Thursday, July 7, 2011

Campaign in Chel

We do a campaign each week which involves one day of doing publicity (going around and telling as many people as we can find about the campaign) and one day of actually doing the campaign. Our campaign this week was in Chel, which is a very rural village about 3 hours from Nebaj. On Tuesday we went to do publicity, and we found out that about 2 hours of the 3 hour drive is on dirt, rocky roads that are incredibly steep and have potholes legitimately EVERYWHERE. Not only were we scared for our lives that the bus was going to fall off the cliff or not be able to make it up and down the mountains, but the bus was just bumping up and down like crazy for 2 hours. Not a fun ride. Abby and I now have permanent butt bruises. The ride was worth it because the village was incredibly beautiful. A huge wide river ran through the center and it was full of women washing their clothes, kids playing, and every baby animal that ever existes (chicks, ducks, pigglets, puppies, kitties...yeah Guatemala is baby-central) The women’s indigenous clothing here is gorgeous. They wear a red skirt and a vibrantly colored shirt (aka huipil) and these intricate hairpiece things that involve huge colorful pom poms. Most of the people there only speak Ixil and not Spanish, so it was really hard to communicate with them. We relied mostly on the asesores (women and men we worth with) to speak and translate back into spanish. We went back on Friday to do the campaign. It was pretty successful—we sold a couple solar lamps, some lightbulbs and a ton of glasses. The other group sold three water filters which is a HUGE accomplishment. Devin even sold one while he was not wearing pants. He got bed bugs so his host mom had to wash all his clothes and she didn’t leave him with any pants… so he fashioned a skirt-ish thing by tying two sweatshirts around his waist, one in the front and one in the back. Classic Devin. The campaigns were really, really successful, though, and a lot of fun.

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