You Can Go Urine Way in Nuevo San Jose

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Traveling is one of those enlightening experiences where you get to engage with other cultures and meet interesting people with fascinating stories. Usually the people you meet on the road are of a like mind to you - why else would they be studying Spanish in a leftist school in Guatemala.? But every now and then you meet someone who is definitely reading from another page to the one that you are on. Of course you get the questions from Americans that are totally unbelievable, such as “Did y’all drive from Guatemala to Cuba?” - I mean SURELY an American would know that Cuba was an island?! Or the typical - “Do y’all use the American dollar in Australia?” I’ve stopped saying no, I let them believe that everyone in the world (bar Guatemala) uses the American dollar as their currency. I also tell them that we vote in American election and that next Presidential election I’m hoping Australia will be a swing state. That really throws them.

But ignorance aside, occasionally you do meet someone who is so different from you it really rocks your foundations (and is generally a bit o a challenge to deal with). But before I get to this “amazing” person I’ll first mention a little bit about where I encountered her.

About 80 kilometres outside of Xela is the PLQ’s (my Spanish school) main project. On an organic coffee finca (farm).Next to the two communities of Fatima and Nuevo San Jose is a school of around 13 students (and 7 teachers) (La Escuela de la Montaña) whose fees go towards improving the living and educational standards o those who live in the nearby communities. Each student lives at the school (yes, just like Hogwarts!) and eats their meals with one of the families of either community.

I ate with two families during my fortnight at the school and the food was basic (beans and eggs anyone?) but tasty. The mother of one of my families had 9 children (!) but was also the communities’ family planning advisor. At first I thought she was joking when she told me this but then she explained that without the information she learned through the family planning classes she would have had even more kids. It is very difficult with the Catholic Church being so influential in Guatemala and the Church’s stance on contraception. She told me she would have preferred 5 children because 9 were too expensive and she had had to send some of them off to work so that they could pay for the schooling of the other, younger children. I thought 9 was a lot until one evening I was dancing in the living room (don’t ask) of a family who had 12 children (!) ranging in age from 24 to 2 years old!

The communities are not the size you would expect them to be. When you normally think of a community you don’t envisage a row of 10-15 houses. But this is what each community near the school consists of. The reason that they are so small, ye distinct is that each community lived on different coffee fincas before moving to where they are now. Both Nuevo San Jose and Fatima had to move form where they lived after bitter labour and wage disputes with the respective owner of the fincas. In the case of the community of Fatima the finca owner paid the Guatemalan army to come and force the community off the farm and then blacklisted all of the men of the community so that they were not able to work in any other fincas in the region.

The story of how each community ended up living where they now are is a sad one - and during our time at the school we had the opportunity to hear first hand accounts from our families of what it was like existing in basically a feudal employment/living arrangement and how they manage to survive on less than the minimum wage of Guatemala (which is round 7-8 dollars per day).

Of course when two communities are practically built on top of each other some rivalries are bound to arise and soon enough I encountered the “we did it tougher than them” phenomenon.

One day during lunch with my family in Nuevo San Jose I casually mentioned that I had heard the story of the Fatima community and how it had been quite sad.

“Sad?! Sad!?” said the sweet old grandmother who was cooking for me (and had warn the same cool World Cup 1994 bandanna for the last 4 days). “NO! Their story is not sad. It’s not sad when you get given your land, have new houses built for you and then just go about complaining about how sad your past was.” Taken aback, I politely listened (and weakly agreed) as she then catalogued all of the greater injustices that had happened to them in their community and why Nuevo San Jose had been REALLY hard done by.
Always one to spark a little conflict, the next week I casually mentioned to y mother in Fatima that the story in Nuevo San Jose was quite sad.

“Sad, sad!” she replied. “Are you joking? They have their own water supply and want to charge us a ridiculous price to use it. Sit down and I’ll tell you our story - now it’s really sad.”

For most of my time at the Mountain School I was struck by how these 2 communities were, in many ways, barely tolerating each other rather than co-existing. I thought it would be fun to pepper my conversations with remarks about how the food or houses were better in one community or the other but my natural fear of lynch mobs turned me off the idea. As it turns out, one of my teachers explained, the strained history between the two communities has been a long time in the making. It stems from the fact that the land that Fatima is built on was in the past owned by Nuevo San Jose but was reclaimed by the Catholic Church (who saves land for disposed finca communities) and given to Fatima after Nuevo San Jose defaulted on part of their repayments. In happier news however; there has been an inter-community marriage and the kids (all 10,000 of them) all play together despite the fact that Nuevo San Jose supposedly wont share their water supply at a reasonable rate.

