Goata get a hold of myself (so bad)

As of this morning, I own a goat and he looks like this:


I know I was all confident in my last post that he’d be here within like 48 hours or whatever, but this is Guatemala and nothing ever goes to plan.

(I recently heard some great advice – “you can start enjoying your time in Guatemala once you rid yourself of any expectations. Just go with the flow and you’ll be much happier than if you had a schedule ”)

As you can see, he’s already pretty big, which is ok because that’ll mean more goat stew later on. I’m hoping that he likes to eat ☺

I also know I was supposed to get a baby goat, but that one got sold and so I went to this butcher with no front teeth who acts as the local goat guru and he lined me up with a replacement. So here’s my new pet (?):


He’s kinda cute, right? I think he’s pretty cool looking at the very least, although a bit feisty (definitely gotta watch out for those horns>

The twist here is that I don’t have space for him at my house, so my bottle school counterpart Don Miguel will keep him in his yard. I’m fairly confident that this arrangement will work out, as the village only has 52 families and pretty much everyone knows:

A: Me
B: the fact that I own a goat
C: and that I’m working to bring the community a school

So there’s the gratitude factor, which I hope will go a long way towards keeping my goat safe. Furthermore, I’ve made it common knowledge that I intend to turn him into a big community feast in about 6 months, so I’m hoping it’s in everyone’s interest to keep him fed for the future. Also, the kids like him!


I found the neighborhood kids checking him out when I finished helping with the bottle school this afternoon, so I let them take him out for a walk. “Just make sure to put him back in his pen when the rains start,” I told them.

Ok - most important part of this post - my goat still doesn’t have a name! What should I call him???

Identifying a community

I wrote about some progress with my Bottle School project in a recent email, but it seems worth repeating here for posterity and for everybody else that didn’t get cc’d (I also wrote in Spanglish, which was probably confusing)

Check out this blog post for background information – a basic idea of school construction, design, etc.

Now – the official first step of a Bottle School project to identify a community with whom you’ll work. Here’s a picture of the main road in the village where I hope to build a school made out of 6,500 plastic soda bottles (so cool!)


There’s no school here, just a couple of areas where de facto classes are held for the 52 students of elementary school age. On the right you can see a structure wrapped with blue tarp; it looks like this from the front:


The floor is made of dirt, and a few stray dogs can usually be found lying around trying to stay cool – the midday sunshine here can be punishing. There’s another area where classes are held, which can be seen faintly on the left side of the first photograph – it’s actually the verandah of someone’s house:


The need for a school in this community is obvious, but there are plenty of Guatemalan villages that need schools, unfortunately. As a project coordinator, therefore, the question is to decide with whom you wish to work, which is important because a Bottle School project represents a partnership with the community in question – they’re the ones responsible for collecting the bottles. Furthermore, each two-room Bottle School (approx. 7 x 14 meters in size) requires that all 6,500 20 oz plastic bottles be stuffed absolutely full with inorganic trash (candy wrappers, styrofoam, etc.) Sound time-consuming? I’d say so – collecting the bottles represents a huge task, but filling just one takes like 10 minutes. Here’s a very brief, accidentally-shot video of me struggling to cram a plastic bag into a soda bottle with a piece of rebar:



Ha ha, very funny. Anyway, so the sheer amount of work requires that you partner with a motivated and dedicated group of people who won’t waste your time. What’s more, the community also has to provide all unskilled labor in the school’s construction. Hug It Forward, the NGO with whom I’m hoping to partner, agrees to provide only for skilled labor and building materials (obviously not including the bottles…)

Basically, the Bottle School project isn’t meant to be manna from heaven, a huge influx of cash appearing from United States that precludes the residents of some lucky community from lifting a finger – it’s meant to be a collaborative effort. The Bottle School project insists that a community to get involved with its own development, which is arguably just as important as building a school for needy students or cleaning up the environment.

At this point I haven’t run into any roadblocks or detours yet, so I’m still feeling pretty optimistic about the whole project. We’ll see where I’m at in about 4 months :)

Religiosity

Guatemala is a seriously religious country, way more so than I initially realized. It’s been over 5 months since I’ve attended church, which I believe to be a pretty unique situation in the Peace Corps. I think that most volunteers get asked, insinuated, pressured or simply bored into attending a church service, but I happen to have missed getting a direct invitation since first arriving in-country (when my first host family brought me to the Evangelical church two nights in a row.) Those times, I was just being culturally tolerant.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious person; I would say that I’m a more spiritual person, which sounds totally stupid. Basically, I don’t see myself going to church except in an abstract way, kind of like I’ve decided that I sort of enjoy bible stories in Spanish because it’s novel getting proselytized in a different language. I like good people and I like the good things they do. I understand why people say that God is love.

Why I’m writing about religion is that it pervades almost every part of society here. God, His Divine Will and His Guidance run most Guatemalan lives, which you notice in conversation (“if God allows me to live that long!”)or people simply giving eachother advice: (“Will I be safe on the bus to Guatemala City?” “Just … pray to God.”) It’s also not unusual to hear sermons blaring overloudspeakers throughout the streets of town for a couple hours a couple nights a week.

Today I went to a ribbon cutting for a new school in one of our aldeas (villages) – every single individual addressing the crowd, from the naturalized American philanthropist of Guatemalan origin to the mayor, from the head schoolteacher to the community group president – every single last person made it painfully clear how responsible God was for this new school. Everyone, including the crowd, seemed to believe so fervently in their religionthat I felt like I wasn’t witnessing a collection of individual believers but an entire community expressing its collective vision of reality, where acceptance of the status quo was simply a given. It made me wonder about life in a religious state,and what Afghanistan or Indonesia might be like.

Obviously I’m coming from a church-state separation perspective, so watching public officials exalt God makes me flinch a little bit. At the same time, organized religion is growing on me here – in a country with as much social, historical and physical turmoil as Guatemala, you can understand why people would identify with the Catholic preacher I heard riding the bus yesterday, who declared that one encounters wisdom the minute he or she admits that they know very little, the minute they admit they are not in control.

There are so many social problems here, so many physical threats and so much uncertainty that I can see why it’selevating to acknowledge that you’re a merely a pawn. That way you don’t go crazy – the status quo is beyond your comprehension.

What I found funny was today, while a second evangelical preacher thundered at the community on the radiance of god and his boundless compassion, I realized that I might as well BE in church….it didn’t matter that I was at a “public” event; everything seems to intimate God here in Guatemala.


Here’s some people collecting maize in the fields