Una boda con la gripe

On Saturday night i went to a funeral. And a wedding. In that order. I hiked up a hill satuday afternoon for a picnic, and by the time i returned i felt somewhat ill. I thought maybe it was because I had gotten too much sun. I had been invited to attend a neighbor´s wedding that night and didn´t want to miss the opprortunity. So i put on my one skirt and nice shirt and got assurance from my host mother that the wedding was "just around the corner and we´re just going to eat dinner really quick and come right home, and you can walk home at anytime if you´d like". So i pulled myself out of bed, got in the car and set off for the wedding. They had told me that the wedding was a civil wedding, so when we arrived at the local church i was rather confused. They explained that we were just going to a really short mass first. An hour and a half later, i found myself still standing in the back of the church, dizzy and very definitely feverish, as a mob of people slowly pushed their way out the doors. A very small Mayan woman in traditional dress kept resting her hands on my ass. I could not understand how it could take anybody so long to leave a building until twenty minutes later when i finally emerged from the building and found myself proceeding down a long receiving line of men and women dressed in black. I was at a funeral! Actually a memorial service after a funeral, but pushed along through the line i found myself offering "lo sientos" to a lot of unsuspecting strangers. My fever rose.
We made it two the wedding about 2 and a hald hours after leaving the house. The huge banquet hall was filled with men dancing this dance that is traditional to this area. It essentially involves a few steps forward (very slow steps), a few steps backwards (slower still), and a nod of the head. Then the women line up and do the same dance. But they wear way cooler clothes.
We ate Pepian and drank whiskey and coke and my fever rose. Then i drank tea and my fever rose some more. When i woke up the next morning it was 102. I had la gripe. But that was one interesting funeral/wedding. Someone gave the couple a stove with a big bow on it. And midway through the party the kids got to take down all of the baloons and pop them.

Water

This past week I lived with a new family in Xela. They were really nice and super welcoming and have an unbelievable love of all things hip-hop and reggaeton. My first night we took a trip to Hiper Pais, which is basically the Guatemalan Walmart and listend to Eminem, 50 Cent and Snoop Dog the whole way there. I´m not so sure if they know the meanings of any of the words, but I felt pretty confident that if i played them the Orishas i wouldn´t receive any stunned looks of embarassment.

The week was complicated by the fact that there was no water from Monday afternoon until Sunday morning. I smelled. A lot. Apparently, with the aid of the Japanese embassy, Xela is installing a new water system in order to increase the potential water pressure that the pipes can hold. The project was so succesful that when the water was turned back on on Wednesday, the increase of water pressure was so high that several old pipes burst, resulting in the prolonged suspension of water for four more days while they repaired the old pipes. I would like to think that this sort of accident could have been predicted, but I´m no engineer.

So Saturday morning when I woke up, my family informed me that if i was interested I could come with them on a little excursion to the grandfather´s house, which was located on the other side of town where water service had already resumed. We would all shower at his house. I jumped at the opportunity, as I had played soccer for two hours on Thursday night and hadn´t showered since Monday morning and had no faith that the promises that the water would return by mid-day would be met (i was right, water returned mid-day on Sunday, not Saturday, and we´ve been told to expect further interruptions).
So we packed out bags and headed down the street to wait for a microbus to take us out to grandpa´s house. Grandpa supposedly lived "muy cerca". I´m not sure grandpa actually lives within city limits, which would explain why he had water when most of the city did not, but I did not care. Grandpas house had a shower! And grass! and all was wonderful. I was clean and ate cake and drank coffee with a super cool grandfather who was dancing in the living room to blasting christian rock when we arrived and who is a drummer in a marimba band. That was my favorite shower that i´ve had in months.

Santa Anita

This past weekend I went to a nearby coffee finca called Santa Anita. Santa Anita, about twenty minutes outside the town of Colomba in the southwest of Guatemala is actually a decently well known community within Guatemala. It is one of only four communities of former members of the guerrilla movement who received land through the government sponsored Land Fund after the Peace Accords were signed in 1996. The land, however, is not free, and the community has ten years to repay the government for the loan. It is unclear at this point whether this will be possible. After two years, they are yet to be able to afford to make a payment.

Santa Anita is a small community, up a steep hill in the steamy jungle-like forests of western Guatemala. The community members are working tirelessly to operate a viable organic coffee and banana farm, but have faced many setbacks. I first learned of the group through a friend in Xela who is working with the project Cafe Conciencia. He is working to provide the technical assistance necessary for Santa Anita, and two other local coffee fincas to operate viable business that provide sufficient compensation for the families involved and that will result in the secure, continued posession of the land. I went to the farm with two photographer friends who were there to take photos that might be used for promotional material for the finca. Hopefully i´ll get to post some of their work here. The preliminary shots i saw were really beautiful.

