A week ago, we put Kelsey’s mom on a plane back to the States, and received our first Philadelphia-based visitors — Kevin and Erica — a few hours later. Later in the week, they were joined by Kelsey’s law school friends, Amy, Eric, and Marsha. Yesterday, Kevin, Erica, Amy, and Marsha headed back to Pennsylvania, while Eric went to spend his 27th birthday weekend atop Volcan Pacaya and exploring the Copan ruins in Honduras (happy birthday, Eric!); we returned to the lake, and to the inevitable piling-up of mundane chores that a month of visitors brings.
As we warned, updates may be few & far between for the last few months of our time here…this particular one details the beginning of our months of mostly-vacation before we head home. In a post later this week, once we’ve sorted through photos, we’ll update you on hiking Pacaya with Kelsey’s mother (a distinctly less put-together experience than our first attempt on the volcano, in August, but still worthwhile), and on our adventures with the folks from Philly. For now, we’re backtracking several weeks to the second half of Karen’s visit.
Karen continued studying Spanish for her second week, commuting by boat to Panajachel, but she spent the evenings in Mayan Medical Aid’s student house, a 10-minute walk from our place. During her second week, we had drinks and appetizers at the newly-opened Laguna Lodge, next door (it is a decidedly “small plates” place, but the atmosphere, complete with vaulted wooden ceilings and stone fireplace, is lovely), and were treated to pulique — the official dish of Santa Cruz — as concocted by Kelsey’s English students. Pulique is a chicken stew made with potatoes, carrots, guisquil (a squash with a consistency somewhat like a melon), onions, cilantro, and achiote (Jimmy’s new favorite spice, a flavoring made from a tropical American tree with pink flowers and red fruit.)
Saturday, we took a tour of the lake on a local pontoon boat operated by Lee, an ex-pat who drove the boat down to Guatemala all the way from Texas. Jose, Karen’s roommate and our new dentist at the clinic (he is completing a practicum through October, a requirement in your final year of dental school here in Guatemala), joined us. The tour was lovely. We had flat, glassy water in the morning, and so could enjoy our tour of the sprawling lakeside homes on the opposite shore. We made stops in Cerro de Oro and Santa Catarina, two villages we had not yet visited, and swam in cool waters punctuated by natural steaming geothermal jets at the aguas calientes (hot springs — literally, “hot waters.”)
Sunday, we made the return to Chichicastenango, the highland market we visited in the fall with our friend Jake. We hoped for better weather than that particular visit (we were poured on), but it actually sprinkled a bit and so all the stalls were still covered with tarps. The market is quite a sight. It is stuffed with the handicrafts tourists can buy everywhere, but is also a bustling hub for locals — they buy material, thread, fruits, vegetables, toothbrushes, t-shirts, and dishes.
At the center of the market is an old church, la Iglesia de Santo Tomas, which dates to the mid-1500s. It is a fascinating place because it was built on top of an old Mayan sacred site — deliberately, by the Catholic church, in order to discourage practice of the traditional religion. Inside the church, however, trap doors in the floor have been constructed in order to allow access to the ground below. The parishioners light candles and pray, not just to Jesus and Mary in the front of the church, but also to their ancestors below. The church’s crumbling stone steps are covered with people praying, lighting incense, and selling flowers and candles to those entering the church.
We took advantage of Karen’s visit as a way to make our own souvenir purchases. From Catarina, the local woman who gave us the weaving workshop, we purchased a Santa Cruz huipil (the traditional top garment for Mayan women), which we plan to hang on our wall with a bamboo rod. We also ordered a table runner and table cloth, which Catarina is still working on. In Chichi, we picked out fabrics we liked for future use as accent cloths, placemats, and napkins, and also purchased three masks like those we saw displayed in the textile museum in Guatemala City. The masks, of a cow, monkey, and devil, are related to a traditional Mayan dance.
Our trip to Chichi was also full of animal-related attractions. Karen was aggressively pursued by a woman who wanted to sell her a turkey, and we saw a man stuff a 100-plus pound hog, alive, into a grain sack, wait for it to stop struggling, and haul it with him onto the chicken bus. Perhaps the oddest sight, however, were the crates of Ash Wednesday chicks, dyed neon colors (we tried to figure out how, and every theory we came up with seems irrevocably toxic) and sold to children in plastic bags.
On March 1, we made our first return to Xela since things we moved to the lake in September. Kelsey’s mother, a journalist for the Eugene Register-Guard, did research for several articles while she was here (apparently to be published in an upcoming Guatemala package of stories and web-based video; we’ll be sure to post the link when it runs.) The first involved the trek back to Quetzaltenango. INEPAS, which is the school Jimmy and Joel attended for three weeks in August, is a social justice organization with a variety of projects in the western highlands. One of these projects is to install computer labs — dozens of them so far — in local public schools. The computers are donated by a Eugene recycling organization, NextStep, and the labs are set up and maintained through the collaboration of parents, teachers, students, and local government.
Kelsey and Karen visited three labs with Maria Antonieta, the director of INEPAS — one in suburban neighborhood (well, perhaps better-termed semi-urban; suburbs as such don’t really exist in Guatemala except in the capital and Antigua), one in a very rural area, and one for low-income children housed in the public library in the center of Quetzaltenango.
Karen’s second story focused on the Cascade Medical Team, a group of doctors, nurses, and medical support staff who have been coming to Guatemala for years to deliver essential short-term health services. The group this year was larger than 100. They work out of a clinic at the Universidad del Valle, in buildings that used to be an army barracks. Each morning, hundreds of prospective patients line up outside the gates, eager to receive medical care — ob/gyn visits, hernia surgery, fillings and root canals, plastic surgery, eye care — in a setting where they are not discriminated against. Gaining access to health care is very difficult for indigenous people here due to systemic discrmination and financial barriers.
One bonus of the Team’s presence in Solola, which is just up the hill from Panajachel, was that we were able to refer five patients from Santa Cruz to their services. Karen focused her reporting on Fidelito, an 11-year-old boy who has suffered from a painful hernia since he was at least 6. When Fidelito is not in school, he helps his father, a lancha driver, by loading and unloading items. As you can imagine, this only exacerbates the hernia. He was very excited about the surgery, and when we checked up on him this past week he was recovering at home — following, according his father, strict doctor’s orders not to lift anything or exert himself in any way while the cut heals.
In other clinic-related news, Jimmy has spearheaded an attempt to deworm the kids in Santa Cruz and the surrounding villages. Parasitic infections take kids out of school and inhibit cognitive and physical growth, only adding to the problems created by general malnutrition. Albendazole, a chewable pill, can be taken every 6 months prophylactically, avoiding many of these issues. However, efforts to deworm the population stalled several years ago when distribution coincided with a change in the weather — and with a spike in respiratory illness. The then-mayor, an unstable and cutthroat leader, spread the rumor that our nurse practitioner, Guadalupe, was attempting to poison the children with the albendazole, and most parents refused the treatment.
In collaboration with the new mayor, the school, and another non-profit in town, Amigos de Santa Cruz, we are now ready to try again. Jimmy’s parents have generously offered to fund one administration (the pills are about seven cents each, but that does add up, as we have more than a thousand children in the town and surrounding villages), and we just received a donation of 2,000 pills, so we will be able to complete the deworming this year. Part of the plan is an educational campaign aimed at both the children and their parents, which was missing from the prior deworming attempt, and we hope that will contribute to a better success rate this time around.
