My curly ringlets, tanned skin, and light brown eyes have made it so that I’m greeted with an, “y como puedo servirle?” upon walking into any store in NYC. If I had a dime for each time I was mistaken for Hispanic, I’d have enough money to buy myself a plane ticket to Central America and back. And that’s exactly what I did this summer. While I didn’t ask each confused shop owner for ten cents, I did receive a grant to conduct ten weeks of research in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala.

            My mistaken identity had always given me a deeper connection to the Spanish language beyond the grammatical rhymes of my high school teacher – “can’t have ‘le lo’, gotta have ‘se lo’!” Yet, I left high school Spanish a bit frustrated and decided not to continue classes in college, as the forty minutes of language exposure per day still had me tripping over my grammar. Being surrounded by English the second I broke free of the classroom confines was hindering any true sense of mastery I tried to attain.

            Thus, the opportunity for total immersion in Guatemala was a dream come true. I arrived in Santiago, rusty having not taken a class in four years, to find myself thrown into a family whose English ended at “Hello, my name is Nicolas Sapalu.” After sneezing right after our introduction, I told my host dad, “si no mejoras manana, voy a tomar las pastillas”. Oops. I had accidentally told him that if he didn’t feel better tomorow, I would take pills. I asked my host sister how many knives of sugar to put in my tea, rather than how many teaspoons. Each time I exited the room, I said “una vez mas”, instead of “un momento”. My host family would stare at each other in confusion, wondering why I had just said, “one more time”.

            Yet, over the course of the summer, I sat during my lunch break with a group of my Guatemalan friends, conversing only in Spanish. I developed a sarcastic sibling relationship with my host brother – in Spanish. I flirted with the boys on the street to entice them to buy tickets for a hospital benefit – in Spanish. I told my most long-winded and notoriously awful “bagel story”– in Spanish (the reviews were not much better from a Guatemalan standpoint). While I can’t deny that my Spanish mishaps continued over the summer, by the end, I felt as though I had mastered a piece of my identity that I had never been able to in a forty-minute lecture. Next time I’m addressed in Spanish on the Subway, I’ll probably just continue a conversation in the language that I have learned and loved, without any need to correct their assumptions. 

“you’ll be with me, like a handprint on my heart. and now whatever way our stories end, i know you have rewritten mine by being my friend..”

jumped in the lake at 11pm last night and started floating. literally, the only thing i could see was the stars and the only thing i could hear was my own heart beating. 

i never want to leave this place! 

so the feria came and went. highlights include:

the greased pole competition, in which atitecas (and one gringo.. JAKE!) compete to climb a 324908 meter high pole that’s covered in lard. el palo envelezado. so the people that normally compete have been doing it for a few years and have learned to come equipped with a dirt in their pockets, to try to climb the pole. it took 4 rounds, but eventually the guy who won the past four years won again. perhaps he’ll make it to the guinness book of greased poles. as a prize, he got 1000 quetzales and danced on stage with the reina del lago. our friend jake also competed and managed to get approximately 1 meter high, and that was only because some atitecas who felt bad for him pushed his feet up. yay gringo represent. now everyone in the town yells JACOBO! or laughs when he passes by.

the greased PIG competition. yes, that’s right. i said pig. they began by dragging this pig covered in grease into the ring. but they must have been mad because this pig was not about to move. so they started whipping it and we could hear it crying =( it was sad, but the point of the competition was to hold the pig over both shoulders and take two laps around the ring with it. ollin participated and ALMOST WON! but he was only holding it over one shoulder so everyone kept yelling until he realized 1.5 laps later. then some drunk man pushed him. then time ran out. sad.

ollin enters the ring.

the parade, in which certain children looked miserable, others looked like the KKK (not entirely sure what they were supposed to be), and others were plain adorable. 

angry bunny.

la gran rueda! it’s a bit disconcerting to watch men climb up this thing in the middle of the day and work on it with wrenches and paint. makes me wonder what was wrong with it the past few nights when i rode it.. hm. anyway, i rode the gran rueda 3 nights in a row, with various levels of rocking the chairs till we were nearly horizontal and parallel to the ground. luckily, i’m still alive!! win. 

