Tis the Season

Slip back into the nostalgic past of middle school fairs, or if you’re from NOLA like me, crawfish boils. Food stands, death-defying rides (looking at you, Zipper), arts and crafts booths, and throngs of joyful families basking in the momentary bliss of funnel cake and raffle tickets. Now replace the foods you know with pupusas, fried chicken and tortillas, and all manner of meats being grilled on the plancha. Take the sweet, childish rides you once knew and exchange them for the same ones, just twenty years older, covered in rust, and plastered with caricatures of nearly naked, extremely bodacious women. And finally, multiply the crowds you’re used to by a factor of 5 and imagine inhaling an atmosphere composed entirely of B.O. and farts as you squeeze through a vast sea of seemingly unmoving people. Now you’re at a Guatemalan feria!

                                                    

Currently, Guatemala is in feria season – a wonderful time where small towns and big cities get to leave behind their troubles and celebrate their home pride with gusto. Most ferias in Guate are a multi-day event that includes a parade, a concert, and of course the aforementioned fair scene. Intense crowds, the cries of vendors auctioning off their products, and the smells of fried foods are just some of the things you can expect to encounter at every Guatemalan feria. And let us not forget the Ferris Wheels of death. As rusted and rickety as they are, I can only imagine that they were retired from use in the States and sent to Guatemala for another few years of perilous diversion. It is impossible to describe fully the overwhelming blend of smells, sounds, and emotions one can experience in just an hour of feria.

   

Guatemalans celebrate the various patron saints of their hometowns by hosting these enormous parties around the days the saints first appeared to the Spanish colonists telling them to settle in the spots that hundreds of years later would become the towns I know and love today. Town members go all out to celebrate these metaphysical miracle makers. Town streets can be seen adorned with colorful decorations, churches hold elaborate mass ceremonies, families host large feasts, and nearly all governmental offices and services are temporarily shut down. Ferias are extremely important cultural and religious festivities in the lives of Guatemalans. They are dreamed about, planned for, and the focus of sentimental storytelling throughout the year. With their focus on history, religion, giving thanks, and enjoying the latest trends in music and pop culture, feria represents the past, present, and future all in one. The nuances that exist in each feria – the foods served, the products sold, and the colors used to embellish the streets – represent the identity and individuality of the place. All in all, feria is a time for drinking, eating, dancing, playing, and of course praying.

   

During my first year in Guatemala, I’ve had the pleasure of attending three ferias thus far: Xela (aka Quetzaltenango), Totonicapán, and San Miguel Dueñas. Within my first hour at Xela feria, I was robbed blind of nearly all of my valuables, including my phone, wallet, keys, and Twix bar. I want to be clear: it was awful. I felt dumb and helpless, and very lost and scared in a foreign city with no money and no means of communication. But it was also an incredible reminder of how fortunate I am to be surrounded by people that go above and beyond to look after me. I am forever indebted to my mom for wiring me money and canceling my cards, to my friends for buying all my food and drank, and to Don Rafael who offered to drive me three hours home in the pouring rain. You all remind me how truly beautiful the human experience can be.

                                                        

Other than that blip, my time at the three ferias was amazing! In Xela, I almost vomited on a crowd of unsuspecting Guatemalans as I raced towards death on a Ferris Wheel that likely reached speeds capable of breaking the sound barrier. In Totonicapán, I accidentally marched in the parade, lost and confused as I tried to find my way to the bus terminal. Let’s just say A LOT of people waved at us and they were probably laughing with us not at us. And I got to bring my indigenous host mom to Dueñas to celebrate feria there with my ladino host family. My time at feria has been a small, but extremely powerful look into the gorgeous complexities of Guatemalan life. Eating and blundering my way through the celebrations provided me a firsthand account of the true joy Guatemalans take in celebrating their history and religion. Talking to excited feria-goers opened up a world of fellowship, where no matter your origins we are all Guatemalans.  

  

Black, White, And Everything In Between

This past week, I was fortunate enough to spend my days talking about diversity and inclusion with other volunteers and nearly every member of the Peace Corps staff, including our amazing gardeners, custodians, and shuttle drivers. The Intercultural Diversity and Inclusion workshop provided by Peace Corps Global was an incredible opportunity for me to witness how Guatemalans perceive and digest complex issues like privilege, race, and sexuality, but it also gave me a chance to introspect on my own experiences with these themes back in the U.S.

