What a Beautiful Life

Sorry no pics.. iPod connector cable is temporarily MIA.

When people ask me how I’m doing, I have one answer for them: busy – and it’s incredible!  I always say I’d rather be busy than board, so I’m loving this pick up in work.  I’m still working very hard with trying to make the Student Leader program sustainable, something that can be difficult when the teachers at the school rarely stay longer than a year.  The kids in the program, though, are still dedicated.  They buy bananas and sell them at the school almost daily.  The money they raise is used to help pay for the World Map Project, which is slowly starting to look more and more legit.  We have an ocean now!!

Fun fact: you can buy 175 bananas in Belize for the equivalent of $6.00 USD.

Aside from banana sales and the world map, the Student Leaders are also working to get some clubs up and running.  They really want to see the creation of a boys and girls sports club, so I’ve been working to help them out with that.  They also want to have a chess club and a garden, something that I’m going to start looking into more in the next week.

The teachers at the school have begun to give me more opportunities to do lessons, as well, something that I think will be very successful.  I believe that if you want to see behavior change, it’s best to start with the children.  Learning healthy habits at a young age is how change takes place over time.  The one lesson I’ve given this semester was on diabetes and nutrition and was very successful!  I really felt like the kids understood what I was talking about, and, though they may not put into practice exactly what I said, they are at least aware of it.  Hopefully, with continued encouragement, behavior change can begin to take place. 

The lesson was so successful that I’m beginning to plan an NCD prevention series with the school that will focus on physical activity and healthy diet.  Once all of the classes are complete, I’m envisioning a field day for the students in which they can play new sports that I taught them, have a poster competition, and perform skits.  Maybe they’ll even be able to set up a booth and give lessons to some of the adults in the village.  We’ll just have to wait and see, though!  The teachers could also get together and cook some foods from the garden (which as mentioned before doesn’t exist as yet but hopefully will soon).  They could give community lessons about healthy diets and sell the dishes to make some money for the school.  I’m really stoked about this potential series.  I hope that it comes to fruition in the coming month.

The health work doesn’t stop in the classroom, though.  In the community, I’m really focusing on latrines and diarrheal disease prevention.  It’s my personal goal to see that everyone in the village has a latrine by the time I leave.  Ideally, I’ll be able to do it in a way that’s sustainable, too.  In order to do this, I’m requiring that people who want latrines attend four classes in which they learn about diarrhea signs and symptoms, prevention, and treatment.  Once I have completed the four classes with my CHW, I will do random house visits to make sure that not only the participants are applying what I taught, but that they are also teaching their children and spouses as well.  Only after they pass the courses AND house visits will they be able to get a latrine.  The first class was an introduction on the project and discussed the fecal-oral cycle and why it’s important to use a latrine.

Before I could begin these lessons, though, I needed to get permission from the village and the village leaders.  My CHW and I requested permission to speak at one of the village meetings.  Since my CHW actually speaks Q’eqchi, I was kind of assuming that I’d say a few words and he would explain the details.  Five minutes before the meeting, I decided that it would be a good idea to confirm this belief, just so I could plan out what I wanted to say while the meeting was going on.  Turns out, his expectation for me was to explain the entire project and then he would answer any questions the villagers may have.  What I was anticipating to be a few words to prepare suddenly had become a full on explanation…

Luckily, village meetings tend to be about 3-4 hours long, giving me plenty of time to prepare.  After figuring out what I wanted to say and repeating it a few hundred times in my head, I started to wonder what would happen when I finally spoke.  Would people just get up and leave out of lack of interest? Or would they be so shocked that the white guy was trying to speak Q’eqchi that they’d stay to hear/see the potential train wreck?  I’m happy to say that they stayed to hear what it was I needed to say! Unfortunately, however, the hours of repetition prior to actually speaking slipped my mind as soon as I was called on to speak.  Apparently, I did well enough, though, since some people had questions about time and place so that they could make sure to be there.  And, to ensure people remembered the first upcoming lesson, I made 22 house visits to the people I knew didn’t have latrines.  All this work proved worthwhile when 35 people showed up to the first lesson!!  

