Tuesday May 15: Learning

My past week in Xela has been a flurry of Spanish cramming, background research, reading, and chilling in this amazing mountain city. I read a fabulous satire of Guatemalan traveler blogs describing the carbon-copy nature of so many—detailing intense volcano climbs, wonderful homestay families, and enlightening language experiences with great new friends—all along peppering entries with Spanish vocabulary. Though this could perhaps indeed describe my week of classes, I shall resist the temptation to join the blogging hordes and try to offer a more colorful portrayal of my pleasant week.

First a bit of background to where I am: I had envisioned Xela as a small town, but in reality the city is one of Guatmeala’s most important cities—the hub of business, government, and transportation in the Western Highlands. In 1820 the region even tried to secede from Guatemala; the movement was short-lived and the city never really recovered from a massive 1902 earthquake and a huge eruption of a new volcano that successfully destroyed many of the surrounding coffee plantations. Nonetheless, the city still is the center of the Western region of the country, with a vibrant European-like town square surrounded by majestic buildings, shopping arcades, and now, the ever-ubiquitous McDonald's. Though the winding cobblestone streets of Zone 1 do lend a feeling of bygone centuries, the rest of the city is a frenetic mass of business and industry, with two large breweries, a major university, and a spanking-new shopping mall.

“Intense” is really the only appropriate adjective to describe the Spanish learning experience. The classes are five hours a day of one-on-one tutoring through conversation, reading, writing, and lots of grammar. I’ve really been able to put together a lot of murky rules and conjugations into something somewhat cohesive, and for the first time, Spanish classes are really fun, filled with passionate conversations, debates, and even the occasional teasing (my teacher continues to tease that if I’m going to insult her, I should at least use proper grammar—she’s got me there!)

My teacher is a fabulously spunky young woman full of political opinions. We’ve had a chance to talk about the US and Guatemala’s upcoming elections, wars, history, and the divides and struggles in both countries. One interesting debate has involved which country has more internal racism. Guatemala has Central America’s highest concentration of indigenous Mayan peoples, and during colonialism the social structure was divided into hierarchies of indigenous, mixed-blood (“Mestizo,” or more commonly “Ladino”), and foreign colonist categories. Especially in rural areas, economic inequities and vastly different access to social services continue to divide society. My teacher insists that Guatemala is more progressive in fighting racism than the United States, but much of her opinions are based on viewings of Michael Moore documentaries, so though I readily agreed with much of her analysis of US shortcomings, I tried to point out that there were other, perhaps slightly more balanced social analyses of our government and its problems.

We spent a lot of time talking about the problem of “machismo” in Latin American countries and how the entrenched culture has undermined much of the struggles for female equality. She bristled at being labeled a feminist though, and even harbored some disdain—I loved her reply and I know some friends at school would appreciate this: Being a feminist is just the opposite of being machismo and it would be just as bad. Her goal was to deconstruct stereotypes, but she certainly didn’t want women getting any special treatment. However, as she herself admitted, she is far more assertive than even many women her age, who continue to insist that women should not try to push beyond traditional gender roles.

I stayed with a very “typical” middle-class family; the father worked in a small construction tools and materials store the mother was a homemaker who spent most of her days cooking, washing clothes by hand, and keeping the house spotless. Grandmother, an adorable old woman with a colorful ball dangling from each of her braids, helped with all the work at home, while the two boys were university students, studying engineering and medical school, but living at home (as almost all university students do). The rooms of the house were constructed on two levels around a courtyard—the rooms were attached but not connected and were all entered separately from the outside. Upstairs the family was working to add on a room at a time, with an old man slowly working on the construction project.

The best descriptor for family life would be down-to-earth. Life seemed pretty straightforward; the kids always seemed to be studying. I arrived at the beginning of three weeks of exams for both of them. The younger son attending the public medical school told me how more than ninety percent of his class would not finish the decade of classes and training, and this first year served as the largest weed-out. Dad worked hard and came home for lunch and dinner, but on Mother’s Day when he produced two tickets for a fancy dinner and concert, the mother just beamed and immediately began to detail everything she had to do to get ready for the big night. The next morning she told me breathlessly how she had danced until 1:30 in the morning!