A common topic of discussion throughout the week related to Guatemalans’ grasp of the American identity. Many POC volunteers have found that Guatemalans are slower to accept their American citizenship when they’re not blonde and blue-eyed. The “typical gringo” is a highly valued volunteer, one that Guatemalan families can easily tote around town and say, “this is my American.” Meanwhile black, Hispanic, and Asian American volunteers are met with more confusion than excitement – that’s to say we’re not the typical American girls and boys they had pictured before our arrival. This idea of the white American as “the American” wasn’t invented by Guatemalans, but rather ingrained into their perception of the U.S. by American TV shows, movies, and media campaigns that still favor white-washing their characters over a truthful representation of the plentitude of shapes, sizes, and colors Americans come in.

As humans, we like to categorize and we tend to stick to this delineation of personas with a particular stubbornness. It’s the reason the media shows mug shots of black criminals, and even victims of crimes, and the school or family photos of white criminals. We have a very consistent idea of what it means to be white and black in America and we’re not ready to deviate from it, not ready to disassociate certain traits from our perceptions of an entire race or ethnicity. Because of this blackness and innocence, Islam and peace, Hispanic and legal, gay and manly, lesbian and effeminate, handicapped and athletic have become antithetical concepts in our minds. If you think I’m exaggerating, you probably don’t ascribe yourself to one of these communities. As a small testament, I offer you the stories Peace Corps staff members have shared with me of travelling in the U.S. to visit family, where they were called illegals and threatened with deportation. In the eyes of too many Americans, you’re either a fully integrated Latinx American who speaks English without an accent like me or an illegal immigrant. The idea of Latinx tourists in the U.S. may have never even occurred to you.

I can’t help but wonder what it is about us as human beings that leads us to favor this dichotomization of the individual experience so much. Why is it so hard to grasp that we are not just black or white, straight or gay, religious or atheist, good or bad? The idea of identity as an ever-moving point on a spectrum of spectrums is still incredibly obscure to most people I know, especially here in Guatemala. We struggle when we can’t clearly define another individual using a vocabulary based solely on our own experiences and perceptions. 

Here the most prevalent polarization of identity separates the ladinos, those of Spanish descent, from the indigenous Mayan populations. I had always heard of this division and see it regularly, but I wasn’t fully aware of it’s depth until I heard my ladino host family refer to my indigenous host family as “indios” – a highly derogative term in Guatemala. To address this division of identity, many Guatemalans have begun to refer to themselves as “mestizo” in place of “ladino” to indicate that no one is just one thing: we are all have a place on some sort of ethnic or racial spectrum.

I’ve come to realize that when you’re surrounded by like-minded individuals, you forget to challenge your perspective. I’m guessing that the reason my ladino host family feels comfortable using the word “indio” is because they’ve never truly spent time with someone who would be affected by it. They’ve lived their entire lives in their exclusively ladino community. Coming to Guatemala has forced me slice my perspective from the navel up and root around the guts of it. It’s caused me to reflect on the language I use, the beliefs I hold true, and how that impacts those around me. It’s also given me the opportunity to reflect on how others’ language and perceptions of me have affected my own personal growth and development.

When I was younger, my Cuban ethnicity was a huge source of both external and internal confusion. Many of my classmates asked me if I was white or black, never once considering that there were countless other options. Personally, I knew that I was Latina, but I didn’t have a strong grasp on what that meant. Somewhere along the line, I was led to believe that in order to identify as Latina American, I needed to have a harrowing tale of my family’s journey to the U.S. I used to regale my middle school classmates with the entirely fictional story of how my parent’s risked their lives to arrive in the U.S. after days on a broken down dinghy packed with Cubans ready to start their realization of the American dream. Their eyes met from across the 10-foot boat as the waves salted their hair and they instantly fell in love. In case you’re wondering, there’s not an ounce of truth to this story. Both of my parents were born on U.S. soil and my grandparents immigrated to the U.S. legally. The privilege of growing up white in America is that you’ve probably never struggled enough with your own identity to make up such an outlandish story. You probably haven’t been on the receiving end of pointed questions like, “what are you?” or “but like, where are you from from?”

