Things I Can Buy for Q10

Friday 4.30.10

Q10 is a about a buck twenty, as it’s usually between 7.5-8.3 Quetzals per US dollar. Here’s a list of things I can buy for Q10 in or around my town:

10-20 avocadoes, depending on their size

2 lbs of onions

2 lbs of jalapeno peppers

6-7 cucumbers

10 monster-sized carrots

4-5 red bell peppers

10 bundles of cilantro

10 bundles of radishes

5 heads of broccoli

4 small heads of lettuce

4-5 lbs of tomatoes

6-7 lbs of green beans

5 lbs of green peas

20 bananas

1 papaya to feed 3 people comfortably

5-10 mangoes, depending on their size

1 pineapple

4 apples

5 lbs of plumbs – the plumbs here are the size of monster cherries

½ lb of dried really spicy chilies used to make hot salsa

A little under a pound of chicken

½ lb of beef

10 eggs

2 lbs of black beans

5 lbs of potatoes

2 ½ lbs of rice

4 sticks of margarine

20 packets of cookies (4 cookies in each packet of imitation oreos)

4 bottles of soda

20 pieces of bread the size and shape of a softball

10 “shekas” – breads the size and shape of a small circular plate which are perfect for sandwiches

40 little chocolates the size of small marbles (although they are not very tasty)

20 packets of chips in various flavors (rather small, so I usually buy two at a time)

50 tortillas (about a 6 inch diameter)

10 chuchitos (tortilla with salsa and meat cooked in a little corn husk package)

2-3 chile rellenos

2 meals with my host family – I pay them Q5 each day for them to make me lunch, and I make my own dinner and breakfast

5 minutes of phone calls to the US (15 if I buy minutes on triple day which I usually do)

There are plenty more things I could write about, and plenty more veggies and fruits available during different seasons that I haven’t seen yet, and quite a few veggies which I don’t purchase because I don’t like them or because I wouldn’t know how to cook them. The truth of the food situation is that I’m pretty happy. My host family usually cooks decent food, and if there happens to be something I don’t like, I can always say I’m not that hungry and cook myself a little larger dinner. I’m getting more creative with the things I’m cooking and trying to use as many veggies as possible. It’s more expensive than beans and rice and tortillas, but one of the things I’d like to start teaching in the school is basic nutrition so I want to be setting a good example.

Sunday I will be making a stir-fry dinner for myself and my family using nearly all the veggies mentioned here, maybe some chicken, and rice and soy sauce. I think they’ll like it.

Do You Know Your Date of Birth?

Thursday 4.29.10

When the director of our school called in a student and asked him if he knew his birth date, I thought he was joking. But the student took his time, directed his glance up towards the ceiling trying to think, and said he thought he knew what it was but wasn’t sure. I was surprised. Not that birthdays are anything incredibly special to me, but really, how hard is it to remember one date? I suppose that when a mother has 6-12 children she can’t remember them all, so never makes it an important issue to tell her kids when they were born. The school right now is in the middle of turning in their statistics; how many males and females of each grade and ethnicity and hometown we have. It’s a big deal to collect all of the information about all of the students and present it correctly on the right form. The teachers are basically abandoning their classes for three days preparing these papers.

It’s interesting to me how many days they just cancel class because the teachers have other things they have to do. A week ago they cancelled class for one day to go to Chajul, the municipal we are a part of, to turn in some other papers and go to a meeting (the papers that say they are credentialed and allowed to have a classroom). Half of the teachers didn’t finish that day so they canceled classes the following day too. Why they didn’t decide to hold this meeting in January before school started is beyond me. The organizational process is just, well, it doesn’t exist. Nor does logical thought. But that is a longer post for another time.

