Machetes fix everything

On October 12, I arrived in San Marcos where I will be spending the next 10 months. I am living with a single woman, who has been working with Pastoral de la Mujer for 10 years and is currently studying in the university in Xela for human rights. My living situation is very different from the other YAVs because I am not living with a family, and I am also living with an incredibly modern woman. It makes it more difficult to form community because I don´t have a built in community like people who live with families. I have to create my community myself, which has been a difficult, but important challenge for me. Creating community is not really something I have ever had to do; community has always been created around me. I have never been very good and small talk and don´t particularly enjoy it. Having to make small talk in Spanish has been challenging, but in a good way. I find it is the challenging and uncomfortable things in my life that are the best experiences and most fulfilling.

I explained a little about Pastoral de la Mujer in a previous post, and I am still learning about how they function. San Marcos is a huge department, and there are various Pastoral de la Mujer´s within the department, all connected, but doing different things and with their own programs. My Pastoral works within the mountains and Aldeas of San Marcos, while the other two groups are located on the coast. I arrived in San Marcos on a Monday, and Wednesday I went on my first community visit to Tectitan. Tectitan is actually in the region of Huehuetenago, but the parochial is connected with the dioces of San Marcos. I have known that I would be traveling around the department to visit communities, but I never really thought about how I would be traveling. Well, we travel by caminoeta. I wrote a blog post about the caminoeta´s a while back, so I won´t describe the experience again. Elvia and I traveled for 3 hours in a caminoeta up through the mountains. In order to get to Tectitan we had to go up one side of the highest mountain, Taculmuco, in Central America, and the travel down the other side. We drove up through the clouds and eventually were above the clouds, before we traveled back down. It was incredibly beautiful. After we got of the caminoeta we then had to take a taxi for half hour to Tectitan, which does not have a caminoeta stop. There were four adults crammed into the back seat and two adults and a baby crammed into the front seat, and then the driver.

Once we got to Tectitan we arrived at the house of Padre Jose, who is the main padre of the parochial. Elvia had told me we would be going to a hot water pool, so I was prepared with my bathing suit. Shortly after we arrived Padre Jose came with another guy who works for the parochial and we got in his car to travel to the hot water pools. I assumed that the hot water pool would be fairly close to Tectitan, especially because we headed out at 7 pm at night. The pools were an hour and half away down a dirt road through cornfields and we stayed at the pool until 11 pm. I was tired before we got to the pools, and actually feel asleep for a short period of time before my dinner came at 10 pm. When we left I quickly feel asleep in the car, despite my head bumping against the glass window. At some point I feel the car stopping and Padre Jose asking Elvia for a flashlight. Then I hear this horrible grinding noise coming from the car. I wake myself up and we drive the car a little ways further up the road. So now the car is stopped in the middle of cornfields and Padre Jose disappears into the cornfields and comes back with an old man with a flashlight and a machete, which I assume was to help fix the car. Rural Guatemalans use machete´s for everything, and never leave home without one. I have to admit I was very glad to be stranded at midnight in the middle of a cornfield with head Padre of the parochial because he knows everyone. They take the front left wheel off the car and are talking rapidly. I am tired and barely follow the conversation, more interested in the millions of stars I can see in the sky, but Elvia goes and picks something up off the dirt road, and then it is placed somewhere in the car, the wheel is put back on and we continue on our way. I don´t know if what Elvia picked up was part of the car or not, but it looked like a piece of cornhusk. Overall, it was a wonderful adventure.