Lightning and Thunder Storms

Thursday 8.12.10

For the past few months I have been receiving an average of four or five hours of rain per day. There is rarely a straight 24 hours where we don’t see any rain at all. Lately, this rain has come in the late afternoon and night-time and is usually accompanied by incredibly frequent and close lightning which makes for some really loud thunder. I like it. I like sitting in my bed reading listening to the rain and thunder outside. I also made a mix of songs I call “rain songs” that I like to play on full blast when it’s just pouring outside which features the artists, amongst others, Beethoven, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Mozart, Queen, and Simon & Garfunkel . It’s usually so loud I can barely even hear the music even I crank it up as much as my speakers will allow me. I especially like it when the thunder is so loud it nearly shakes the house; I can feel it in my whole body.

We get here a type of lighting that I never really saw in the US before – cloud to cloud lightning. It’s very frequent, often farther away, doesn’t touch the ground, and harder to spot bolts because it’s often filtered through a few clouds. The thing I like about this lightning though is that I can stand outside and look up at the sky and see 20-30 or more flashes in a minute. I also like when it rains really hard because it drowns out the Evangelical Church music, the neighbors’ music, and my host sister’s music. Sometimes, when I get lucky, even the power goes out and then even if it’s not raining really hard there’s no power at all for the speakers. Except mine. Mine are rechargeable and run on batteries so I can listen to my rain-music even when everybody else is cooking their dinner by candle light.

The first time the power went out when I was in the middle of cooking my dinner I was annoyed. Then I started to appreciated the serenity of the darkness, and after we lit a few candles the small kitchen actually became quite bright and beautiful; naturally lit, and still very calm. Now I’m not bothered at all by the power outages, I can even feel my way to the drawer with the candles with no problems. All in all, I like the rain. It took a while for me to get used to rain every day, never leaving the house without my umbrella (even if it’s sunny and hot and I’m sweating in a short-sleeved shirt, it is 90% likely that I will need the umbrella in a few short hours), and constantly having wet tennis shoes. Now one of my pastimes is guessing when the rain will come each day. Will it start at 2pm? 3pm? Wait until 5:30, the exact hour that I leave the office each afternoon? My goal for the next two years, or really next 1 year 7.5 months, is to become an expert at predicting when the rain will fall.

A Funny Moment

Tuesday 8.10.10

Today I witnessed possibly the funniest thing I have seen since arriving in Guatemala over 7 months ago. My host sister Sely, age 13, and her friend Vicky had been horsing around in her room when they decided they were hungry. There was not much to eat in the house so the mom asked them to go across the street to buy some eggs to cook. They brought back about a dozen eggs in a carton, but not the type of carton we have in the US. This carton is flat, one-sided, and blue and probably fits 8-10 eggs by 8-10 eggs in each one. After they had unloaded the eggs from the carton into the official egg-holding basket, Sely proceeded to beat her friend on the head with the empty egg carton. Naturally, after only a few seconds the mom started yelling at her to stop, which she did with a giggle and a “what? It doesn’t even hurt!” She tore up the carton into four or five small pieces and put them in the fire. The Abuela, who had been seated next to the fire for this entire escapade, saved one of the pieces of carton from the fire and, as if trying to prove Sely right, started beating herself over the head with it. “Ow, hahahaha!” she said after she had done it once. She repeated herself three or four more times, “no, it doesn’t hurt, hahahaha!” she giggled as she tended to her forehead with her available hand. She smiled and giggled and beat herself a few more times before she became bored with her new activity and placed it back in the fire.

I wish things like this would happen every day.

Equal Opportunity

Sunday 8.8.10

I had a dream last night about equal opportunity…vegetables. Yes, my unconscious had the interesting idea to offer reduced-priced healthy foods to underprivileged families and individuals. I was at the Nob Hill grocery store in Martinez, driving around with my brother when somehow the news of this new program reached us. We, logically, decided to follow a long line of parked cars because of course this program would be so popular in my home town that everybody would immediately get into their cars and go to investigate it. We waited in line for many minutes (who knows really how long in dream-time we waited) until we realized it was a line for a drive-through bank. Whoops. We then decided, a little more logically, to go into the grocery store and ask somebody about the program. It turns out it was in the store so we meandered over to the fruit and vegetable isle to investigate. As in all dreams, the reality was a little strange – there were four buckets with different assortments of pre-mixed vegetables, I’m assuming pre-mixed for the purpose of achieving the ideal vitamin and mineral combinations, from which to choose. None of them looked very tasty, but I chose the second bucket which looked more green than the rest. The woman managing the station told me I should prepare my digestion system for that. I don’t know how it would really be possible to prepare one’s digestion system for anything, but I assume she meant there’s just a lot of fiber in the veggies and to be prepared.

