Week 31 - Supermen and Crazy People

There’s a race in Huehue, called the Ascenso (Ascent) that runs from the center of town to the top of the Cuchumatanes, the highest mountain range in Central America. It’s approximately a half marathon and gains more than 5,900ft in vertical elevation. It has few flat sections to break the monotony of climbing, and not a single downhill. It was supposed to be this last weekend and I, considering myself an athlete, decided to check it out. However, before I go any further, we should get one thing clear: I didn’t run in it; Are you kidding? I’m not crazy.

…But a few of my friends are.

As I said, the race was supposed to be this weekend, and for months my compatriots have been training for it. Unfortunately, due to another epic fíjese que, the race directors changed it at the last minute to next weekend instead. For most people I’m sure this is not a huge problem. Then again, most people in Guatemala don’t book non-refundable flights to the United States for a few days after the race.

My crazy friends decided to run it this weekend anyway.

Despite my epic walks through the very same mountains, I am in no shape to run 13 miles, much less through the wispy air at almost 12,000ft. Instead, I offered to be not the thoroughbred but the mule. I raced up the mountain in relative luxury, toting the accoutrements of distance runners: Sweatshirts, pants, extra bottles of water, cell phones, wallets, cameras, and—because it was almost her birthday—clandestine candles.

They started up the road shortly after 7am, with me following at 8. I was bent on arriving at the top first so I could cheer them through the final meters and snap “victory” photos of their triumphant arrival. Unfortunately, the only available transport was a microbus with a maximum capacity of 15 passengers. Unsurprisingly, it contained 22.

Motivated by my task, I handed off my grossly oversized costál (tote made from reappropriated rice sacks) to the driver’s assistant and squeezed into a jump seat already occupied by 2 others.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” I smiled weakly. They grumbled but said nothing; these sorts of inconveniences are expected in this part of the world.

I received my just desserts as a woman behind me attempted to get out and then 3 others get in. Only two of them could fit inside, with one sitting on the armrest between the front seats, staring despondently back at the rest of the micro. The other remained standing, my knees and his lost in a tangle of unclaimed limbs. The third, along with the driver’s assistant, clung to the luggage rack on top of the vehicle, waiting for more space to open up as we began to trundle off.

As I started up, I palmed a camera, hoping that I could whip it out to get an action shot or two of the racers on their journey. The standing man was forced to keep switching his stance as we swerved right then left along the serpentine road. His jean-clad posterior kept blocking the only window available to me. After a few unsuccessful—and entirely awkward—attempts to position my camera towards the opening, I gave up. I’d just have to catch them at the top.

I felt increasing admiration for the runners as our micro ate up more and more road without seeing them. Finally, far later than I expected, we began to pass my friends, two walking during a particularly steep stretch here, a solitary warrior winding their way up there, until I had passed all 7.

With about 20 minutes before I could expect the first runner to appear, I got out of the micro, paid my fare, and trudged off towards the Mirador (Lookout) recessed from the road that marked the race’s conclusion.

I became antsy. I kept checking the settings on my camera to make sure that it was tuned to the proper capture mode, and then my watch to estimate how much time it would be before the first arrived. I propped the costál against a stone, within easy reach but out of the way of the runners who were sure to be stumbling across the final stretch.

Again I checked the camera. Again I checked my watch.

I continued this ritual for an interminable length (ironic, since I kept fiddling with my timepiece) when the first, the only male, rounded a bend and exploded into view. I waved to him like an idiot, as if his success was somehow the exclamation point to my own. As he approached I began fumbling with the camera, suddenly unsure how to get it to focus. I trotted alongside until he burst through the imaginary finish tape and bent over trying to catch his breath, hands resting sturdily on his knees. He stopped his stopwatch before looking at it.

“Huh,” was all he said at first. “Huh.”

I gave him some water.

“I just ran that in an hour and 24 minutes.”

“Huh,” I responded. “That’s fuckin’ crazy.” I was impressed by the bounds of human endurance.

We both sat on a cement embankment and waited for the next runners. Slowly, they began trickling in, until we were all there.

Two more PCVs showed up, bringing along a clandestine birthday cake to compliment my candles.

“Happy birthday!” we all shouted to the birthday girl.

