25 de Mayo

The Corpus Christi Procession

Girls gather the colorful sawdust after it´s trampled on. See the photos below for more information... again, I don´t know why these are all out of order.

Que pasa: Into the second week of the program.

Saturday:

I had expected something a little different for dinner tonight—it is Saturday, and Lius Miguel had added a playful “mmm, delicioso!” onto his usual, “Daniel, vamos a comer!”

We had bowls of whole crabs, about the size of large sand crabs but boiled red, sitting in broth with some kind of tiny, grassy vegetable, like chives or cilantro or something. Luis answered me that yes, the crabs came from the lake. The broth was quite tasty, and the crabs tasted like small crabs taste.

I only had a small portion of crab soup, supplemented with a plate of some ham, beans, avocado (which they tear open with their hands), and tortilla. This is because on Wednesday night, I had a ferocious attack of what I'm guessing was food poisoning. I woke up in the middle of the night with some stomach pain, but then in a matter of seconds it struck: everything in my GI system had to leave, right now, through all exits possible. The next morning I tried a few noodles for breakfast, but then about two hours later, more of the same.

Considering I had been here a week, the time it usually takes for bad-news bugs to incubate in your system, I was afraid that it was one of those many parasites that they warn us about. After 36 hours of crackers and water and juice, I was able to stomach most foods again, though “un poquito, un poquito.” I think what did it was this really funky cheese that I ate... it was the only cheese we had had with a meal, and it was all white and fluffy, like a block of whipped cream and cottage cheese mixed though not nearly as rich or dense, and just tasted like some generic diary product. Dr Wallace told me he avoids white things in general; “white death” he calls it. That means I should probably also avoid that white stuff that they call “crem” that they eat with their refried beans. The ingredients say it's just like milk, egg whites, sugar, you squirt it out of a ketchup bottle.... Anyway, now I'm almost back to normal. Luis indicated that crab soup probably wasn't the best thing for a fragile stomach. I did try a leg though—they eat the legs whole. Really crunchy.

The boys and their friend Byron and I went swimming in the lake today. There are spots where it's “clean,” i.e., no sewage, but it's still rather dirty—in the shin-deep parts closest to the shore I avoided bottle caps, plastic wrap, some miscellaneous old clothes, empty snack food bags, etc. If you can get past that, the lake is really beautiful. We climbed up and jumped off a dock that belongs to someone who doesn't live here... they say that most of the lakeside property is owned by rich gringos with huge yards and gardens who only show up a few times a year. The kids climbed up onto their boat. There are large patches of tul, a reed that grows in the shallow parts of the lake, maybe 8 feet tall?, and the reeds “do the wave” as the waves caused by the afternoon winds or passing boats move under them.

I just had a moment when I imagined what I would be thinking if I were reading this—don't think of your average American lake house setting. In general, everything man-made is closer / more compact here. The docks are smaller. The beach is a nice lightly-grassed grove shaded by tall trees right after the soccer field and basketball court. I'll take some pictures next time we go swimming.

A curious phenomenon is going on right now down below in the town square in front of the church. It's 8:40 pm on Saturday night, and they're having a party because it is the church's anniversary. It's actually kind of like a worship thing—from hearing it, you (an outsider) would think that it was just a salsa dance party were it not for the intermittent speeches and prayers (in Spanish, this town's second language) and clapping. I walked down past it earlier tonight and was surprised to see a crowd of local women in the traditional Kaqchikel huipiles and headdresses and some men in traditional dress all standing up and clapping and bobbing to the beat of salsa praise music. I think what was most striking to me was the fact instead of seeing smiling faces and dancing (which I guess it what I associate with salsa or Latin beats), most had the praise-music look on their faces, you know, that hands-clasped eyes-closed forehead-clenched look, like you're in a little bit of pain but the good kind of pain.

I guess this is pretty similar to most praise-services I've seen in the States (I have seen quite a few). They are wearing their nicest clothes, they are listening to a more streamlined version of slightly-dated pop music—in the States have that soft rock singer-songwriter sound plus cheesy synthesizers as praise music, and here it is Latin-beat stuff.

