El Proyecto

I'm one week into my time in Antigua. These first two weeks are all orientation at The Project. I spend half days in different areas of the operation in order to get a broad overview of what goes on. The overarching purpose of this organization is education, encouraging children to stay in school in hopes that through this they will gain personal power and be able to improve their own lives and their own communities. The other programs including the clinic, legal representation, home construction, and social work services are designed to support this mission. The organization, Common Hope, currently supports over three thousand children and their families, totaling over 8000 people.

I will be working in the main compound which contains most of the offices, the clinic, and a school and has about 100 employees all told. The people have been incredibly welcoming and seem to be genuinely interested in who I am, how I'm settling in, and where the hell my names came from (actually, that part's not that different from the States). I've switched from Javod to Ali down here since Javod usually leads to a five minute conversation since the J sound doesn't really have an equivalent in Spanish.

I catch a chicken bus every morning for the 2km ride out of town to the Project. Timing is always interesting as the buses only leave once enough people have boarded to make the trip profitable. The first day this took about 30 minutes. Since then I've been staking out the station from two blocks away hoping to flag down already full buses leaving for the next town.

I started this week in the supply room helping move boxes around with Cicero, the man in charge of supplies for the project. We moved things around for about 20 minutes, then spent the next hour playing the guitar in his office. Turns out he taught himself and, being quite religious, has a small library of Christian songs he's composed. He's really interested in learning how to read sheet music and some piano, so I've agreed to try to teach him some basics in return for him teaching me some latin strumming patterns. There's a piano in the lunch room here which hasn't been tuned since probably the turn of the century, but we'll see what we can do with it and a copy of Dozen a Day that someone left behind a long time ago.

I spent another half day in the daycare chasing kids around the yard. I was again reminded of the bottomless nature of kids' energy levels. I started off the recess period accidentally flipping two four year old girls off the swings onto their faces. The teachers rushed over to make sure they weren't bleeding and to comfort them as I stood there trying to figure out how to tell them in Spanish that I am not a trained professional in pre-elementary education and therefore cannot be held responsible for any children I injure.

Another day was spent helping level out the foundation for a new house that a current volunteer group from the States is helping build. Spending time with the construction team taught me that Spanish has, as far as I can tell, many more ways of making sex jokes out of otherwise benign nouns and verbs, and that I seem to have a knack for unwittingly saying them.

Oh, the US qualified for the World Cup last night over Honduras. I watched the game with the father and daughter of the family I'm living with and felt conflicted the whole time. I was torn between my at best modest sense of patriotism and the knowledge that the vast majority of people back home don't give a damn about soccer and probably don't even realize the world cup is happening this coming summer. I thought this as the camera panned to the Honduran faces in the crowd after it was all over showing the tears of the people.

Tomorrow I have a day of orientation in the clinic. Should make for an interesting challenge of my language skills. Some conversations at this point just flow and I start feeling pretty good, until the next conversation in which I have no clue what anybody is saying. Anyways, into the deep end . . .

Corruption Goes Both Ways

I had an interesting conversation with a New Zealander whose been in Guatemala for four years doing his PhD thesis on contemporary pressures on Mayan religion and culture. He has a friend who works in the legal profession here and had an interesting example of how the justice system works in Guatemala.

It starts with Paco, who's a low level criminal who specializes in disappearing people for as little as 12 dollars upwards depending on the importance on the person in question. He works for a much more powerful man who is on trial for a litany of offenses and is asked to go tell the prosecuting attorney in the case to back off. He goes to this woman's office and brandishes a pistol in her face and tells her to drop the case. She in so many words tells him to fuck off so he pistol whips her and then, because why not, steals her laptop. Since she is intimately aware of the operation of the man she is trying, she knows who Paco is from surveillance photos and goes to the police and tells them what happened. The police go to the bar that Paco uses as a base of operations, arrests him, and because they haven't caught him in the act of doing anything illegal, drop a few bullets and some cocaine on the ground. Boom, you've got illegal weapon and drug charges.

Paco goes to prison, but since the case against him is weak and they know that if he comes before the judge he'll likely get released, his court appointed attorney just keeps missing his court date. After three months of this in which he's been hanging out in prison, they give him another court appointed attorney. Unfortunately for him, this new attorney is a friend of the woman he pistol whipped. She, however, is willing to show up for his court date. More bad luck for Paco since the gun and drug charges they're holding him on carry a maximum sentence of two years in prison and his new attorney decides that the best legal decision is to plea bargain . . . for a four year prison sentence.

This doesn't even get into the prison system, which is almost fully controlled internally by the gangs. The guards control the walls, but inside the gangs run kidnappings, drug operations, and brothels.

It adds up to an interesting picture of justice in a system that appears to require corruption from both sides in order to operate. At least it seems everyone understands the rules.