the people! well half the people. unfortunately the feria is a very catholic thing - it’s a celebration of st. james (sant - iago, get it?), but it’s a mix of mayan and catholic traditions. the evangelicals in the town watch on the tele or simply don’t go out during the feria. but for the rest of them, they thoroughly enjoy watching penn students make spectacles of themselves while dancing or watching the drunk men in the center dancing OR sometimes even dancing themselves. interesting dancers of the nights included dona luz, a transgender, an angry pizza lady, and some more.

less than one week left - i don’t want to leave this place =(

with santiago atitlan and the spanish language! (caught your attention though, didn’t it?) seriously. i can’t get enough of this place and can’t deal with the fact that i’m coming home in 2 weeks. time really does fly, or as they say aqui, “el tiempo corre” (the time runs). they have a lot of phrases that basically translate exactly to spanish - por ejemplo, the phrase “ventanas de opurtunidad” means “windows of opportunity”. 

the feria is this weekend/monday! each town around the lake has a feria, which i perceive as the fling of santiago. however, keep in mind, that the majority of the town is evangelical and sleeps at 10 pm, unless of course, it’s a sunday (church night - wild). but they’ve put up a few ferris wheel, there should be a lot of drunk men dancing on monday, there’s a parade tomorrow that hopefully we’ll get to be driving in a car in if all goes well, there’s a GRAN RIFA where the grand prize is a cow, for which we had to sell raffle tickets - good stuff. we rode the rueda grande today and the view of atitlan is incredible, though the fact that they were constructing it in front of me only yesterday was a little discomforting. 

immediately after i took this picture, the angrier looking of the two atiteca children said “1 quetzal” to me. even though they had asked me to take the picture. lame.

in preparation for the feria, people have set up stands in the mercado since last week - here are a few glimpses of the regular food mercado and what’s been going down recently. 

in other news, spanish is wonderful. i love so much that i can sit with a group of solely spanish speaking (and tzutujil speaking people) and have great conversations and really feel like a part of their friend circle. i can joke in spanish, be sarcastic in spanish, flirt in spanish (as evidenced when we tried to sell the tickets to win the cow in the gran rifa to benefit the hospitalito). the difference between tu and usted is hilarious - we use usted with our host mom, who doesn’t love us all that much, but tu with the rest of the family. i also immediately and consciously switched from ud. to tu when i found out the vacunadora i was shadowing was actually one year younger than me. julia and i sometimes say, “yeah, i just usted’d you” as a huge insult - it means you’re a distant stranger (much like our host mom). speaking of tzutujil though, the greeting when you pass anyone on the street (but only if you’re walking, not if you’re stopped) is “unca”, and the response is literally “eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!” (if you’re a woman) or “vayyyyyyyyyyyy!” (if you’re a man). tzutujil is the most guttural of all languages - try saying the word for banana with is sko’ol, with a click of the tongue in between. stuff like this cannot be transmitted cross-blog, so ask me for a t’zutujil lesson when i come home.

in terms of my project, i’ve switched to studying vaccines here in santiago. i’ve normally been going around with celeste, a vacunadora from the Centro de Salud. the vacunadoras go house to house to vaccinate children who haven’t come to the centro to receive their free vaccinations. these houses range from dirt and bamboo to pretty nice (we even visited the mayor’s house). they spend close to half hour looking for a child, a veces, because there are no addresses here. they’ll often have to go house to house asking if a child lives further - seems inefficient, but the amount of work they put in into finding one child is extremely impressive and the vaccination rate here is mas o menos 75 - 90% (a huge range, but there aren’t exactly super accurate statistics aqui). celeste, a 20-year-old vacunadora, is one of the best people i’ve met here! - she also has 2 brothers, turned 20 two days after i turned 21, dated a guy for three years, loves enrique iglesias so much that she wrote down the word “dirty” on her hand from “dirty dancer”, and proceeded to ask me to translate the song. 

