Taking Going to School for Granted

According to the 2012 UNICEF report: the "average schooling in Guatemala is 5.98 years, below the average for Latin America (7.8 years) and that of Central America (7.3 years)." These numbers also change depending on where the kids live. Children in the rural areas are pulled out of school earlier than urban children. For more information check out the whole report.

If you haven't been following my blog, I am the District Coordinator for the Healthy Schools Project. I worked in eleven schools doing health promotion and basic health education. From what I saw and from the people that I met in my small town, these UNICEF statistics seem about right to me. What I would add is that this average would be very different if they separated the average into boys and girls. Women typically receive far less education than men in Guatemala. I would suspect the average for girls is closer to 3 or 4 years. I had numerous teachers tell me that girls being taken out of school way before they finish elementary school was a big problem (TRUE). It seemed to me that the trend was heading towards more education for girls as women are gaining social status within Guatemala, however they told me that the trend is more stagnant if not moving in the opposite direction. A number of teachers expressed to me that parents were pulling their girls out of school when they saw that they could read, write, and count because they believed that these were the main skills that their girls would need. The issue here, they told me, is that children are learning these skills earlier in school and so the girls are being taken out sooner than they might have in the past.

The picture below I took in one of my schools. The girls took turns cleaning the school bathrooms (and yes this was the school bathroom for the entire elementary school). Could you imagine children in the U.S. being expected to get out mops, brushes, and brooms and cleaning the bathrooms each day?!? Me neither.

Female students cleaning the school bathrooms

Tuk-tuks: The Tricycle of Taxis

A tuk-tuk in beautiful Antigua

It's true. Tuk-tuks have three wheels, are covered (they have cloth flaps on the sides instead of doors), and fit 2-4 people (2 comfortably). The steering on the inside is more like a motorcycle than a car. There are no pedals and everything is controlled by the handlebars. There is one smaller bench seat in the front for the driver (usually a 16~25 year old male) and a larger bench seat in the back. There isn't much room. Hailing one is like hailing a cab: just wave one down on the street. What you cannot do is call a number and have on pick you up. There is no tuk-tuk dispatcher number. As far as I know they are privately owned and drive around where / when they want.

As you can see they are very...open

The front row of the tuk-tuk.
From right to left: paying passinger, driver, driver's son(?) along for the ride

In my small town there was a line of about five tuk-tuks lined up by the one bus stop. It was only about a five minute walk from there, the center of town, to my house, but if it was really raining and I was carrying a large bag of laundry then I would sometimes pay the 5 Quetzales (~$0.65) to have a tuk-tuk take me to my house.

Like any other buying situation in Guatemala, taking a ride in a tuk-tuk requires negotiation. You have to bargain with the tuk-tuk driver. What I found is that there is generally a set price for certain distances and you need to know how much more than that you are being charged. If you are a gringo or don't speak Spanish - expect to pay more for everything. That is just the way it is. Luckily things (and tuk-tuk rides) in Guatemala are relatively inexpensive and even the foreigner price is low. I highly recommend taking a tuk-tuk if you find yourself in Guatemala (they can be found all over all cities). 

If you are wondering why the driver's head is tilted to the side it is because he was on the phone. In general, this is how I feel about transportation in Guatemala:

http://howapcvputsitgently.tumblr.com/post/130546685762/how-i-feel-while-riding-local-transportation

In conjunction with:

http://howapcvputsitgently.tumblr.com/post/123538299831/hcns-concept-of-personal-space

(HCN is Peace Corps lingo for Host Country Nationals aka Guatemalans in my case)

Me in Traje (the Traditional Mayan Clothing)

My host mom, Juana, and I

I know this is a bunch of pictures of me (and my host family) but bear with me.

Traje (pronounced traw-hey) is the traditional Mayan clothing.

One of the things that I love most about Guatemala is the vibrant Mayan culture. Below are some of my blog posts about different aspects of the culture.

