no free tortillas

December 10, 2005

I´m hoping to leave Xela soon to travel around a bit, probably in the eastern part of the country, and perhaps a little bit into Honduras. I don´t really want to leave
Guatemala, but I am looking forward to seeing many of you for the holidays or in January. I had a bit of a delay in writing this email because I was working on my varicela ("pollo pox!"=chicken pox, but not really) report, which involved a lot of typing in Spanish. Spanish grammar/spell check is my new best friend, though!

As I mentioned, I've been working with a comadrona (midwife) who is also trained as a nurse and does a lot of primary care with indigenous women outside of the city. She had a big lunch party of sorts last week, and announced that Priscilla (the US nurse-midwife) and I needed to dress up. We wore nice-ish clothes, but it turned out that she meant that SHE was going to dress us up in her own traditional clothes.

So I'm standing in the kitchen, attempting to make tortillas by hand, wearing a colorful headwrap and beautiful woven blouse (the third one I tried...they're big and boxy and are wrapped into the skirt, so size wouldn't have been a problem, except that I couldn't get my HEAD through the head hole of the first two I tried!). My multi-wrap skirt is tied about a foot above my waist with a gorgeous hand-beaded belt and striped apron, and I´m wearing these hilarious clear plastic slide heels with plastic flowers (over my black socks). Yes, I have a picture. About a dozen women and girls are in the kitchen, helping prepare the meal, and mostly laughing at me and Priscilla as we drop more tortilla dough on the floor, adjust our skirts, and attempt to speak our 6 words of Mam (the indigenous language). By the way, group consensus was that a lack of tortilla-making skills was all that stood in the way of me having a husband--and my years of pottery classes served me well in learning quickly--so they declared me a hot prospect now. Feel free to spread the word!

In the midst of the hilarity, two new people came into the kitchen. The woman wore a nice American-style silk blouse and pants (now we're REALLY feeling silly in our headwraps) and the guy even had a tie, one of the first I've seen. I assumed they were relatives who worked in the city, but we got to talking in Spanish and it turned out that they were...wait for it...drug reps! They were visiting the comadrona to sell meds and were invited to stay for the party (as you do for drug reps!). These drug reps, however, didn't bring lunch. Instead, the comadrona put the drug-rep woman to work making tortillas, in her nice clothes, and sent the guy out to help with the fire! I, of course, found this hilarious and fascinating and started asking them questions. It gets better. It turned out that they were GENERIC drug reps!!! They mostly sell drugs made cheaply in India (basics like ibuprofen) at lower prices, which the midwifes and doctors can then sell to patients who can´t easily travel to a pharmacy. We all ate lunch together, still wearing our fancy clothes, and discussed Indian drug companies and patenting details (well, as best as I could in Spanish!). I hope you all have the chance to dine one day with a Guatemalan generic drug rep while wearing traditional Guatemalan clothing. No free lunch, indeed!

I´ve also been working with a doctor based at the school, and on Mondays we go out to a small community without a clinic and see people in the empty school room. However, last Monday nobody could find the key to the school, so we hiked back down to the car with all of the meds (our two-duffel bag traveling pharmacy) and examined a couple of kids in the backseat of the car. We then trekked to a house where all of the kids had chicken pox and after that had the woman clear off a bed in a different room to examine an (unrelated) sick pregnant woman. Finally we deposited everything back in the car because the last patient (16-year-old girl apparently with severe migratory joint pain/arthritis...OK, med students, what's your differential?) lived up a very steep MOUNTAIN. We made her sister come back down to carry up meds for the
family since none of us wanted to risk our lives making a second trip! I love how nothing phases this doctor for a minute.

I'm still playing lots of games with the kids at my house. The most recent additions are cuatro esquinas (four corners, a card game) and basta, which turned out to be like scattergories. Now, many of you will know how much I like scattergories (gorge-leaping IS a sport!), but if you're not familiar with the game it entails choosing a letter and then thinking of a first name, surname, thing, color, animal, fruit, cartoon character, job, country, etc., etc. that begin with that letter. The problem is that we, of course, play in Spanish, and that each round ends when the first person has filled in all of the catergories! I know some decent Spanish at this point, but my fruit repertoire includes basics like apples, oranges and bananas, not all of the crazy fruits in this country (Abbey, there´s a fruit that tastes exactly like cooked sweet potatoes with brown sugar, right off the tree!). I can tell you if something is red, yellow, or blue, but I don't know how to say beige or maroon. I'm not even any good at Spanish surnames. It's fun, though, and the kids give me EXTRA points if I get a good one, like last night when I thought of bombero=fireman for a
job that starts with B!

What else? I spent last weekend at a finca (farm) with an interesting social history. After coffee prices crashed in the late 90s, the owner of the farm didn't pay the workers at all for a year and a half and, long story short, the workers eventually had a sit-in of sorts and managed to take over the farm after the owner had money management problems with the bank. A rural banking organization loaned them the $200,000 to buy the whole thing with a four-year interest-free loan, and now they're organically farming lots of coffee and macademia, with all 40 families as joint owners. It´s been less than a year since they´ve been owners, but they´ve already started a water purification project (to sell spring water), a bunch of livestock projects, and a semi-"hotel" in the owner´s old house (this is where we stayed). There´s no hot water or anything, but the location was lovely, and it was interesting to see all of the projects and talk with a lot of people about the history and ongoing challenges, including the guy who spent probably 90 minutes explaining his future livestock plans (big things can come from the existing two cows!). This guy who used to work for Legal Aid in NYC is down here working with a few groups of similar workers, so he was at the finca for the weekend as well.

I went to the finca with a group of students from my school that I really like. We´re almost all women, all between 26 and 34, med students and nurses, writer/journalists, social workers, etc. Everyone is very politically aware and active, learning Spanish for interesting reasons, and it´s been a lot of fun. It´s going to be hard to go back to the crazy hours of third-year med school in January after this! I like reading books like "El leon, la bruja, y el ropero" (think narnia) and "mujercitas" (think louisa may alcott)! My teacher, who also teaches public school 6th grade, had me read all of the fourth grade history curriculum, too, since it´s focused on Guatemala...and at a nice easy level for me!

May you dream of beans.

p.s. For those who asked, Hurricane Stan was in early October here (and, therefore, overshadowed by a lot of the other natural events around the world), and most of the destruction came from landslides after the initial storm. There are still major bridges out all over the country, and though there are detours, it can be painfully slow (like yesterday, when I spent four hours on a bus ride that used to take about an hour). Just because people asked, if anyone would like to donate any $ for hurricane relief or the scholarship program for kids, email me directly and I can send you the info. The school has a non-profit in the U.S. set up through Paypal that´s tax-deductible, etc. No pressure obviously (especially since most of you live on loans!), just responding to requests.