not celeste, but two other vacunadoras en casa.

another day, we babysat the four children of these two american doctors that are here serving for three years - two are their biological children, one is an adopted chinese girl, and one is an adopted african boy. we took them to school, while the two girls were wearing huipiles, where the little white girl said “buenos dias alvaro” and gave him that classic awkward hug/kiss-on-the-cheek, and proceeded to talk about the ferris wheel in spanish.

we also made a 6 hour roundtrip journey to guatemala city to see the last harry potter movie. worth it. definitely. 

the accuracy with which they can predict the weather here is far superior to any weatherman on tv. it torentially downpours every day, at anywhere between 1 and 4 pm - however, apparently, there’s always a week without any rain, se llama canicula - and we’re in it right now! however, on july 25, the actual date of the feria, there’s always rain. stay tuned to find out if there’s rain on july 25!

jrat chic! (en t’zutujil, this means “see you later!”)

mantioshe. (thank you, in t’zutujil - see i’m learning!!)

Observation #1 about Santiago that you all should know: Everyone has the same name.

I’ve met approximately fifteen Concepcions (many of whom are midwives, ironically) and six Candelarias (including my host mom). One of the host families that we’re staying with has two sons named Juan, who each have a son named Eduardo – who all live in the same house. Everyone’s last name is either Reanda, Sojuel, or Mendoza.

Observation #2: Everyone is related.

There are over 40,000 people in the 11 cantones and some other number of aldeas that I can’t remember. However, everyone I’ve come across during my interviews, is related to someone else that I know (and believe me, I don’t know that many people in this town). The current mayor, Manuel Reanda Pablo, is my host mom’s cousin, while one of the candidates in another party, Antonio Sapalu, is the son of my host dad’s cousin. After walking around with Selman for five minutes, we ran into his uncle, his abuelita who owns the store down the street, and his cousin. I interviewed a lady in her home, who told me she was related to Jose Reanda, someone who works at administration in the Hospitalito, who is also the cousin of my host mom. (Except Jose Reanda just walked by and claimed not to know who I was talking about) Katherine and Janet moved out of one host family to another family – but the families are apparently cousins. Incomodo.

Observation #3: Everyone talks about everything.

I had a laugh attack in the middle of the street, as we were leaving the house one day. As I sat down on the curb to catch my breath, there were some idle Atiteca women watching me like I was a lunatic, which I don’t blame them for. Later that night, when I came home, Emily, my host sister, asked Julia and I if either of us fell today on the street. We were thoroughly confused, until she said the women outside said that that girl in red had fallen. Apparently, my sitting down to laugh was the biggest talk of Pnem Bielh (our street) that day and had translated into “that American in red fell on the street”.

Observation #4: Dating is weird.

Our host sister has a boyfriend. However, she only talks to him at the door of our house, while he’s in the alleyway outside. He’ll never come in the house, and he hasn’t met any members of the family. Yet, it’s perfectly acceptable for her to only talk to him in the alleyway, and our host family is well aware of this.

Apparently, people date other people all they want. However, these people can never come inside each other’s house, and the families will not acknowledge that their kids are dating anyone, even though they all know. Only when they become “novios oficiales” do they meet each other’s families and are accepted as a couple- and there sometimes is a party! Novios oficiales seems like the equivalent of engaged in the states, as people generally only have one novio official that they end up marrying.

Here’s another sad, but true observation from the developing world –

The failures of Western intervention is another thing that’s become increasingly clear to me throughout my time here. So many of the things that we do, especially huge aid organizations, are so poorly researched that they end up hurting, rather than helping the community. I’ve seen, for example, that the community has very poor perceptions of the Hospitalito, because it is staffed by volunteer doctors from other places that do not understand the local customs and culture, often speaking choppy Spanish and always speaking zero T’zutujil. We often donate technology that are of no use in developing countries simply to get rid of them, without truly researching who could actually use these and in what capacity. Humanitarian aid organization came down one year to build relief housing from the 2005 mudslide in Santiago. Yet, they did so without doing any research about the community itself, and as a result, ended up with houses that could not be lived in because of the danger of another mudslide hitting the chosen location. We try to impose certain biomedical values that do not coincide with people’s local customs and beliefs – and then we wonder why they fail. Makes you think twice before branding things that we do as great service work.

