Week 38 - Opus Ultimum

It is with great sadness that I write this post, the last of my Peace Corps adventure in Guatemala. Earlier today I was medically separated from my service due to what the Peace Corps deemed an “unmanageable condition” within Guatemala.

Many of you I know I have suffered persistent dental problems since early July, and after 10 chipped teeth, 8 medical visits to Antigua and Guatemala City, a night guard, and prescription toothpaste, -spray, and muscle relaxants, Peace Corps has admitted defeat. After submitting to a battery of closing procedures, I will be back in the United States early next week.

The irony that this is exactly what I fantasized about during the weeks immediately surrounding my departure in early January is not lost on me, a way to go home with my honor intact. And yet, now that it´s here there is no relief, no satisfaction. I am depressed to leave, even as I´m acutely aware I was drooling over an American-style sandwich less than a week ago.

As a coping mechanism I keep trying to hate this place, to remind myself of the cold showers, the intestinal fireworks, the frustrating work situation…

But I can´t, because it´s not any of those things that have made the greatest impression on me. Rather, it has been the people of this truly remarkable group. My fellow PCVs have been my confidants, my drinking buddies, my fellow explorers into parts unknown. They have been my surrogate family, even when (and perhaps especially when) surrounded by the peculiarities of my host families. What truly destroys me from this violent expulsion back into the proverbial “real world” is to no longer be part of this fraternity of shared experience forged—and yes, improved—by hardship.

In these final hours of my service, I have been thinking with increasing fondness of its beginning: I remember riding the chartered bus through the deserted streets of Washington nine months ago, that early morning darkness tinted by the orange glow of street lights. It just as easily could be nine years ago for how distant that person seems from myself. I was terrified; each passing building took me further and further from the known, the safe.

I remember those first days in Santa Lucia, so unsettled by my surroundings I thought about bolting back to the airport, begging the airline to forgive my enormous mistake even as I continued to hide behind my painted veneer of bravado.

But you fake it ´til you make it, and after a few months here I found little fault with my life on any day-to-day basis. The strangeness of the everyday became exciting only after it ceased to be terrifying.

And now that I’ve relived that cycle in San Se, supplanting the threatening with the thrilling, growing accustomed to—and then comfortable with—the banality of my routine, I can´t help but be sentimental to the way life was, and will likely never be again.

I am scared, and I make no secret of that fact. Not so much about substituting one country for another, but that I will never fully be part of this motley crew again. I can—and will—continue to keep up communication over Skype, Facebook, and the easy conveniences of modern technology, but it is the daily grind that brings us together, not the distilled talking points each evening.

So now must I resort to being a member of an imagined community rather than a physical one? Am I now part of the Peace Corps diaspora that was not unified in the initial country and dispersed to distant lands, but united in distant lands dispersed to the initial country? Or has the betrayal of my teeth against my PCV status precluded me from being part of this “deep, horizontal comradeship”?

But I´ll only get a bruise from beating my head against this wall of unknowable, not some sense of vindication or epiphany. For that, perhaps only time.

Goodbye, Peace Corps. You weren´t perfect, but we had our moments. And now, with great remorse, I admit that for or better or worse, this too has passed.

Week 37 - Computer Aneurysms

It was a mediocre movie, and it was perhaps for this reason that it happened: My computer had simply had enough and, like the Mahayana Buddhist monks, chose self-immolation as a form of nonviolent protest.

That is to say, my computer caught fire, and it was its own damned fault.

Living in San Se gives a lot of time for personal reflection, and after the first few months, there really aren’t a lot of things left to reflect about; movies become a big part of my nightly routine.

On the particular night in question, it was Marley and Me, a middling movie with a squandered cast based off the book of the same name. It features a young blond couple in Miami trying to raise a dog, and later a family.

I didn’t get it; where were the live-in grandparents? The irregular water pressure? The tortillas? It was entirely unrelatable to my current situation.

Still, my computer seemed to be enjoying it just fine until the beginning of the third act, when a postpartum depressed Jennifer Aniston was yelling at her uncomfortable-with-his-literary-success husband, Owen Wilson. And right there the movie jumped the shark.

I mean, how could anyone find cause to yell at Owen Wilson?

My computer seems to pause, the screen becoming cloudy as it tries to rationalize Aniston’s irrational behavior.

Dark holes begin to appear in the right corner of the screen—my computer is having an aneurysm.

With a shriek that would put Wilhelm to shame, I lunge for the power button. In a few seconds it goes dark. My heart is thumping wildly. For a brief second I contemplate Peace Corps life without a laptop, and fear seeps over my chest, swelling my throat and face like air into a flaccid balloon.

I wait a few minutes. Usually these sorts of issues are the result of overheating, but the localized pixel dead zones have me worried. Like the brain cells after an aneurysm, a lot of times they don’t come back to life.

With a muted prayer to not punish me for cutting corners and buying a Dell, I depress the power button once again. The clicking and whirring of a normal computer boot-up greets me. The screen is still dark, but with a brilliant flash, my darkened room is painted in light.