The school is good. There's a pretty good deal of reading and work. Today, my assignment was to sit at a transportation spot for two hours and observe who uses the transport to go where, etc. We are supposed to look for patterns, etc... you can actually tell a lot through where people go and when. For me, this meant sitting along different parts of the main (only) street and watching people climb on and off pickup trucks. I'm still new enough that it didn't get boring for me. I had to wonder what everyone thought seeing that gringo student staring at trucks and scribbling in his notebook. For the most part, I wasn't bothered, but I got a few requests for money in Spanish, a little derision in Kaqchikel, and one offer for pot in English. A handful of kids know my name, so it is nice to get personal greetings now and then. That's another thing we're supposed to be working on—making ourselves generally known about the town so that people we want to interview will at least have heard of us. So this assignment was a good excuse to me out there.

Parenthetically, I have taken pickups to Panajachel a few times. I usually end up standing on the bumper; they're really fun and cheap to ride.

My proposed research topic! I think I'm going to do something about exploring the ways that American pop-culture media makes its way here. My family has a Spiderman clock in their kitchen, kids play Super Mario Bros. in the internet place, when the two boys wrestle it's always Goku vs. Rambo, etc. Yesterday Luis wore the usual traditionally hand-woven multicolored pants (I'm gonna buy me some before I leave) with a sash and a Coors Light t-shirt. I need to refine it more though, to know if I want to look for how it gets here, who controls it, how pervasive it is, etc.
In case you're interested, some other students' research topics are non-traditional crop exports and English class education, to name two.

A moth the size of a small hummingbird just flew into my room.

Now there's a sermon going on down below; a man is speaking (halfway yelling) through the PA about “La Palabra de Dios” (the Word of God) and “El Diablo.”

That's about all I got, y'all.

Sunday:

So generally, I'm a pretty chill guy who doesn't have mood swings or whatever. If I'm in a bad mood, which doesn't happen often, I don't run to music or chocolate or cigarettes or “little things” like smiles or personal interaction to make me “feel better,” just like little things don't get me down either.

Here, things are different. Sometimes I'm kind of awkwardly depressed. You can call it culture shock, but all that really means is that it's something that happens to everyone for the first few days or weeks they're in a new place. Regardless, I do find myself looking for the little things here to cheer me up... looking at the paintings in Luis's gallery, watching part of Bambi with Luis Miguel and Wilson and their mom. And it works, too.

I see change in relationships to be like charged batteries between people that gradually run out over time. It's not that once your run out you stop being friends, it's that once you run out, there is no more energy for your opinion of the other person to go anywhere. There will be no more “developments,” if you will. If the two people are a couple, you won't ask the girl “How's your boyfriend doing?” anymore because they have already gotten where they are going to be. This process usually takes a very long time—at least years, generally. And at the end of this process, if you still like this person, he or she will be a very good friend. That is, affection at the end of this process is much more valuable than affection at the beginning.

For example, I have two friends and UGA who are both smart, extroverted, argumentative, and very set in their beliefs (which just so happen to be very different in some areas). They were roommates the first year, and sometimes you could hear them arguing from two doors down. Now, they still see each other every now and then... similar social circles. Having lived with each other for two semesters, their relationship developed and has now landed in a place where I believe it will stay: be cordial to one other and enjoy each other's company, but no more. They have nothing left to say to each other; their minds are made up. They won't ever be anything else than what they are right now.

It's like a gobstopper—the gobstopper represents the movement of these two guys' opinions of each other with respect to time (a derivative!). These guys went through every flavor of movement in their relationship and now, there's nowhere left to move.

I'm going to apply this to places too. In my “travels,” I've never really stayed at one place for an extended period of time—no more than two weeks—so with places I visit, it's very much “love 'em and leave 'em.” Maybe this is why I've had such a romantic idea of traveling. Well, I'm going to be here for a long time: Five more weeks at least. I have already experienced the “honeymoon” phase (Dr Wallace and Carla call it this), which is as far as I ever got with any other place. I'm pretty sure that ended as soon as I threw up. Now, my impressions of things are changing. Things (people, buildings, landscapes) have more depth, it's like my attitude towards things here is developing, changing colors or falvors or something. I used to love how baking tortillas smelled—simple and delicious. Then I got sick, and I hated how they smelled, like wet dog I thought. Now, it's back on the positive side, but some of the enchanting novelty has been traded in for a faint familiarity.

(Along this vein, I realize that for this post, I don't have many pictures of my “normal life” here. I will work on that.)