While the teachers run around frantically organizing their life, I sit in the office and do next to nothing. All the teachers arrive at 7:30 and have class until noon, they lunch for a half hour, then have classes again from 12:30 until 5:00. I live with four people that either work or attend classes at the institute (that’s what they call the school here) so I just keep the same schedule as them. I don’t have 8 hours of things to fill my day with however so I spend a lot of time twiddling my thumbs and reading. I feel like I should be doing more to help, especially since everyone around me always seems so busy, but every time I ask if there is anything I can do, they reject me and say when something comes up they’ll let me know. Right now I’m working on writing the text for the website. The only thing is, my Spanish grammar is horrific and I don’t have most of the information about the different programs here to actually write anything of substance. If someone else did the work it would probably take them a half a day to write and an hour to edit. Me, it’s going to take a week. I just have to treat it as a exercise to better my Spanish and to get to know the institute better. I am also going to try and put together another taller (workshop) on organic composting and inorganic trash management.

The institute is a perfect pilot program for starting composting in the town. There are lots of students available for manual labor to build the structures required, there’s lots of organic trash and very little inorganic trash produced, and it’s a perfect teaching tool for a school that wants to go in the agricultural/environmental direction. In my town I’m estimating that about 80-90% of the total “waste” produced could be composted. The exceptions are: plastic bags (which they give you in every store whether you buy one bag of rice which already comes in a sealed bag or a bottle of soda; obviously neither of which really needs a bag), plastic bottles, tin cans, and wrapper waste (like the plastic bags that chips or rice or salt or little candies come in). Much of this can also be reduced. For the next couple days when I get overly frustrated with the website I’ll just work on my composting charla. I get sad every time I see my family throw the plastics out with the vegetable waste in the backyard, there’s an easy solution and they could even be able to sell the products of the organic compost! And a big part of my job here is creating revenue-inducing programs to help solve the debt problem here. I think compost is a perfect mix between everything I want to do and am supposed to do.

Mega-Charla

Monday 4.26.10

Today I gave a 4 hour “taller”, or workshop, to about 90 students covering physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology. The topic: “Functions of Plants”. I covered physics so they could understand positive and negative charges and therefore atoms. I covered atoms and elements so they could understand molecules. I covered molecules so they could understand cells. I covered cells so they could understand photosynthesis. I covered photosynthesis so they could understand the differences between plants and animals. I covered plants and animals and other living and non-living beings so they could understand how they all work together in an ecosystem. Overall, I tried to explain to them that a healthy ecosystem is one in which all components work together. It was all on powerpoint but I had lots of really fun experiments and demonstrations to do, however, nobody in Guatemala is really into being participatory so they didn’t turn out like I had planned. This is the information I went over

Physics: the study of mass, energy, and forces. Mass is the measure of quantity of material, energy is the ability to do work, and force is the changing or modifying of an object. There are forces that attract and forces that repel, like magnets.

Chemistry: the study of the properties and interactions of materials. Elements are the basic units of matter and can form bonds with other elements, based on the electrons they have, to form molecules.

Biology: the study of living beings, there are 6 kingdoms of living things. The cell – cells are the building blocks of life. There are a few differences between the cells of the 6 different kingdoms as well as differences in cells within an organism that do different jobs. Parts of the Plant – the roots, stem, leaves, flower, and seed all have different jobs. Photosynthesis – plants get energy from the sun and make sugar and oxygen. They use water and carbon dioxide in this process. Animals eat the sugar and use the oxygen and in return make carbon dioxide. Reproduction – all living things reproduce. Seeds of plants are similar to the eggs of chickens because the egg provides the nutrients to the growing chicken like the seed provides nutrients to the growing plant before it can produce enough leaves to sustain itself. Plants in an Ecosystem – Plants work together with animals and non-living matter to sustain themselves and each other. There is a delicate balance between all participants and the study of these interactions is called Ecology.

Ecology: the study of ecosystems and how living and non-living things work together. Everybody is part of an ecosystem; everybody has needs that somebody/else meets and everybody should do their part to meet the needs of others. Death and decomposition is a natural part of life and an important part of ecological cycles.