On my first weekend the language school offered a trip up Volcán Chicabal, one of the many volcanoes ringing the region. Set in the volcano’s cone was a crystal lagoon—a sacred site for Mayan worshipers. We were able to stand at the top of the crater and look down at the lagoon and then across the valley at a smoking volcano that erupts with bits of smoke and ash several times a day, and then descending the precipitous steps right to the lakeshore, we found ourselves in the midst of a Mayan religious ceremony. The children were especially excited to see gringos; we had had our cameras out to photograph the lagoon and they were captivated. A few brave youngsters asked us to take their pictures while the rest cowered in fear nearby—the best picture from the encounter is a snapshot of all the children gathered around me showing them a picture.

Today featured my attempt at salsa dancing—generally a disaster. For all my improvements in conversation, my feet and brain still don’t coordinate particularly well. When I danced with my absolutely gorgeous instructor, she guided me nicely and I even sort of looked like I knew what I was doing, twirling her away. However, when I tried to dance with my gringa partner, we pretty much fell apart. I vowed that next time I am enrolling in classes, I will pick up some serious dance sessions to go with my language learning.

All-in-all, the week has been thoroughly enjoyable. The other language students are a great, diverse mix: our usual nightly contingent is drawn from a former Air Force linguist from Alabama, a Michigan sophomore, a couple formerly from Wisconsin now moving here from Puerto Rico, a cute Australian girl, and a jolly Dutch guy, and we’ve had a great time exploring the bars and cafes all over. I’ve gotten to run and kill my lungs with the elevation and read lots about Guatemalan history and politics. I’ve also started my research with visits to a weaving cooperative and a couple of area NGOs. I’ll write a bit about what I’ve read and learned, and soon I can add my own observations from the field.

May 9: Beginnings

Colorful, dirty, chaotic, friendly—finding accurate adjectives for my first impressions of Guatemala City is difficult. Almost 2.5 million people call the largest city in Central America home, living about 5,000 meters above sea level. My Rough Guide minced no words in describing the place as “grim…a depressing vision of urban blight.” I would beg to differ. Perhaps “beautiful” would not be an accurate descriptor, but the city has a certain charm. In a sense, I was reminded a lot of Saigon—a city of contrasts. I wandered from the National Palace and Plaza Mayor at the center of the Old City to urban shopping malls and gleaming office buildings in the modern Zona 4. The New City was glossy and tall, filled with skyscrapers, shopping malls, and every American chain imaginable. The Old City retained more of a traditional air, with narrower, packed streets. In general, the buildings themselves were nothing to write home about—mostly crumbling concrete edifices—but the streets were crowded with vendors and the wide open storefronts displayed everything from paint to pharmaceuticals. In between, comedores served up filling lunch plates from steaming pots and street vendors fried tortillas hawked fresh fruits. Street urchins, professionally-dressed businessmen, and Mayan women in traditional dresses all contributed to the colorful mélange.

My first night was spent comfortably recovering from a ridiculous week of finals and moving out at Duke in a pleasant hotel right in the heart of Zona 1, but after an entire twenty-four hours passed without hearing a word of English, I decided that prior to any further research, I should get myself to a Spanish school for a much-needed refresher. The town of Quezaltenango (commonly known by its Mayan name, Xela), perched in the Western Highlands, offers an ideal mountainous backdrop with the added advantage of headquartering many of the country’s Fair Trade Cooperatives. I purchased a first-class bus ticket (think old Greyhound, as opposed to the second class “chicken busses,” which are old American school busses) for a five hour ride heading from the already elevated capital up impossibly steep climbs—upwards almost the entire time, with our bus’s transmission threatening to give out for most of the trip (in fact, the trip was only slated to last four hours, but a combination of rickety engine parts, random mountainous traffic jams, and construction for miles and miles seemingly following the American logic of ripping up an entire road and then proceeding to work excruciatingly on single small stretches extended the journey).

The panoramic images from the bus window brought back memories of Africa, with small huts of all sorts of make-shift materials crammed into hillsides. Small towns with crammed main streets straddled the highway, featuring ubiquitous broken-down cement-block cookie-cutter buildings featuring brightly painted advertisement facades. One of the themes in the bit of literature I’ve read so far is the huge discrepancies in Guatemala between the “haves” and “have-nots.” Depending on the author or context, dividing lines are rural versus urban, indigenous versus Hispanic, or based upon various geographic divides. Certainly discrimination an inequity has been a recurring struggle and primary motivator in the 36-year civil war.