In other news, since I’ve changed my research topic, I’ve had to go about interviewing in a different way – randomly knocking on people’s doors to interview requires a higher self-esteem than even flyering on Locust Walk (and we all know how much rejection one faces on Locust). The amount of times I heard “no tengo tiempo”, a T’zutujil phrase that I believe translated to “I don’t speak Spanish”, or the classic, tonal, “mahooooooooon” (which means no) was unimaginable, but understandable, as I’d probably say the same thing to a random foreign student that came to my door.

I’m going to a place across the lake called “La Iguana Perdida”, the lost iguana, for my birthday this weekend. Let’s hope I don’t become a Lost Iguana. 

imagine exploring caves. imagine exploring caves that are a black abyss, with stone walls, with only the light of the slowly shortening candle in your hand. imagine that cave being filled with water, unannounced rocks, and waterfalls. imagine being as short as me and having that water get unexpectedly deep. imagine attempting to swim through the water because you can’t stand and attempting to simultaneously hold the candle over your head, while the wax is dripping down your finger.

and that was my experience exploring the caves of lanquin and semuc champey! i wish i had pictures of the caves but trying to hold a camera and a candle at the same time would have been a deadly combination. luckily the caves were indeed filled with water that we had to swim through - so if we dropped the candle, it was nbd. 

we traveled 11 hours to get to semuc champey, around windy curves, on unpaved roads, and even almost had to bribe some protestors to get through the barrier they had put up on the only road out of san pedro. 

but i’d say it was definitely worth it - 

semuc champey involved those caves, jumping off a bridge into a river, an unexpected ridiculous hike to get the above view with an 18 year old tour guide named “johnny bravo”, swimming in these naturally clear blue pools (se llaman pozas)- (here are some of my attempts to be artsy with my brother’s cool camera)

- oh and it also involved scorpions and cockroaches in our hostel, el retiro. and a midnight loaf of bread, some debauchery and dancing, and some nutella. but what happens in guatemala, stays in guatemala.

we then drove for 8 hours back to to antigua, which i didn’t love because it seems like its set up solely for tourists. our drive involved a speed demon (emphasis on speed and demon) that rounded curves like the coefficient of friction was far greater than the maximum of 1.0, reversed in the middle of a highway to pick up a random hubcap, wouldn’t let us out of the van at rest stops, had an inspector peer in the van for ten minutes, and then to top it all off, hugged us each good bye at the end of the nauseating drive.

hands down the best part of antigua was this BAGEL CAFE that we discovered. ate their twice in one day, they had sweet pepper & cilantro bagels and PESTO cream cheese! heaven. i miss bagels. (anyone want to hear a bagel story?)

however, we DID climb up a volcano that was live and had lava up until last year when it erupted on may 27. but some of the rocks were still hot because they had recently dried. so i decided to stay in this sort of rock formation by myself for a while because i was so cold from the cloud/rainstorm that was going on on the rest of the volcano. the volcano looked exactly like what i picture mars to look like (except for this one little hut up there that sold jewelery made out of lava - not sure if they have that on mars)! 

here are some more attempts at being artsy and some trip photos - 

makeshift checkerboard found on our boat back from sanpedro

so the word for basil in spanish is albahaca. julia (pronounced hulia) and i were preparing dinner for our family on friday and i needed albahaca for pesto. the only place to buy groceries for real here is the mercado, but for SOME REASON or another, no one could understand what albahaca was and i spent half hour searching in the mercado.