Her eyes lit up, and she immediately began picking at the chocolate, a slave to the restorative properties of calories and cocoa powder after a long run. As she picked at it I tried to place the candles, but my unobtrusive aim was no match for her barbarism: She executed the dessert with extreme prejudice.

We lazed around at the lookout, partly resting, partly waiting for the thick cloud cover to lift so we could see Huehue laid out below us. It never did, and after an hour we unstuck ourselves from the ground and hitch hiked to a comedor (independently owned family restaurant) nearby. Two decided to run there as a cool down to their earlier workout.

When we got to our table I picked the nearest seat and slumped into it.

“What’s with you?” One of the others asked.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted.”

They laughed politely, thinking it was a joke, but I had meant it. The thin air, the excitement of the run, the crowded jockeying in the micro…I was just a normal man among a table full of supermen.

Jesus, I really should start running.

Find the photos here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week31?authkey=Gv1sRgCJHe3d-n_fGkDA

Week 30 - Your Mouth Should Never Billow Smoke

Teeth, like good friends and certain venereal diseases, are expected to stay with you whether you want them to or not. Given this sentiment, I don’t think it’s out of order to feel a certain amount of betrayal at my own for their increasingly flaky behavior: Lately, they’ve been jumping ship like it’s cool. Or rather, little pieces of them are deciding, with hardly any warning, to spontaneously unstick themselves from the calcified majority and wander off.

In the last 6 weeks, I’ve had 5 teeth crack or chip. Naturally this has necessitated getting myself to a dentist, and that is where my story begins…

The dental office sat on an Antigua side street above the west end of the park, nestled between a tailor and a bed and breakfast. All three were named Ovalle, and it made me wonder if the family was as financially diversified as the location suggested. I walked in the front door of the clinic and announced my presence to the receptionist. She smiled, pointed upstairs, and indicated that the dentist would be with me shortly.

Wallpaper pictures of Pixar characters made a lazy rotation around the room. In a corner sat resilient toys made of impact- and stain-resistant plastic. A hygienist smiled and me and reminded me that the dentist would be with me shortly.

I busied myself by trying not to wonder about the dentist’s qualifications. If the Peace Corps had sent me to her, then she was certified by the U.S. State Department as equal to the care I would receive at home. Still, a lot of uncertainties bubbled through. It’s hard not to think about all the things that can go wrong in a third world dental clinic. That it’s a common fashion statement for Guatemalans to have their teeth pulled and replaced with some combination of gold, faux pearl, and star designs only made it more so. I’m rather attached to the natural elegance of my front teeth.

After a few minutes a different hygienist directed me to the chair where it would all take place. The big show.

The dentist turned out to be a dentista, and she immediately began questioning me about my teeth and brushing habits. I answered as best I could, but when it came time to describe why I was there, my equal mix of academic and countrified Spanish began to fail me. My previous language education had never prepared me for the possibility of tooth decay.

“Well, uh,” I began, “My teeth are…breaking…little pieces.”

As I started to falter, she held up a single latex-covered palm.

“Stop,” she told me, “and let’s switch to English.” She spoke it with a sizable accent, but was quite understandable.

“Right. Lately my teeth have begun to chip. There are little pieces missing out of the cutting edges, and I want to get it dealt with before any more damage occurs.”

“Ah, yes; I see,” she began as she poked delicately with her mirror and hook probe. “Unfortunately, the damage has progressed too far and we’re going to need to pull these two.” She indicated my top front teeth.

I nearly fell out of the seat as she began laughing. Apparently she was no stranger to the aversion gringos held towards obvious prosthetics.

“I kid, I kid. This is easy work.”

I settled back into the deep recline of the dental chair, heart still battering itself against my ribcage. I was ready at any moment to flee if I saw the slightest flash of gold.

She picked up a drill with a flat, saucer-like attachment at the business end. “Don’t move,” she told me, all humor aside.

She pressed the power button and it began to whir. Like a bad horror movie, it inched closer to my face. My eyes bulged, but I was too afraid of what additional damage turning away might cause. It became lost inside my mouth, the sensation a dull vibration that resonated along my jaw and into my eardrums.

“At least it doesn’t hurt,” the relentlessly optimistic part of my psyche chirped.

My teeth began to heat up, the way they do when you hold hot coffee in that space between your teeth and lips. Smoke—honest to goodness smoke—began billowing out of my mouth. I closed my eyes. My optimism, already in the gross minority, was beaten almost to death by my increasingly powerful neuroses. Somehow I just knew that from this day forward I would never be able to smile in public again.