- Mayan ceremony

- Traditional Mayan folk dancing

- K'iche' one of the many Mayan languages

- Mayan language map

- Mayan saunas 

- Mayan ruins 

- Mayan numerals

- Cinta: The Mayan

headband

In Peace Corps Guatemala each volunteer had to live with a host family. This was partially to help keep us safe and accounted for and partially to help us integrate into the community. In my case this was extremely helpful. I lived with a LARGE host family. My host parents had nine children and their children had children. Not all of these people lived in the house, but many of them did. At any given meal there were 15 people. 

Another thing that I loved was that the Guatemalans I met really wanted to share their heritage / culture with me. My host mom would dress me up like her doll. She would pick out an outfit for me, one of her many trajes. This included four pieces: the wrap around skirt, belt, apron, short-sleeve top, and sweater. Then we would go around the house and sometimes around town and take pictures. 

Sheryl and I. This hot pink number was one of my favorites.

Princess. I'm not kidding her name is princess.
Not even princesa (princess in Spanish)

Juana liked picking new places to take pictures.
Any place with flowers was a good spot.

Corn drying in the front of the house

Genesis Cristal, one of the youngest in the family

Michel and Sheryl

My two best friends in town, Lidia and Rosemeri. They are both teachers in the local school.

Organic Wrapping Makes for Good Bio-Degradable Trash

A bunch of swiss chard tied with organic wrapping

I found that I produced far less non-organic trash while I was in Guatemala. This was mainly thanks to the food. There were no supermarkets or even real markets in my town. What there was was an open air farmers market twice a week (and for the first year I was there it was only once a week). At this market it was all individuals selling produce so there were no shrink-wrapped vegetables on styrofoam trays. I didn't even encounter rubber bands (probably because this would be an extra and unnecessary cost). What there was a lot of was bundles of vegetables tied with leaves or other natural materials.

Even the chicken came unpackaged 

This bundle of chipilin was tied with the leaf

There was no buying a sack of potatoes -
just tell the guy how many pounds you want

I also wrote a post about how I "handled" the trash I did produce - mainly by feeding the organic trash to the pigs.

I know that I wrote about this before, but it makes me so angry. I literally have a severe visceral reaction to seeing people of all ages throw their trash on the ground or out the window of a camioneta without even thinking about it. And I am not talking about organic trash like a banana peel that will decompose. Noooooooo I'm talking plastic, Styrofoam, everything. To be fair the real problem (besides a lack of environmental education) is a bad trash collection system. There is one trash can in my entire town. Even in Xela, the second largest city in Guatemala, it was hard to find a trashcan. So rather than carry trash around all day and then most likely burn it when they got home, a lot of people chose to throw their trash on the ground or out the window of the bus.   

Things That Don't Exist in Guatemala

I really should have started this list at the beginning of my Peace Corps service as I'm sure it would have been pages long, but below are a couple things that are thought of as commonplace in the United States, but simply don't exist in Guatemala. Guatemala is a poor country so some of this won't be surprising. Disclaimer: I'm sure they do in some places such as the cosmopolitan capital, but not anywhere that I found out in the rural Western Highlands.

• Substitute teachers - If the teacher can't come in the kids don't either.
• Indoor heating/cooling.
• Parking lots for schools.
• Hot water coming out of faucets.
• Subways.
• Washers and dryers in every town (the closest laundromat to me was an hour bus ride away and I didn't know a single home in my town with one).
• Babysitters (that's what family is for).
• Refrigerators (I didn't know of a single family in my town with one - that's right I did't have one either).
• Wifi (I did buy a modem and was able to buy internet that way).
• School buses (to bring kids to school) - kids walk to school often with only their siblings. American school buses on the other hand are driven down through Mexico, given a killer pain job, and used as the public buses in Guatemala.
• Bus passes - Pay the man who comes walking through the bus cash (and it better be exact change or else you probably aren't getting that back).
• House pets. (At least in the rural villages). Animals serve a purpose and that is to protect the house. There were a ton of street dogs in my town and 0 dogs were ever walked or put on leashes.
• Supermarkets (at least in my town - we had an outdoor market twice a week).

