MY SITE VISIT TO ORATORIO!

Tuesday morning I left for my site. I had to travel by chicken bus to the capital, the most dangerous place in the country. I got off the bus at Tikal Futura, a big mall. I met a couple volunteers who were passing through there, and then had lunch with a professor who is a friend of mine who was visiting from the states. After a great lunch at the infamous Pollo Campero with Dr. Silva and Jaime (another volunteer), Dr. Silva took us to Zone 1 to find my bus for Oratorio, Santa Rosa. I barely know the capital except for this mall, and the PC office in a different zone, and do not know any of the roads, so I didn´t really know where to find this bus. The business program director´s assistant told me to go to Zone 1 (the central area of the city) to find a bus. Unfortunately, we spent over an hour looking for the bus, and had no luck. Finally someone suggested us to go to the Zone 4 bus terminal. Gotta love PC for giving me wrong directions! We ended up somewhere near the zone 4 terminal, and luckily found a bus for Santa Rosa, so he dropped me off. Thanks for your help Dr. Silva, I would have called the PC Office in frustration early on without your help!

I asked the bus driver if he was going to Oratorio, but they told me they weren´t going that way. They suggested me to walk 3 blocks to the terminal and find it there. As I was walking, I noticed this area was even shadier than zone 1 and it was raining. I started walking that way, and saw 3 people that looked like they were not up to anything good. I turned around and started walking back towards the first bus where I met the bus driver. In that moment, I thought if those Guatemalan thugs were going to follow me, I would hop in a taxi and go to the PC office in Zone 9 and make my director personally drive me to my site. Luckily in that moment the bus I was supposed to get on showed up on the cross street and I got in and didn´t bother to look back at the goons. I know when I return I´m going to talk to my program director and the security guy to find me another place to get on the bus, because I don´t want to go to Zone 4 to catch the bus next time.

On the bus surprisingly it wasn´t crowded and I was finally able to relax. I must have dozed off for a few minutes, but then again for those of you who know me, is very easy to do. It took about 3 hours to get to Oratorio. The people on the bus were nice, and told me where to get off.

First Impressions of Oratorio

Oratorio is small and very calm, my phone does NOT work at my site, and there is NO internet. I think I´m gonna go crazy here! The program director told me this was a municipality larger than Magdalena Milpas Altas (where I´m living right now). It´s obviously smaller. I made a quick round around a section of town, and finally asked someone where it was. I had walked right by the cooperative the first time around and didn´t notice it, how am I supposed to know what it looks like? I went inside, and a young girl who is the secretary let me in. I talked to Evelyn (the secretary) for a bit and she told me Don Efraín (my counterpart) was out on business and wouldn´t be back for awhile. He showed up later on that evening and it turns out the cooperative is connected to a comedor (local restaurant) and he lives upstairs. He asked me if I wanted to stay there and I agreed since I was exhausted after a long adventure.

After the next day of sitting in the office not doing anything at all (because they were busy with daily activities of people coming in), we finally discussed a little bit about what the coop does. I had a tough time understanding, since the people talk really fast here. I thought I was doing well in Spanish, but I still have a lot to learn. Basically the coop has almost 500 associates who have loans or savings accounts there. The reason they are so busy is they do everything BY HAND on little cards they have for all the associates! It´s great my counterpart and the secretary can calculate interest and payments on the calculator, but it takes so much time. I am beginning to see my role to move them onto Excel or Access or an accounting system. Creating a system in Access wouldn´t be too hard, but I´d have to train them how to use it and fix it if it breaks, and they have one computer that they can barely use in the first place. If anyone has any ideas of an existing accounting system that can keep track of 500 associates and their loans and savings accounts, pls let me know. Apparently software is available without much trouble in Guatemala at REALLY cheap prices...