A few more minutes of drill work and the dentist asked one of the two hovering hygienists to fetch the composite. When it came, she slathered some on my filed teeth and began forming them into approximations of what they used to be. I couldn’t tell how good of a job she was doing, whether it would dry clear or white, and how it would hold up to the daily rigors I put my mouth through.

“That would make a great ‘that’s what she said’ joke,” my cowed optimism whispered, not looking for another pummeling. My pessimism left it alone, just this once.

Opening my eyes, I peered up into the orange safety goggles the dentist had donned. She was using the UV light to harden the composite. I wondered what the likelihood was of getting mouth cancer from such treatments. Was it like a CT scan, dishing out carcinomas to one unlucky patient in every thousand? I believed my optimism when it said it was less.

She pulled the ray gun out of my mouth and stuck a piece of black electrical tape in instead.

“Bite,” she commanded.

I bit.

She looked at the strip. “Do any of your teeth feel larger than they should?”

“The top left one feels longer than normal.”

She nodded, as if this statement confirmed what she already knew. Out came the drill again. Out billowed the smoke. Out boiled my neuroses.

When she was done, I ran my tongue along the offending incisor. It felt more normal.

Again she stuck the black electrical tape in my mouth and told me to bite. Only then did it occur to me that she was checking that the pressure of my bite was equal along the strip. Equal pressure meant equal tooth length.

Out came the drill twice more, and each time I winced in expected mutilation. When she was finally done she handed me a mirror. My teeth had a different texture, somehow more rough and plastic, but the mirror told me that no permanent damage had been done. Aesthetically they looked no different than they had a month ago.

Somewhere, deep inside, my narcissism breathed a sigh of relief.

Find the accompanying pictures here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week30?authkey=Gv1sRgCOWiw92E3ev5Dw

Week 29 - This is What it's Like When Worlds Collide

As some of you may know, my father, in a fit of what can only be described as impulsivity derived from paternal love and relatively cheap airline tickets, came to visit me this last week. Much of the visit was very good, but what struck me was not that it was so good to see an old, familiar face (indeed, the oldest and most familiar), but the way it reflected my image back at me.

I suppose I should clarify that last sentence a little bit. I’d hate for you to think that I was so self-absorbed that I need to see myself in every situation. What I mean is that my dad is someone who knows virtually nothing about contemporary Guatemalan mores, and speaking Spanish is, put lightly, not his forte. In essence, he is exactly like I was when I first arrived.

When I first joined Peace Corps, I knew nothing, and it forced me to construct a new world of familiarity. Everything was new to me. Even the people with whom I came were entirely foreign. They had different educations, interests, Spanish abilities, stereotypes, and accents. Obviously, to survive here, I had to make their acquaintance.

Little by little, I became more knowledgeable about my fellow volunteers, about my host country, and about Spanish as a language. But in doing so, it remained entirely divorced from my life back home. There was no pollution of old relationships—to the people or the culture—that crossed from the old to the new. My point, if I have a point, is that everything that I’ve built here has been unique to this place.

So when my father came to Guatemala it was unexpectedly more complicated than simply having a loved one come to visit. It’s difficult to overlay separate lives, and it felt like a profound collision of my old world with my new one. I’m not saying that I am necessarily an entirely new person, or even that I’ve consciously worked at reinventing troublesome parts of my personality, but I found it uncommonly difficult to straddle both personas: I was the dedicated PCV during the mornings, then the concierge during the afternoons, the translator throughout the day, and the young adult off with his friends after my he went to bed. I loved having him here, but it was a role I wasn’t prepared for. It was a role that others had filled for me during my first weeks in country.

Mostly it felt weird to be in a condition where that was possible for me to do.