Unfortunately none of it makes any sense. The pixels are working, but there’s no picture, just jumbled grayish lines of pixels swimming about without cohesion. On the right, the dead zones stay dead, and several more restarts improve nothing.

The fear turns to disappointment and deflation. I immediately start trying to recall the last time I backed up my files. Had I saved since the Tajumulco photos? The great cooking experiment? I had now way to check at that moment, and with little other recourse, I went to bed.

The next day I drank my coffee staring despondently into space rather than reading the New York Times.

Later, I rode into Huehue, hoping to get my computer examined and receive an estimate for its repair. It sounded like my internal hard drive was spinning, which was a good sign, and I felt fairly confident that if I connected my laptop to an external monitor I could back up the system once again before leaving it in a questionable condition in a questionable shop.

I got to the internet café, and was pleased to see my hunch was correct—the rest of the computer was working as it should. I spent the better part of the morning dragging and dropping files from one folder to another, ultimately confirming that the most important elements of my digital life had been salvaged.

Almost on a whim I went online and contacted Dell customer support. I expected no favorable solution as I got connected via their chat program with “Jaspreet,” a customer service representative.

“My, uh, computer recently caught fire while watching a movie, and now I want you to replace it.” I sounded lame and mildly deceitful even to me.

He replied with one of those cheerful nonsequitors that make you wonder if you’re connected to a person or an answering machine. “Hello, and welcome to Dell support! If it’s not too much trouble, may I have your service tag number?”

I humor him, though I’m already formulating my arguments for why this is everyone’s fault but my own, and the character assassination I will rain down upon Dell if they leave me unsatisfied.

As the conversation progresses, he actually seems like he can make something happen, and when he assures me that Dell will overnight the parts to a technician who will come to my house in San Se to replace them, I am pleasantly shocked. We end on a good note.

A few hours later I receive an email from him to that effect, along with the transcript of our conversation. The email tells me I need to contact Dell-Latin America, presumably to work out some final details or something.

They are not as helpful.

“I’m sorry sir, I know you have proof of our prior agreement, but you need to upgrade your warranty to include Latin America.”

“Then why did the other representative say I would be granted an exception and specifically do not need to upgrade the warranty?”

“…You need an upgraded warranty.”

I switched back to Dell-US to complain, and they seemed to split the difference. “We’ll ship you the parts, but you’ve got to install them yourself.”

I’m annoyed, but it’s still a better resolution than I originally hoped for. The problem is that I’m legitimately afraid that a big box marked “computer parts” will never make it to rural Guatemala. All of my care packages are sent with “family photos” and “history books” translated into Spanish and liberally scrawled across each face of the box. Even with these unprofitable sounding descriptions, they can get stolen or “mislaid” by the postal service.

I guess all I can do at this point is wait. I’m sure Marley and Me will still be there when I get back.

Week 36 - Evacuation and Standfast

The general election has finally passed. Since getting here, there’s been a steady ramp-up in violence perpetrated against both the citizens and politicians of Guatemala.

“But don’t worry,” everyone kept saying, “the situation will improve after the elections.”

And so this past Sunday an estimated 65% of the populace went to the voting booths and selected from ten candidates for president and hundreds more for congress and various local political offices.

Many people believed that it would be the mayoral, not the presidential, elections that would cause violent reprisals. More than 35 mayoral candidates and/or their families throughout the country have been assassinated in the preceding months (including orchestration, on at least one occasion, by a rival mayoral candidate). Because San Se’s mayor was publicly assassinated last year, as well as concerns expressed to me by my friends in town, Peace Corps decided to evacuate me and Lauren for the days immediately preceding and following the general election.

This was hardly uncommon; more than one third of the 250 volunteers in Guatemala were relocated to safer areas and told to stay put. On Friday morning I left for Aguacatán, about two hours from San Se, and stayed with friends, returning to San Se earlier this morning. It proved to be a popular spot: Including myself, there were four refugees.

For the most part it felt like a giant party. The three volunteers who were putting us all up made sure we felt welcome and relaxed. Work, mostly due to the widespread and continuing strikes, was hardly a thought, and travel outside of the municipality was forbidden by the Evacuation and Stand Fast orders issued by Peace Corps. Thus, we amused ourselves by going to the pool one day, hiking to a beautiful mountain spring the next…

On the day the election there was increased traffic on the roads as people came in from the surrounding communities to vote as mandated by law. While Aguacatán is hardly a sleepy town—I was envious to see that they have reliable sources of pancake mix—it became bloated with traje-bedecked Aguacatecos (traditional Mayan dress; people from Aguacatán, respectively). I kept expecting there to be more drama as the day progressed, but save the occasional rat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers, it seemed, as hoped, rather tame.

In order to win the presidency, a candidate must get an absolute majority of votes (50% plus 1). As the polls began reporting, it became clear that Otto Perez Molina, the heavily favored frontrunner, would fall well short of that majority, entering him into a runoff with second place finisher Manuel Baldizón scheduled for November 6th.

