and tried to ignore the stares. The dress was really beautiful so why should I care if people laugh, right? Well... it's just that I felt like I was sort of intruding on someone else's culture. A culture that is not mine and that I really know little about at this point. Anyway I reminded myself that it was to make Rosa happy and continued on my way. The next obstacle was how to loosen the belt on my waist so I could breath a bit easier. The skirt is really just a piece of fabric that wraps around and relies on the belt to stay up. Therefore, if I were to loosen the belt too much, I would be standing in my undies with a blanket at my feet, and then people would REALLY stare. I managed to find a way to loosen it slightly without losing the whole bottom half and went through my day just fine. Little by little I felt the belt loosening as the day went on and when we finished our training for the day, I quickly went home and changed. I told myself that next time I wear such clothes, I shall be further integrated into the community and shall wear them with nothing but pride.

my bed