I was out the other night with a group of dental students at a local bar. My Spanish remains spotty and add loud rock music to the background with everybody else being Guatemalan and I was understanding close to nothing. I was greatful when the boyfriend of one of the dental students started speaking to me in slow Spanish and English. We talked for awhile about his life. He´d spent some time in the US, studied engineering, been with his girlfriend for five years. Then he tells me that since I´ll be here for awhile, he´ll let me in on a few Guatemalan secrets.
¨It´s like this,¨ he says, ¨when your woman is starting to get pushy, saying things like ´take out the garbage, go out and buy milk, ´you say, ´okay honey, but pórtate bien,´¨ which is the equivalent of ¨behave yourself,¨ or ¨be good. ¨ Then you give her a little tug by the hair at the nape of her neck (he demonstrated the correct form on his girlfriend). To this I thought, oh, if that´s how it´s done, I definitely have a lot to learn. At the time, I thought he was making a joke along the lines of the jokes that get told around the Thanksgiving dinner table in my family. I was later informed that he was actually completely serious and felt that he was truly imparting valuable information and life skills unto a an unlightened foreigner.
Machismo is definitely prevalent down here and comes up at least once every day in clinic. Women can´t get jobs, can´t leave the house, get abused, get sexually harrassed, all stemming from Machismo. When I ask people where this comes from, the most common answer is ¨who knows.¨ I´ll currently searching for a book that could give me some insight.
When I shared the story of the machista in the bar with one of the women from the US that live in my house, she turned to her boyfriend and informed him that if he ever tried the hair tug move she´d fucking beat him to death. And the cultural exchange continues.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Clinic Days
I´ve just finished my second week working in the clinic at Common Hope. I came in at 8am the first day last week, after two weeks of orientation to the rest of the project, expecting to have a few days of shadowing, further clinic orientation, and general advice on their approach to patient care. By 815 I was seeing my own patients.
It´s actually been going much better than I had expected. While I still find myself floundering at times with Spanish in the outside world, in clinic more often than not I understand what my patients are saying and am able (or at least think I am able to) make myself understood. The chief complaints run the gamut of primary care (my god, the guy using the computer next to me has been browsing pictures of women´s feet for the last 30 minutes) from endless coughs and sore throats to end stage colon cancer. The challenge is very similar to what I´ve seen in the states in that you have people who have so many stressors in their lives that it´s difficult to differentiate organic pathology from the psychosomatic. A patient comes in and tells me they have headaches, nausea, back pain, their legs hurt (but only in the front), they´re losing weight, and they want me to inject them with the contents of the two bottles that ¨some person¨told them would help them. One bottle contained intravenous B12 supplements and the other liquified liver.
The doctors who work in the clinic are incredibly helpful and take the time to explain things to me and give their opinions when I´m completely lost regarding how to manage a patient (which doesn´t happen infrequently). There´s still a steep learning curve in front of me and it still feels weird to walk around in a white coat and be addressed as doctor. The other day the doctors weren´t in the clinic and I asked the receptionist what we were going to do since we didn´t have any doctors that morning. She reminded me that I was there and that I should go stand in front of the bathroom mirror and repeat to myself ¨soy medico, soy medico, soy medico.¨ I´ve now incorporated this into my morning routine. Still not convinced it´s working.
But morale remains middling and tomorrow I begin anew. Onwards and upwards.
It´s actually been going much better than I had expected. While I still find myself floundering at times with Spanish in the outside world, in clinic more often than not I understand what my patients are saying and am able (or at least think I am able to) make myself understood. The chief complaints run the gamut of primary care (my god, the guy using the computer next to me has been browsing pictures of women´s feet for the last 30 minutes) from endless coughs and sore throats to end stage colon cancer. The challenge is very similar to what I´ve seen in the states in that you have people who have so many stressors in their lives that it´s difficult to differentiate organic pathology from the psychosomatic. A patient comes in and tells me they have headaches, nausea, back pain, their legs hurt (but only in the front), they´re losing weight, and they want me to inject them with the contents of the two bottles that ¨some person¨told them would help them. One bottle contained intravenous B12 supplements and the other liquified liver.
The doctors who work in the clinic are incredibly helpful and take the time to explain things to me and give their opinions when I´m completely lost regarding how to manage a patient (which doesn´t happen infrequently). There´s still a steep learning curve in front of me and it still feels weird to walk around in a white coat and be addressed as doctor. The other day the doctors weren´t in the clinic and I asked the receptionist what we were going to do since we didn´t have any doctors that morning. She reminded me that I was there and that I should go stand in front of the bathroom mirror and repeat to myself ¨soy medico, soy medico, soy medico.¨ I´ve now incorporated this into my morning routine. Still not convinced it´s working.
But morale remains middling and tomorrow I begin anew. Onwards and upwards.
Kites and Dia de Los Muertos
Yesterday was The Day of the Dead I went to a town called Sumpango to watch their annual kite festival. The idea is that every year, for this day only, the spirits of dead family members descend from the heavens and commune with the living. Families go the the cemetery bringing flowers and other things to decorate the gravesites of the deceased and eat their lunch sitting close by in order to have a meal with the departed. Another part of the tradition is kite flying which is a way of creating a closer connection with the spirits in the sky.
It was an incredible site seeing kites fifty feet tall or more intricately decorated with a specific ultralight paper and propped up side by side (these ones aren´t for flying). Another part of the festival is a competition to see which team can keep their kite airborne the longest. The flying kites are smaller than the others but still are 10-15 feet in diameter. Tracks are formed through the crowd to allow the team members to run, pulling the rope attached to their kite behind them in an attempt to get them up in the air. A number I saw were successful, one staying up for several minutes. What´s interesting is that as the teams continue to pull the rope, the kite begins drifting over the crowd and a few actually starting coming down on us. At this point everybody scatters to make way and being applauding when the kite lands without crushing anybody. I kept thinking that in the states we´d probably be watching from behind a fence 100 yards away. This way is definitely more interesting.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
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 . . .
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.
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.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Starting It Off (Week 1)
I´m now exactly two weeks in and decided I should probably get this thing going or there´s a good chance it wasn´t going to happen.
I arrived in Guatemala City at about 8pm. You walk out the front entrance and see a large group of people all waiting for arrivals and taxi drivers advertising rides to Antigua. Also noticeable is the dramatic change in size of guns that security guards carry. I was picked up by a woman that had been arranged through my language school and spent the night in her home. We talked about the economic recession which has apparently dramatically lowered the number of tourists coming into the country and has put a lot of strain on her income which, like many people, relies solely on the industry.
The following morning she drove me to the bus stop for Xela, where I´ve been the last two weeks studying Spanish. I ended up sitting next to Jeff, a 55 yo chiropracter from Connecticut and two Guatemalan law students from La Capital. Jeff had decided to leave his practice after 30 years when he felt like he wasn´t enjoying what he was doing anymore and his years of having the opportunity to do something like this were becoming more and more obviously finite.
The two law students were traveling to Xela (a four hour bus ride) for a concert that was being held in a few days with a number of very popular Guatemalan groups. I had been unaware at the time that the coming week was Independence Week for Guatemala and a number of other countries in Central America and Xela happens to be one of the more popular places to spend the holiday in all of Central America.
Xela is a city of 250,000 people and is the former capital of Western Guatemala. It is located up in the mountains at an altitude that I´m forgetting but is high enough to make me winded after a very short uphill walk.
We arrived in Xela and I was picked up by a rep from the language school and driven to my family home for the next 3 weeks. The family consists of a woman in her 50´s named Vilma, her daughter and son-in-law, her 20 yo son, and her 4 yo grandson who was born premature and suffered oxygen deprivation to the brain in utero and has severe Cerebral Palsy requiring constant care. A 15 yo Mayan girl is the grandson´s caretaker and tells me she works 7 days a week, 17 hours a day caring for the child. I asked her if she went to school and she told me she hadn´t been to school in 2 years because "she didn´t like studying.¨
The following day I joined three other students for a school trip to a sacred Mayan Lake up in the mountains. The ride consisted of the four of us sitting in the back of a pickup truck on a mattress which is how it´s done by pretty much everybody down here. I´ve seen people driving with their pre-teen kids in the flatbed even when there´s clearly enough room inside the cab. Definitely makes for a more exciting trip. We drove out of town and up into the mountains, passing through several small Mayan villages and farm land scattered among the slopes. When the truck couldn´t navigate the road anymore, we walked. This is when I first realized how far above sea-level we were and how I imagine people with heart failure of COPD feel. You know you´re taking a deep breath, but you´re never fully satisfied and you´re out of breath by the time you´re finished exhaling.