Planting a New School Garden!

Part of the Healthy Schools Project includes school gardens. The idea is that not only will it teach the kids about gardening, but also so that the vegetables can be used to make the school snack healthier. I don't know about where you went to elementary school, but at mine there was a small garden and there was an after school program called "City Sprouts" where we learned about gardening and made some healthy recipes. I'll be honest I only went to a few days of City Sprouts and remember making Kale soup way before Kale became popular. 

I really liked the school garden part of Healthy Schools mainly because it is so applicable to their lives. In the town that I lived in, and the surrounding area the main industry was agriculture. However, I would guestimate that over 90% of what was produced in this area was corn. Literally there were corn fields and only corn fields everywhere. 

Town center (during our fair) surrounded by corn fields 

To start off with, the patch of land that this school decided to grow its garden on had its problems:

The plot to the left - soapy run-off from the bathroom to the right

Burning the school's trash

The school's kitchen billowing smoke

But all that aside the kids, teachers, and I got to work.

Little kids are usually deemed responsible enough to work with machetes

Me getting down and dirty (the kids really did most of the work)

Resourceful

The teachers and I

While the garden plan could use some more work, they did get an ok crop of radishes. It was a start and hopefully next year they will grow their garden so that the vegetables can be used in the school snack. :)

And one picture of the little ones because they are just so stinking cute. This is in the school "playground" aka the dirt field in front of the school.

Animals Sure Are Treated Differently Here in Guatemala

My host family has many "pets." I say "pets" because the most interaction that they have with them is yelling at them to get away or occasionally throwing them leftover scraps of food. (*I'm sure there are many people in Guatemala who love their pets and treat them nicely, but from what I have seen this is not the norm out in the rural countryside*). Animals here serve a purpose and it's definitely not to cuddle with you at night. They are used to protect the house. The vast majority of the animals are "outdoor" animals, meaning they are given free range of the family compounds and often the whole town. From my experience in the states usually when you call a dogs name you want them to come to you, but when they say the dog's name it intuitively backs away and goes back into the yard. Even the two year old knows to yell and throw things at the dogs when they get too close. Being an animal lover this was really hard for me to become accustomed to. I for the most part just tried to ignore it and be nice to the animals myself, giving them food, and hoping that my host family would see me doing this and being a little nicer to them themselves. I'm pretty certain that this just put me further on the list of crazy foreigner. Worth it. This cat and dog (below) I happened across on the street and are probably someone's "pets."

They also tied the animals up to wherever with whatever they could find.

Our skinny dog, "canchita" tied up and eating some bread I gave her

Animals pretty much had free reign over the house. A pig once walked into my kitchen (no it's not a joke).

Front entrance to our house - you can see two of the cats hanging out in the yard/driveway

our backyard

View from the window on my door - pigs everywhere

The front door to my room

Bathroom trash bid that had just been washed

I found some chicks eating my mint plant (and I just thought I had a brown thumb).

On the flip-side, here is a chicken that was a little bit of an "indoor pet" at least at that moment. 

On one especially cold night I let two of their cats into my room whileI gave them some eggs. Big mistake. After that they always tried to get into my room. I would have let them into my room more often except for the fear that they were going to give me fleas (which really did happen - I even wrote a blog post: Fleas...Not Just for Animals). 

I NEVER saw a single person in my town walk their dog, but I did see plenty of people walking their sheep. 

Riding in the Back of Pickup Trucks

I have a confession to make: I love riding in the back of pickup trucks! It's just so different from anything I had done in the States. The wind in your hair, the slight sense of danger. It's great. What is not great is when kids ride in the back of the truck by themselves. This happens OFTEN. It is also pretty common for A LOT of people to be crammed into the back of a single truck. Sometimes on market days they are used almost as public transportation. Locals who have a truck will bring people into town and then back out to their smaller villages and charge a small fee ($.50-$.75) per person.

School field trip