Are my neighbors trashy?

As mentioned, the people with the little store in front of my house, Tienda la Bendición, are always around. They’d always seemed like good neighbors to me (even if rarely allowing the privacy I want when it comes time to burn my toilet paper), I’ve started to wonder a bit about their character. I was leaving my house a few weeks back to go to work, and one of the boat pilots, Arnaldo, came running up to me and asked me for a loan of 2Q (quetzals), which is about a quarter. Since I have to cross from San Miguel to Flores and back at least once a day, all of the boat pilots are familiar to me, and this one is also the brother-in-law of my landlady so he’s even done some work in my place. So I gave him the 5Q bill I had in my pocket and when he leaned in to give me a thank you kiss on the cheek I caught a whiff of heavy drinking. When I left my house the following morning, I saw Arnaldo sleeping on the cement patio of Tienda la Bendición. Then a few days later as I left my house, Arnaldo arose from where he was sitting on the patio of Tienda la Bendición, leaving a wet spot behind, and came running up to me again as I was leaving my house and asked for 5Q. Well, despite my misgivings I gave it to him, and he said he’d pay me back in boat crossings. That evening, I got on a relatively late night boat back to San Miguel, piloted by my landlady’s actual brother, Andreas, and since we were waiting for more people to arrive before leaving I casually started asking about Arnaldo and Andreas was like, “He’s drinking now.” So apparently Arnaldo will not drink for a few months and then will go on a binge of a few weeks to a month, during which time he is not welcome at home with his wife and 8 children because he will steal things to sell. He spends his time on the street, then comes home when he’s done. And the reason he asked me for 2Q was because he drinks rubbing alcohol, which at 2Q a bottle is much cheaper than grain alcohol. Apparently not too long ago another gentleman of San Miguel died from drinking rubbing alcohol. And that brings me to the question of whether or not my neighbors are trashy, because even though it’s illegal and deadly they sell Arnaldo the rubbing alcohol. Boo!

Soon after learning that, I went away for almost two weeks, and passed my proposal defense at UCSB. Now I’m back in San Miguel, ABD, and another 6 months to go here. This morning I saw Arnaldo sitting on his son’s boat and chatting, so maybe his binge is done. Anyway, the good news is that I now have a “new” camera with me. “New” because I think it might be one of the first digital cameras ever made. We’ll see how I ornament my blog with it.

Toilet paper fire

Here in San Miguel, where perhaps two or three cars or trucks pass through per week, it is a common occurrence to see people burning their garbage. Unlike in Flores, no truck comes by to pick it up and take it to a dump. And since pretty much no where in Guatemala is the plumbing up to the challenge of sucking down toilet paper, every toilet has a wastebasket next to it for depositing the toilet paper. Even if you can get a kid to take your garbage off to the dump here, everyone would agree that toilet paper should just be burned. The first time someone suggested I burn my toilet paper I laughed at the image of myself out front tending a burning pile. I’d been able to avoid it to date because a few times my landlady’s mother was sweeping up leaves out front and asked me for my toilet paper, and a few times I used a piece of corrugated metal as a base for burning it within my little fenced-in compound, away from the eyes of the public, but I figured enough was enough. No one else is embarrassed to burn their paper in front of their house, I could already imagine my landlady asking me what happened to her piece of metal, and I had some guests coming over so I had to do something. I’d been thinking about it for days and days. The people who live across from me have a little store where they sell about ten things and they are constantly out front of their house. I honestly can’t imagine this is how they earn their living because they can’t be selling all that much of anything, but as far as I can tell both the husband and wife seem to be there pretty much constantly. This is nice because they kind of keep an eye on my place, get new 5 gallon water bottles for me when the truck passes by once a week, and whenever I pass by the husband calls me Laurita, which for some reason I love. It is bad, however, because if I want to do anything discreetly there’s not much chance until past 11 pm, at which point it seems that making a fire in front of my place in the middle of the night would enhance the oddball status I already enjoy as the only gringa in San Miguel. But, because of my impending visitors, I decided to just suck it up and do it yesterday morning, Saturday. I got excited as I was walking to the gate of my place to see that the family across the street were actually all leaving as a group, so I hung back a minute until they were gone. Then I went outside, made a pile of the bags of paper on a preexisting burn mark, and nervously went through about 7 matches before it caught fire. Then I realized I’d have to stir it around to make sure everything caught fire, so I found a stick and did just that. All this time, three or four people passed by and looked at me, I thought, oddly. I might have appeared strange, but most likely that’s because I’m seldom seen out front of my house, I’m usually coming or going to the boat and because my house is a little removed from the street I don’t pass a lot of time in public view so for some this might have been a rare gringa sighting. I remember when I’d been living here only a few weeks I took a walk around San Miguel and as I turned a corner I’d never turned before I heard a kid yell, “Here comes the gringa!” Anyway, yesterday I finally confronted something I’d been dreading and I’m glad about that, though it pained me later on to deposit more paper in the empty basket. Well, in about six days I’m going back to the Santa Barbara for a week and half, so at least there I won’t have this kind of concern. There I’ll just have the situation that passes every time I come back from here, of finding myself with toilet paper in my hand and looking around for a wastebasket before I realize that I can just drop it in the toilet.

Dog eats chicken bone… And survives!

Anyone who has spent much time around here will tell you that there are a lot of gnarled-up looking dogs. Skin conditions, fur and ear tips missing, ribs poking out, a dozen ticks ringing their eyes, it’s all common place, even in cases where the dog actually has an owner. There are, of course, many well maintained pets, but even then are distinct from the dogs you see around the US because so few of them are neutered that dog balls and saggy tatas are commonly on display. One of the more painful things to see is an absolute stick and bones female who is obviously nursing out scavenging for their food because many owners don’t feed their dogs anything at all. Such dogs make the rounds at the post where I stay at in Bethel when I’m visiting the park, and for that reason I can tell you that a dog can eat a chicken bone and survive. They come at meal times and wait where the guards and the odd visiting researcher might throw the cast-offs of their meal. These dogs are so skinny that even I, raised with a multi-generationally strong tradition of not giving chicken bones to dogs (my dad has said that as a child he’d believed a dog would die instantly upon taking a chicken bone in its mouth), will toss my bones to these creatures. This is something I would never do with Josie. And these dogs come back for more the following day. Well, I think in the face of all the hazards these dogs face, the danger of a splintered chicken bone raking their digestive track is pretty minor. I still feel conflicted, however, every time anyone tosses these dogs a chicken bone, and doubly so when it’s me.

Speaking of gnarled-up dogs, there is one less in the world now. Black, the little dog that lived my little fenced in area, is no longer with us. Well my landlady spends great stretches of time in Guatemala City, caring for her two little grandsons while her daughter and son-in-law attend classes at the medical school. She hasn’t been up here once since I came back two months ago, though she has called me a few times to see how things are going. I stop by her mother’s house to pay my rent, a woman who is probably about 80 years old and caring for her great grandchildren (after raising their dad, her grandson) since their dad is off working at the airport during the day and the mom has been in the US for about a year as an undocumented worker. This is the 3^rd generation she’s raised. Anyway, Black hasn’t been here since I got back and I asked a few people around here about him and no one knew what’d happened, and then finally when my landlady called me the other day I remembered to ask and she said her nephew had called her months ago with word that he’d died, must have been when I was in the US at the start of the New Year. Well, he was an old dog, but I also suspect he was rather neglected by the nephew that was supposedly caring for him. He spent his time chained up on the side of the house, poor fella, and I can tell you that when I came back the plants outside looked like they hadn’t been watered in a long time, which I imagine was another of his responsibilities.