“sabe donde se vende albahaca?”
“una vaca?” (a cow)
“no, albahaca”
“aguacate?” (avocado)

(taken on my itouch because i don’t even want to imagine the looks and amount of selling attempts i’ll get in the market if i pull out my camera)

the mercado has three floors, none of which sell albahaca or had anyone who even knew what albahaca was - or if they did, they pointed me to the opposite corner. my host fam told me it was because most of them don’t use albahaca or only speak tzutujil (the local indigenous language here). 

FRUSTRATING. i eventually finally got basil by literally going to selman’s friend house and picking basil off the plant that they grew in their alleyway. i miss frogro and waldbaums.

but here was our resulting dinner!

in other news, i just got handed a book of tickets that i have to sell for a raffle to win a cow. 

recent spanish mishaps:

• mili: “i can’t wait to go home today and relajate”
  julia: “you want to RELAX me?!”
• i asked emily what “que es su altitud” (altitude) instead of “altura” (height)
• julia asked our host mom “cuantos cuchillos estan en el te” (how many knives are in the tea) instead of “cuantos cucharas” (how many teaspoons)
• in a meeting with the director of the hospital, i kept talking about patients in the “sala de esparanza” (the room of hope) intsead of the “sala de espera”

yesterday, we went to san marcos, across the lake for the day and got caught in a boat in the middle of a lake during one of the daily near-hurricanes that happen everyday. we took a mayan yoga class, because san marcos is apparently the land of all that is tranquil (and a bit of narcotrafficing, i believe) 

i’m being lazy and waiting for the obstetrician that i’m working with to come back so i can shadow him for the day. perhaps i’ll actually tell you what i’m doing here.. i’m researching perceptions of health and prenatal care by interviewing pregnant women. what i’ve realized though, is research here is quite different than the research i’m used to at home. interviews may or may not happen, ethnography research involves a lot of observation and semistructured casual conversations as opposed to structured surveys. it also involves knocking on random people’s doors, standing in the back of fletas (pick up trucks) to go to 77-year-old midwives houses, having a turkey and a chicken strut into the house in the middle of an interview, and other such adventures. 

i’m also shadowing an OB one day a week, who is awesome, and let me do an ultrasound on a pregnant woman (though i had no idea what i was looking at, how do you tell the difference between a baby’s stomach and its head if it looks exactly the same?).

also during my run today, a herd of goats ran by.

oh. what’s that? you didn’t know i had a soccer career? well. 

i played albertson soccer when i was in 1st and 2nd grade. i was extremely awful and would run down the field pretty aimlessly. the highlight of my career was the one assist that i accidentally made. i never played again after that.

BUT YESTERDAY! all of that changed! we played el futbol with eduardo sojuel (one of the brothers in one of our host families) and his dad and cousin. NOT only did i make some excellent blocks at the goal, but i made some savvy steals and scored a goal! WIN! 

perhaps i’ll become a soccer star by the end of the summer. i know my soccer career had a 13 year hiatus, during which all my admiradores were wondering when i would make a comeback, but perhaps i’m back for good. 

another first of yesterday was my intense upper body workout doing laundry en la pila, a santiago version of a double sink with interesting texture (see below). notes: don’t mix socks with underwear (a mortal sin, apparently), don’t use the brush except for with pantalones largas, and don’t hang your laundry to dry before the daily 2:00 rains.

in other news, we’ve been hanging out with our host familia a lot. we talk to at least one of them for about three hours every night, and the spanish is getting easier and easier! i’ll save the interesting spanish mishaps for my next post, but on friday night, we baked brownies for the whole family with little aklaxito, who wanted galletas but we forgot some essential ingredients that you can only get in panahanchel (a town across the lake), like baking soda, brown sugar, and vanilla extract.

there are also lots of random little kids that show up at our house, and though we’re not quite sure who they are or what role the play, we enlist them to bake brownies and play computer games tambien. like this girl, antonia.

x

also julia accidentally almost killed the entire family by turning on the gas on the stove without lighting it first, a very ghetto process. the whole house apparently was filling with gas and would have exploded in another hour, according to aklax. oops!

