A Trip to Pacamán

The van pulled to a stop in front of the closed municipal gate. A large group of men stood about idly, looking like they had no intentions of opening it. This did not bode well for my plan for the day, to travel to the remote community of Pacamán, deep in the mountains some 25 kilometers south of Ixtahuacán, to conduct a needs assessment. I had left my house only three minutes prior. But Juan, the driver, chatted the men up briefly and they allowed us to pass through. The microbus whizzed along the gravel road through the highlands of Alaska, and I enjoyed the vistas of cornfields, villages, and mountain panoramas, all drenched in fresh morning sunlight. Half an hour later in Chikisis I changed over to a pickup, and hanging off the back I braced myself for the slow grinding descent to Tzamjuyub. Winding down the valley, I looked out over the adobe villages enshrouded with a veil of smoke from the morning fires. In Tzamjuyub I waited until a trio of campesinos arrived to walk me to Pacamán.

We hiked down to the river bed and greeting the women who were washing their clothes. Neither of the three men spoke much Spanish, but with the help of my nascent K’iche we managed to carry a conversation. Arriving in their village an hour later, I was ushered into a hut and given a Pepsi. They thanked me for my efforts, and told me that they needed new houses. I told them that I saw that their houses were not nice, but they I had thought we were going to have a meeting with the whole village to discuss all the needs they face, then decide on a course of action. It’s fine, they told me, we’ll go to the school and the people will come. But they will agree with us that we want new houses.

The next two hours made mockery of the community needs assessment techniques that the Peace Corps taught me earlier this year. Vainly I struggled to get the people to discuss their problems and identify ways to improve their lives. I tried to get them to draw pictures, to make lists, to talk amongst themselves and present back to the group. No dice. Finally about halfway through a woman piped up that it would be nice to have some free fertilizer as well. But really houses are the important part.

Over the course of the day I tried to explain, in different ways, the problems with trying to do a housing project: the lack of funding for such ventures, the high budgets, the logic of development agencies. All fell on deaf ears, a combination of not understanding Spanish and not wanting to listen. In the afternoon I went to a private house with community leaders to continue dialoging, and they gave me a lunch of tamalitos and fried chicken. We continued to wrangle for a couple more hours, the men asking me to write an application for them right then and there, and I endeavoring to explain the steps of the project process and why that wasn’t even a possibility.
Finally I told them I had to leave and that I would investigate potential funding sources and return in the New Year. I set off on the dusty road back up the valley towards Tzamjuyub. But along the way nearly every village I passed had a group of people sitting out in front of it, waiting for me to ask when I was coming to their town to see how miserable their houses were. I distributed my cellphone number, promising to visit other communities a different day and pleading in my broken K’iche that they find a Spanish speaker to call me and make the arrangements. In Tzamjuyub I was welcomed by the leader of the local development committee, given small breads and a pineapple soda. I again expressed my willingness to visit the town and hear their desires, but insisted I had to get out to the road to wait for a pickup back to the highlands at the top of the valley. “Pickup? At this hour? Too late,” I was informed.
I set out at rapid pace, motoring to the top of the mountain as if someone’s very life depended on it. I knew that if I could hike the four miles to Chikisis in less than an hour, I had a chance at catching the last microbus back to the highway. Otherwise, it would be a further 2 ½ hours to Ixtahuacán.

63 minutes later and sweat pouring from my person, I arrived just in time to flag down a friend’s pickup. I collapsed in the bed and pondered the day’s events, considering that I had committed myself to visit an additional five communities in the distant valley.

Legend of the Sija'

During the town fair these costumed celebrants danced for three days, hours at a time. They had come masked and caped on the first day, and didn’t remove the disguises until twilight of the third, and so no one knew who they were. It is a very old tradition that is observed in many indigenous towns in Guatemala, and finds its roots in nonviolent resistance to colonization by the Spaniards. The masks all have pale skin and clear eyes; many of the costumes mock the capes and armor worn by the conquistadores. I have read that the Spanish subjugators were so vain that they thought the people were worshipping them, when in fact they were being mock ridiculed.

