Last Thursday, December 10th, Sarah and I had the chance to visit the home town of the closest volunteer living near us. It’s about twenty minutes in pickup in the same valley in the foothills of the Cuchamatanes, the mountain range that extends into the neighboring department of Huehuetenango. Her town is considerably more ladino, meaning there are more Spanish-speaking people and the social mores are relatively looser. The percentage of indigenous population is over 90% where we live, while in her site it’s around 70%. Whenever we talk about the neighboring town in-site, people always proclaim enthusiatiscally, “Over there, people dance!”. To us, however, the town seemed pretty similar. It has a nicer town square and municipal building because the municipality isn’t as staggeringly poor as ours.

Both of our towns have a very strong ganadero presence, meaning many people make their living raising cattle for beef. Both towns have their festivals back-to-back, with ours starting in late November. In reality our festival starts in early November and ends in mid-January, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyways, one of the main attractions of both festivals is the rodeo. It’s generally a small-scale affair, and there was one occasion where the guys managing the gate let two extra bulls into the pen after releasing the first bull with rider attached. Whoops!

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Here are a few highlights of the results of our SPA project. We only had the chance to see ten floors today and left the rest for next Sunday. Due to Sarah’s ankle injury, we haven’t been able to get out to the community as much as we’d like. Finding a reliable ride out the community, paying the driver, and then trying to find a way back to town is quite an ordeal. Nevertheless, we would like to start going out to visit more, especially now that we get the typical little kid response – “HOLA MATEO! HOLA SARITA! ADIOS MATEO! ADIOS SARITA!” at the top of their little lungs.

The floors are typically constructed by hand using a wheelbarrow, trowel, and a long section of PVC pipe to smooth it all out. A typical room only takes a few hours.

Here, Jacinto is showing off a new floor:

We had a group pose for us in their freshly-cemented kitchen. Notice how clean those bare feet are! The kitchen is usually a popular choice because it’s where the majority of women and children spend their time during the day. Another good choice is the patio area outside of the rooms of the house. All of the traffic during the rainy season creates mud, and mud breeds hookworms. Notice how no one is wearing shoes? At first we were opposed to using the cement to make patios – until we saw how the pigs, dogs, and sometimes cows are right up in there “doing their necessities” in the open air. Better to have something to wash off, especially when it gets wet and wild.

Maria Gloria de Leon opted not to build a floor and instead built a pila, a do-it-all water deposit/sink. We did not have very strict requirements and let each family choose which room to build the floor and, if they wanted to construct something else, how to use the materials. Our only requirement was that the construction had to benefit or improve the health of the family. In this case, it is beneficial because they can hold and purify the water, clean the pila when it gets dirty, and wash clothes and dishes more frequently and easily. There was no way to do this beforehand, just a faucet, a couple of rocks, and a little puddle in the mud.

Maura in the middle of cleaning her floor. She heard we were coming and wanted to make sure it was spic-and-span. This is a cool picture because it shows the biggest advantage of concrete floors – being able to clean them! We love going to her house because she always fills my backpack with whatever fruit tree happens to be in season. This time, we got a metric ton of these weird hybrid lime/lemon/orange citrus fruits.

I’ll do a “before and after” comparison when I get some more free time this week.

It’s that time of year again! I can still remember making the blog post about last Thanksgiving. Time certainly does go by quickly. With the holidays rolling around again, I just wanted to make a quick post to give thanks for everything we have. Even though we live on less than $10 a day and, compared to American standards, have very little in the way of material possessions, we still have many things to be thankful for:

• Good health
• Successful projects
• Amazing families
• Each other
• Great friends
• Access to a wide variety of healthy food
• Reliable income (however small)
• Spanish cable TV
• Internet
• Many other things too numerous to list…

This is an incredibly challenging experience for someone coming from a privileged life in the United States, and for me it’s important to remember that not only is this experience normal for someone that has lived here all their life (in that it has been all the person has known) – but that it is still challenging for them as well.

I feel the greatest thing we have to be thankful for is the fact that we get to easily return to such a plentiful country and continue our lives of privilege, especially when so many people struggle with the basics of daily life.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!