Giant Kites and My Site

This past week was certainly a full week. Tuesday, as I mentioned would happen, we learned about out future sites. I was surprised when I got my site because all the talk was that Abi, the volunteer living in San Bartolome, was going to live there. I also knew that the town was asking for a woman volunteer. Furthermore, I thought I was going to the site where I visited a volunteer. Boy were we all mistaken about all the sites. Really though, I am happy with how the site was chosen. I asked for a site where I could improve my Spanish, whether that site be a place where only Spanish was spoken or site where Spanish and an indigenous language were both spoken (sites where 2 languages were spoken were very common unlike a site where only Spanish was spoken). Guatemala also has some sites where only indigenous languages are spoken, which I guess in essence I was asking not to go to. Well, I got exactly what I wanted to the full extent. In the site I´ll be living at for the next 2 years, only Spanish is spoken. I´ll be living in an aldea in the Department of Jalapá, in the SE of Guatemala. This aldea, which basically is another word for a really small town, has 3500 people in it. The climate is temperate ranging between 60F and 72F during the day with an average annual temperature of 63F. I am pretty sure the amenities are few, but I do know that there is water to house through pipe and that they do have cell phone service. I´ll be going to my site this Wednesday til Sunday to basically get to know people and where I´ll be working and the agency with which I´ll be working (volunteers always have a partner group/agency with whom they are working with and specifically one person from this agency/group works specifically with the volunteer) before I actually start working and living there on Nov. 18. After that I´ll fill you all in on what the site is like. Oh, I thought I should also note that my site is very safe. All the sites that Peace Corps picks meet certain security and safety standards, so there is no worry for anyone, but this site was secure enough for women volunteers to go to (some sites women cannot work in because of other dangers toward them such as sexual harassment). I am a bit nervous about changing towns since I have become accustomed to living here in San Bartolome, but I am excited and only hope that the people are warm and welcoming to the first gringo that will ever living in their aldea.

The next day, Wednesday, was the day our group in San Bartolome made our presentations to the people of the town and a group of women there learning about things like cooking, nutrition, and crafts. We had prepared since the previous week, but still spent the whole day starting at 8am going til 6pm preparing food, practicing the presentation, or actually doing the presentation. We did the presentation on nutrition and prepared 4 items to make a balanced meal. It was a lot like a TV show except that the kitchen was open to all the people and that in between explaining the recipes, were also explaining the benefits of the food and the importance of eating healthily. We were worried at first since the women in the group did not show up until 3:00pm (even though they chose the beginning time of 2:00pm – the concept of time down here is a big challenge for me – I´ll have to explain it in a lesson.), but the day ended up being a huge success. We made dulce de pera y manzana (apple and pear sauce), pan integral (whole wheat bread), raguu de verduras (basically a tomato based pasta with tons of local vegetables), and humus con verduras crudas (a hummus dip served with raw vegetables). The hummus the people had never eaten before and eating the raw vegetables was something bizarre to do. They all ate the food though, and actually liked it and asked lots of questions about how to make it and the nutrition of the things.

Thursday, Día de Todos Los Santos (All Saint´s Day), I went with a Catholic family (Abi´s family) to the cemetery to see what the family did on this national holiday to honor their loved ones that had passed away. In the cemetery, people were painting the above ground graves (unlike in the US, it is a lot more common to have cement structures above ground) and cleaning and putting all kinds of flowers and other decorations. There were no fiestas in this cemetery like in other communities, but there were people flying kites so to get close to loved one in the sky.
After the cemetery, we walked to Santiago where there was a kite festival known throughout Guatemala. It was unbelievable. The kites were huge and made with such detail. Furthermore, there were tons of people and all this took place in a cemetery. People were crowed all over sitting and standing on everything. Vendors were selling everything from pastries and popsicles to beer. Plus, there were ropes everywhere with people every now and then running through the crowds trying to get their huge kite made of paper machete in the air. While in the cemetery, you had to always be on the look out for these people along with kites that were falling from the sky. All in all, we had such luck since the sun was out, there was plenty of wind, and we had no problems.
Below I tried to post a small clip of what it looked like in the cemetary for the festival of the giant kites.




Later in the day on Thursday along with making traditional foods, Catholics go to the Church in the evening in memory of loved ones that passed away. In the Church, the pews were taken from the center and in their place were 6 long rows of 15ft planks of wood with sawdust beneath the planks of wood. Families came to this area and lit about 20 candles in one area on the board. The families would then pass their times sitting next to the candles or in pews (but always leaving someone with the candles). They would wait until the candles completely burned away, which took a long time to do. At this point when there was barely any candle left, a child would take the flower of the flor de muerto (marigold, which is the flower used quite often on this day) and put out the flame. Only when all the candles were out did the family leave.

