Emily in Guatemala

For Sustainable Development Nerds and Insomniacs

2008-04-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

I'm no longer in Guatemala or even Central America, so I'll keep this short. If you are interested in alternative financial services provision in rural agricultural communities, or are simply having trouble falling asleep, my Master's Paper is now available online here. Thanks to everyone who has read my blog over the past eight months! It's been surprisingly fun writing this blog, but I'm going to end it here--somehow "Emily in Suburban California" just doesn't sound quite as interesting. By the way, if anyone has a job lying around that they would like to give me, please let me know! I'm going to close out this blog with the best quote I've found on the true meaning of sustainable development.

"The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth--urgent as they are--will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

-Alan Watts

From San Salvador to Playa Conchal

2008-04-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

Since I got back to Portland from Guatemala, I've maintained a grueling schedule of napping, eating, and playing with my parents' cuter and hairier children, the Dalmatians. Today I took a quick break from not working on my thesis to upload photos from an amazing two weeks of travel through most of the rest of Central America. After finishing my internship, I spent a relaxing few days in El Salvador and Honduras, and then my friend Jacky and I braved the 100 degree heat, three hour immigration lines, and $90 taxi rides of Semana Santa to see Costa Rica and Nicaragua. A photographic tour from the Bay Islands to the Monteverde Cloud Forest can be found here.

Adios, Guatemala

2008-03-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

Today is my last day of work here in Xela. Over the last couple of weeks I've been oscillating between incipient nostalgia and a near-physical urgency to get the hell out of here. Looking back, I can see that spending so much time in a country to which I felt no immediate connection has taught me some profound and unexpected lessons. More than anything, I've been able to see the ways in which cultures construct themselves with a logic that is rarely comprehensible to the outside observer. I feel privileged to have gotten beyond the tourist's "Guatemalan cultural experience" that includes one ride on a chicken bus, a photograph of an indigenous child, and a few handicrafts. Living here has helped me understand how, in a thousand subtle ways, the safety of family and tradition counterweighs the physical and psychological insecurity that are a part of every Guatemalan's life. My initial frustration with the conservative social values here in the highlands has slowly given way to a respect for the fact that Guatemala's indigenous cultures have been able to maintain their identity and their dignity even after 400 years of assaults on their cosmology, their languages, their economics. I will probably never identify with the Guatemalan culture on a personal level, but what started out as tolerance, that cloaked synonym of misunderstanding, has slowly given way over the last six months to admiration.

At the same time, I'm tired. Traveling alone throughout rural Guatemala and Chiapas as a tall blonde woman has been exhausting in many ways. Beyond the vegetarian's search for food, or the risks that any woman takes walking by herself at night, I am tired of always being noticed. Maybe this comes off as disrespectful of what, for example, minorities suffer every day living in the US. Well, if you are a transgendered Vietnamese woman living in Hartshorne, Oklahoma, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's impossible to go anywhere without people talking to me, staring at me, touching me. There is something beautiful and even soothing about the anonymity of walking down the street in any multicultural North American city.

That doesn't mean that there aren't things that I already miss about Guatemala. I love the sound of Spanish, the slang, the way it feels to speak it. It has been an amazing experience discovering the endless layers of fluency, the idioms and gray areas that before only existed for me in English. I miss the quiet generosity of the friends I've made here, the fact that I can walk to work, the sangria and wireless internet at Las Lagartijas that helped me finish my thesis. And of course, I know I am going to miss some of the mundane facts of life that I disliked most while I was here: the rickety, overcrowded chicken buses and the eggs-bean paste-tortilla meals. My internship will be over in an hour and fifteen minutes, I've already turned in the first draft of my thesis, and my bags are almost packed. But in December, when I swore I couldn't wait to leave Guatemala, I never realized how much I would want to come back.

Before I head back to the States I'm going to be traveling for two weeks, first by myself in Honduras, and then with my friend Jacky in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I'm sure that I'll have time to at least post jealousy-inducing photos of gorgeous tropical beaches. But in the meantime, it wouldn't be very culturally-sensitive of me to sign off without the standard Guatemalan goodbye: ¡Adios, Guatemala, que te vaya bien!

"La Revolución es la unidad y la justicia"

2008-02-22T12:39:00.004-08:00

Access to land was one of the defining issues, if not the central conflict, during Guatemala's 36-year armed struggle. Hundreds of thousands of people died during this period, and yet even after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, very little was resolved. For many rural indigenous people, life is still governed by the rule of the patrón, or plantation owner, who controls everything from wages to access to education. In spite of the many promises left unfulfilled by the government in the wake of the armed conflict, it seems that a quiet revolution in rural land distribution may be within reach. The unlikely agent of this transformation is, in fact, the government itself. Through Fontierras, a land fund whose creation was mandated by the Peace Accords, the government has begun to facilitate loans to indigenous farmers who want to purchase productive land.