This all seems so basic to me, though it took me nearly four hours to explain it all, and I doubt more than a handful actually understood even the basic points of what I was trying to get across. How I see it, I can jump into composting from here. I explained a little bit about monocropping and how only planting one crop year after year depletes the soil of nutrients, but everybody here in my town monocrops: maíz. Or maíz and frijoles (beans). Some people plant potatoes and there are a few fruit trees, but the majority of the people just plant corn and beans. I tried to explain that through composting we can replace a lot of these nutrients through adding nutrient-rich compost to the dry soil. Making this compost is easy, rather quick, and best of all we have all the materials we need right here! This is another taller for hopefully next week or the week after.

The funniest part of the charla: I brought in a hard-boiled egg and an avocado to show how fruits (seeds) and eggs are similar because they are both the reproductive parts of the plant. I chopped the avocado open with my knife, then I took the knife to the egg. The students had no idea it was hard-boiled so they all gasped and were quite stunned while watching what I was attempting to do. We all had a good laugh when I showed them that I did not in fact make a mess on the table and that the egg was actually hard-boiled.

The most educational part of the charla: I attempted to demonstrate how molecules are made by giving a few students (oxygen atoms) 6 beans (electrons) and a few other students (hydrogen atoms) 1 bean (electron) and telling them: “oxygens, you want 8 electrons and you’re probably going to have to share some of your electrons with other atoms” and “hydrogens, you want 2 electrons and you’re probably going to have to share also”. I gave them about 5 minutes to work it out, all the while asking other students in the audience if they wanted either 6 electrons or 1 electron to help the others with the process. Finally one oxygen figured out that if he shared his electrons with 2 other hydrogens he would have 8 and I left it at that. I then asked the students if anyone knew what that molecule was called. No response. When I told them “agua” they looked at me like I was crazy. I think it was very confusing for them to think of these abstract concepts of atoms and molecules and electrons as something they actually use every day and know well. But that’s the whole idea. To show them how science explains what happens in daily life, how it can be important to them if they choose to let it, and that the world functions logically and in a predictable manor and they can use this to their advantage if they learn a little basic science.

The most frustrating part of the charla: Lack of participation. That’s it, that was the only part that was frustrating. I would call on volunteers for various experiments or demonstrations and I nearly had to drag each one out of their seat to get them to participate. At the end of each section, each science, I asked each one to write one question they had about the class, science, or anything else relating to what we had been talking about. I asked for volunteers to read their questions…no takers. I then called individuals out to read their questions…they just shook their heads. “Did you write a question?” “No.” I asked a bunch of others the same question and received the same response. It’s one thing to be shy and not want to participate in a silly gringa’s experiments, but to not be doing assigned work; to be so lazy that you cannot even write one simple question in 5 minutes, that’s just poor management on the parts of the other teachers.

Photos: Insects of April

Some insects from a couple short walks around my town. I'm trying to identify them, at least their orders, but I don't want to write down any names until I know for sure. I've got three of the big four orders represented here: Coleoptera (beetles), Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants), and Diptera (flies including mosquitoes), but I'm still lacking Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). I'll be adding more to my collection over the next months.

A Part of Death

Saturday 4.17.2010

Today I helped kill my lunch; we killed a rooster for chicken soup. Usually we buy our meat at the market but once before I’d had soup made of a freshly killed rooster, though I’ve never had a hand in the killing myself. I have never been one to kill animals. I only recently started killing mosquitoes and I try to avoid that if I can. I’m that person that puts the spider in the corner of her room in a cup and takes them outside (to a minimum distance of 50m away from the house). I’m still this person, and I don’t believe in killing unnecessarily, but I do understand the fact that everybody that eats, eats something else. And if that something else is an animal than I believe it’s only fair to be involved in that killing, I think it makes you respect your food more.