Evelyn, the secretary, has a friend Yohana that comes and bothers us in the afternoons, which helped ease the boredom since I had someone else to talk to who wasn´t working. There is one guy who came in to paint the comedor who speaks English. He has a striking resemblance to somebody not very much liked in the states. I´ll take a picture some day when I get a chance so you can see what I´m talking about. A guy from INACOP came twice to visit the coop that week, but I think it was a bunch of bs just to get some free food from the comedor. INACOP is an organization that usually helps cooperatives.

I still need to find a place to live when I go back, because I don´t feel comfortable living with my counterpart. Mixing business and pleasure in this sense is too close for comfort. I practically share the same room with the guy. The bathrooms don´t have doors, they have curtains! When I told Efraín and his wife Ana I wanted to find my own place, they asked me why. Why would you want to live all by yourself? What are you going to do? were the questions I got, but she has been very helpful. The good thing is Doña Ana, Efraín´s wife, runs the comedor and talks to a lot of people there. She´s asking around for an apartment I can live in. One lady offered me 500 for an apartment, but I supposedly I only get 312 quetzales for rent. There is other room in my monthly budget for miscellaneous expenses so I´m not totally screwed. I can always fill out bunches of paperwork to ask for a salary adjustment if I find that I can´t reasonably live within my means and hope for a positive effect. Some trainees might have the same problem in their sites, even if their income level is dependent on the site. I will stay with my counterpart when I return until I find my own place.

Besides the savings and loan part of the business, I was surprised to find out that they have other (hopefully) profitable projects going on. They have some lemon project that they are making money off of. Also, they have teamed up with an NGO called PRAAC-SALUD that wishes to open pharmacies selling generic drugs around Guatemala. The NGO gives 15000 Quetzales as seed money to start each farmacia. The coop has opened one up in Oratorio, and it wasn´t doing well at first but it´s profitable now. The doctor and another pharmacy in town were telling all the habitants that generic drugs were bad and they needed to buy the name brand drugs. Basically an associate took out a loan from the coop and manages the pharmacy herself. The plan is to start up about 6 of these farmacias in other towns around Oratorio and take 10% of the income from each farmacia, and the coop will be rich!

There is a basketball court next to the municipal building, but I didn´t see anyone playing. I´ll check it out in detail when I move there. I also visited the judges office, the mayor, and the police. They all want computer training, so these are good opportunities for secondary projects. I think the girl that works there wants to teach me how to dance salsa, if I teach her English. We´ll see how that goes.

Friday Don Efraín, Don Gildardo (president of the coop), and I went offsite to a town close to the capital called Fraijanes to talk to the mayor about opening one there. It seems like the mayor has his own plans about opening up his own generic drug farmacia and we would not be able to put our farmacia in the busy part of that town. It sucks, because Don Gildardo had family there and it would have been easy to hire one of them as the manager. Oh well, it seems there are many other towns within a 2 hour driving distance from Oratorio.

I left Saturday morning for the capital from Oratorio and I didn´t have any problems this time - I took a taxi to Tikal Futura. met a local friend from Magdalena there, and he helped me buy a guitar. I got a good deal on it - normally 595 Q, and I got it for 320. I´m grateful for this bono catorce - most salaried Guatemalans receive a bonus in July and December. I don´t get a bonus, but I was able to take advantage of the sale!

At the end of the day, I do realize this is Peace Corps, and if everything was perfect, well we wouldn´t be here. I´m glad to be back home (the Milpas Altas area feels like home now)away from my site, so I can process this trip with my fellow trainees. About the phone not working, and no internet, well I´ll im pretty sure there is internet in the next town over, Cuilapa, since it is the capital of the Santa Rosa department. And my phone should work there too. How often I´ll go there I still don´t know; it´s a 30 minute bus ride going back in the direction of the capital. An interesting fact Carlos told me about Cuilapa is it is located in the center of all the Americas. That means I´ll be just slightly east of it. And I´ll put the heat on the director and the security guy on Monday to find me a different place to get on the bus.
Pictures under SITE VISIT - ORATORIO or something like that.