This week I worked with the APODIP cooperative in Alta Verapaz, a department in north-central Guatemala. This group has united isolated communities of Q'eqchi' Maya farmers living in the buffer zone of the Sierra de las minas Biosphere Reserve. Over the last couple of years, more groups of ex-plantation workers have begun to join APODIP and to produce organic coffee on their own land. I visited two groups that have worked with Fontierras to buy plantations that were abandoned by their owners during the coffee crisis of the late 1990s.

The manager of one association told me that two years ago, he was living on a large plantation where the owner refused to build a school because he wanted the workers' children to start picking coffee as soon as they could walk. Out of desperation, he and other coffee farmers contacted the patrón of an abandoned plantation to see if he would sell it. With the assistance of Fontierras, the group managed to lower the price from 12 million quetzales to two million, and to obtain a low-interest loan. Now, they are rehabilitating the plantation's lands and processing facilities, and transitioning to 100% organic production.

During my tour of their facilities, the group took me into the attic space above their processing plant. They had obviously had a party the night before, as chairs, beer bottles, and pine needles were strewn across the floor. Above a pile of sacks of coffee they had hung a banner that read: "Welcome to the community...The revolution is unity and justice." In so much of Guatemala, revolutionary dreams have given way to resignation. I felt very moved to see that hope for a better future is still alive in some of the country's remote mountain communities. And, that this revolution holds the promise of a peaceful and just resolution.

My photos from this field visit, as well as the rest of my photos from my last six weeks in Guatemala, are here.

Marketing The "Real Story"

2008-01-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

What does it take to market someone's life story? How does a non-profit sell itself? Who decides what the public gets to know? Collecting quotes from coffee cooperative members to share with Foundation Finance supporters and donors seemed like a simple task back in August. Soon enough, however, mundane considerations like transportation and accurate translation started to assert themselves. And then, to my surprise, questions of morality began to make my job much more difficult than I had ever imagined.

Foundation Finance, like almost all non-profit organizations, needs funding from individuals and foundations in order to continue its work. The best way to secure this is by demonstrating positive impacts, by showing how the organization has changed people's lives for the better. One of my main responsibilities during my internship has been to produce "testimonials" from coffee farmers about the positive impacts that their cooperative and Foundation Finance have had on their lives. But out in the field, sitting in dim, smoky, one-room shacks and talking to the farmers directly, I've found out that packaging someone's life experiences is far from easy. Actually, it's fairly simple to take a quote out of context and stick it next to a photo of a farmer standing in a field and smiling. But the words, the emotions, the whole truth that people entrusted to me, those have been difficult to discard.

While none of the testimonials I've sent to my boss in Boston have been fabricated, they are far from the full story. This process of editing out the inconvenient hardships, the discontent, is absolutely commonplace in the world of non-profits. I don't know how to go about altering the strange hierarchies of the social change machine, but I do feel a responsibility to let some of these farmers speak for themselves. So, without further ado, I present the real "real story," in the form of quotes and photos from my work over the last five months. I bet you won't have a hard time picking out whose words became official Foundation Finance testimonials.

"The credit through Foundation Finance helps us with school expenses, since we have two children in primary school, one in high school, and the rest in technical school...We thank ADIPSA firstly for looking for support for us. The association is really important for us all. And then also we thank the organizations behind ADIPSA that provide credit funds to help us improve our situation."

-Oliva Albizures, member of ADIPSA

“Now I’m a little old, and I’m getting tired. I have children, but they’ve moved away. But I keep on fighting here, old man that I am, as much as I can.”

-Raymundo Veracruz Gonzalez, member of Selva Negra Zoque

“We have one child who is studying in El Progreso. This is what has taken up almost all of our life. The year before last, two kids were still studying, and it was really difficult. This is what has prevented us from getting ahead in life, from living in a decent house, because we are spending so much to educate our children...Because we make our living only from coffee, we have no other resources...When the last kid graduates, our troubles will be over...And then bigger troubles will come! Our problems will never end.”

-Felix Cruz Jacobo, member of ADIPSA

“Growing coffee independently, we sold our coffee too cheaply. If we had any urgent needs, we went directly to the middleman. And when they saw that we were in trouble, they paid us even less. Now that we’re organized, it’s different. We can take a loan from the cooperative to keep from selling to the middlemen...With capital from the cooperative we keep up our shade cover, pruning, and weeding. And then, when it comes to storage, paying producers, drying the coffee, all of this is thanks to financing from Foundation Finance.”