I’m not so naïve to think that killing for food is wrong. It’s a part of life, it’s a part of evolution, and that’s just how it is. This isn’t always how I thought, though. When I was around 12 years old I decided to become a vegetarian. I didn’t like the taste of meat, but I knew this was not a good enough excuse for my parents so I told them I didn’t believe in killing animals for food when there was plenty of plant food to be had. A couple years later I think I started believing in this statement, and at one point I was dead-set on building my future house out of concrete so I wouldn’t have to kill any trees to make it. I obviously didn’t think this all the way through because I also tried really hard to figure out a way to eat without killing anything. I don’t remember exactly, but I think the theory was to only eat fruits that had already fallen from the tree. Bad idea.

Sometime during early high school I did a short presentation on the treatment of dairy cows where I learned a lot of hideous things about how livestock is grown. I then changed my reasons for being vegetarian from being opposed to the killing of animals to being opposed to the maltreatment of animals. During college, after taking numerous courses on evolution and ecology, and reading more about current events, I started thinking about the human’s role in the world-wide food chain. I read about how much energy (food) it takes to sustain animals for meat as opposed to how much energy it takes to grow plants. I read about how much water it takes to sustain livestock as opposed to plants. I started believing that it would be better, ecologically, for the world if I could be a primary consumer rather than a secondary consumer. The more paths energy takes to get from the sun to our bodies, the more is wasted.

I thought I could do my part to save water and resources by going straight to the energy source, and because I’m an animal and can’t photosynthesize, I became vegan for nearly one year and I ate only plants. I also tried to reduce my consumption of packaged goods, because cardboard and plastic and machinery only represent a different type of energy-wasting. I was pretty happy as a vegan, and didn’t really miss or crave any foods. I did indulge myself in a special vegan/tofu cream cheese, but since I had my bagels and cream cheese all was good. Overall, I think this was the most healthily I’ve eaten in my life.

However, I do believe that humans evolved to eat meat and that meat is a healthy part of the human diet: I just don’t agree with how it’s produced, how it’s bought, how it’s wasted, how it’s packed with hormones, and how the animal that provides the food is so disconnected from the animal that eats the food. My participation today included holding the rooster’s feet and wings as María wrung its neck. It was hard, physically and emotionally. Everybody’s heard the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off”, and this is because the body still does twitch uncontrollably for at least two minutes after its neck is broken and the bird has died. I wasn’t physically strong enough to hold the bird steady while it writhed and squirmed for those following two minutes, nor was I emotionally strong enough to actually watch the neck break. It’s just hard to watch death. But I believe it’s important.

It’s easy to waste food when you don’t know where it comes from, if all you know about your lunch is that it came from a box and the box came from the supermarket. But if you till the field, plant the seed, water the garden for months, then put your hard work into harvesting your crops, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to think lightly about letting that work go to waste. I think the sentiment around killing an animal is the same, if not stronger. If I kill an animal, if I understand what it means to be alive and to feel, to have breathed and eaten and now I’m taking that away, I’m sure not going to waste it.

I’ve been an omnivore now for about 6 months, and I think I’ll probably remain this way for the rest of my life. Though now the belief in killing your own animal is stronger than ever in my mind, and I’d like to continue killing my own food, if only to remind me where or who my food actually comes from.

Music

Thursday 4.15.10

I have a piano! Well, it’s a 5 octave keyboard with a plug that is a little finicky, speakers that crack, and it doesn’t really belong to me…but I can play it. I’ve been playing almost an hour each day since my counterpart brought it out of hiding last weekend. I actually brought some sheet music with me, and they are all really impressed that I can read such complex stuff (I still know the basics by heart, and by that I mean Watermark). I started to explain a little bit about it, then realized how I don’t have nearly the musical vocabulary in Spanish necessary to explain how to read notes, key signatures, sharps and flats, quarter notes, eighth notes, crescendos, and especially why the treble and bass clef are different! My counterpart suggested that I start teaching the local children how to read music, because there are a lot of them who have their own keyboards and who can play; they just can’t read. I think that is a really great idea and I’m pretty excited about getting started. I told him I just needed a little time to get comfortable with the vocabulary and to write a couple lessons.