Soon after, my mom appeared and I felt a grand desire to eat hummus. I searched all over but could not locate the hummus and felt sad. I spent what felt like a good 15 minutes searching all over the various refrigerated sections of the Nob Hill to find hummus but it could not be found. It reminded me of the time I was at the Albertsons in Morro Bay, Central California, and asked a bagger boy where they kept the hummus and he brought me a package of some cheese spread. He didn’t even know what hummus is. That basically ended the dream, and I woke up hungry and wanting hummus.

Although the dream didn’t really have anything to do with offering lower-priced vegetables to lower-income families, the idea is very interesting. Here in Guatemala the staple foods are, of course, tortillas and beans. Coffee too, or really, hot sugar water with a tiny bit of instant coffee grounds added. Families that have enough money can afford to buy more vegetables and fruits and meats sometimes, but I’ve found that even with the families that can afford to buy a healthier variety and mixture of foods just don’t. It’s not their culture, and they don’t really realize the nutritional benefits of varying their diet. In my family, out of the 21 meals they eat every week:

5 are bread and coffee (almost always breakfast)
8 are eggs and beans, sometimes rice (sometimes the eggs have some onion, but more often plain)
2 are some type of spaghetti
3 are some type of caldo (watery soup with potato, carrot, meat, and very little flavor)
1 is some type of grilled meat
1 is cauliflower, potato, or green beans enveloped in egg and cooked
1 is something else, like fried plantains, box boles (the typical food in the Ixil region here) or fried chicken they brought back from Nebaj
Every meal is served with tortillas, except for the bread and coffee, and in my family the adults eat an average of 3-4 tortillas per lunch/dinner meal. Now, I don’t eat every meal with my family – just lunch. I make my own breakfast and dinner but I do understand one of the reasons they don’t always cook with vegetables; by Thursday, without a refrigerator, they are often no good to eat anymore. Nevertheless, it is still possible to cook very healthily up through Wednesday and then have your beans-and-eggs days at the end of the week.

I’ve been asked more times than I remember by a bunch of different people my plans for after I leave the Peace Corps. Where are you going to live? Are you going to go for a Masters or Ph.D? What kind of job are you going to look for? My answer has always been, and probably will continue to be up until the day I leave, “I have no idea”. But if I were to pursue a higher degree, nutrition would definitely be on my list of possible fields. I think it’s fascinating how micro- and macronutrients function together in the body, affect each other, and basically drive this intricate machine we call the human being. More than that, how the same foods affect each individual differently. One of the things I’d like to do during my time here teach some basic nutrition to the mothers in my town, and especially show them that you can add a great amount of nutritional value to your meals in an inexpensive manner.

One thing they could do is substitute agua pura at lunch for their fresca, which is basically tang or some other “fruit” flavored juice which they add a bunch of sugar to. They would save a bunch of money on the sugar and they could put that into buying a head of broccoli or some carrots they could eat with their rice. Another thing I could do is teach them different ways of cleaning and preparing vegetables to be eaten raw. The typical way to cook vegetables is to boil them until dead and lifeless, until they barely have any nutritional value remaining. But if they could learn how to add raw or half-cooked veggies into their diets they could be spending the same amount of money on the same foods, but getting more health benefits just by the manner of cooking them. But I think the most important thing I can do is somehow get the schools to buy fruit for snacks instead of cookies and crackers. The reason they buy cookies now is that they come from stores, and stores give receipts which they need to show the ministry of education when they come to audit the books. Fruits can only be bought in the open-air market from venders who surely don’t give receipts. I’d like to figure out a way to get around this for two main reasons. One, it’s just healthier to eat fruit than cookies and if kids get into the habit of eating healthy now, they’ll be more likely to pass it along in their adult years. Two, fruit creates only organic waste; cookies always come packaged in plastic which inevitably gets tossed into the street creating this monstrous build-up of plastic and trash just sitting in the streets and in the rivers.