The lake quite pretty and you could hear the rumbling of the nearby active volcanoes. One of the students I was with is a mechanical engineer who worked at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He told me he´d known since he was in high school that that was what he wanted to do, but five years of working there, he´d become burnt out and was questioning whether this is what he saw for his life in the future. He has 6 months off and a job waiting for him, but has started questioning whether he´ll be going back.
When we returned to Xela, we all went to the soccer stadium to watch Xelaju, the city team, play. It is the Guatemalan equivalent of the MLS. Everybody gets really into it and at one point, after a Xelaju player scored a penalty kick, the only point of the game, some sort of bottle rocket set off in the celebration winged him and he was carried off the field in a stretcher. I stood next to two Guatemalan kids and they taught me some of the vocab of the game and made sure to point out when anybody around us said a bad word.
After the game, I went with Arroldo, the son in law of the house and met up with Pai and Liz, the law students. We all went out for a drink at a popular bar. About 1130, after 8 liters of cerveza, the bar started playing music by a famous musician whose name I´m forgetting. Everybody in the bar knew these songs, were singing along, and then started weeping. Seriously every person around me was crying. I know we have songs that are sad in the States, but I´d never seen such a communal reaction to a series of songs. They played seven songs from this guy who apparently only sings on the topic of lost love.
Two days later I attended the Independence Concert with Pai and Liz. The concert was sponsored by Gallo, effectively the national beer of Guatemala. I´ve realized that there´s nothing that they figure they can´t sell down here with women in spandex. Between groups (there were 6 or 7), they would parade out Las Chicas de Gallo and with the MC, get the crowd chanting Gallo! Gallo! Gallo! It took me awhile to ask myself what the fuck I was doing chanting the name of a beer. I´ve never seen anyone yelling Coors! Coors! Coors!
The concert was packed and I learned that Guatemalan youth are fond of moshando (from the verb moshar = to mosh). It´s a very different experience for someone like me who is below average in height in the US but here ranks in the 98th percentile. A group of drunk kids behind us kept trying to hoist their equally drunk buddy in the air except didn´t possess the coordination of the strength to pull it off. Instead, he just ended up kicking me in the head several times before I turned around and shoved him which actually sent the entire group of 8 people to the ground. To feel physically powerful . . .
The following night I went to a fair with the son in law. This particular fair is the only one that happens all year so is a huge event. We took the bus to the outskirts of the fairgrounds and walked the final half kilometer in because traffic was at a full standstill. It´s a very big deal in this town and everybody comes out to sell things. I passed a woman selling bottles of shampoo in plastic bags, because apparently come to the fair to buy their Head&Shoulders. I saw a kid of maybe 15 going up to cars in the street and guiding them along in hopes that the driver would give him a tip. The only thing was that it was a one-way street and there was really no other available options for movement. I´d probably be able to do that job for two weeks before I started playing with the idea of kidnapping white people.
The fair itself was a chaotic mix of colors, smells, noises, and rides. I decided against trying out the rides after I´d been told that Liz´s sister had dislocated her shoulder on one of the spinny ones. I didn´t see another foreigner the entire night.
Alright, enough for one sitting.
I arrived in Guatemala City at about 8pm. You walk out the front entrance and see a large group of people all waiting for arrivals and taxi drivers advertising rides to Antigua. Also noticeable is the dramatic change in size of guns that security guards carry. I was picked up by a woman that had been arranged through my language school and spent the night in her home. We talked about the economic recession which has apparently dramatically lowered the number of tourists coming into the country and has put a lot of strain on her income which, like many people, relies solely on the industry.
The following morning she drove me to the bus stop for Xela, where I´ve been the last two weeks studying Spanish. I ended up sitting next to Jeff, a 55 yo chiropracter from Connecticut and two Guatemalan law students from La Capital. Jeff had decided to leave his practice after 30 years when he felt like he wasn´t enjoying what he was doing anymore and his years of having the opportunity to do something like this were becoming more and more obviously finite.
The two law students were traveling to Xela (a four hour bus ride) for a concert that was being held in a few days with a number of very popular Guatemalan groups. I had been unaware at the time that the coming week was Independence Week for Guatemala and a number of other countries in Central America and Xela happens to be one of the more popular places to spend the holiday in all of Central America.
Xela is a city of 250,000 people and is the former capital of Western Guatemala. It is located up in the mountains at an altitude that I´m forgetting but is high enough to make me winded after a very short uphill walk.