It’s happened only one other time in my life: My friend and former roommate Will L. once visited me while I was studying abroad in Athens, Greece during the fall of 2008 just before the U.S. presidential election. While there I wrote weekly emails with almost as much religiosity as I do here. Being a digital packrat, they weren’t hard to dig up. At the time had this to say about his visit:

“I'm finding my ability to speak and understand Greek has improved noticeably. I guess that's to be expected, given that I came to Greece knowing nothing and now know at least a little something, but Will really made me realize that my language classes are not necessarily the poorly-organized jumble I thought they were. I surprised even myself by having a mildly intelligent exchange with a shop owner while Will looked at all the trinkets and t-shirts that stores near the Acropolis try to hawk to tourists like, well, him. I won't go into the meat of the dialogue, but I assure you it was ripe with comments concerning where I was from, what I was doing in Athens, and the didactic nature of Sophoclean thought and its pertinence to the contemporary geopolitical climate. That is, ‘go Obama!’”

What strikes me with this is that it is virtually identical to how I feel now. My question is, is this a normal phenomenon? I’m not talking about the slow acquisition of acculturation or linguistic competency, but rather that it seems virtually impossible to see how far you’ve come without literally standing next to someone on square one? I suppose on some level it’s like anything else, the athlete who doesn’t know how good they are until they disgrace their old training partner; the child who must stand next to last year’s penciled height mark on the doorway to see how tall they are now.

I guess it really doesn’t matter; if you’ve read my other posts you know that I haven’t been too shy about making sweeping claims about personality changes. “I’ve gotten more mature with this,” or “my that has improved substantially.” Still, having a stationary target to compare myself to really helped me to see what’s really going on. As a result I feel mildly refreshed; I looked forward to going back to San Se, to continuing my life rather than staying in Antigua, the tourist heaven I idealized so much during training.

To paraphrase the immortal words of the Pampers jingle, “Mommy, wow! I’m a big kid now!”

Sorry, I forgot my camera while he was here, and so, like last week, there aren’t any accompanying pictures. Next week, I promise…

Week 28 - An Albeit Short Ode to Coffee

In the land of the volcanoes, it’s the little things that keep you going. Perhaps as a semi-intended continuation of last week’s entry, I’d like to talk about that little thing that keeps me going: Coffee.

When I walk into a good coffee shop, you can immediately tell: Only the good ones rely exclusively on their java. In a culinary Darwinism, the good coffee survives and is allowed to spread its bean. It's the ones that water down their menu--even their selections--with too much choice that you have to be aware of. The caramel macchiato with soy milk and extra whip cream, while ephemerally tasty, really isn't about the beans, and the twice-as-large price tag makes it attractive as a profit subsidizer. Still, the good ones are small, with the espresso machine confronting you before anything else. My coffee shop du jour, the Refuge, is a simple hole in the wall about the size of my bedroom. Its L-shaped counter is made of varnished white pine, and it has only 4 drinks on the menu. The lime-green espresso maker sits front and center, dispensing bean-based truth to its gathered disciples.

It’s amazing how much of the stuff I can put back throughout the day if I’m not required to leave the easy proximity of a pot. What’s more amazing still is the nuance in flavor that I can now detect. The old, shriveled beans that have hidden in the permafrost of a freezer since the dawn of, well, freezers, taste much less complex than the babies that were roasted this morning; The slightly burnt, acidic taste of a mediocre drip blend is a 9^th grade Sadie Hawkins compared to the melodious Tarantella created by a professional-grade machine.

Then of course there’s the difference the barista makes: Try as I might, I will never be quite as good as the near-mythical Alex in Antigua, or the dedicated entrepreneurs of El Museo in Huehue. You taste that in the ambiance, and the little flourishes at the end: The garnishes, the designs in the foam, the graceful slant of the sugar spoon against the ceramic. Presentation, while not everything, rates a solid “important.”

But I think it's the routine that I like the most, those infrequent moments where I have the opportunity to read the paper under the avocado trees of my favorite coffeehouses. It feels so sophisticated, especially compared to the rest of my life, to read meaningful articles and ruminate on the lacunae of the global political process.

Will I ever be the same in my predilections for a good java? Can I go back to the mouthwash that I drank in my darker moments of college? God, I hope not.

Also, my dad is currently here in Antigua and, like a few weeks ago, I am finding it hard to write a meaningful entry. Still, if I let it go for a single week I’ll never be able to maintain my near-perfect adherence each week. It’ll be better next week. I’ll have no distractions (or fun, no doubt).

Signing off…

Week 27 - Early Mornings: Suck.

They say that the morning starts out with a quiet calm, and those up early enough catch the worm. Let me tell you: If the person weren’t so sleep-addled, they would realize they have no need for a worm to begin with. After almost 7 months of Peace Corps life, I can tell you that my relationship to the dawn has drastically changed.

