Piñatas and more

The view of the volcanoes in Antigua, on my way to Pino Dulce this morning.

My tire gardens: finally I have fresh cilantro and radishes whenever I want!

Emelin, looking absolutely thrilled with the piñata I made her- it turned out to be some kind of a berry.

Emelin and I with the piñata that Desiree made her- a pretty cool ice cream cone!

So I’ve been asked some pretty strange things by Guatemalans. But the question I was asked last week pretty much tops them all. I stopped by the house of a lady I’ve been working with in Pino Dulce to take a look at her compost pile. Her husband came home from lunch while I was there, and of course she wouldn’t hear of me leaving without eating. So there I was, eating my broccoli and tortillas, when her husband asked me “So do you a device to find buried treasure?” What? Buried treasure? I told him no, I did not, but why did he want to know? “Well I have this piece of land and light comes out of the ground at night. So somebody told me that there just might be a treasure buried there. So I was wondering if you had a device to find buried treasure.” Umm, right. I realized he must be talking about a metal detector, but did he really say that the ground glows at night? I asked again, just to be sure, and yes, I heard him correctly. Unfortunately, I do not own a metal detector, so I guess we may never know.

This past week was pretty eventful- two birthday parties and six piñatas. It started out with Emelin’s 3^rd birthday on Thursday. I asked my host mom if it would be all right if I made her a piñata. “Sure,” she replied “but if we have a piñata, we have to invite kids. And if we invite kids, their parents are going to come, so I’ll have to make lunch. I’ll just invite her cousins”. Well, since my host mom is one of 18 children, that adds up to a lot of cousins. I think 50 or 60 people ended up coming! So I made a piñata and two birthday cakes, and Desiree, another PCV who lives in town, also made a piñata. Then it turns out that it was also the birthday of one of Emelin’s cousins, so his parents brought a piñata as well. Emelin, in typical three-year-old fashion, was SO excited about the piñata all week, until it came time to break it. Then she got shy and refused to hit it. Oh well, at least she enjoyed the candy.

But that’s only the first three piñatas. One of the ladies in my women’s group invited me to come to a birthday party for her two granddaughters on Sunday, for lunch and to break a few piñatas. (And by the way, could you please bring your camera). Sure, why not. It turned out to be just a family party (her, her husband, four sons, two daughters, two daughters-in-law, and three granddaughters). At first I thought, well this is awkward, they obviously just wanted to invite my camera. But it actually turned out to be a lot of fun. First I was fed a heaping plate of beef stew (I’m getting better at finishing the large quantities of food that people always seem to feed me). Then we started out with a huge bunny piñata. The little girls whacked away at it for a while, and then all the adults got a turn. When that piñata was done for, we broke two more little ones. Phew! And I must say, Guatemalans are pretty intense when it comes to piñatas. They hang it on a clothesline and attach two strings. A person holds on to each string, and pull the piñata back and forth on the clothesline. And the person hitting the piñata is blindfolded and “embolado”, which literally means spun around till they’re dizzy and walk like a drunk. Fun times.

Now that the rainy season is upon us, everybody is getting started planting- the men with corn, the women in their veggie gardens. I spent all day yesterday helping my host dad’s mother clean out her garden, harvest radish and mustard seeds, and fix the fence. We were planning to plant as well, but didn’t quite get that far due to the fact that grass had pretty much taken over the place. It felt good to get my hands in the dirt, and I’ve even got some good blisters. Maybe I won’t be in too much pain when we start digging out the grass to start the garden in our yard (with a hoe, mind you. Unfortunately nobody here has ever heard of a rotatiller).

One thing that I still haven’t quite gotten used to is the generosity of people here. It’s pretty hard to go anywhere without being gifted something, usually food. Today, for example, I was given a cup of atol, rice and tortillas, blackberry juice, a head of broccoli, a potato, a bag of peas, a cup of coffee and a piece of sweet bread. Yesterday I was given breakfast and lunch (I think I did earn that after six hours of serious gardening), coffee and bread, a bag of whole wheat flour, and a bag of carrots. Tuesday I got invited to lunch after a baptism, and Monday…I guess that was the only day that I wasn’t given something. But see what I mean? It’s crazy. These people are poor, they have nothing, and all they want to do is give you something. I feel ok about it when it’s given in return for me working with them or teaching them something, but when it’s for just because, I honestly feel a little guilty. But refusing would be offensive. And I try to give back too- bring food to people, give them a snack if they come visit me, but it can be kind of hard, as the average family here is probably six or seven people! A loaf of homemade bread is appreciated, but hardly feeds the whole family. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to get over it- this is just a lesson in how to give and receive humbly.

Holy Week Festivities

Here are a couple of pictures of what I've been up to- making bread for Holy Week, an Easter egg hunt, lily pads on Rio Dulce (outside of Livingston), and me and my friends in the ruins of Tikal.

Hope everybody had a wonderful Easter! Like all the other holidays I’ve experienced thus far in Guate, this Easter was very different, but good. First of all, Semana Santa (Holy Week), or Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday, is a HUGE deal here. No school all week, and most businesses close on Thursday. Monday I was invited by my host Dad’s family to make bread with them. And did we every make bread! My host Dad’s mom has a big adobe oven, so she invited me, my host mom, and then her two sisters-in-law to bake. It’s a Holy Week tradition here to make a special kind of bread from whole wheat flour, which they grind themselves. They also add cream from their cows, the end result being pretty delicious! So they taught me to make that, and I taught them to make banana bran bread. We even added blackberries! Who would have imagined it- blackberries in March!

Tuesday I had a “cultural exchange” with a bunch of the women in my group. A fellow volunteer, who’s been here a year already, told me that she’d done an Easter egg hunt with her ladies last year. It sounded like a good time to me, so I bought about 7 dozen eggs (I think the check-out lady at the store thought I was nuts…) and some food coloring and made a huge batch of sugar cookies. And it turned out to be quite a success, if I don’t say so myself! I don’t know how many people showed up, but there were a lot. We dyed the eggs and let them dry, then locked all the kids in the casita (the house that the ladies have their meetings in) while the moms and grandmothers hid the eggs. The kids had so much fun finding the eggs that they insisted on making the señoras search for eggs once they’d finish. We finished up snacking on sugar cookies and some traditional Guatemalan food for semana santa, including dulce de platano (sweetened, cooked platanos) toreja (platano cooked with bread and milk) and tamal (kind of like polenta but eaten with beans or cheese).

Then I took advantage of my four day weekend to do a bit of traveling with some fellow PCVs. We headed to Livingston, a town on the eastern coast of Guate. It’s only reachable by boat, and has a very distinct feel because part of the population is descended from Africans who somehow got left there during the slave trade. It’s famous for its seafood and punta, which is a type of music with a distinct African beat. Then we went north to El Peten, where we visited some ancient Mayan ruins in the national park Tikal- amazing! But it was incredibly hot and humid. After walking around the park all day, we went for a swim in the lake. So refreshing! I’ve only swam in salt water since I got to Guate, and I’d forgotten how much better fresh water is!

So now it’s back to work. I’ve really been getting on my ladies to get their compost piles going, and offering up my labor to encourage them. My goal is that every lady in my group will have their compost pile started by the end of this month- we’ll see how that goes. It’s been raining quite a bit this week, and everybody is saying that “winter” is coming early this year. So strange, they call it winter because it’s the half of the year during which it’s going to rain every day. But to me it feels like spring, April showers bring May flowers! I’m excited to get my own garden started- my host parents sound like their game to help me, so hopefully it can be a joint project. Because there’s a lot of grass to dig up, and no rotatiller!