Day in the Life

Today I went to an event that is called the Eleccion de Madrina Magisterial. It's a pageant that involves four female teachers showing themselves off. They each model four different outfits, they have a talent section, and they have to give a little speech. One of them is eventually voted by a panel of judges to be the representative of our district for something (I really don't know what, but I could guess that it might have something to do with their Independence Day celebration which is in September). So they canceled school for the whole district and had this pageant, which was quite amusing to me, as all pageants here are.

As with most of these things, the crowd had a favorite before the women even came out, because there were two tables of teachers who were rooting for one of their friends, and they had brought lots of noisemakers.

[Sidebar] I don't think I've remembered to mention in the past how much Guatemalans love noisemakers. If you mention to any Guatemalan when your birthday is, you are guaranteed to have a series of fire crackers set off outside your bedroom at 5am on that day, even though it's a day you feel like you deserve to be able to sleep as late as you want. For any holiday, or semi-holiday, or day that feels like it could be a holiday, some skeezy men come out of the woodwork with an infinite supply of "bombas" which are like fireworks except that they don't emit any light or color, just one "BANG" loud enough to set off the car alarm at my house when the bomba is set off 4 blocks away... [End sidebar]

So these teachers had whistles, their voices, and balloons, which it turns out can be inflated with the sole purpose of popping to make a bunch of noise (and considering that when I was younger I had a distinct fear of balloons popping, it is not something that I would have ever thought of on my own). So the popular teacher would come out to do something and these two tables would make a ton of noise and pop some balloons, and then someone from their party would set off a firecracker at the back of the room (yes, people set off firecrackers indoors in Guatemala, how else can you expect to make enough noise to deafen the whole room). Then the other teachers would come out and there would be ten seconds of polite clapping and then awkward silence while they walked down off the stage, all the way through the crowd of 300 people, made their turn on the catwalk, and then walked all the way back up onto the stage and eventually, backstage. This process usually took about two minutes, and was made slightly more awkward by the fact that the MCs would periodically ask the crowd to clap when the silence was feeling really long.

Wow, apparently I'm feeling long-winded today, sorry about that, I still have quite a bit to say... So each participant would come out in a dress, and once they had all gone there would be an interlude to allow the women to change into their next dress. Two girls sang two songs one time, and they were surprisingly good, and a boy sang two songs a different time, and he was also surprisingly good. There was a group of girls who demonstrated a ceremonial dance that had something to do with corn, and there were four boys who did the classic Guatemalan boy dance, which I have no idea how to describe except that it involves very little movement and tends to go on for at least five minutes. The most notable interlude was done by a boy and a girl who both appeared to be in their early teens, but that's usually deceiving here, they could well have both been 25... Anyway, the girl was wearing an skirt that was kind of like a tutu, but slightly larger (I should remind you all that Guatemalan culture is very conservative, and skirts above the knee are rarely seen), and the boy was.....a mime. I'm not kidding. He was wearing all black and had his face painted white and didn't speak a word the whole time. The skit was that he wanted her to dance to music, but she didn't like most of his choices of music. He would put on a song and then dance to it for a couple minutes while she stood motionless, and then he would stop, gesture at her angrily, and then gesture at the DJ (who was wearing a backward, white baseball cap and a baggy white t-shirt, just like any reputable DJ should) to change to the next song. At one point he was moonwalking to Billy Jean. It was pretty incredible/bizarre. Eventually he found a song that she would dance to, and then she danced down off the stage and up through the crowd while he made fun of how she was dancing and demonstrated how he thought it should be done. So that was weird.

The only other weird thing was in the talent section. One contestant did an amazing dance sequence with a partner (I'd say it was swing, but it could have easily been some other type since I know nothing about dancing), and two of the others sang a song. The weird thing was that the fourth one sewed a purse for her talent. The dancers had just gone off stage and a stage hand brought out a table and a basket of cloth, and out came the contestant, sat down at the table and silently started working. We couldn't see anything that she was doing, since she was up on stage, and she didn't say a word or hold up her work to show what she was doing or anything. The MCs appeared to be staring at her with no idea what she was doing and the crowd just started chatting amongst themselves. Once she finished it turned out that she had taken a pair of jeans and some random other cloth, and turned the jeans into a jean purse, which actually looked pretty nice. She proceeded to take the purse down and give it to the judges, and hardly looked at the crowd once. I guess she did demonstrate a talent, it just wasn't a talent meant to entertain a group of people.