The day's genesis isn't always bad, it just feels that way at the time. When I first stir at 5:10am, wipe the sleep bogeys from my eyes, and stumble over to the toilet followed by the percolator (rarely confusing the two pots), I can hardly appreciate the way the mist rolls through the trees and down the mountain behind my house. I can barely stand that soft chirping of sparrows, and truly despise the rustic call of a rooster echoing along the valley.

Gone are the days of forcing myself to bathe as soon as I awake. Our shower is solar-heated, and while you can have a truly divine experience later in the afternoon (just before the rains), at 5am it’s no better than the river. My body has awoken to a hot shower almost every morning since 8^th grade. Even those terrible 8:30am “1a” classes in college usually were preluded by a quick rinse. Now waking up at 8:00 seems like an unfathomable luxury. Oh, how spoilt was I!

During high school I always took a certain amount of pride in the maximal efficiency of my morning routine. It was a team effort, not unlike those rapid pit stops during Nascar races: Wake up at 6:33, out of the shower by 6:45, dressed by 6:48, and out the door by 6:55. I had memorized each split, and the slightest slip from any of my pit crew—“Dad, get out of the damned shower!; Mom, peanut butter that bread faster!”—was enough to upset my morning. Today it’s the same race, but a different course, a solo dune buggy sprint across a feral landscape: Up by 5:12, urinated by 5:16, coffee started by 5:18, pack my bag for the day by 5:21, coffee off the burner by 5:22, and then head back to the bathroom to brush, primp, and deuce. Of course there’s usually no water that early in the morning, so precious minutes are wasted going to the pila with a bucket and bringing back enough water to manually trigger the flush mechanism.

By the time I return to my room for the second time, my coffee has cooled enough to drink, and I spend a few more minutes feebly trying to appreciate it while reading an online article of the New York Times. That first taste of coffee, now taken with a half-spoon of sugar and no milk, is good, but my dozing taste buds can hardly make the distinction between this organic, hand-picked, from the finca previously just-for-family-but-now-also-a-few-select-gringos and that brown swill that's patented by Nescafé.

I toss on my pants—those same dungarees that I’ve been wearing with adroit comfort for 22 consecutive days now—but the coffee has already begun to stagger in its daily war against the tentacles of that beast Slumber. In a final excruciating feat of masochism, I make my bed and flop out the door.

The time says 5:55am.

I live on the very outskirts of town, and walking to the center to beg a ride up the mountain takes just under four minutes. By the time a suitable chariot is found, the caffeine is starting to hit my system. I perk up a little, especially now that the siren song of my bed is drowned out by the chug of a poorly maintained combustion engine and a concentrated effort to not fall backward out of the pick-up bed. The wind is fierce, and I’m jealous of those older/cooler/more pregnant teachers who have secured a seat in the cab. My butt begins to hurt from the rock-strewn road’s constant jolts. I tell my butt to shut up. I’m in the Peace Corps, damn it. It reminds me that this is not that type of hardship it signed up for, and furthermore, I’m talking to my ass. Point, butt.

There are only cars moving along the mountain in the early morning and in the mid-afternoon, so while we are coming up the mountain workers are usually coming down to work in the lower fields or in Huehue. Despite the fact that they see me almost every day, the workers, all indigenous, gawk and whisper. I’ve become more brazen, too; while they stare at me coming up, I stare back. Neither side is willing to give in, their bemusement against my indignation, so we rotate like geriatric sprinklers, hardly blinking as we pass. This uncomfortable dance finishes when the road finally makes another of its ungainly switchbacks, blocking us from each other’s view. In the wind I hear a final Mam catcall of me’xj (pronounced “mesh”; lit. guy-with-the-hair-made-of-corn-silk). Despite the fact most people in the US would consider my hair to be some synonym of dark brown, here in Guatemala there are only variations on the shade of black. Since mine is not equally jet, I automatically get lumped into the category of “blond.”

Trying to distract myself from my growing discomfort allows for a lot of planning: I plan my walk. I plan my pit stops. I plan how I’m going to get back down the mountain, and if there’s anyone I can guilt into giving me a ride. I typically visit two schools each day, and and that means four to seven miles of walking. If I finish early for the day and don’t want to wait for the afternoon cars, it means another ten or more to get home. The Peace Corps does not allow me to own a motorcycle, and the mountains are too steep to use a bike. I often fantasize about owning a hang glider.