-Abundo Virgidio Ramos Angel, member of Finca Triunfo Verde

“The problem is that right now we need money to pay our workers, and we don’t have any...The workers want their payment right away, and if you’re late by even one day, sometimes they just walk out. It’s hard for us.”

-Hermelinda Morales Martinez, member of Finca Triunfo Verde

“When I joined Maya Ixil, I had a house that was a roof over our heads, nothing more. By saving up my checks from the cooperative, I was able to build a house and terrace my land. Being part of the cooperative has been a blessing for us...I have two sons, one who is a teacher and one who’s still in high school. The cooperative has always helped us with the school fees, and my family has seen the benefits.

-Juan Ordoñez Perez, member of Maya Ixil

P.S. Realizing that this post could mean an early despedida from my internship, I've gone back through the blog and changed the name of my employer. So much for my ethics, right?

Decompression

2008-01-11T06:55:00.000-08:00

After over 80 hours in transit, I arrived back in Xela on Wednesday afternoon. Visiting so many different places and distinct cultures in a little over two weeks was a surreal experience. I was never sure if I could drink the tap water, if I should be covering my head or taking off my shoes, or whether or not I ought to pick up a fork at meals. The whole time I was in India, I kept speaking to taxi drivers in Spanish. But when I got to the Guatemala City airport, I opened my mouth and said something in Hindi to a surprised customs official.

Lying awake with jet lag at three this morning, I felt like an accordion that had been expanded and then suddenly compressed in a rushing wheeze of discordant notes. The trip happened so quickly that I barely had time to truly experience any of it, and as I stared up at the darkened ceiling and counted the minutes until dawn, a disordered and extravagant river of images, sounds, and smells washed back over me.

More than anything else from the last few weeks, the wedding itself still seems like a mirage. The process started on Friday night, with a puja at Kunal's parents' flat that filled the apartment with smoke, chanting, and the insistent call of a conch shell. The next day began at 4:15am, when Kunal's aunt woke me up to spoon-fed me sugary gruel on the floor of her hotel room. I then had several hours to wait before being dressed in a bright yellow sari for a lengthy ritual focusing on our fathers asking for permission from their ancestors for the marriage. The ceremony culminated with family members and friends smearing both of us with a paste made from turmeric and mustard oil.

The main event occurred in the early evening, starting at the astrologically auspicious time of 4:52pm. Kunal arrived in a horse-drawn chariot while I remained inside on a throne, weighed down by silk and gold, hiding my eyes behind two large leaves. I can only imagine the fear and anticipation that a woman would feel waiting to see her husband for the first time. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had already met Kunal once or twice, so I knew what to expect. Once my parents had paid Kunal Rs. 1000 ($26.32) to seal the deal, he was lifted from the chariot and my Mom led him inside. Four lucky friends then carried me above their heads and circled around him seven times. They set me down and I was finally able to remove my blindfold, and Kunal and I exchanged thick garlands of jasmine. During the final ritual, Harmony participated as my moral support as Kunal and I cast various symbolic plants into a fire. At last, we walked around the fire together seven times, dazed from the smoke and from exhaustion, and emerged into the cool night married, again.

The intensely ritualized wedding in Kolkata felt like the perfect counterpoint to our celebration in Oregon last summer. Very often I had no idea what was going on, but it was reassuring to think of the millions of people who had performed the exact same ceremonies over the centuries. The wedding not only involved our family and friends, but unnamed and uncounted gods and ancestors who were asked to give their blessings. And although I'm only now starting to understand the experience, I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate in such a beautiful testament to the force of the past in the elaboration of an emblematic present.

In my next post, I promise to get back to the point, i.e. Guatemala. In the meantime, my photos from the trip are here.

See you in 2008!

2007-12-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving this afternoon for a Xela-Guatemala City-Miami-NYC-Dubai-Kolkata-Agra-Aurangabad-Mumbai-Dubai-NYC- Miami-Guatemala City-Xela odyssey...Oh yeah, somewhere in the midst of all that I'm finding time to ride Arabian horses in the desert, see the Taj Mahal, and get married (again)!!! OK, the point of this isn't to brag (well, maybe a little), or even to temporarily distract myself while I wait, but really to wish you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year! I'll see some of you soon--safe travels!

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Virgencita Morena!

2007-12-14T10:41:00.003-08:00

Mexicans seem to always be celebrating something. Fireworks go off at odd times, entire families dance in the street, and in almost any town you can count on finding old men plunking away on marimbas in the central square. On Friday night in Oaxaca City, I was finishing up my mole negro on the patio of a restaurant in the zócalo when a massive crowd surged around the corner across the park, led by a 10-piece band. They stopped a block from us, and with a shout, struck up a loud banda song. Almost everyone in the crowd, at least 200 people, grabbed a partner and started to dance. Those left on the sidelines raised bottles of mezcal above their heads and sang along.

