During training, there are two very important days one week apart. One is site assignment day, where the volunteers receive their two year locations, and the other is counterpart day, where a person with whom you’ll be working and who is from your site comes to meet you, have a mini orientation, and then take you to your site for a first time visit. These counterparts are hit or miss. Some volunteers, like myself, are lucky and get hard working dedicated people who are excited about your work and eager to help you settle into your site, and others get stuck with counterparts who don’t make themselves available, and instead of formally introducing them to their sites, leave the volunteers slightly alone and with no other connections. All Healthy Schools volunteers receive a CTA (Coordinador Tecnica Administrativa) as their counterpart. The CTA monitors the directors (principles) and teachers of all schools located within a certain area, for example my CTA Juliana is in charge of 33 schools. The job is near impossible. With 33 schools she barely sees them all once a month, and if you really want to monitor something you need to show your face more than once a month. Juliana was a great counterpart, she took me to all my schools and explained my project correctly, she introduced me to a family to live with for the first three months in site (this is what a volunteer really needs from their counterpart otherwise they become this stranger with no legitimizing connection walking around asking people if they can live with them), and finally introduced me to the owner of a comedor (eatery) so that I have something to eat. She also arranged dates for me to meet the Padres and Madres de Familia (parents committees) of each of my three schools, and dates to meet the Alcalde (mayor) and COCODES (community groups) of my town. She put me off to a good start.
Meeting the Padres and Madres de Familia was an interesting experience. The first presentation was at Xecaxjoj, my biggest school. In Guatemala whenever there’s a presentation or some kind of unordinary event, a microphone and amplifier are requirements. Having heard about this from other volunteers I came mentally prepared to have my Spanish voice projected at an unnecessarily loud volume. The Director Irma red aloud the agenda, then my CTA spoke, and then I spoke. Funny thing was that as I was speaking, trying my best to describe my job and how happy I was to be in Guatemala in Spanish, it didn’t really seem like people were listening, but I just kept going. When I finished, my CTA repeated everything I said in the indigenous language K´íche, and immediately everyone moved to the front in order to hear more clearly what she was saying. I thought to myself, what was the purpose of my 10 minute spiel if no one could understand it? But I know for a fact that some of them speak Spanish, so why weren’t they listening to me? Not really understanding what was going on, I just let it go and watched on in admiration as my CTA spoke eloquent K´íche, and people were nodding their heads in agreement to what she was saying. What would I have done without her? Even better, after she was done some of the Padres actually had questions for me in Spanish that I was more than willing to answer-I had to show them something.
That night my Diarrhea hit hard: a pounding headache, uncontrollable chills, and toilet time every two hours throughout the night. Despite this, I still felt obligated to go to my second school Parracana to meet the padres the next day. After all, the parents came just to meet me and I couldn’t leave them hanging. In retrospect I still don’t know if this was the best idea, I had to leave several times to go and use the DIRTY outdoor latrine whose door didn’t close all the way. At first I didn’t sit on the latrine seat, but my stomach was hurting so bad and it was so awkward and uncomfortable squatting that I had to sit – gross I know, but I was desperate (I later found bites on my butt from were the flies or whatever had bit me)! Plus I was so out f it, I hope the parents didn’t think I was crazy. I still managed to give my spiel, no microphone this time, and my CTA spoke more than last time trying to cut me some slack. The following day I felt much better, and went to the third school where a microphone was present, and it seemed that people understood my Spanish. All in all the presentations went well, and I was glad to meet all the parents.
Since then the schools have been on strike, about two weeks now, so my visits unfortunately have been few. I was able to go to a school on Monday, and got to hang with the kids a little bit. Not gonna lie, the kids came to school kind of dirty, and the soccer boys after recess looked like they jumped in a pile of mud. They had dirt on their faces, their clothes where covered in dirt, and one kids hands were black! I told them that they were dirty kind of jokingly (¡Bastante sucios ustedes son!) and they agreed with me. The kid with the dirty hands proceeded to tell me exactly what happened during the soccer game that made him all dirty. I told them that it’s natural to get dirty when playing sports but that it’s not okay to stay dirty afterwards. The problem was that that day there was no water, so my point couldn’t be reinforced with corrective actions. Frankie asked me if he should go wash his face in the river, but I said that probably wasn’t a good idea because the river’s dirty too, although I think the dirty hands kid actually did do that because he came back and I could actually see his skin. The great thing is that the kids were very receptive to what I had to say, but it didn’t seem like they had any real cleaning habits nor did they recognize when they were absolutely filthy- it didn’t phase the boys at all that the amount of dirt on them had increased 10 fold after recess. The trick is going to be getting the family habits to change. The director of the school said that the children only bathe at home twice a week – that simply isn’t enough bathing! How to make cleanliness a priority? I’ll eventually need to have another meeting with the Madres and Padres de Familia!