Plastic Bottle Madness

Today was a good day.


Here I am, out in a rural village in my municipality, communing with a bunch of students who have been collecting plastic soda bottles that we’ll use in my bottle school project (background blog post here). The look on my face says it all – we made a big haul, the kids were adorable, and now we’re a heck of a lot closer to the 8000 bottles we’ll need for our project. Woo hoo!


It all started six weeks ago, when my counterpart and I convened a bunch of school principals together at the district office and asked them to convince their students to gather plastic soda bottles and fill them with inorganic trash. The big idea, we explained, was that these stuffed bottles would serve as eco-ladrillos or eco bricks, which we could use instead of concrete blocks in the construction of a two-room schoolhouse for a needy community. Further advantages included:

- Cheaper construction costs
- anti-seismic design (walls of mostly trash rather than concrete are a plus)
- inorganic/organic trash awareness for students
- neighborhood garbage cleanup
- citizen participation and community involvement
- there’s an NGO helping out (external $$$$ for infrastructure creation)

Yeah, building a school out of bottles seems like a crazy idea, but…… there are a few advantages :)

Anyway, so we convinced the principals to help out, throwing in the further enticement that we’d be awarding prizes to the student, class and school that brought in the most filled bottles within six weeks. Man, did they get excited!


This is just one of the five communities we visited, and there are probably 500+ filled bottles in that pile! I was pretty excited, because we pulled in around 1000 filled bottles just in one morning’s haul, with 1000 more only half filled or empty (still useful). However, the real shocker is that there are around FIFTEEN more communities that we have to visit over the next few days, so there’s no telling how many bottles we’re going to end up with….


Here we are, preparing the costales (plastic sacks) of bottles that we’ll haul away. That’s my counterpart on the right, the mayor’s brother in the middle, and a resident of the community where the school will be built on the left.

Things are coming together! With hope, we’ll begin construction within the next 4-5 weeks….

poco a poco (little by little)

I figure I should write an entry with details on stuff that I’m actually doing, not just random anecdotes. Most people probably have no idea how I spend my days.

Which is ok, I think, because most of my days are spent in an office. I do a lot of document writing (in Spanish) and I have internet. I don’t live in a cave or have to hunt my own food. Life as a Municipal Development volunteer in Guatemala seems pretty western-standard normal, at least it does now that I’m accustomed anyway.

Anyway, I’ve recently spent a good deal of my time in the office working on a series of workshops, five presentations that I’ll give to community leaders over the course of the next few months. Basically, my counterpart and I want to help train the community groups that act as the cornerstones of the democratic system here in Guatemala. Any community group, once registered, is supposed to have a direct voice in a council system that is shaped like a pyramid, broad at the bottom with tens of thousands of community groups throughout rural Guatemala, each of which having the (theoretical) input in the decisions of the roughly 333 municipality councils in Guatemala at the subsequent level (each representing what roughly amounts to a county or borough in the States)

Each county or borough council has a voice in the succeeding level (what we’d think of as a state), which then has a voice in the regional council, and finally there is a national council over which the Guatemalan President presides. The idea in this system is that even the lowliest campesino can be directly involved in the democracy of his country.

Of course, there are lots of problems. First of all, many Guatemalans are woefully undereducated, which is a large part of the reason why we’re doing these workshops. We want to provide local leaders with some pointers on the associated legal background of their community groups (which are known as COCODES), helping them to identify their organizational strengths and weaknesses, assisting in the prioritization of needs and finally, helping to elaborate a project profile. The hope is that we can empower these groups in their drive to improve their communities.

Ok, so I just described one problem, the education bit, and then I got carried away talking about mission and failed to elaborate on the other problems to which I alluded. Here’s a big one – the existing power structure. Oppression in Perpetuity, or Why Would I Really Want To Make Life Difficult For Myself?

Case in point – during our first presentation to about 50 rural community leaders last Tuesday, where we talked about the lawswhich sanction community involvement and transparency, my counterpart decided to gloss over the established legal provision which dictates that municipal treasuries should be able to respond to individual citizen requests for accountability and/or financial records. Later on I asked him why, and he told me that one particular community leader would have gotten animated and started causing trouble, this guy whose personality apparently feels like having an inextricable rock in your shoe.

I tried to tell my counterpart that yeah democracy is messy and annoying, that when everyone knows their rights and can speak up for themselves that change can happen without fear of reprisal, and maybe if That One Guy started causing trouble, then maybe there wouldn’t be so much corruption (Guatemalans love to bemoan the corruption here)

So thatwas my counterpart, perpetuating the status quo, ostensibly involved in an effort to spread awareness and transparency but intentionally leaving out important details. Oh well.