as a result, this is selman, our 22-year-old host brother, trying to burn julia. selman is the best— and we sit and talk to him for a looong time everyday about “special” galletas, horror stories, and jason mraz. he wants to go to music school! 

we also went to panahanchel, across the lake for a few hours, where i entered a tienda solo for ninos and found myself a rain jacket. panahanchel is filled with tourists- gringolandia, as aklax calls it. they had pizza. to get a boat, you need to wait for it to completely fill up - even if that means you’re waiting for 45 minutes after getting on the boat. things don’t really run by schedule in guatemala. evidence that panahanchel is really gringolandia (land of the white people):

okay i’ll save the rest for next time, in fear of this post getting too long! stay tuned for interesting spanish mishaps, being followed by a group of elementary school kids with flowers, and maybe even a little bit about my research down here (yes, i do actually have some purpose)!

adios! 

buenas tardes! santiago atitlan is beautiful - however, the fact that i haven’t owned a real rain coat since i was 2 and still don’t is proving to be quite the problem. 

interesting spanish mishaps thus far:

- i accidentally keep saying una vez mas every time i exit a room instead of uno momento

- i told my host father that “voy a ver si mejoras” instead of “voy a ver si mejorare” - meaning that “i’ll see if i should take a different medicine when YOU get better”, even though i was the one that was sick

- i thought that the “una via” signs all over the street meant that all the streets were named “una via”. then julia proceeded to announce that to our whole group - who gawked at us and said “didn’t we see the doble via signs? una via just means one way.” oops.

- thought that my host brother was telling me he liked my tattoo instead of trevor hall’s

also julia and i have developed a signal in which we tell the other that she should stop telling her story because there’s no way that our host family is understanding us. luckily, they’re very patient and somehow follow along in almost all our stories!! (and you KNOW how bad my stories are - imagine them en espanol!)

here’s the vista from our balcony - santiago atitlan with the san pedro volcano in the background

all the women come down here and do laundry, which seems to be a day long process. apparently when you place a rock in the lake to watch your clothes, it’s your rock for good and you have the right to displace anyone who tries to use it.

this is emily, my 19 or 20 year old host sister - her mother and father have told me and julia (my roommate from our group) two different ages, so we still need to confirm with her. emily is awesome, makes fantastic tortillas, and corrects our imperfect spanish. she also asked me why i said “like” so often, which is quite difficult to explain in spanish.

learning to make tortillas is harder than it looks. when you pinch the dough to make it circular, it rips! but this is julia and me trying to make some with our host mom, candelaria, and emily.

AKLAXITO! my little host brother who enjoys ciencias mucho. i also have a 22 year old host brother named selman, who i haven’t taken a picture of yet.

aklax, my host father, surrounded by barbells - an seemingly out of place object in santiago.

coerced by a combination of the group and a mayan saleswoman in san pedro to put on some traditional mayan clothing. how authentic do i look? i’m certainly short enough.

stray dogs at whom you’re apparently supposed to bend down and pretend to throw rocksonce they start following you to avoid rabies.

the old hospitalito, where you can see the line up to where the mudslide of 2005 went up to

cows. that moo. all the time. especially outside the new hospitalito.

todo el grupo! we attempted to spell out atitlan with our bodies - success, no?

dr. bream kept on insisting that swimming in the lake at night is wonderful and apparently cleanses your pores after sitting in the sauna at la posada (our hotel for the first two nights) - so here we are, no moon, en el lago at midnight!

jumping off a platform (wish i could say cliff, but it was manmade) into lake atitlan in the rain! 

dr. bream dressed as a conquistador. a fitting outfit.

side note - i woke up at 6 am and went running today. with julia and aklax, my host father. not sure, but my host father might be in better shape than me.

okay that’s all for now! dr. bream and dr. barg are leaving today so we’re on our own - who knows exactly what that means.. 

GUESS YOU’LL HAVE TO STAY TUNED!

also credit is due to senor sanjay hariharan for the name of this blog. gracias.

i really wish this would work. guatemili is already taken (by me), so here i am on guatemili1.