My counterpart also has two guitars which I’ve been playing pretty regularly, though whenever I start playing somebody in the family comes to give me an audience, which only makes me nervous and not willing to sing so I haven’t gotten anywhere with that. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find some townspeople who want to play more than church music. Or maybe I could play the church music with them and find some way to slip in there how it’s not necessary to scream at the top of your lungs every time you’re singing. Either way I’m happy to be around music. I’ve always been able to just slip away a little from the world and get absolved in whatever piece I’m playing, and I’ve missed that the past three months where I didn’t have much access to playing an instrument. Listening to music is okay, but it just doesn’t have the same affect on me. Besides, in any given place in my town I’m almost guaranteed to be hearing music blaring from three different sets of speakers all at the same time. Right now: 1) US hip-hop, 2) Evangelical sung-by-a-6-year-old propaganda, and 3) some religious music that sounds like it is being sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks. You can see how listening to music is losing my interest more and more each day.

Why You Should Read the Newspaper

Wednesday 4.14.10

Sunday I went into Nebaj to meet up with some fellow Peace Corps Volunteers from around the area, buy food for the week, and more importantly, buy a newspaper. On Sundays the Prensa Libre, one of the more popular papers here, includes a couple magazines and a short selection of New York Times articles translated into Spanish from the previous week. Today is Wednesday and I’ve read about half of the articles in the Times section and I’m ready to move on to the Prensa section. I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down my other host family, but they just weren’t interested in reading the paper; they read the tabloid, photo-full version of the paper, but not much for current events and discussing things. In this family, both the mom and dad are currently attending the University of San Carlos in Nebaj and they are interested in reading, learning, and discussing. So for nearly all of Sunday afternoon we read together, talked about current events and our opinions, and just shared a lot about or beliefs and what we thought about the things going on in the world today. This is what I want every day. Besides the obvious benefits of increased vocabulary, better awareness of grammar, and plain increase in knowledge about current events, I believe that conversations with real people are better than any other benefit I could gain from any activity.

During my first few months in Guatemala I had a number of very stimulating conversations…with my gringo friends. I had some interesting talks with my host mom Dona Esperanza, but those were mostly just me talking and her nodding along. What I had been most worried about when moving to my new site away from English speakers was the ability to make new friends based on something substantial. “Hey, my name’s Katy, I like tortillas”. “Hi, my name’s Ana, I like tortillas too”. That was my imaginary dialogue of how making friends was going to go based on my interactions and conversations with Guatemalans over the past three months. Now I know that it doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure I’ll come across plenty of people who really don’t care about having an interesting conversation. They’ll be content to ask me how many siblings I have, if I’m married yet, if I miss my family and if my family back at home misses me, and what I think of the Aldea so far. Most people I’ve met so far very rarely stray far from these basic questions. But, I’m going to make it my goal for the next few weeks to seek out those people who have the mental capacity and are comfortable enough with me to actually hold a conversation. The great thing about talking about a newspaper article I’ve read is I have already learned a good portion of the vocabulary I’ll need to talk about it. And I’ll actually remember the new vocab because I’ll be putting it into practice.

Today I talked with my counterpart about how to make moonshine. Now, neither of us really know how to do it, but he said he was interested in learning because it would be a good business, and I said I was interested in learning because it’s all about science. The only part of the process he understood was the boiling off and separating the alcohol from the other liquid at the end of the process, and he compared it to when you are boiling beans over the fire, the liquid that evaporates and condenses on the lid is always clean and clear and never has any beans in it. Then we had a little chemistry lesson. I explained about the three different states of matter, solids liquids and gasses;f that liquids evaporate into gasses and solids melt into liquids. When you boil a pot of beans, the liquids evaporate but the solids need a much higher temperature to liquefy which is why what evaporates is so clear: it’s pure water. I proceeded to explain that alcohol is a different type of liquid that’s more volatile than water, and each liquid has its specific boiling point. To separate alcohol from water, all you have to do is make sure that the temperature you boil the mixture at is between the two specific boiling points. I think he understood.

