Meeting the Fams

From Thursday, October 1 - Sunday, October 4, I met the families and placements of all the YAVs, including my own. It was a busy couple of days full of ackward conversations and being completley overwhelmed by all the information being thrown at us...in Spanish. My spanish is certainly getting better, but I have difficulty recognizing verb tenses at times, plus I can´t understand people who mumble even in the slightest, nor can I keep up with conversations when people talk to fast. Then when you get left behind it is just about impossible to catch back up. So I ask all of you, if you are speaking to a person just learning your language, first, speak CLEARLY. Second, speak slightly slower so people can keep up and it will allow you to annunciate your words.

We spent Thursday in San Felipe, Quezaltenango. Willem, the sole boy in our group, will be living there working in a school and on a coffee finca near the western coast of Guatemala. The school is a private colegio that holds primerio in the morning (grades 1-6) and basico (grades 7-9) in the afternoons. It is a private school, but I am not convinced it is much better than the public schools. Willem will be living with the family who owns the school, which was bought to help the family earn additional income. Right now the school is actually loosing money. After we visited the school we went to meet Willem´s family and have lunch. His mother or sister made this delicious rice with all kinds of weird things in it. I especially loved the raisins and had seconds. Then we traveled to Finca Santa Elena where he will be working. The finca has been owned by the same family for three generations and two siblings run it and the French husband of Anne Marie (one of the siblings). The finca is also a money making enterprise, but the owners first priority is to their workers and providing stable work. The finca pays at least 10 quetzales more per 100 pounds of coffee picked and the owners are not making money to put in the bank. All of the income from the finca goes to pay their expenses. In order to generate more cash flow, they have opened their finca to tourism, but in a way that highlights the problems of coffee picking and issues of social justice. They want people to understand the reality of coffee farming and the types of lives the pickers lead. The finca is absolutely a beautiful place in general and I am excited to have our November retreat there.

Friday morning Marcia walked us around Xela helping the three girls who are living get accoustmed to the second largest city in Guatemala. After lunch we went and visited Emily´s placement, La Fraternidad de Presbeterianos Mayas. I love La Fraternidad. Both times I went to Guatemala with Queens we spent time with La Fraternidad and in the communities they work with. I have so much respect for the women of La Fraternidad and am slightly jealous of Emily. The vision of La Fraternidad is to promote and train women´s groups to act as catalysts of change, creating a better future through the implementation of holistic projects that benefit the members and their communities. They work with Maya women and have four main projects that are currently running. The have a socio-developmet program that provides technical assistance of an agronnomist to groups with agricultural projects, and environmental protection in general. They have a women´s ministry program that seeks to increase women´s participation and leadership in the family, church and community. They have an education program that seeks to elevete the quality and capacity for the independence of poor Maya women. Finally, they have a holistic health program that works on preventative health and nutrition. Then we went and met Emily´s family. Marcia had initally told us all that no one was going to have a really rural experience and likely everyone would have indoor plumbing. Well, Emily is rural and does not have indoor plumbing. She will certaintly have the longest adjustment period, but her family seems wonderful and she will be living in the same community as the people she will be working with.

Saturday we drove into San Marcos and met my placement and Elvia. I will be working with Pastoral de la Mujer of the Catholic diocese. The diocese in San Marcos is apparently the best in Guatemala and one of the best in Central America. The archbishop is very progressive and they have many wonderful projects that cover a variety of issues. Elvia started to explain to us what Pastoral does, but also started explaining all of the projects that the diocese is involved in. She also speaks very fast so I could not keep up with everything. Marcia and I both understand what the organization is trying to do, but not how they do it exactly. I know I will be traveling a lot out to different communities. Most of them will be day trips but San Marcos is a huge department so some will be overnight trips. We went to Judy´s house for lunch. Judy is an American nun who has been working in Guatemala for 15 years, and was in Bolivia before that. Then we went to Elvia´s apartment for dessert, which is where I will be living. I will just be living with Elvia, but her extened family lives across the street, with whom we will spend a lot of time. Elivia lives above a construction garage of some kind and another family lives off of the garage. It is a small apartment but very comfortable. My living situation is different from everyone else because I don´t have a family, but this will be better for my spanish. It is a lot harder not to practice when it is only you and one other highly extroverted female. Elvia is Maya, but she is incredibly modern and no longer wears the traje. I am not sure if she speaks an indigenous language, but her mother still wears the traje and lives in pueblo outside of the city of San Marcos.

Saturday night we went and had dinner with Bettina´s family. Bettina is also living with a Mayan family, but they are obviously the first generation with money. They live in an incredibly nice house, nice by American standards, and Bettina will be living in what we believe is the servants quarters because it is right next to the kitchen and she has her own bathroom. She has six brothers of varying age and the family is evengalical. Her experience will be highly different from mine and Emily´s, but in reality all five of us will have highly different experiences. We ate a delicious dinner and decided Bettina is going to get fat this year. We later learned the meal is a traditional Guatemala party meal called pepitino, or something like that. I keep forgetting the word but it is served in various methods, which we also had in a different form for lunch at Judy´s that day, and then for lunch Sunday at Dana´s.

Sunday we went to an Episcopal church service, which is the church Dana will be working at. She will be mostly working on a daily lunch service for the elderly. The church also has a small clinic that they run sometimes and bring in at least one medical mission team a year. Dana will probably travel with that team when they arrive. We had lunch with Dana´s family and then left for our last week of language school in Pachaj, a small pueblo outside of Xela.