We quickly paid the bill and hurried over to see what was going on. Just as we got near, the singer in the band shouted "¡Vámonos!" over the music and the throng turned and began stumbling off toward the cathedral. Intrigued, we followed along behind. After a few blocks, the group stopped and the same ritual was repeated. Although we were a little hesitant at first, being the only touristas in sight, we soon got swept up in the good time. After we'd been dancing for a few minutes, a guy approached us and, incredulous, exclaimed in English, "You don't have any mezcal?!?" Once we had been introduced to all of his friends, hugged, photographed, and thrown back on the "dancefloor" with new partners, we ended up having mezcal poured down our throats while the crowd shouted "¡uno, dos, tres, cuatro...!" Luckily for me, since mezcal tastes like barbecued turpentine, our new friend was so inebriated already that the majority of the alcohol ended up on my shirt. We eventually found out that they were partying in honor of the anniversary of the founding of their university. "And a lot of us don't even go there!" confessed a girl nearby as she took a swig from an empty bottle. We ended the night at 1am, dancing and singing in front of the dimly lit Catedral de Oaxaca, and wondering why we didn't live in Mexico.

And that was just a random excuse to have a good time. I also happened to be in Mexico for possibly the biggest festival of all, the Fiestas de la Virgen de Guadalupe, several weeks leading up to the December 12th Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In honor of the Virgin, thousands of Catholics from all around Mexico engage in pilgrimage. Some groups go only a few miles, riding in trucks adorned with paintings of the Virgin, sending a runner ahead of their vehicles to carry a flaming torch the whole way. Many people, however, travel for days. Literally millions of people go to Mexico's capital to pay their respects at the Basilica of Guadalupe, where the miraculous first image of the "Virgen Morena" is housed. Apparently, there is even a three-month-long pilgrimage on foot from Mexico City to New York.

In San Cristobal and Tuxtla Gutierrez, the faithful took to the streets at night, mounting processions to various churches and cathedrals. The groups were all led by a truck carrying a young girl dressed as the Virgin in the back, followed by a mariachi band escorting dozens of people carrying candles and singing. Traveling all over the state on my coffee cooperative visits, I came across more and more pilgrims slowing traffic as they made their way on seemingly random journeys from Veracruz to Tuxtla, from Motozintla to Tapachula.

One night in Tuxtla, I walked out of my hotel to find the world's strongest concentration of Mexican stereotypes marching past me towards the town's Guadalupe temple. At the head of the parade, an enormous balloon-covered yellow tow truck dragged a banner announcing that the parade was sponsored by a local horchata factory. This was followed by a pickup carrying a full marimba band, followed by another truck whose bed was filled with mariachi musicians, all playing at top volume. A group of men carrying a life-size poster of the Virgin came next, leading a girl wearing the Virgin's trademark green shroud, and hundreds of women dressed in traditional flowered skirts and lacy white blouses, carrying lilies, singing hymns, and chanting G-U-A-D-A-L-U-P-E over and over. Then came a fleet of at least 30 balloon-encrusted taxis in various states of disrepair, arrhythmically honking their horns. Bringing up the rear was a white, mid-60s VW bug, covered in loudspeakers, announcing: "¡Estamos aquí para celebrar la Virgen de Guadalupe! ¡Felicitaciones Virgencita Morena!" ("We're here to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe! Congratulations little brown virgin!"). All that was missing was the mezcal.

Photos from my time in Mexico are here.

It's not that stones are mute

2007-12-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

No es que las piedras sean mudas,
sólo guardan silencio.

It's not that stones are mute,
they just maintain their silence.

-Humberto Ak'abal

Browsing the shelves at a bookstore in Oaxaca City a couple of weeks ago, I happened on a photography and essay book on Guatemala. It fell open to a black-and-white photo of a beautiful young couple at their wedding, tight-lipped, stiff, staring resolutely at the camera. As I leafed through the book, a quote from the K'iche' poet Humberto Ak'abal caught my eye: "It's not that stones are mute,/ they just maintain their silence." In two lines, he articulated my experience of Guatemala. Before I came to Xela this summer, countless people told me how friendly Guatemalans were, how helpful and warm. I arrived expecting the infectious sense of humor and generosity that I remembered from trips to Mexico. After a couple of months of work throughout Western Guatemala, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. It's not that highland Guatemalans are rude, or unfriendly at all. It's just that being obliging is a form of defense, a deflection learned by people who have been conquered, enslaved, and killed for hundreds of years. It has been hard for me to tell the difference between civility and compliance in a culture whose conservatism is both innate and imposed.

