K'iche'
I've always loved learning languages, or attempting to learn them. So far, I've managed to get at least competent in Spanish and French. However, I'm realizing that I've also developed the annoying habit of trying and failing to learn languages wherever I go. Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese--my "mastery" ranges from 10 random words to basic comprehension, but no one is going to mistake me for Brazilian. Of course when I found out I could study K'iche' in Xela, I immediately signed up. And now, three weeks into my one-on-one class, I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be yet another failed experiment in language learning. K'iche' is hard. The first class literally gave me a sore throat and a pounding headache. A couple of the most common letters are supposed to be pronounced deep in the throat, but when I try to to pronounce the word qq'uq' ("our quetzal"), or kqtzukuj ("we look for"), I end up sounding like I'm choking to death. Not only is K'iche' hard to pronounce, its structure bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything I have ever come across in my detours through various Romance and Dravidian languages. Personal pronouns are buried inside of verbs, and nouns are proceeded by a baffling variety of untranslatable helping words. When pluralizing human-related nouns (woman, doctor, etc), you have the choice of two word endings. Trying to distinguish between them, I asked how I knew which one to use. My teacher smiled sweetly and explained, "sólo hay que sentir el gusto de la palabra"--you just have to feel what the word wants. So far, I haven't felt it.
And yet, there is something addictive about K'iche'. My instructor is an old woman from the small town of Totonicapán, who has fought her whole life to bring K'iche' instruction to public schools in Guatemala. On the first day of our class, she told me that what makes the language unique is that in speaking it, we are elaborating the Mayan cosmovision with our words. My first thought was that all languages carry within themselves an implicit view of how the universe functions. But after two hours in which we talked about nothing but corn, earth, water, birds, and animals, I started to realize that she was right.
The K'iche' origin story tells how God made the first people out of yellow and white corn. In K'iche', there are words for every part of the corn plant, from the unripe cob to the dried kernels used to make masa. There is no word for telephone, so it is simply called "the thread
that passes words." Cars and forks are both referred to by the general word for metal or iron. Even the word k'iche' means "many trees." It seems that in K'iche', there is no dichotomy between natural and human worlds, only the illumination of an order that roots us in the earth like so many stalks of corn. Somehow I've begun to feel invested in this language, and I'm hoping that someday, I can honestly say "¡je', kinch'aw pa ch'ab'al k'iche'!"Foundation Finance*
Every day on my twenty minute walk to work, past three or four headstone factories, slowly up the hill in a cloud of black exhaust, crossing the street by the Cabro brewery, I wonder how I ended up working somewhere with "capital" in the name. I never made it past Algebra II. I cringe at the thought of the "live for the weekend" lifestyle. I hate spreadsheets. But here I am. Granted, Foundation Finance is a financial organization with a social and environmental mission. That doesn't change the fact that I'm still involved in discussions about financial risk mitigation, pre-shipment trade credit, and interest rates. Weird.
Luckily for me, and for Foundation Finance's legitimate number crunchers, my work here focuses on qualitative impact assessment. This means I get to travel to remote parts of Guatemala to interview coffee farmers about their lives, with the aim of improving Foundation Finance's services, and of course, developing marketing materials for the organization. I had my first field visit this week, to a coffee cooperative called ASUVIM, about 3 hours from Xela. Let me quickly digress to mention that for some reason that I can't understand, every organizational name in Spanish must be an acronym, or some combination of words smashed together to produce an easy-to-say but meaningless designation. This tendency has reached its zenith/nadir in Guatemala. The national telephone company is TelGua, the tourism institute is InGuat, and the names of coffee cooperatives range from APECAFORM to ADIPSA to ASUVIM, which stands for Asociación Unidos para Vivir Mejor.
Anyway, most of this past month has been spent developing indicators and interview questions to assess the socio-economic impact of Foundation Finance in these communities. I leafed through my 40 pound Social Research Methods textbook. I read scholarly articles on microfinance indicator construction. I pondered how credit might affect the lives of coffee growers and their families, and came up with nine pages of questions ranging from "have you had to travel outside of the community to work in the last year?" to "how many times a week do you eat meat?"
I have to admit that I was surprised when my assessment of ASUVIM turned out to be a complete failure. When I arrived at the cooperative, I found out the management had scheduled a visit with a buyer for the next morning, so instead of having the planned two days to interview community members, I had three hours. When I sat down with my first interview subject and asked him what he thought about Foundation Finance, I got a blank stare. Only the manager and accountant had even heard of the organization. And, in fact, since the association received its first loan, life has gotten harder for many people: Hurricane Stan decimated their crop two years ago, and the government keeps raising the price of staples like bread and sugar too fast for the price of coffee to keep pace. Although the visit wasn't a total disaster, and I met some very funny and perceptive people, I didn't arrive back in Xela with either a comprehensive impact report or marketing-friendly stories of success against the odds.
I'll be traveling for two of the next three weeks, to three different cooperatives. This time, I'll have more time in each community, and a much shorter list of questions.
Check out my updated photos from this month. ¡Hasta octubre!
*Not the organization's real name