The truck stops and I get out. The time says 7:15am. I have reached my job site. It’s time to begin my day.

The photos, an equal mix of work and the walks between, can be found at https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week27?authkey=Gv1sRgCL31itPUieWRqgE

Week 26 - American Appetites

It’s an unexpected truism that patriotism expresses itself differently when you’re an expat. Take for instance my typical celebration of the 4^th of July in the US: Maybe hanging out with some friends, drink a few beers, eat a few brats, and call it a night after trying to blow something up with tiny explosives. Here—and I have it on good authority in almost every Peace Corps country—the 4^th of July is one of the biggest celebrations of the year. Perhaps it’s because it’s one of only a few US holidays we get to officially recognize here, or perhaps it’s because all the volunteers come—even those from the mythical Oriente (East side of the country)—and you get to see people you ordinarily don’t, but it’s a party atmosphere all weekend.

I ‘m not going to go into too much detail of what I did. Most of it really doesn’t translate well into an anecdote; do you really want to hear about me eating 3 burgers and a hotdog in only a few minutes and then the stomach-situated misery that followed? I didn’t think so, though I will say at the end of the day it was totally worth it.

Instead, I want to focus more on the sense of patriotism, and more generally, the connection I felt to other Americans on that day. I felt it too when I was in Greece in 2008, awaiting the presidential results that would put Obama in the White House. I’m not by nature prone to what more outspoken conservatives would call “patriotism:” I don’t wear a flag pin on my lapel; despite Rush Limbaugh’s abhorrent philosophies, I’m pretty sure he’s not a Nazi; and, except when I’m in the company of a select few, do not elongate—while simultaneously dropping most of the vowels from—the word “terrorist” (Will, you’re a dirty, dirty trrrrist!).

And yet, I find myself feeling pleased to hail from the United States. Is that really patriotism then, if I only feel it with other Americans, a beer and a burger clutched in each hand? I suppose it doesn’t really matter. More important, at least to me at least, is that Guatemala feels a little bit more familiar…

…I’m writing this in a café in Antigua called Y tú piña tambien (And your pineapple also), and the proprietor just came over and offered me a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. I figured that it deserved a shout-out.

…And now, upon leaving, I see that he charged me for it. Asshole.

But back to the matter at hand: Is it because we are all, at least in some sense, banded together as expats that we express a common ideology? I don’t think so. We’re all in Peace Corps, and I think that forms the basis of our connection. Patriotism is secondary to talent shows that make people look like endearing fools.

Indeed, when I arrived at a bar on the actual 4^th of July (the Peace Corps’ celebration was on Saturday), I was turned off by the profligacy and boorish representation of what being “American” meant to most of the patrons, only a few of which were Peace Corps. Beer was flowing, shots were shooting, and the playlist was chockablock with southern twang. Granted, it was a “redneck” themed party, but still. I’d be remiss if I suggested that I don’t occasionally party also (and let’s face it: The three lead guitars of Lynyrd Skynyrd are hot enough to melt your face off). There are a lot of volunteers who have a problem with how we portray our culture to locals, but what gets me is the projection we’re emitting of America to each other. Is this who we are? Where have I been?

Sorry this installment is so short. I’m still stuck in Antigua while I wait for the roads to be unblocked by protesting farmers and an “emergency security meeting” tomorrow afternoon at the Peace Corps office, whatever that means. My mind is other places at the moment.

Pictures at: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week26?authkey=Gv1sRgCLujsNvIquKIDg

Week 25 - Falling Off My High, High Horse

I think by this point you’ve all heard my half-hearted griping about the fíjese que’s, the impromptu holidays, and the general state of disrepair in which the Guatemalan school system finds itself. It still all holds true, of course, but I find myself having, given what transpired this week, a harder time sitting on my high, high horse.

The MINEDUC (Guatemalan abbreviation for the Ministry of Education), in conjunction with the San Se mayor’s office, sponsor a trip every school year not for the students, but the teachers of my district. They mostly pay for transportation costs, but are also able to finagle discounts that would be otherwise unobtainable on a smaller scale. I was pleased, but not terribly surprised, when my boss, the CTA (Superintendent) invited me to go along, given that I am, in some sense, both a teacher and an employee of the MINEDUC.