Finally to note something else interesting that day, the Church bells were manually rung all day and night. I can attest to the night part as I got up to go to the bathroom and at 4:30, the bells were still ringing.

Friday, I finally bought a cell phone. I resisted as I enjoyed being a bit “free” but I know it will be important to have not that I am moving to my site. If anyone wants the number, send me an email. I also bought some things to prepare spaghetti with garlic bread and chicken marinated in Italian dressing for the host-family. They gobbled it all up and kept asking for the recipe and how I did such a good job. I just told them I cooked it without a recipe by imagining how my Mom would cook it from watching her cook it so much. (I know spaghetti is easy, but I did make it a bit complicated by using different herbs and all kinds of vegetables).

Sunday, after mass, I got to experience what the process was like when a person passed away.
When a person dies, the next day the house/family opens up to the public for 8 days, night and day (this is what I was told). People come in to visit the family and pay their respects. The body may be in a casket which is in a room in the house (I am pretty sure there is a law in Guatemala that the body can only be allowed to stay in he house for up to 48 hours. After this, it has to be buried or brought to a funeral home, which is not really done because of cost. People at the house pray, play cards, and eat among other things. The food and drinks are important, especially at night so to help people stay awake through the night. I am not exactly clear right now why something has to be done throughout the night. It is also typical for those visiting to give money to help pay for the huge costs that are incurred.
When I went to the room in the house where the casket was, I noticed the body was in a suit like in the US, but that the mouth and nose were stuffed with cotton. Also, something different was that when I first got there, the body was still in the room where the person died. The casket was brought in the house and the body was then place inside it. Basically, the house is the funeral home.

Finally later in that evening to cap off this week jam packed with Guatemalan culture, I attended with Lauren’s family something that is called the Posada, which recounts the journey that Joseph and Mary had to take when they fled from their home before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. To reenact this, the people of the town use 2 large statues of Joseph and Mary and these statues visit a different house each night up until Christmas (Usually something like this is only done for 14 days, but since there were so many people that wanted to do this, they extended the days. Now the town starts doing this in October and sometimes as early as the 7th and still end on Christmas Eve.). To go from one house to another, the process goes like this. First people go to the existing house where a rosary and other prayers are said with people from the town. Then people from the town take the statues leading a procession to the next house. All the while in the procession there is prayers said and sound sung which recount the journey Mary and Joseph took. Then after other formalities, the statues and people are let in the house where more prayers, the day’s readings, and blessings are said and then finally food is served to everyone. (I can only imagine the work in serving 50 people.) The statues stay in the house til the next day when in the afternoon the process repeats itself. I just wanted to note that there is no day of rest for this. Every day of the week this occurs. I am definitely hoping I can experience this again before I leave. I thought it was so good to see the whole family participating in this, from child to adult.

This picture was from the week earlier when we went to the most beautiful lake in Guatemala in the Departamento de Sololá. As you can kind of see, the lake is surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. In the picture are the volunteers living in San Bartolomé.

Here is a picture of us during our presentation we gave on Halloween to the people of San Bartolome. You can see in the left-hand bottom corner the left overs from the hummus with platter of vegetables. You should have seen their faces when we told them that they were going to eat the vegetables raw! (They just dont do that here.) While we were giving the presentation, a group of people were preparing their giant kite for the next day, Día de Todos los Santos. They said they had worked on this for 2 months. I believed them as the detail is amazing. If you look close, you can see things like parrots.

Here is picture during Día de Todos Los Santos in the cemetary with a host-family in the morning. There are putting up flowers next to the gravestone of a loved one that passed away.

Here is another picture of them decorating another niche. You can see on the left another group painting an above-ground tomb.

Here is a picture of some of the kites in Santiago. This was the ¨launching area¨where people were trying to get their kites of the ground.


Here is me in front of the massive kites. They did not fly, but were stood upright by the wind and rope. The detail on these is even more than the kite we saw during our nutrition presentation. Be sure to click on the picture so to really get some of the details. These kites, I think were about 15 meters or more tall!
Here is picture in the cemetary at Santiago showing people pulling a rope to keep one of the giant kites upright. As you can see below on the ground are mounds, where people are buried. For me, it was certainly strange at first to see so many people running over the graves.