Controlling crime has been the greatest issue in this race, though few remember—or seem to care—that former School of the Americas graduate Perez Molina was the director of Military Intelligence during Guatemala’s lengthy civil war. Thinly-veiled accusations in the media that he ordered several of the major human rights violations perpetrated by the Army have bred skepticism that the tough-on-crime Mano Dura (Firm Hand) policy he now seeks to implement will not result in extra-judicial killings or open war in the street between the military and the equally well-armed narcos.

Baldizón, by contrast, is a wealthy business man from the department of Petén, the heavily narco-infested region of northern Guatemala that made news when 27 farmworkers were slaughtered by the Zetas in pursuit of the ranch’s owner earlier this year. He is inarguably more centrist than Perez Molina, but his strongly pro-business stance and conspicuously opaque campaign finance reports make him a question mark for the future.

But I really should get away from making statements regarding the politicians. Not only is it bad form given my overall level of knowledge on the race, but Peace Corps rightly maintains political neutrality for our safety and its continuity from one political reign to the next.

Moving on; as I mentioned, we cooked, we ate, we relaxed. Unfortunately, not all municipalities experienced as much tranquility as Aguacatán.  At least four municipal offices were torched by protesters in response to real or perceived voting irregularities in Huehue alone, and dozens of similarly violent riots took place throughout the country.

When I got back to San Se I was eager for news regarding our own situation. Had violence occurred? Do we have a new mayor? Are there still chocolate- and peanut-covered frozen bananas at that store near my house?

No; yes; yes, respectively.

According to everyone I talked to, the political structure remains standing here, though the son of the deceased mayor was elected under the banner of the incumbent UNE party. Without knowing a single thing about his politics, there would seem to be a tragically heroic story in the making, of sons taking up the mantle of their slain fathers, courageously fighting the good fight against shadowy criminal forces, getting the girl in the final act…

So now we are left with greater questions: Will the future president be able to control crime? Will the threat of getting a country-wide Peace Corps evacuation diminish? Will that store near my house continue to sell choco-bananas? Only time will tell.

The photos can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/114291229338134891582/Week36?authkey=Gv1sRgCLToqt763pLm3gE

Week 35 - Tax Season

Arguably the hardest aspect to resolve with preconceived, pre-departure notions of what service will be like is that we are still a part of a bureaucracy. While the entire application process, frequently lasting more than a year, is an enormous mess of paperwork, signatures, background checks, and interviews, I expected it to end when I got out into the boondocks. Here we often feel like we’re out in the middle of nowhere, free to do virtually whatever our own sense of morality and work ethic let us get away with. Most of the year this is true; then again, there’s that one nagging downer on the calendar. Like tax season for real adults, there comes a time where we are held accountable for our actions over the previous year. And like real adults, we hate it. We hate it a lot.

It’s called the Volunteer Report File, or VRF, and it chronicles everything we do related to our job over the fiscal year, from baseline surveying to running workshops, school visits to addressing the city council.

I don’t doubt the need for such a tool. As much as I despised doing it, I never once questioned that it wasn’t an important diagnostic by which Washington can measure the Peace Corps’ efficacy. Rather, it’s just so boring. Beat your head against the wall and run screaming for the internet boring.

Vaguely Recalled Failure

As I look through my datebook, deciphering scribbles in black and blue ink, I take stock of what I’ve done in the last 5 months since getting to site: Visited each school (30) once to introduce myself and give a broad overview of what Healthy Schools is about; Visited each school (15, my half) once to conduct baseline surveys of the current infrastructure and health practices; and conducted a workshop in 7 schools delving a little more in depth about how to become certified as a Healthy School.

Beyond a few little odds and ends, that’s about it. 52 school visits in 5 months. Even only going to one school per day (I try to go to two or more), that’s only going to work every other day. In any other field in the world I would be fired. Here, in the land of strikes and unplanned holidays, it’s about par for the course.

The VRF sits dauntingly empty. There’s no way to increase the margins or make the font size 13. Just me and the tragic loneliness of the reporting tool.

            Very Real Frustration

I enter the same details again and again and again: School name, number of workshop leaders, subject presented…In a minute I can no longer force myself to go on, and take a break, wallowing in the shared misery of all the other volunteers expressing their frustrations on Facebook.

“Mine didn’t save,” said several status updates. “There goes 4 hours of work, down the drain.”

I press the save button on mine 3 times in a row, still not convinced it’s telling me the truth when the program tacitly says “enough already.”

A lot of it is just the typical complaints of burdened shoulders. I certainly give in to it—frequently, in fact—and cannot begrudge anyone partaking in the same.

After a short period I decide that others’ melancholy is increasing my own, and I go back to the form.

            Verbosely Reported Fluff

How can I make my own accomplishments seem more grandiose than they were? I use eye-catching filler words, like vis-à-vis, indubitably, and hence. Hopefully my lexicon will be conflated with an equal dedication to precision and efficiency.

Three hours later I’m finally done. Entries litter my file, and all of the essay questions (“Describe a success you’ve had”) are completed.

I email it to my bosses, and then lean back, exhaling. Tax season is done for the year.