For the last three weeks, I have been working in Chiapas, with a long weekend vacation in Oaxaca. The unlikely contrasts between Mexico and Guatemala led me to reflect on the stoic Guatemalan character that has challenged me during my first three months in the country. A cultural, economic, and political divide runs along the Guatemala-Mexico border. On the ride out of the mountains from Xela, the only noise came from the bus itself, belching smoke and creaking at every turn while its passengers sat quietly gazing out the window or slumped forward in an exhausted torpor. Crossing the trash-clogged river to Chiapas swept us into a world of paved highways, loud laughter, air conditioning, and spicy food. The contrast between Ciudad Tecún Umán in Guatemala and Tapachula in Chiapas was heartbreaking. In Tapachula, couples kissed under the shade of the trees filling the zócalo, musicians played in front of sidewalk cafés, and shouts from an anti-domestic violence rally carried for blocks. Walking around town in the late afternoon heat, I felt intoxicated by the colors, smells, and sounds of life bursting around me.

Physically and demographically, Chiapas is as close to Guatemala as any state in Mexico. In fact, its highlands were once part of the Sixth State of the Federal Republic of Central America, along with much of Western Guatemala. It is Mexico's poorest state, with a large indigenous population and a history of armed conflict. But the social history of Guatemala has marked it in ways that I only realized once in Mexico. The most telling difference, in a convoluted way, is the fact that in Guatemala you will almost never see someone begging on the street. Although Mexico is relatively wealthy, in Chiapas and Oaxaca, it's commonplace to be approached by people asking for help, appealing to your sense of communal duty. Indigenous Guatemalans have learned to survive by turning inward, and, as Ak'abal writes, by recognizing the power and defiance implicit in maintaining their silence.

Is there a metaphor in here somewhere?

2007-11-19T05:51:00.001-08:00

Eight years ago it was still the second millennium A.C.E., Clinton was president, and Kunal and I were both teenagers. Eight years is a long time. Yep, as of today we've been together/dating/whatever/married for eight years! Yesterday we celebrated by climbing Santa María, a 12,375 foot volcano near Xela. The 4500 foot climb was arduous but the sense of accomplishment and views from the summit made the effort more than worth it. ¡Feliz aniversario a nosotros!

More photos here.

Happy Shiny Fancy Guatemala

2007-11-14T05:32:00.000-08:00

I should apologize in advance for the lack of depressing stories about poverty, apathy, and the vagaries of free trade in this entry. Since my last post Kunal and I have hosted my parents and then Pam and Carl, managed to see just about every tourist site in Guatemala, and even squeezed some work in between visits. Not only was it wonderful to have everyone here, we also got to see a completely different side of Guatemala. We traveled to Tikal, Lago de Atitlán, and Antigua with my parents and (truly a miracle here) even ate good food a few times! Tikal and Lago de Atitlán easily surpassed their reputations. The temples of Tikal are surrounded by a living, breathing jungle filled with howler monkeys, toucans, and coatimundis. Risking the climb up rickety wooden ladders to the top of the tallest pre-Columbian structure in the Western Hemisphere, we were confronted by hundreds of miles of thick jungle, its canopy disturbed only by the tops of other temples and the roars of howler monkeys.

After a few days in Xela, where the highlight was El Día de Todos los Santos on November 1st (a sober Guatemalan take on Día de los Muertos), we crammed into a little car and headed to Lago de Atitlán. Even though it is widely known as "one of the most beautiful lakes in the world," the first view from the road into Panajachel from the Interamerican Highway shocked us into silence. The lake formed 85,000 years ago, after the Chokoyos eruption spewed rocks and ash as far as Florida and Ecuador. Today, at 1000 feet deep and ringed by three perfect volcanoes, it looks like a lost world where dinosaurs might still graze among the bougainvillea. We spent a "cosmic" (thanks, mom) two days at La Casa del Mundo jumping off of rocks into the blue water, soaking in a wood-heated hot tub, and eating such traditional Guatemalan delicacies as tofu burgers.

Before Carl and Pam showed up, I had a three day cooperative visit in the central desert area of Guatemala, and Kunal came along to see how the magic happens. Or doesn't, in my case. This visit was notable only for the fact that the cooperative manager and I got in a motorcycle crash on a remote mountain road. Luckily we came away with nothing but bruises and a broken side mirror. Next time I need to ascend a 45 degree slope covered in slippery rocks and mud wallows, I'm going to stick with the mule option.