On a recent sunny afternoon I climbed the Sija’, a small, stubby mountain a couple of kms from town. The mountain is held sacred by local traditional spiritualists, and at the top one finds Mayan altars covered in flowers from recent ceremonies. The name of the place which means “flower of water,” is explained in oral tradition. Many centuries ago, the town of Ixtahuacán was located at its present day site. When the conquistadores came down from Mexico, the people heard of their coming and fled. They first went to a site on the far side of the Sija’, and to test the quality of the land they jammed a cane down into the earth. Soon water flowed out from the cane, and they knew the land was bountiful. But they soon feared they had not yet escaped the Spaniards, so they continued further down into the mountains, to the valley where the town of Antigua Ixtahuacán was built. The town remained there for hundreds of years until Hurricane Mitch triggered a sinking of ground that destroyed many houses, and damaged countless others, leading to the relocation of the majority of the town’s population to the current (and historical) location in the high, treeless plain known as Alaska. As the entire town was built by a coalition of international NGOs in 1999 and 2000, it is a planned community, with straight wide streets, and residential neighborhoods ringing a core of commercial, communal, and municipal buildings. Here is a photo of the town I took from a rocky altar on the Sija’.

It is the season of the corn harvest, which means fresh corn on the cob. Roasted or boiled, it is always delicious and sustaining. Some eat it plain, some rub it with lime and salt, and others douse it in ketchup, mayonnaise, and hot sauce (a preparation I have sampled and wish not to try ever again—though I do recommend lime as an excellent substitute for butter to my North American friends!) One bright morning last week, I went out to the fields with my friends Victoriano and Cata to pick some fresh elotes. Victoriano is one of my best friends here, as well as my K’iche teacher.

Cata is one of his granddaughters and a daily playmate. The youngest of five children, her father abandoned the family when she was still a baby, which endears her to me even more.

We brought the elotes back to the house and shucked them, roasting them on the hot coals. The kids crawled on my knees, begging me to play horsie. We ate our corn, cupping our hands around the cobs between bites to warm our chilled hands. The women teased me in K’iche about my supposed girlfriends and who from the village I was most likely to marry. Rosa offered me her fifteen year-old daughter, a twinkle in her eye; I have explained to her many times that cultural taboos and legal issues would prevent me from taking the girl back to the States as my wife. There is no doubt that my extended host family has accepted me as one of their own, for which I am very grateful. I hope and pray that this post finds readers well. With Love from Guatemala!

Dry Season

The rainy season has ended now. The mornings dawn bright, clear, crisp, and cold. Some days the clouds and fog never come, and glorious high altitude sunsets give way to a carpet of twilight stars. The cornfields are browning, the leaves burned by frost, the ears drying in the endless breeze. Children fly colorful paper kites, often entangling them in trees and power lines. The kites bounce in the wind, snarled in place and flyerless. The political propaganda of the election season has been painted over; Álvaro Colóm, a self-declared social democrat with reported links to organized crime and narcotrafficking, beat an ex-general in the second round. Feria, or town fair, will begin this week. Small mechanical rides have been rolling in on trailers, and are being set up in a dusty lot in front of the central plaza. The men that arrived with them suggest to me that carnies are a seedy breed regardless of nationality. Feria promises to offer more than just the rides…Marimba orchestras, bull fighting, dances, bicycle racing, a rock concert, arcade games, and an impressive show of public drunkenness are all on the docket.

What have I been up to recently? First of all, after the end of the school year last month I went to the island of Oahu in Hawaii to be a part of my brother Peter’s wedding. A man from Maine married a woman from Alaska on a beautiful tropical beach. I am grateful that I could be there among friends and family new and old, and returned to Guatemala excited for new work opportunities. Unfortunately a series of workshops on disaster preparedness that I had planned with communities affected by landslides never materialized, and I have spent the bulk of this month trying in vain to make it happen. Apparently, what with feria, the corn harvest and the approach of the Christmas holiday, it is not the ideal season for community organizing around here. After a couple of frustrating weeks I have accepted this and am now devoting myself to preparations for 2008, my seemingly futile studies of the K’iche language, tickling young children until they nearly soil themselves, teaching friends how to cook and bake new dishes, and all the other vital functions of the de facto cultural ambassador of the United States in Nueva Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán.