¡Feliz Navidad!

I hope everyone had as wonderful a Christmas as I did!  This whole week has actually been pretty great…

Monday: on my last day of work before the holiday vacation, I completed 2 of the 3 Peace Corps community analysis tools with my group in Trigales.

Tuesday: I met up with Noor in Quiché and we went to Chichicastenango (about 30 minutes away) for their feria.  I was pretty sure that that was the last day of their tradition where men attach themselves to this massive pole and fly around it, but it turned out that it was one of the only days that week they weren’t doing it!  It was still quite a fun daytrip and I of course managed to drop a bunch of quetzales on Christmas gifts for myself and my host family :)

Wednesday: I was violently ill and spent the day in bed reading and watching movies…which wasn’t too bad once I stopped feeling like death.

Thursday: daytrip to Uspantan to help pick out animals for our American-style Christmas feast.

Then the holiday celebrations began!  Friday was Noche Buena (aka Christmas Eve), which here is more important than Christmas day itself.  I went to Uspantan to spend the evening with Stephen and Mary and a family they are friendly with to get the real Guatemalan experience…and what an experience!  The night began with dinner and hanging out, followed by Catholic mass and incredible fireworks immediately after – though we were at most 50 feet away from where they were setting them off!  Then we headed back to their house to wait until midnight, when literally the whole town set off fireworks in sync…as Mary said, it looked like a news reel from the Gaza Strip with all the bomb-like noise and lights!  We set off our own cohetes (little fireworks) and estrellitas (sparklers) and succumbed to the tradition of eating tamales and drinking ponche (like a hot fruit punch).  The war-zone feeling continued during the walk home across town, this time accompanied by bolos (drunks) in the street and a serious stomach ache from everything I’d eaten!

As I mentioned previously, yesterday we had a more American-style celebration, though with a Guatemalan twist: we (not me) actually killed our dinner!  With all the neighborhood kids watching outside the gate, Stephen and Cara first did the rabbit and then the duck…I thankfully missed some of the more gruesome parts while searching for firewood.  Stephen swore that rabbit was the best meat he’d ever had (it was at his house during training that we watched the murder of a rabbit and chicken), and maybe I just felt bad for the little guy, but I didn’t like it that much.  The duck, however, was fantastic.  It ended up taking forever to cook and we didn’t dig into it until after dessert, but we literally attacked it…think Dee and Charlie with “the hunger” in that It’s Always Sunny episode!

Now that Christmas has gone and went, December and the year are almost over!  Wednesday we head  to Chichi to pick up the new cell phones Peace Corps is issuing us, and then back to Panajachel and the lake for New Years.  It seems like most of my training class will be there, so I can’t wait!

Anyway, just ate a late dinner of sweet bread and tamales – that’s ALL people eat on Christmas and the days after, but I actually like the non-Christmas ones better!  I’ll leave you with a few photos:


some of the craziness in Chichi

me, Mary, and the family with our sparklers at midnight

Mary’s dog Mojito playing with our Christmas duck while it was still alive

the rabbit cooking on the fire pit

Eating Guatemalan children...

I forgot to tell the funniest story:

So Stephen and I were on a micro on Sunday and he was telling me a story (in English, of course) about one of the volunteers we had just met, who happens to be African-American.  She went with a couple of other African-American PCVs to give a charla in a small aldea, and I should preface this by saying that there are some really strange stereotypes about black people here.  Anyway, they started their presentation by saying, “We’re not here to eat your children if that’s what you think.  And we’re not going to steal your kids either because we don’t want them!”  (The kidnapping thing is general for all foreigners, no matter what skin color.)  I thought this was the funniest thing ever and was like, “Did they really just go and say no estamos aquí para comer sus hijos?”  That being the only thing either of us had said in Spanish, the entire micro turned around and stared at us, fairly horrified!  Stephen feebly tried to explain, “no no, era nuestra compañera…” but they were having none of it and I couldn’t stop laughing for the next 10 minutes straight!

Welcome party and other fun :)

The last two weeks have been pretty slow, so forgive me when I say the highlight of each were the PCV get-togethers :)  Last weekend was our official welcome party for Quiché (and almost every other department in the Occidente) in Panajachel, Lake Atitlán, and words cannot describe what a gorgeous place it is!  From our cabecera (department capitol), we took 3 buses, a pick-up truck, and a boat to arrive…normally it would only be the 3 buses (plus a 2-hour microbus from Cunen to Quiché), but an awful mudslide a few months ago wiped out the road that goes directly to Pana.  Whatever, the boat ride across the lake was so vale la pena!  It was really fun seeing a bunch of my friends from training and meeting some new people (there were almost 80 of us altogether), and of course dancing the night away!  We absolutely fell in love with the place and the plan is to return there for New Years.  We definitely need to go for more time, though, because that much traveling for only 1 night was insanely tiring.  But I did at least get more peanut butter in Quiché on the way back :)

This past Friday was also awesome: a (belated) Hanukkah dinner with our “family” of northern Quiché volunteers, a really great group!  We had a great time and the food was fantastic – I made potato pancakes, Stephen made the apple sauce, and Hillary and Mary made an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” curry stir fry lol.

All this traveling since Thanksgiving has been extremely exhausting, however, and I definitely need to hang out in Cunen for a bit.  Not all has been boring here…last Wednesday the town was in an uproar with the Christmas-season convite – they call it a social dance, but I’m not sure why because it’s a bunch of couples dressed up in really strange/inappropriate costumes dancing through town all day.  I was in Uspantan working most of the day, but I got back in time to see the grand finale at the basketball court, where the couples danced a bit more and then de-masked.  My favorite had been a pair of drag queens, but it turned out that actually a lot more men were in drag than I thought!

I’ve also made some more progress work-wise with my association in Trigales, who I’m kind of starting to feel connected to.  Two Mondays ago I gave them a charla on the importance of having different commissions/committees within their larger group.  I think the actual presentation went well enough, but they definitely understood and took away the message of the importance of being well-organized, and seemed to really appreciate my bringing it to their attention, which was definitely gratifying.  I went around the village last Monday with my co-worker Moises to check on the mini bodegas (kind of like tool sheds) they're building with materials given to them by Save the Children and then I even went by myself that Friday.  That was actually a really big step for me because I had no idea how to get to anyone’s house by myself, so I decided to go to the house of one woman who I know and she ended up taking me to everyone else’s, which was really cute :)  It’s been kind of hard for me working with a community but not living in it, so little achievements like that always feel great.  That being said, I went back this afternoon by myself only to find out there was no meeting…but at least I made appointments for later this week and next!

Anyway, as always here are some photos: 

me, Noor, and gorgeous Lake Atitlán

me and one of the women of Trigales

the two drag queens in the convite

and the other dancers