Since Kunal and I can never sit still, we used our free 24 hours to visit the Garífuna community of Lívingston, on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala. We ate Calcutta-style Indian food (the world really is a handkerchief, as they say in Spanish) and drank coconuts filled with rum while contemplating the impossible task of showing Pam and Carl the highlights of Central America in two and a half days. Naturally we took them directly from the airport to Lago de Atitlán. Our main activity was jumping into the lake from the hotel's balconies, so many times that Carl gave himself a bloody nose. Twice. OK, really I just wanted an excuse to post this photo. On Sunday we took a 4am shuttle to Copán, in Honduras, and wandered for a few hours among crumbling temples and massive, intricately carved stelae. After a hectic trip back to Guatemala City in seven different vehicles, it was time for our visitors to head back to the States, and for us to re-enter Guatemalan reality.

Last but not least, Auntie-ji and Sam, we wished you could have been here with us this past weekend. You were missed! Lots of photos from the last month can been seen here.

"Para qué se usa el café en los Estados Unidos?"

2007-10-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 4am every day. I ate nothing but a few eggs and beans at each meal. I lost the digital recorder I had spent 11 hours on a bus to retrieve from Guatemala City, and with it hours of recorded interviews. I hiked all day wearing a 50 pound backpack and a heavy shoulder bag, and fell repeatedly on sharp, slippery rocks. Every little thing that could have gone wrong with my most recent cooperative visit did. But in the end, nothing was more painful that a simple question from a young coffee farmer: "¿Para qué se usa el café en los Estados Unidos?"

I spent three days this last week working on the Guatemala-Chiapas border, in communities that are part of a coffee cooperative called APECAFORM. And although I felt lucky to be able to spend time in such a remote and beautiful place (see photos), I couldn't escape the mounting evidence that the organic, Fair Trade, shade grown, microfinance, quality improvement, cooperative organization complex is failing these farmers. The majority of cooperative members live in tiny wooden shacks, without access to improved water and sanitation, and in many cases without electricity. Every family has sent at least one person to work in "El Norte." In the communities that make up APECAFORM, coyotes charge between 40,000-60,000 Quetzals ($5000-$8000) to smuggle a single person into the US. In the village where we stayed, the nearest pharmacy is over four hours away, and no one can afford the medicine they sell anyway. Don't believe the Fair Trade, organic marketing hype that the extra $5/lb you spend for "responsible" coffee has pulled certified farmers out of desperate poverty.

Really, though, the fault lies not so much with the cooperatives and the international certifying agencies, but in much larger macroeconomic processes. At each cooperative that I've visited so far, I've heard the same thing from almost every farmer: the slightly higher, consistent price we get from the cooperative helps, but the cost of basic necessities has increased so much in the last five years that we are worse off than before. A little research supports the coffee producers' claims. In the month of January 2007 alone, the price of the "basic food basket" in Guatemala went up 17%. In part, this is due to worldwide increases in the price of oil and other commodities. However, according to one article, a major factor in Guatemala is the fact that twenty years ago, the country was self-sufficient in corn and rice production, but now imports 40% of its corn, 66% of its rice, and 100% of its wheat.

Throughout my visit to APECAFORM, the human costs of nonexistent health care, lack of even the most basic infrastructure, and rising commodity prices became more and more evident. On the morning I left, completely exhausted from the previous day's trudge over a mountain, I opted to rent a mule to ride out to the nearest road. I won't even go into the personal pride and white guilt issues that came up riding a starving mule through the forest, with the mule's owner following behind on foot. At least it will provide a good crazy gringo story to the many bewildered children we passed on the two hour journey.

My companion for the morning was a 20 year old coffee farmer from the tiny village of San Juan Bullaj. And although we didn't speak the same native language, we kept up a steady conversation, pausing only to adjust the sweating mule's saddle or to try and remember a word in Spanish. Vincente recounted what it was like growing up on a small coffee farm, and how when his father died a few years ago, his mother gave up farming and moved away to a larger town. Both of his older sisters work in the US, one in Florida and one in Kentucky, and he hasn't seen either of them in five years. He grows coffee alone on a few hectares of steep land, and makes about three dollars a day.

I told Vincente about living in the US, about what the weather was like in the places where his sisters were living, about my own family. He had a lot of questions, too, mostly about why it was so difficult to get a visa to come to the US, and why I didn't have to pay to come to Guatemala. Eventually the talk turned back to coffee, and I told him some of his coffee probably ends up in my hometown. "Well," he said, "I don't know where my coffee goes." There was a long pause, broken only by the heaving breath of the mule. "What do they use the coffee for in the US, anyway?"

Every time I think of him looking up at me, asking an innocent question that has such an unjust answer, I start to cry. It took me a minute to realize that he really had no idea what happened to his coffee. The few years of school he must have attended taught him almost nothing about life outside of San Juan Bullaj, and no one bothered to tell him anything about the international system of trade and commerce and labor in which he participated without a choice. I explained to him that in the US, we drink coffee just like in Guatemala, only there, a single latte costs as much as he makes in one day. "Oh, I didn't realize," he whispered, and we climbed the rest of the way up to the road in silence.