However my shock that these two, apparently peaceful, communities may hate each other paled in comparison to the shock I was in when I learned the habits of one of the other students at the school. Meet Becca - guitar toting, basic Spanish speaking, middle-aged, herbal therapists from New York State. Becca arrived at the school and as soon as I met her I had an inking that we may not click. Anyone that insists on speaking a language 24/7 despite not being able to speak that language is always going to grate a little. Someone who then gargles their own urine for ten minutes each night is going to leave you in stark disbelief for the rest of your life. That’s right - you didn’t misread - just like I didn’t mishear when I thought I had heard her explain to someone the medical benefits of gargling fresh urine every day.

Lying in my bed one evening I was doing some study when voices floated through my bedroom window. I was reading my book and vaguely listening to the conversation when I suddenly sat bolt upright in my bed.

“What the FUCK!” I ever so eloquently thought to myself. “Did she really just say what I thought she said?” Planting my face flush against the window I listened carefully. As pain spread over my face - my nose flattened against the cold, hard glass - I learned the reality of Becca’s hygiene habits. In broken Spanish I discovered that nothing was better for flu’s, throat infections or the like than a cup of hot, fresh urine (apparently it has to be fresh - the old stuff simply will not do - which is a shame because according to her roommates Becca, too old, lazy, infirmed or god knows what, to make the 10 metre trip to the bathroom each night would instead get up, squat and piss into a cup in front of the other students. Judging by the frequency in which she did this I’m guessing that if the pee didn’t have to be freshly brewed she would had had stores to cure the common cold amongst all the kids of the surrounding communities.)

A day later (after doing my civic duty and spreading the gossip around the school that the John Denver wannabe was actually harping back to some sub-continental practices of dubious benefit) I spoke to the student that Becca had had the originally conversation with. Confirming that I did understand awful Spanglish and that I hadn’t misheard, Sara only made my fears worse when she mentioned that the conversation continued later and that not only does Becca gargle for 10 minutes daily she also swallows afterwards! Afraid of a bit of good, old fashioned DEET she also liberally applied urine to her skin to ward off mosquitoes too! “What the hell?” I thought to myself. “I’m living with the queen of recycling- if she’s not careful she’ll be snapped up by some inner western -Syney local council to give lectures on the benefits of worm farming and drinking your own piss. (But she already gives lectures on the latter in the states. So if anyone reading this is interested I think I’ll be acting as booking agent.)

Enough is enough. I cant go on for too long about this crazed herbalist with a penchant for re-writing Beatles classics into Spanish. Instead, one last image. The next night I was lying in bed again reading. Suddenly I realized there was a strange sound surrounding me. A long, low, guttural, groan that seemed to bubble along at the bottom o my consciousness before I realized what it was and where it was coming from. Frozen to the spot (quite easy when you’re lying in bed I guess), my mouth open wide in horror I knew I was hearing for the first time someone gargling their own urine. Cultural genocide, abject poverty and awful injustice all have the power to move you - but as I ran from my room with my hands covered over my ears I realized that more, err unexpected things, really can get you moving a lot faster. GULP…

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Photos

Piñata!!!
Well what party is complete without a piñata? It's so much fun and we got to see children nearly get decapitated as they ran for falling lollies as people kept swinging at the target.

Compa!
One of the dogs of the school!

Escuela de la Montaña
The school

Nothing like a few Danes
Lars and Sara

On the way to school
Jane and Pia on the way down to the mountain school.

Bad ass girls
Pia and Kelly causing trouble during "the hour of fruit".

Keep on dancin
Rosie and me doing our thang during our Friday night pancake party. (Ok it was pretty quiet at the school so we had to entertain ourselves somehow!)

Dont go chasin' water falls.
and please Patrick put your shirt back on. One weekend we went on a hike for a few hours to a waterfall. Tempted by someone´s comment "bet you wont get in" I promptly jumped in to the freezing downpour, better than the Shower of Death though.

What's that noise?
Well I had to include a photo for context, didnt I?

The teachers
Some of the teachers and students at the school during a joint birthday party and a party for my saint's day.

Comments

[s p ... r e n d o]

my my ... i miss you patrick
i can't really add anything to match that... but i am on the back over of the NZ listener this week... fancy me... face of comalco... don't hate me too much Karen... love to all from nz... s p

[dgiddy]

stinkerbelle
she probably smells better than half the taxi drivers in Sydney, Paddyboomsticks