Who knew Guatemala has a perfectly respectable waterpark in the middle of the southern jungle?

I was torn. On one hand it seemed like a great way to build confianza with my teachers. On the other, it was exactly the kind of non-accountability that I’ve grown so frustrated with. This two day trip, on a Wednesday and Thursday, was another glaring testament to the maxim, “teachers refuse to do anything during the weekend.” Much of the trip seemed to say, “Students? What students?”

Forget that this was a trip to the Guatemalan equivalent of Six Flags with a quick stop off at the beach first. Forget that it was heavily subsidized by the MINEDUC. Forget that it was perched comfortably between the ordinary work days of Tuesday and Friday. Well, maybe don’t forget that part; that’s kind of my point.

There seems to be no continuity, no flow, to the school week. It’s as if an axe murderer is lopping off a day here, two or three there, until the supposedly nine month school year feels like 3 or 4. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a good vacation day as much as the next person, but it honestly feels like the MINEDUC panders to the teachers over the students, always forgetting—or ignoring—which ones are the children.

You might think that I would forgo the trip as a politick statement of my distaste for this style of education. You give me too much credit. Officially speaking, it was the chance to build relationships with my coworkers, and more personally, create friendships so I’m not stuck in the house every night after 4pm. Also, Xocomil (sho-koh-MIL) is a Mayan-themed water park. It seemed worthy of an anecdote.

Wednesday morning I woke up at 3:30am so that I could be waiting for the MINEDUC bus by 4. By this point a lot of the teachers know who I am, or at least my face, but I think they were still a little surprised that one of the two gringos in town was headed out with them for the coast. Lauren, perhaps more overtly dedicated to her principles than I, declined the invitation.

Only about 40 teachers came on the trip, and when we reached the beach at Champerico around 10, we immediately hit the surf. Well, I waded in with gusto, remembering just how hot the beaches can become. Swim lessons are not very popular (or indeed, available) here, so few teachers know how to cope in deep water. Combine that with a strong riptide and vicious waves, and only the most daring went past waist depth. The majority dipped toes.

We packed it in after lunch, where I had caldo de mariscos (crustacean stew). As I think I’ve noted in other posts, Guatemalans don’t put much stock in making it easy to eat food. The stew was excellent, but it was pretty shocking to see a miniature ocean biome floating in front of me. 3 crabs (shell on), a dozen or more shrimp (shell and heads on), a fillet of fish (possibly tilapia, skin on), and fifteen tiny mussels floating around the soup like a rocky garnish (shells opened, but attached). When I was done, there was a graveyard surrounding the bowl and nearly as tall. Filling, messy, delicious.

That night we stayed in Mazatenango. Some teachers, tapping hidden reserves of herculean energy, suggested we hit the discos after dinner. I was born with no such assets. I called it a night around 7:30 and was asleep by 8.

The next morning we finally got to Xocomil. It’s been quite some time since I was at a water park, but I can assure you, those I went to in my youth were nothing like this. Towering step pyramids, painted in garish colors, poked above the banana and palm trees. From your vantage point at the top, just before sliding down, you could see miles and miles of uninterrupted forest. Virtually the entire park was fill with teachers from other districts, apparently equally drawn by the MINEDUC discount of half-priced admission and free lunch (total cost for the day was 50Q, or roughly $6).

There were really all of the rides you’d expect at a large water park in the US: Waterslides for both inner tubes and people without, giant slides, a lazy river, and wave pool. Were it not for the exotic views, it could have been anywhere.

I spent the day alternating between two groups of people, and by the time I was done I felt like I had created some foundations for friendships that will last me while I’m living here. I think it helped to be seen in a less professional, stiff environment. Everyone bends over backwards to properly greet and acknowledge the titles of others. At Xocomil, standing there in my oversized bathing suit, laughing, wading, floating, just like everyone else, I think it helped me be seen as a real person. I’m still a light-eyed, English speaking, sorely burnt oddity, but now slightly less so.

So was it worth it overall, swallowing moral indignation in favor of further establishing myself here in San Se?

I hope so.

The pictures, of which there’s only one (it’s hard to take pictures at a water park!),  can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week25?authkey=Gv1sRgCNT89MuHjszl7AE#5623078790259948386