At the same time, I readily admit that it’d be a tough decision. Furthermore, this is his community and not mine, so….. I can’t really tell him how to behave. Lastly, physical violence as a reprisal for sticking one’s neck out is not uncommon here.

What stays with me is a conversation I had after the fact, when I recounted the meeting to a friend and he assured me that most people probably already know their rights but fear for their safety. My friend told me that if you draw enough attention to yourself and make the existing power structure feel threatened, someone might take steps to have you silenced.

Which is pretty intimidating.

susceptibility

Up front, I’ll say that I didn’t even see this woman I’m writing about or her sick baby, it’s just …. last week I heard a vivid story and I wanted to comment on Guatemalan acceptance, desperation, folk belief and the just plain lamentability of living in a country where the absence of public health resources can kill a child suddenly.

…

There was a warning though. A mother here in the community took her 7-month old child to the health center and was told that it had a high fever and needed medication urgently. Returning the next day, the mother was told that the situation was dire and her child should be rushed to the emergency room immediately.

There was no money.

The mother, with likely very few options, came to the Municipality to ask or beg or plead with the Mayor for the means necessary for a hospital visit, but the mayor couldn’t be found. So the woman brought her dying child to the OMM (Oficina Municipal de la Mujer), and she asked for help.

I have to interject for a second – this baby is going to die. It was incredibly sick, apparently white as a sheet, diagnosed in critical condition and yet the mother didn’t have the means to save her child. Probably desperately, she opened up to any suggestion that emerged.

The coordinator of the OMM is a midwife, and she determined that the baby might be stricken with Ojo, The Eye, something I don’t know about. I get the sense that it’s like a curse.

The coordinator went to the market to buy pepper and a plant called rue or the Herb of Grace and chewed them up, taking a mouthful of aguardiente (cane liquor) and spraying the whole mixture into the face of the child.

Then the child went into convulsions, and the coordinator went on to turn the child upside down, hanging while she began to pound on the soles of its feet, meant as a cure for the soft spot on the baby’s head.

The baby died. And it’s not to say that the coordinator was responsible – by all accounts the baby was already incredibly sick. As for the methodology or its aim, I don’t know.

I feel like one lesson here is that you can’t discount folk belief - people will still do what seems right no matter the circumstances. And regardless of whether you disagree with me, consider the panicked mother: if you were poor like her and had no other option, wouldn’t you consent to just about anything with the hope that it might save your child?

Election misconduct

Here's an interesting article that deals with the environment surrounding the upcoming elections in Guatemala.

The article is a little flimsy, making a number of vague accusations about the various political parties without examples, but she's right about the illegal political advertisements because they're everywhere in my town. Also, her suspicions on the influence of drug money are probably accurate.

Getting away

I’m in Antigua this week, which is the de facto nexus of all Peace Corps life. It’s a beautiful city (I know I’ve been skeptical about its origins before, all colonial and ironic and mute about all the historically reprehensible stuff that you can turn your nose up at from the past, but I do love it here.)

For one, the Peace Corps office is nearby, so we inevitably stay in Antigua whenever we have to visit for official matters. It’s also where the hotels are, the hostels, the bars, the delicious restaurants, the glimpse of the western stuff we miss or long for. Some things I’ve mostly forgotten but will suddenly recall (like juicy bacon and a stack of fluffy pancakes). You come to Antigua, it’s where you can find what you’re craving.

It’s like a mini-vacation when you come here, and I’m sure that Peace Corps posts all over the world have some city center or locale to which volunteers can slip away, zero the balance and go back to their sites feeling recharged. Here in Guatemala, it’s cobblestone streets and Spanish architecture (plus the volcanoes).

The funny thing is that yesterday I realized that I’ll probably be coming back here the rest of my life, like my relationship with this country and this city is already forming or has formed to a degree that I’ll never forget it here, like I’ll leave but it’ll be too beautiful in my memories to not think about. I’ll come back, and I seem to sense it every time I hike back into town. From the teeming bus station, towards some modest hostel with a knapsack stuffed with clothing I stream past tourists and townspeople,the brilliant colors in the market stalls, down bumpy streets and alongside the beggars, the fashionistas, the teenage school uniforms, the Europeans and the business suits, the mopeds, tuk-tuks and the Beamers, the indigenous traje and the working poor, the Burger King and the hawkers and hustlers and everyone else.

Into the central square, the trees are shedding purple blossoms and someone put two bursting bouquets of flowers in the fountain, waters streaming over the basin lip and people stroll around, below the gleaming white stone church which lingers while an even larger, slightly foreboding volcano looks out over everything.

things not working out for the OMM

First of all – sorry I haven’t been posting lately, but there’s been a whole mess of preoccupations – mom came to visit, then things get busy, and plus there’s the inevitable Guatemalia that keeps me occupied; maybe I’ll be in a community meeting until 9:00 at night, maybe I get exhausted from debating with my counterparts about bottle school construction and all I want to do is lie on the couch and stare at the wall when I get home. Regardless…..I’m gonna keep trying to post regular on this here blog….