The segue is just too good to resist—suffer me for a plug of anthropology as a discipline. To have any kind of legitimacy in the (cultural) anthropology world these days, you have to have done fieldwork for an extended period of time—at least a year, one full “cycle”—in your field site. This is in order to gain as much of an insider's view as you can. You wouldn't like it if someone wrote your biography after spending a few weeks with you, would you? And especially dealing with the slippery things anthropologists deal with, you have to get to know what you're talking about.

For instance, we have read an account of a grad student doing her fieldwork in juvenile prisons in Brazil. The prison officials become very suspicious of her because she spends so much time with them just talking and stuff, building the trust necessary for the insider's view. She overhears some of the directors of the prison saying that she is not doing “real research”—they are used to people coming in and getting some surveys done and then leaving.

Why do anthropologists do it this way? Because problems arise (or rather, are not truly fixed) when policy is implemented according to models that are less than holistic (and 100% holistic models are impossible, so problems always arise). You gain in one area, but turn a blind eye to a loss in another. Anthropologists are very wary of quick fixes and easy answers. It's like food, or construction, or everything: there's just no substitute for lots of time and good, old-fashioned elbow grease. So don't be surprised if you ask Dr Wallace a question and he begins his answer with “Well, it's very complicated....”

That's giving you a flavor of what they're feeding me here in the classes and the literature, expecting me to digest it and then to output a report. But yeah, I'm experiencing that development already in my relationship with Santa Catarina Palopo: a flood of causes, a swamp of effects. Whatever; if you've ever changed your opinion of somebody (or rather, if you acknowledge that you ever have), then you know what I'm talking about. People and places are very complex things.

We went to the Corpus Christi festival in Patzun today. Funny, but I don't even know what a lot of the masks and dances and costumes mean, or even very much about the festival. We will probably talk about it in class tomorrow. In the mean time, it was fun eye candy—“beads and feathers anthropology.” Enjoy the photos.

On a final note, if you are wondering where I am in the development of my relationship with the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala, then here you go: I feel right now that this place is weird, weird and estranging, smiling at me and shoving and pulling me. It's a rush. Right now I hear the raspy wailing and the Latin “boom, chiboom chick boom, chiboom chick” and the hallelujahs of the church fiesta still going on below (stacks of speakers the size of quicky-marts). On two separate occasions people have tried to pickpocket me—first a little boy and today an older man. I am reading about massacres and kidnappings that happened here (around the lake) in the eighties, and last night the church decided it would be a good idea to end the fiesta with mortars (not even fireworks, just explosions that sound like bombs! They rattle the windows!). I wake up to the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life: this morning while I was hanging on the back of a pickup truck I saw a huge cloud that appeared to be sliding down the side of some mountains and onto the lake, like a gigantic and soft glacier. I really enjoy spending time with the other students. I got Dr Wallace to draw me a map to his place from the coffee shop in Panajachel so I could pick up some papers, and it took me through wide allies with weird windows and odd turns, by a soccer field next to a huge warehouse, down a cobblestone street with huge beautiful flowers and vines, through a gate. It started to rain. I found myself alone and very tall in a parade of normal kids celebrating “The Body of Christ” festival in freaky masks and capes and flags and whips. Luis laughs good-naturedly, showing his gold-rimmed teeth. He (or rather the language barrier) keeps me at a polite distance. I just ate a meal of broiled eggs with tomato sauce and tortillas and hot chocolate. Huge buses barrow through these tiny streets with their barge horns blaring. I have a place here to my own, “mi cuarto,” where all my stuff is on a table and a bench, up here perched on this hill in a house of three buildings and a wood-fire oven and kids who watch only Bambi and Rambo, one after the other. A dog yelps like his legs are being crushed by a steamroller. The roosters have random crow sessions in the middle of the night; at times it sounds like children moaning. I hang out with preteen boys, I carry a pocket dictionary with me everywhere, and all the while the weather is divine.

In Patzun, this guy came up to us and gave us something like a sermon... most of it was in unintelligible Spanish. Some stuff I caught was,´not for these, not for those, not for the earth, only for God.´

Corpus Christi

Families make these carputs out of sawdust, flowers, fruit, and whatever else. I think it goes for more than a mile. Then, the procession comes along and walks on top of it, singing hymns and chanting and burning incense and playing drums and fluits. At the caboose was a generator, I suppose to power the speakers that they use to amplify the instruments.


Waiting for the procession.

Some weird weather at dusk. View from my house.

Luis Miguel and Bandera.

On the trek up to my house.

In San Jorge

Manuel de Jesus