I’m not going to lie, my confidence in my Q’eqchi was pretty high after introducing the project at the village meeting basically off the top of my head.  That was when I decided to do another lesson the following day with the football club on the importance of eating healthy to prevent NCDs.  For the most part, it seemed like most of the men were more interested in watching football, but apparently someone was listening since one of the men showed up two days after to get his blood sugar and vitals checked!

I’ve also added some more… interesting… foods to my list of foods consumed during service.  The very same day that I presented at the village meeting, my CHW killed a deer.  Needless to say, I had a few meals that consisted of deer; however, that’s not the interesting part.  On the evening following the meeting, I sat down to eat at my host sister’s house and she served me something called kot li kej, or literally deer shit.  It looked like something I’d had before so I figured I’d just eat it and pray that it was, in fact, edible.  Though far from appetizing, I was able to get it down, at which point her husband came in and explained to me that it was actually the deer’s intestines cleaned out and steamed.  Needless to say, I suffered from some digestive issues the following day.  Funny how that works.

Aside from work, I’m still focusing on cultural integration, or as I prefer to say, getting the villagers to like me.  One of the key integration activities I’ve participated in recently was helping to build a house.  The first step to doing this was to go out with my host dad and brother and find four or five trees to chop down and debark.  We then got together with about 20 other men and started putting up the house.  I didn’t do much the first day, but I was able to make the group laugh when I pretended to knock my head on one of the rafters and told them the house was too short, something that’s very common (at least by my 6’2” standards) in Q’eqchi villages. 

Once the frame of the house was completed, they began putting on the thatch, which they got from the cahun palm trees.  It took about 400 palm leaves to make the roof.  As you can imagine, this required a lot of walking back and forth with the horses hauling the leaves.  At one point, I decided that I wanted to go help, so I walked about a half mile to the place where they were loading the thatch on the horses.  I then walked about a quarter of a mile further, across a creek, to where the thatch was located.  Dragging the thatch back to the horses that quarter of a mile was tough, especially around the creek, but I managed with only a little stumble around the creek.

When I returned to the horses, one of the villagers gave me a rock.  It was very smooth, flat on back and a carved edge on the opposite side, resembling an axe head.  When he first handed it to me, I was stoked because I was (and still am) pretty sure that it’s an axe head carved by the ancient Maya; however, the villagers had a different story for the rock.  They believe that when lightning strikes a tree, these rocks are a part of the lightning and are the reason that the tree splits down the middle.  So, whether an ancient Mayan axe head or a lightning rock, I am stoked to have it, and even more honored that it was given to me by one of the villagers.

Before I finish up this post, I just want to tell one final story about what I consider to be one of the best bus rides I’ve ever had into PG.  To start off, the bus left from my village, meaning that I didn’t need to go through the extremely uncomfortable ride in the back of a truck to the neighboring village.  As the bus was leaving the village, it stopped to pick up a family.  The first person on the bus was a little five or six year old named Vasilio.  As soon as he saw me on the bus, he ran up and sat right down next to me, not even waiting for the permission from his mom, who, with his cousin, was laughing about the whole situation.

Vasilio and I spoke some at first, but as the bus began to move, he started looking out the front window and became transfixed with the movement of the bus over the rough hills.  As I as observing him observing the road, a song came on my iPod: I Mua by Nahko and Medicine for the People.  As the song nears its end, Nahko starts repeating “What a beautiful life.”  This really resonated with me.  I thought of how lucky I am to be in my village and to have been able to build relationships with the people of the village in just five months.  I also thought about the potential that I have to really have an impact on this community and the people that I’ve fallen in love with.  These people to people interactions are, in my opinion, as important, if not more so, than any health lesson that I can give.  As I Mua reached its conclusion, I realized that this really is a beautiful life.