We recently had the chance to make it out to El Limón to finish documenting the final results of our USAID Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant. Without further ado, here are the results.

*I know this post is a bit late, but we’ve been bouncing all over for the holidays, just bear with me

On December 3rd, we celebrated World AIDS Day with our Health Center. As the name implies, World AIDS Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS Pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection on December 1st. So why did we hold the event on the 3rd? Because this is Guatemala! We thought we could get a bigger audience on a market day that was a bit farther away from the last day of the town festival (November 30th). To mark this occasion, we held a small presentation and information station by the main bank, Banrural, in our town square.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV as of 2007. These figures make it one of the most devasting epidemics recorded. According to USAID, less than 1 percent of the adult population in Guatemala is estimated to be HIV-positive, making it a concentrated epidemic. Even so, Guatemala – Central America’s largest country – is responsible for almost one-sixth of Central America’s HIV-infected population. For this reason, USAID has been campaigning and educating on HIV/AIDS and all programs within to Peace Corps Guatemala have a component of HIV/AIDS education. All volunteers have taken part in multiple workshops that include our counterpart agencies so that we can better inform our host communities.

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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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