There are days when these questions are easy enough to shrug off and laugh at, and there are days when these questions are as harmful as calling me a “spic” or any other derogatory term.  Fielding these questions is a constant reminder that, to you, I am different. You are forcing me to define myself by something that is more convenient for you than is true for me because if I answered, “I am an ambitious young woman with dreams of changing the world” I doubt you would leave it there.  You would push me to tell you my ethnicity so that you can comfortably place me in a box and move on.   

One of the Peace Corps’ most unique and demanding challenges is navigating your way through an entirely new society’s race relations and gender dynamics after spending your whole life conforming to America’s ideas of race and gender. This has been particularly true for me as a Latina still learning Spanish – many don’t understand why my Spanish isn’t perfect if I identify as Cuban. The incredible trick is to know, without a doubt, who it is you are and how you wish to be defined. From there you can start the type of necessary conversations about race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Guatemalans, and most Americans, aren’t accustomed to the idea that there can be so many choices when it comes to self-definition, and so they react with a confusion and misperception that can be easily taken as discrimination. The challenge of the Peace Corps volunteer is to find productive and culturally sensitive avenues of tackling these complex issues with host country nationals while forgiving their hurtful missteps. It isn’t easy and you will fail at times, but if personally demonstrating the sense of self to define yourself outside the convenient lines our societies have constructed inspires just one person to seek their own truth, then it’s worth the fight.  

Square One

I know square one like the back of my hand. I’ve got it mapped out inch by inch. For the past three weeks, every time I sit down at a makeshift wooden table surrounded by chickens and children for my Kaqchikel language class I’ve found myself right back at square one.  This is my very first experience learning a completely new language, one that I’ve never seen or even heard of before moving to Guatemala. The sounds of Kaqchikel are nothing like those of the Latin languages I currently speak. Nearly every word is punctuated by guttural clicks I’m convinced I simply lack the anatomy to create. Words that are meanings apart are distinguished by the infinitesimal differences between the pronunciation of k’s and q’s. Letters make entirely different sounds based on whether they’re found in the beginning, middle, or end of the word. It’s all incredibly confusing and I leave each class completely exhausted and angry at stupid square one. I’m not only mentally drained after class; I’m physically pooped too. My throat tends to hurt after three hours of trying to force myself to make the back of the throat clicks or pronounce the harsh vowels all too common in Kaqchikel. And my brain turns to literal mush after hours of trying to understand what my teacher means when she says that if I hold my hands in front of my mouth and feel the air escape as I say the word q’aq’ it means fire, if no air escapes it means wolf.

My classroom

 

When you’re learning a brand new language you lack the ear for the tiny differences between words like ch’oy, which means rat, and choy, which means lake.  When you’ve never even heard that language before or anything like it, you lack the ear for the apparently larger differences between words like ka’i’ (two) and kaji’ (four). As I sit dumbfounded in my seat futilely trying to grasp these nuances, my mind can’t help but to drift to the thought of language and how incredible it is. Thousands of miles and worlds apart, two complete strangers both looked at the same exact thing and christened it with entirely distinctive sets of vowels and constants strung together. How is it that humans around the world have so many inherent similarities, but managed to come up with nearly 7,000 completely distinct languages? Whether you grew up in Manhattan or in a small village in the Amazon, you probably say “oww” when you stub your toe or “eeeek” when you see a disgusting bug, so obviously there is some sort of reservoir of inherent phonetics applicable to nearly everyone around the world, right? And yet there are entire sounds and letters that exist in some languages and not in others. I don’t get it, you guys. Seriously, can someone explain this to me?

Snapping out of my linguistic mental tangent for a moment, I look down at my desk and softly laugh at my note-taking tactics. Scribbled on my pages are little tips like, “the sound a drop of water makes when it lands on a hot pan,” “the sound the men on the street make when they want my attention,” or “wave sound.” Having never heard many of these sounds used in actual words before, getting creative with my notes is a necessity. Many of these helpful hints come from my Kaqchikel teacher, Leticia, who desperately tries to find ways for me to understand her language. This woman is the paragon of patience, the patron saint of repetition.  Every Saturday, she graciously invites me into her home where we use the chickens running around and vegetable garden for interactive learning. Tak’ampe ri che ko’ol räx she’ll say, and after taking a few moments to translate in my head I’ll bring her a small twig plucked from a shrub. Taqaja’ wo’o’ tra’s and I’ll find five peaches from the nearby trees to bring her.