Balance

2007-10-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

I've had a strange week, a bizarre mix of the extremely good and the extremely bad. And since I'm still in bed with the "bad," I figured why not write about it...

On Sunday, we hiked to Laguna Chicabal ("the center of Maya-Mam cosmovision," or so they say in tourist literature), with our housemates Ethan and Lacey. We woke up at 5am to beat the clouds that settle over the highlands by 11 every day, and took a rickety bus an hour out of Xela to the town of San Martín Chile Verde (St. Martin of the Green Chiles is one of the best town names I've ever come across). From the center of town, we had a 3 mile slog 2000 feet up to the top of Volcán Chicabal, and down into the crater, which is now a beautiful, perfectly round lake. The hike was tough, partly because we started at 7800 feet, and partly because of the total absence of switchbacks. In spite of the effort, the hike was amazing, first through the outskirts of town, up into a dense tropical forest with views out onto the flat Pacific plains, then higher to the summit of Volcán Chicabal.

Panting and sweating as we reached the top, we were greeted on one side by clear views of Volcán Santa María and Santiaguito smoking and steaming in the early morning light. On the other side, we looked down five hundred feet into the crater of the volcano, to the blue-green waters of Laguna Chicabal, framed by dense vegetation and a narrow strip of beach. Standing on the rickety wooden viewing platform, I felt a rush of pride for having made the hike. I couldn't help but think back to five months ago, when I was lying in bed with an IV dripping antibiotics into my arm. Although even now I am certainly not 100%, it felt like a great accomplishment to summit a mountain, and to feel good doing it.

After a much needed break, we hiked around the lake, passing 20 simple altars that represent each of the nahuals of the Mayan calendar. Just as we were lying down to sunbathe on the beach, and commenting on the lucky weather, clouds began to pour over the rim of the crater. Within 15 minutes, fog had enveloped the lake, and we couldn't see more than a few yards in front of us. We hiked back to San Martín through the gathering clouds, sore but exhilarated.

On Monday, I woke up even earlier, at 3am, and got on the first bus to Guatemala City. Several weeks ago, my mom had sent me a package containing a digital recorder for my interviews and some medicine, both of which I really needed. Global Express had said they'd have it to me in 3-5 days. After two weeks, I had pretty much given up. Then, after three weeks, I received a telegram (those still exist?!) in the mail from the Guatemalan postal service. I was overjoyed as I read that "a package has arrived for you and is being held at the post office in zone 1." Excellent, I thought, that's one block from my apartment! "...in Guatemala City." Yes, in order to retrieve my package, I had to take a five hour bus trip to Guatemala City, present my passport, and allow customs agents to open the box and perfunctorily check for contraband. It is supreme irony that on the telegram envelope was a stamp proclaiming: "ésta es una prueba de que el correo si funciona" (this is proof that the postal service does work). Even better, as my dad pointed out, is the fact that they neglected to put the accent on "sí," making it "if" instead of "yes", and rendering the phrase both nonsensical and accurately equivocal. There is nothing much that can be said about spending 11 hours on a bus in Guatemala, just to pick up a package that should have been delivered to my office weeks ago, except that it was extremely not fun.

And then, on Tuesday, I got the flu. The flu is awful in its own right, but really does not go well with Lyme Disease. And so the lesson of the week seems to be that good and bad actually do balance each other out over time. Sometimes even in the course of a few days.

Religion in Guatemala

2007-10-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

Just a quick link for anyone interested in a little more about how evangelical Protestantism is changing Guatemala--an article entitled "Born Again in Guatemala."

K'iche' and Foundation Finance

2007-09-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

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

First Impressions, Elections, Xelafer

2007-09-16T14:27:00.001-07:00

Welcome to my blog! I'm going to very periodically update this with info, stories, and random thoughts during my time in Guatemala...

First Impressions

Honestly, the first thing that struck me about Guatemala is the sheer number of guns here: at the army checkpoints along the highway, at banks, even the home appliance store down the street from my apartment is watched over by two men carrying sawed-off shotguns. Guns are everywhere, slung over men's shoulders as casually as backpacks or sacks of rice.

A close second is the religious conviction that pervades all aspects of life here, and is neatly summed up by the massive sign that dominates one of the hills behind Xela: "Cristo Viene." This to-the-point sentiment is echoed by the windshields of every pickup in town, announcing "Jesus cambió mi vida," "Dios te ama," and "Jesus es El Señor." There is a love of the Lord in Guatemala unlike anything I have ever encountered anywhere else in the world. To me it makes sense as an indirect measure of the suffering inflicted on Guatemala over the last 50 years. I read recently that an evangelical Christianity that preached abstinence from politics and transcendence of earthly suffering took hold in indigenous communities during the war, and has all but displaced Catholicism in many rural areas. But no matter what the reason, you can't walk 10 feet, or talk to most Guatemalans for more than 10 minutes, without encountering God in one of His many forms.