Second – I have to give a shout out to International Woman’s Day, which coincided with Fat Tuesday this last Tuesday, but unfortunately, for various reasons I didn’t get to celebrate either one.

Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras revelry? I could have told you three weeks ago that nothing was gonna happen for me in that respect; I’m a teetotaler here in site. I’ve been on super good behavior, first to leave a good impression on the community but then I realized that there aren’t too many people here that I’d wanna drink with anyway so I don’t bother.

As for International Women’s Day … that’s a little more unfortunate story. Back two weeks ago, I went upstairs to the Municipal Women’s Office (OMM) and sat down with the office secretary, coordinator and president. I said to them, “Hey guys! March 8th is a big deal! Do you wanna do something to celebrate, or raise the profile of women here in the community?” Of course, they get excited and we decided on a march, complete with banners and a show, a stage and music plus snacks for all the women participating.

So I sat down with the secretary and we wrote out a proposal and a simple budget – we signed both and left them with the mayor. Unfortunately, I found out later that the mayor (who’s a woman, mind you) couldn’t be bothered to provide the requested 400 quetzales, or $50 US.

Don’t bother asking why a female administrator in a misogynistic country like Guatemala would dog the celebration that’s meant to empower her own oppressed gender because ….. I can’t figure it out either.

Anyway, so I say to the ladies in the OMM, “Well guys, it looks like the march isn’t going to work out. How about we try putting on that workshop on HIV/AIDS that we planned back in December?” They liked that idea, so we spent the next couple days getting the presentation ready until Tuesday afternoon, when the community called us back to cancel.

Apparently, the women’s group to whom we wanted to speak to were convinced that if representatives from the Municipality (read: us) rolled up and gave a talk, then they would lose eligibility for the 300 quetzales of government assistance publicly available through a program called Mi Familia Progresa (My Family Progresses), an account that is completely untrue.

Basically, someone decided to make political hay by taking advantage of campesino (peasant) ignorance, suggesting that if these women attended a simple workshop that it would equate to their joining up with the political party that controls the municipality (which is different than the political party controlling the federal government). Losing the 300 quetzales would be the subsequential punishment.

What’s telling, however, is that people here believed that the federal government could exclude citizens from public programs based on personal politics. That’s an outrageous prospect if you’re an American, but hey, I’ve got a lot to learn about Guatemala.

Anyway, so the workshop never happened.

What I haven’t told you is that both local and national elections are slated for September, and campaigns are ramping up like mad. Political logos and colors cover most of the houses in my town, and public figures here take any opportunity to make speeches infused with la politica. Chisme (gossip) is everywhere.

Potential ATM fraud? Or absentmindedness?

So my mom and I went to the ATM the other day and wouldn’t you know it, somebody left the door open.


We had direct access into this ATM, but sadly, I couldn’t see any money :) Har har - I thought about a closer look but the alarm went off and I settled for an amused commentary to the nearby security guard. I should note that this ATM was right next to its host bank.

For those of you that haven’t heard of THIS scam (this is two entries in a row about scams, I realize) apparently thieves can intercept your bank account information via machinery surreptitiously installed in an ATM. Unbeknownst to you, the card information and PIN number you’re entering gets transmitted electronically to a third party who then goes on a Pina Colada and Marc Jacobs binge with your life savings. This would be mildly funny IF it hadn’t recently happened to a Peace Corps volunteer here in Guatemala. Apparently, girl hit a popular yet compromised ATM in Antigua (tourist central) and found her US bank account totally drained a few days later :( I’m sure she was much-less-than-thrilled.

It’s been happening a lot recently; here’s an editor’s warning from a tourist magazine in Antigua that amounts to a big fat caveat emptor, as the corresponding banks are taking zero responsibility for fraud committed on their machines.

Anyway, so we Peace Corps volunteers got a warning from the security office that we should be on the alert when choosing an ATM – pick an at least semi-guarded area where thugs wouldn’t be able to install their contraption, and at least examine the machine before you use it. Maybe shake it a few times, see if it’s been tampered with.

Recalling the advice, and convinced that if my mom got ripped off it would ruin her whole vacation, I gave her machine a little shake and wouldn’t you know the entire front end slid out:



(obviously I staged this video a bit, as you can already hear the alarm wailing in the background, but you get the picture; walk up, grab hold of the machine, and boom, you’re in.)

So – not too sure of what to make of this whole situation – disaster narrowly averted, or some ATM technician too bored to finish the job?