 

Although I have my struggles and occasional bitterness, the truth is that I love learning Kaqchikel. The exciting challenge of learning a new language is made even better by the feeling that I am connecting with my community on a deep level.  Kaqchikel is so beautifully unique in it’s intrinsic reverence to nature. Many of the words I learn have an etymology that stems back to nature somehow, like q’ij, which means both day and sun, or nimamixk’u’ that means apple or literally translates to big, red heart. As I learn and speak this language, I become increasingly more aware of the Mayans’ intimate relationship with the Earth and their belief that we belong to it as much as it belongs to us. It fills me with a sense of history and culture that brings me closer to the people I live amongst everyday. Plus it is wickedly fun to see the mixture of surprise and amusement that springs up on Guatemalans’ faces when they hear an American speaking their ancestors’ tongue.   

Achike ri nub’ey wakami

Who knows where my path will lead

Dad's Role in Health

As a maternal and child health volunteer, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about mothers and I often make the mistake of overlooking dads. Like moms, fathers provide an incredible variety of health, mental, social, and economic benefits in childrearing, many of which go beyond anything observable or measurable. Having not one, but two incredible fathers in my life, has been crucial in my personal development. My dad and stepdad are positive male role models in my life that have helped sculpt me into a confident, ambitious young woman. They've taught me that I am strong, and that real men love strong women. They’ve introduced me to boxing and scuba diving. They’ve watched countless movies and Monk episodes with me, sampled my ice cream creations, held me when I’ve cried, laughed at my bad jokes, and cheered me on through even my more inspired endeavors.  I can only imagine the beautiful world we would live in if every girl were lucky enough to have them as their dads.

In my Mother’s Day blog post, I spoke about giving women more time by relieving them of some of their familial responsibilities. Now the other side of that coin is helping fathers worldwide take on these newly assigned roles. If you open up a parenting book in the States, you’ll see that it’s written from the perspective of a mother. If you leaf through the piles and piles of parenting pamphlets here in my health center, you’ll find that they’re exclusively directed towards women. If we want men to be more involved in parenting, we have to develop more appropriate resources that implicate men just as much as women. Put changing tables in men’s restrooms. Feature a male in a home appliance commercial for once. Involve men. When we place the complete responsibility of childcare on women, we also deposit the full weight of the blame. I’ve heard many community members and even health workers here in Guatemala disparaging mothers of malnourished kids without a single mention to the involvement or lack thereof of the father. Deconstructing gender norms surrounding parenting helps distribute the obligation, stress, and accountability that come with raising children. Basically we all win, so why aren’t we doing more to include dads?

Research shows that when men are more involved in their children’s wellbeing, they are more likely to share household autonomy with their female partners. In countries like Guatemala where a woman needs formal permission from her husband before seeking medical care for herself or her children, this could mean the difference between life and death. Undeniably, fathers play a unique and important role in the social and mental development of their children, and it has been shown that their involvement is a significant positive predictor of beneficial health and social outcomes that expand even into adulthood.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of research surrounding the exact benefits of including men in promoting maternal and child health because there are very few organizations in the developing world devoted to including men. But when we as public health professionals exclude men from health initiatives, we isolate women as the sole caretakers of their families. Nearly every MCH Peace Corps volunteer has a club de embarazadas (pregnant woman’s club) or a consejeria de mujeres con niños desnutridos (counseling of women with malnourished children). Including fathers would be a novelty to say the least. In resource-poor settings, actively involving fathers not only increases the socioeconomic capital of every member in a household, it also helps reduce rates of things like malnutrition and under-five mortality. I know that several cultural and social factors can make attracting men to MCH activities incredibly strenuous and difficult, but if we don't continue to try we'll never see change. Dads have the potential to be amazing support systems and their role in health is unequivocally important, so let's give them a place at the table. 

Happy Father’s Day to all the men in my life that have been a positive, norm-breaking role model and have taught me to be tough, to be smart, and most importantly be true to who I am. To my dad that has promised to hate every boyfriend I bring home and then immediately becomes their best friend. To my stepdad who is always willing to smoke a cigar or embark on two-year long carpentry projects with me.