Something that has crept up on me over the last two weeks is the sharp contrast between a surface level of Americanized affluence evident in Xela, and the serious poverty and social problems afflicting most of Guatemala. My first week here I visited La Pradera, a spotless mall on the edge of town that boasts Lacoste and a department store owned by Wal Mart. Strolling past shop after shop selling expensive American products, I almost forgot that I was in Guatemala. Then, on my way home, I caught one of the old vans that serve as public transport here. As a skinny 10 year old wearing a torn sweater took my change and I settled in next to a security guard with a semi-automatic on his lap, I was jarred back into a world of child labor, privation, and insecurity. Sadly, a crowded, broken down van seems to be a much more accurate symbol of life here than $100 French polo shirts.

Elections

By coincidence, the national elections, Xela’s yearly fair, and Guatemala’s Independence Day all fell during our first two weeks in Guatemala. The build-up to the elections had been particularly violent this year; murders of campaign workers and political activists culminated in August in the brutal murder of one candidate’s 14-year old daughter, in an attempt to force him to withdraw. The violence and abuses that have characterized Guatemala’s political process for at least the last half-century have produced levels of cynicism and apathy that make US citizens look like passionate participants in the political process. When I asked my boss who the best presidential candidate was, he quickly replied, “none of them.” And the least bad? “None of them.”

On election weekend, the mood was understandably tense,
and we were advised not to travel outside of Xela. The large military presence in town, combined with a national ban on selling or publicly consuming alcohol during the entire weekend, resulted in a sort of forced tranquility on election day. And, in fact, the elections turned out to be surprisingly non-violent and transparent. The field was narrowed down to two candidates, who will face off in a final round on November 4th: a bland left-center businessman, with 36% of the vote, and close behind, with 30%, the far right ex-head of the military police, responsible for sanctioning torture and disappearances during the later years of the civil war.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s almost impossible to understand how so many Guatemalans could vote to bring back the “Mano Dura” (“hard hand”) policies of the 1980s. The prevailing explanation is that people are simply choosing the orderly repression of the army over the unregulated crime and violence that is common today across the country. Although this is probably true to a degree, it’s also undeniable that many rich, urban Guatemalans seek to preserve their economic hegemony by supporting neo-liberal political regimes, while the indigenous rural poor, who tend to vote left, remain disenfranchised and excluded from the political process.

Xelafer
This past weekend could not have been more different from election day. In mid-September every year, Xela hosts Central America’s largest fair, a week-long celebration that coincides with Guatemala’s Independence Day, September 15th. Our first taste of the fair came on Wednesday night, when Kunal and I rounded a corner near our apartment and stopped in our tracks. An enormous flatbed semi-truck carrying at least 25 beauty queens had nearly jack-knifed trying to make a tight turn onto one of Xela’s narrow side streets. The truck lurched back and forth, attempting to complete a 50-point turn, while Miss Quetzaltenango, Miss Indigena, Miss Municipal Employee (seriously), and international representatives including Miss Mexico and Miss Nicaragua struggled to maintain their smiles and choreographed waves without being thrown from the wooden platform. Finally, after about 20 minutes, the truck managed to complete the turn, and the visibly relieved beauty queens disappeared up the hill in a cloud of black exhaust.

The fair itself was held in an enormous dusty field on the outskirts of town, and combined the rides and greasy food of a US county fair and the chaos of a typical Guatemalan market, with vendors hawking cheap Chinese-made toys and housewares from blankets set up along the main paths through the fair. For some reason, we chose to visit on Independence Day, the busiest of the entire week, and made it only 100 meters inside the fair grounds before we were overwhelmed by literally crushing crowds, staggering quantities of broken plastic toys, and the sickly smell of frying chorizo.

While the actual fair turned out to be simultaneously overpowering and disappointing, the sheer number of people in town for the week meant that Xela played host to free concerts in the central plaza every night, even more delicious street food than usual, and parties that lasted until five in the morning. On the last night of the fair, we sat on a bench in the park, eating pupusas and listening to traditional Mexican folk music, as laughing families strolled past and a veil of bright, high-altitude stars came to rest on the shoulders of volcán Santa María. It was the first time since I arrived in Xela that I understood why so many of the expats I’ve met here came to Guatemala on vacation, and ended up calling in their two-week notice to work from one of the payphones lining 12th avenue.

You can check out more photos here

Next time: how someone possessing only a passing familiarity with addition and subtraction ended up working in finance, why learning K’iche' has given me a permanent sore throat, and Guatemala’s love of acronyms...