We arrived in Xela and I was picked up by a rep from the language school and driven to my family home for the next 3 weeks. The family consists of a woman in her 50´s named Vilma, her daughter and son-in-law, her 20 yo son, and her 4 yo grandson who was born premature and suffered oxygen deprivation to the brain in utero and has severe Cerebral Palsy requiring constant care. A 15 yo Mayan girl is the grandson´s caretaker and tells me she works 7 days a week, 17 hours a day caring for the child. I asked her if she went to school and she told me she hadn´t been to school in 2 years because "she didn´t like studying.¨
The following day I joined three other students for a school trip to a sacred Mayan Lake up in the mountains. The ride consisted of the four of us sitting in the back of a pickup truck on a mattress which is how it´s done by pretty much everybody down here. I´ve seen people driving with their pre-teen kids in the flatbed even when there´s clearly enough room inside the cab. Definitely makes for a more exciting trip. We drove out of town and up into the mountains, passing through several small Mayan villages and farm land scattered among the slopes. When the truck couldn´t navigate the road anymore, we walked. This is when I first realized how far above sea-level we were and how I imagine people with heart failure of COPD feel. You know you´re taking a deep breath, but you´re never fully satisfied and you´re out of breath by the time you´re finished exhaling.
The lake quite pretty and you could hear the rumbling of the nearby active volcanoes. One of the students I was with is a mechanical engineer who worked at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He told me he´d known since he was in high school that that was what he wanted to do, but five years of working there, he´d become burnt out and was questioning whether this is what he saw for his life in the future. He has 6 months off and a job waiting for him, but has started questioning whether he´ll be going back.
When we returned to Xela, we all went to the soccer stadium to watch Xelaju, the city team, play. It is the Guatemalan equivalent of the MLS. Everybody gets really into it and at one point, after a Xelaju player scored a penalty kick, the only point of the game, some sort of bottle rocket set off in the celebration winged him and he was carried off the field in a stretcher. I stood next to two Guatemalan kids and they taught me some of the vocab of the game and made sure to point out when anybody around us said a bad word.
After the game, I went with Arroldo, the son in law of the house and met up with Pai and Liz, the law students. We all went out for a drink at a popular bar. About 1130, after 8 liters of cerveza, the bar started playing music by a famous musician whose name I´m forgetting. Everybody in the bar knew these songs, were singing along, and then started weeping. Seriously every person around me was crying. I know we have songs that are sad in the States, but I´d never seen such a communal reaction to a series of songs. They played seven songs from this guy who apparently only sings on the topic of lost love.
Two days later I attended the Independence Concert with Pai and Liz. The concert was sponsored by Gallo, effectively the national beer of Guatemala. I´ve realized that there´s nothing that they figure they can´t sell down here with women in spandex. Between groups (there were 6 or 7), they would parade out Las Chicas de Gallo and with the MC, get the crowd chanting Gallo! Gallo! Gallo! It took me awhile to ask myself what the fuck I was doing chanting the name of a beer. I´ve never seen anyone yelling Coors! Coors! Coors!
The concert was packed and I learned that Guatemalan youth are fond of moshando (from the verb moshar = to mosh). It´s a very different experience for someone like me who is below average in height in the US but here ranks in the 98th percentile. A group of drunk kids behind us kept trying to hoist their equally drunk buddy in the air except didn´t possess the coordination of the strength to pull it off. Instead, he just ended up kicking me in the head several times before I turned around and shoved him which actually sent the entire group of 8 people to the ground. To feel physically powerful . . .
The following night I went to a fair with the son in law. This particular fair is the only one that happens all year so is a huge event. We took the bus to the outskirts of the fairgrounds and walked the final half kilometer in because traffic was at a full standstill. It´s a very big deal in this town and everybody comes out to sell things. I passed a woman selling bottles of shampoo in plastic bags, because apparently come to the fair to buy their Head&Shoulders. I saw a kid of maybe 15 going up to cars in the street and guiding them along in hopes that the driver would give him a tip. The only thing was that it was a one-way street and there was really no other available options for movement. I´d probably be able to do that job for two weeks before I started playing with the idea of kidnapping white people.
The fair itself was a chaotic mix of colors, smells, noises, and rides. I decided against trying out the rides after I´d been told that Liz´s sister had dislocated her shoulder on one of the spinny ones. I didn´t see another foreigner the entire night.
Alright, enough for one sitting.
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