So that's what I did for work today...

Rain Stories

I'm sorry it's been a little while, I'll try to sum up lots of little things that have happened.

Most people have heard that we had a visit from Tropical Storm Agatha, and that a giant sinkhole in the capitol swallowed a building... That didn't really affect me except that for two days it poured rain like I've never seen, and the next week they cancelled school for all the public schools. There were some areas that were really damaged, and I think over 100 people died, but none of that was anywhere near me, and the volunteers who are in areas that were in danger were consolidated to a safe point near their sites. We have really good emergency plans here, so I don't worry too much about these kinds of events.

Speaking of rain, I don't remember if I've described how it rains here, but I'm going to now, so sorry if I'm repeating myself. It almost never rains in the mornings, only in the afternoons and nights. It usually starts around two or three and it's usually only an hour or so, but some days it is flash-flood type rain. On Tuesday I was in the big city nearby, Chimaltenango (which is also the name of the department), when the rain started. I had made a calculated risk by leaving my rain pants behind and only bringing my rain jacket, but that was because it hadn't been raining hard since the tropical storm. So the moment I stepped off the bus the downpour started, and within a couple minutes I discovered that despite the large quantity of rain that they get, that city is not built to deal with it very well. It turns out that people like to throw their garbage in the street, and it tends to get into the stormdrains and clog them up. So five minutes after the rain started the streets were rivers about 6 inches deep, and intersections were about a foot deep where the two rivers met. The Guatemalans are accustomed to this kind of rain, and their strategy is just to stop wherever they are and wait for it to pass. I, of course, do not have that kind of patience since I come from Oregon where it tends to never stop raining, so I just kept on going through the rain and the rivers. I had some idea that my REI rain jacket would keep me dry enough as long as I darted from awning to awning. Unfortunately, most of the awnings are only about a foot wide, so I found myself in the waterfall coming off the awning as often as not. Long story short, I was completely soaked within about four minutes. I still stopped under awnings because it felt like a place to rest, and when I did I would smile and say hello to the group of Guatemalans that had chosen that place to wait out the storm. Then I would smile at them and jump (usually literally, the sidewalks are not really flat so much as they are a series of uncomfortably tall stairs up and then down and then back up again because every store put it its own sidewalk at a different level) back out into the rain and the rivers.

Eventually I got to my destination, the grocery store, around which there were about 25 people because they have an especially big awning. I went inside with my jeans plastered onto my legs and my shoes sloshing at every step (I had ended up just walking through the rivers at the intersections, because there seemed to be no other option). I started walking around, stopping every once in a while to see if I wanted to buy any of the things in front of me, and after about a minute the woman whose job it was to mop the floors found me and started following me around. I would stand for ten seconds looking for things to buy, and then move on leaving a several foot wide puddle of water, which she would immediately mop up. She pretty much just followed me around until I was done and checked out, at which point I'm assuming she breathed a sigh of relief and went to take a break since no one else was going to be coming into the store until the rain stopped... I felt kind of bad for creating a small brook in her territory, but there really wasn't anything else I could do.

I went back out into the rain, walked down the middle of the main street (the very middle of the streets were usually okay for walking because the city engineers at least had the foresight to make them slope to both sides) back to the bus stop, and caught a bus back to my town. I should mention that I somehow ended up with a window seat and that a high school aged girl in a school uniform who had somehow avoided getting wet in the rain sat down next to me. Unfortunately for her, all Guatemalans instinctively want to sit three to a seat, so a woman sat down next to her, smashing her into my soaked-body. Nothing I could do about that either. Sometimes you're just soaked-to-the-bone on a bus in Guatemala and people just have to deal with it.