Wherever one is, there are those classic travel moments that make the journey memorable. Last night at my Xela hostel was just such a moment; I claimed a bunk in a grungy cement grotto and then headed up to the kitchen to check out the other inhabitants. Like something out of a movie, the cast included two Australian Communists decked out in full Rastafarian gear, a pretty Dutch girl working on a tourism internship, and an American ex-Coast Guard Officer as night manager. They were cooking dinner and invited me to join, and we sat around all night drinking tea, joking, and sharing travel stories. A great introduction (and a chance to revert to some English!)

The town is the center of this highlands department (similar to state), and though a former capital of the country, it seems rather modest and unassuming with its narrow, winding cobble-stoned streets—altogether an excellent place to ensconce myself and begin an intensive week of language review. The plan is five days of classes and a week homestay with a Guatemalan family, hopefully allowing opportunities to study and make some connections for research.

An Overview: What’s the Connection?

In the weeks prior to my departure, I heard the question a thousand times: “So why Guatemala and Sierra Leone?” And while the thirty second answer might not have actually satisfied anyone, here I can try to explain my goals a bit more thoroughly (and perhaps make sure I understand the objectives myself!).

First, a bit of an introduction from one of the grant proposals I wrote for the work: Though the cultures differ dramatically between these countries, both are emerging from long and brutal civil conflicts with great potential for growth. Guatemala and Sierra Leone also both have strong traditions of social networks that have strongly impacted local development. This summer I will conduct research for my senior theses, analyzing village social capital—the social networks and cultural norms, trust, and values present in an area—seeking to understand both how dynamic relationships form and change for my anthropology thesis and how these relationships impact micro-level economic development for my public policy thesis.

This research is a capstone to my varied travel and internship experiences at Duke. My past two summers and my semester in Uganda have unequivocally shown me the importance of social structures, relationships, and networks. Whether homeless in Cleveland, Mississippi or a subsistence farmer in Ben Tre, Vietnam or Busitema, Uganda, one’s social connections play a huge role in shaping one’s interactions with the local and global economy.

And to explain that a bit: After years of (bad) classroom Spanish and amazing tales of adventure from friends, I’ve really wanted to visit Latin America. Now, with Duke paying, I can! Fair Trade (or “comercio justo”) coffee cooperatives have achieved notable success in Guatemala, allowing mostly small-scale farmers to access international markets and receive high prices for their crops. For the first three weeks in Guatemala, I hope to take a close look at these cooperatives; I want to know what makes the groups successful, how NGOs have helped cooperatives to succeed, what are the continued difficulties, and if and how this model can be applied outside of Fair Trade’s niche market. I’ve studied the demand side of the process with a semester of research on fair trade consumption, but this will be a chance to learn much more directly about the producer side of the equation. My Spanish is a bit rusty—and was never particularly spectacular—so I am going to spend the first week reviewing at a language school in the Western Highlands. I’ve heard amazing things about volcanoes, Lake Aitlan high in the mountains, and friendly people, so I’m definitely excited to start the summer in Central America.

The plan is to spend Memorial Day at home in Wisconsin before heading back to Africa—this time on the other side of the continent in Sierra Leone. Like most other people, before beginning my research, my only impressions of Sierra Leone were based on headlines from the bloody Civil War, and recently the movie Blood Diamond. It’s probably a bad sign when Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayals represent most of one’s knowledge of anything, but the more I’ve read, the more intriguing both the past and present of the country have become. I look forward to sharing more as I see and learn, but to summarize my project a bit, I’ll be conducting a household level survey to attempt to discover the connections (if any) between social capital and the way families market their produce. I’ve spent almost the entire semester developing the survey, working with several public policy professors; I am trying to get at a concept that is rather new—how individual connections and village levels of trust and cooperation can combine and affect individual households. The goal is to visit at least three villages and speak with at least thirty families in each village. More on this later…

I’ll also be in Sierra Leone for the country’s first independently run elections since the 1997 conclusion of the Civil War, with the potential for the first peaceful transfer of presidential authority. Ranking 2nd to last on the United Nations Development Committee’s index of human development, much of the nation still lacks basic infrastructure, including electricity, running water, telephone lines, and roads. To further complicate things, I’ll be in the country smack in the middle of the monsoon season, where roads can be “impassable.” Whatever happens, it’ll be an adventure!

And finally, the summer will conclude with a week in Uganda. I’m hoping to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship next year, so I want to work on the application. More than that, though, the week will offer a chance to visit all my friends—many SIT alums are returning for the entire summer, and from SIT program staff to my homestay family to all my friends in the slum, I cannot wait to see everyone again! I’ll be arriving back at Duke on August 13th, just in time for my 21st birthday the following day.