Growing coffee is not enough. The community is trying to start an agri/eco-tourism project to supplement their income. They have a large house, the former house of the dueño, that has been converted into habitaciones. They provide the opportunity to volunteer at the finca, eat with a family in the community, attend charlas on their work and exeriences, as well as explore the beautiful grounds of the finca. Cafe Conciencia is trying to facilitate the development of this program, as well as provide trainings in areas such as coffee roasting, marketing etc. that will help the business develop.

My time at the finca made me think quite a bit about my time working at NCV in Boston helping people (mostly recent immigrants) start food businesses. I think that one of the greatest satisfactions in life for people who grow food, cook food, do anything professionally related to food, is the opportunity to nourish your own community with the fruits of your labor. For the people i worked with at NCV, and for the member´s of Santa Anita, this is not possible. There simply is no local market for organic coffee. They cannot command a higher price for organic beans, and few people are able to afford the price that they must charge in order to obtain a fair wage for their efforts. This reminded me a lot of one particular man at NCV, Niel, who was originally from Jamaica. Niel was passionate about hot sauce. Jamaican hot sauce made with Jamaican peppers. Niel´s sauce was damn good. Niel dreamed of opening a hot sauce business, of selling his hot pepper sauce at every corner bodega in Boston, at the larger urban markets, anywhere with a Caribbean community. But when Niel and I figured out his costs, what it would take for him to be able to support himself, he realized that he would need to charge so much for each bottle of hot sauce that few recent immigrants from Jamaica would be able to afford to buy the sauce that he hoped would make them feel more at home in their new community. Niel would have to market his sauce to an affluent (read: white) commmunity that could purchase his ¨exotic¨item at a high price. And so it is with Santa Anita. They must attempt to market their coffeee to tourists, extranjeros, sell it abroad at upscale markets and boutique coffee stores. They cannot be profitable by nourishing their own community. I am meeting this week with someone from Cafe Conciencia to see if there is a way that my weird experience with food business marketing that i never thought i would be doing can somehow be helpful to a group of former guerillas in Guatemala, hoping to make a really great cup of coffee.

Chimaltenango

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Originally uploaded by simcahorwitz.

What more is there to say? Brahva, Guatemala´s premier beer. The King´s Poo. I love this place.

Maximon a.k.a Hermano San Simon

It has been a long time since I have written, primarily because I spent the better part of the past two weeks traveling with my family throughout Guatemala. I wish I had had the chance to write during the trip, as my writing about past events is never as strong, but alas, I´ll make an effort to convey the fun we had and the many crazy and beautiful things we saw.

My family arrived on Sunday, the 18th and took the harrowing drive east from the captial to meet me in Xela. There is nothing like getting passed by a 1980s generation US school bus on a two lane road that is missing one lane due to a mudslide. But they made it and our adventures began the next day with a trip to the nearby towns of Almolonga and Zunil, home of a famed altar to the pre-Columbian Mayan god of the underworld, Maximon . To reach the town of Zunil, about thirty minutes from Xela, you drive through lush farmland where farmers primarily grow vegetables primarily for domestic consumption and for export to El Salvador and Mexico. They farm on mountainsides as steep as airplane trails, rarely using terraces, somehow coaxing life out of the most unlikely spaces. I suppose this is the result of need. And a whole lot of chemicals. The number of men walking down the street going to or coming from a days work spraying the fields is overwhelming.
Arriving in Zunil, we visited the central church, a large colonial building adjacent to a beautiful convent. But i was much more interested in Maximon, supposedly tucked away in a small building behind the church. I don´t know what definition of ¨behind¨ the guide book is using, but it took us two friendly old men in the street and a fifteen minute walk up a steep hill to find Maximon. Maximon sits in a dark room, off a small cobblestone street, waiting for visitors. I expected a wooden statue, somewhat reminicent of the statues of the Virgin that I have seen proceed through the streets of Xela. But modern-day images of Maximon are nothing like this.
Carved out of wood, Maximon is dressed in twentieth century clothes--a dark suit and red tie, black sunglasses, a black top hat. He lounges in a chair in the back of the room, encircled with dripping candles, flower petals and the soft swirls of incense burning on the table in front of him. His hand grasps a bottle of Guatemalan rum and underneath his chair, an empty bed pan sits in waiting. Maximon signifies fertility, the bringer of wealth and luck to all who pay him honor. He is worshipped with offerings of money, Coke, alcohol, flowers and apparently all things hedonistic. I left my two quetzales in the collectionbucket by the bedpan, making a wish as i left the altar, somewhat afraid of what my wish might actually bring. I sadly have no picture of Maximon, as this would have cost another 10 Q, which i did not have at the time. The image on the page I linked to does not do him justice, but it´s a beginning. Apparently the god renowned for his sexual prowess is a bit shy.