It was fun. And it was so typically Guatemalan for him to use “boiling a pot of beans” for his analogy. But, you’ve got to use what you know, and now I know exactly how to explain states of matter if I ever have to do so with kids. Use what they know and are familiar with. Use examples they see every day.

In Other News - Part 2

Monday 4.12.10

I’ve been in Guatemala for a little over 3 months, so I think it’s time for an updated list of things that have happened to me that don’t really fit in anywhere else or that don’t deserve a blog entry on their own to explain. In other news:

Today I rolled my ankle playing basketball and it feels pretty bad. Only once have I rolled it worse than today, and the worst part is that nobody in my town has a refrigerator or a freezer so I don’t have any ice.

It’s a sad day when one realizes she’s allergic to mangoes. I hear that a lot of people find out they have a mango allergy when they come to Guatemala. I also hear that mangoes are related to poison oak. Seeing as how nobody I know is more reactive to poison oak than I am I am not really surprised to hear this. Will this stop me from eating mangoes? No, I’ve eaten an average of two per day since I arrived.

The people here think that I’m way more knowledgeable and experienced than I really am. I don’t want to disappoint them by telling them I really have no idea what I’m doing, but I also don’t want to falsely represent myself by telling them I do know what I’m doing.

I make the meanest sandwich in two countries. Avocado, red bell peppers, onion, cucumber, carrot, radish, jalapeno, all on a toasted sheka - a type of bread here. It’s been my dinner three times in the past week.

I had a dream last night that I called my cell phone carrier Tigo to find out how much saldo (prepaid minutes) I had left and when the minutes would expire. I woke up immediately after the dream-call was made and the first thing I did in real life was call Tigo. My saldo expires today. So, if anybody wants to chat let me know because I’ve got quite a few minutes now that I’ve gotta use up.

I think my back molars are getting sharper. I’m not exactly sure how, but recently I’ve been cutting up my tongue more often on the back part, and I think it’s because my teeth are sharper.

I think my arm hairs are growing longer than normal. I don’t know why I’ve noticed this, but I have and it’s been on my mind for the past month. I don’t know why this would happen (if it’s not all in my head, which I really don’t think it is) but I’ve been trying to come up with a logical explanation for why my arm hairs are growing to abnormal lengths.

I have gotten the hiccups exactly four times here in Guatemala. Two of those times were just one-hiccup deals. One hiccup and then it’s done with. The two other times were not that interesting either. I remember some days in the US where I would get 3-4 bouts of hiccups in one day, and up to 10-15 per week! But here, less than I can count on one hand. Why? Well, seeing as how nobody really knows why we hiccup anyway, I don’t think I’m going to figure out why I stopped hiccupping.

It’s a bad idea to put your finger in your eye just after you’ve finished cutting jalapeno peppers. Because, even though you want to flush out your eye immediately, you still have to wash your hand good and clean before you can pool water in it to wash out your eye.

Guatemalans have a different way of looking at maps than we do. When I visualize an imaginary map in front of me, up is North, down is South, right is, umm, East, and left would be West. But when Guatemalans visualize maps, North is North and South is South; that is, if they want to point to a location that is North, they point in the direction that is actually North rather than illustrate a planar and vertical map in front of them. They create a horizontally planar map oriented correctly. This caused a little confusion for me recently. Luckily, I had a real map that I pulled out to clarify.

I’m going to have to get really creative with the following ingredients over the next two years: onion, bell pepper, cucumber, carrot, green beans, cauliflower, garlic, avocado, radish, and then the starchy basics corn, rice, potato and black beans. I have access to as many eggs as I want and bananas year-round; other fruit seasonally. I’m pretty happy with stir-fry for dinner and omelets for breakfast now, but, it has only been a week of cooking for myself.

I use just about twice the amount of water it takes to flush an average toilet to bathe. And I don’t even do that daily.

Photos: My Site 1

Photos: My Site 2