Finding Grass

The past few weeks have been the busiest of service so far.  There are times that I find myself thinking that there’s too much to get done in the limited electricity setting that I find myself living in, yet somehow I’m still able to complete (most of) the work I have planned while at the same time managing to enjoy myself and my community. 

The latrine project that I am working on with my community work partner is finally beginning to take shape.  I am continuing to make house visits around the village asking the villagers who attended the diarrheal disease lessons how to prevent and manage diarrhea as well as when it is important to go to the hospital with diarrhea.  Naturally, this has led to an improvement in my Q’eqchi, especially when it comes to talking about poop.  I may not know much conversational Q’eqchi, but I could go on for days when talking about diarrhea.

We have also been able to get in contact with a group in the States that is willing to collect donations from the U.S. and wire them into an account that will be made up of community members who have been involved in the project.  My work partner and I will begin identifying people during the next month that we think would be able to support the group, which will ultimately be used for any community development projects that have been identified by the villagers.  To help in understanding how to set up a project of this magnitude, I was able to take a trip out to another volunteer’s site who is also working on a latrine project.  I was able to get information from her about building latrines, how to set up and run a village-based group, people to contact about fundraising, and where to find the best deals for supplies in town.  It was incredibly helpful!

Once the group has been registered as an official group, we will begin to ask for donations from the States.  Ideally, we will be able to come up with an Adopt-a-Family type situation where families in the States will get information on a family that they’ve decided to “adopt.”  Of course this will all take place with the families’ consent.  This way people who decide to donate can have a connection with the families in the village that lack toilets.  More information about this to come!

Aside from the latrine project, my work partner and I are also making headway on the health fair.  We finally have an agenda, a list of invitees, and a budget.  Right now all that’s left to do is get a set date, which I’m pushing to be June 4, but we shall see.  If all of the presenters can come, I think it has potential to be very successful.  For now, I’m just going to continue giving lessons at the school about Non-Communicable Diseases so that the kids can help present information to the villagers at the fair.

Things at site aren’t all about work, though.  Most of the time I’m hanging out with people in the village watching movies on my computer, helping them with household chores, or even just talking.  At one point, I went to go help one of the kids in the village throw beans.  What happens is that when the farmers gather their beans, there tends to be a lot of dried grass and dirt.  Throwing them with bowls helps to clean out some of that dust.  Naturally, never having done this before, my first few throws were terrible… I completely missed the tarp a few times and other times, I wouldn’t throw them high enough to allow the wind to blow out the dust.  It was at this point that the 13 year old corrected my technique, and by the time I finished I was a pro.  The whole experience was just one of those reminders that I don’t, in fact, know everything, and that there are even times when a 13 year old can teach me something.

At another point in time, I was hanging out after school with some of the kids.  I was on my way home when I grabbed my book bag off the ground and stopped to talk with some of the teachers and students.  It was then that I felt something crawling on my chest.  Unfortunately, my first reaction was to grab and throw it, not flick it.  It turns out that if you try and grab and throw a scorpion, you get stung and it’s not like a bee sting.  It’s a full out sting that put me in more pain than I’d been in in a while.  My hand swelled up and there was a tingling sensation all the way up my arm and even into my mouth and lips.  It was crazy! The pain lasted a few days, but things are all good now, thankfully.

Of all the things that have happened in the past month, though, one thing in particular stands out to me as a real “lesson learned” moment.  There had been a bulldozer in the village that was charging people absurd fees to level out certain things like plots of land or the road that leads out to the farms which will just become uneven again as soon as the first rains come and the horses begin to walk the road.  On top of the price, the bulldozer was getting rid of grass from the village and leaving plots of dust in its place.  This is what really frustrated me about its presence.  All I wanted was my grassy yard back!

Just days after the bulldozer left, it began to rain more than it had at any other point during the dry season.  We had a week straight of rain, and all the dust turned into mud.  I had to start wearing my boots around the village and needed to focus on every step that I took in an effort not to fall.  What did I do about this? I complained about it: to the teachers, the kids, the host family, everyone!  To me, it was the bulldozer’s fault, so I continued to complain about that to everyone.  Essentially, I was full of negativity during that week of rain (now, admittedly, over a problem that is pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things).

During the few days of rain, I began reading a book called The Tao of Pooh which considered the different types of people and how they relate to Taoist principles by looking at characters from Winnie the Pooh.  One of the ideas that the book presents is the importance of looking at potentially negative situations but seeing the good that can come from them and knowing that whatever happened occurred for a reason.  Literally within a day of reading this, I stepped outside and saw in the mud something I hadn’t seen since the bulldozer left: grass.  Had it not been for the rain, there would have been no grass. 

This made a profound impact on me.  It taught me to acknowledge the negative but also know that it did happen for a reason.  There will be times at site when something bad happens (probably it’ll be bigger than just losing some grass), but I’m going to need to take that negative and make it into something better, either through my actions or, more simply, my observations.  There was nothing I could have done about the rain, but I was able to notice that something good did come from all that rain and mud.  Because I was focused on finding the good from the not so good, I was able to find a positive – I was able to find grass.