Guest Entry: The Tomato Project

The following is a guest entry by Michael Lewis:

My First Day My first day of work, I got up, showered, and sat down to a “typical” Guatemalan breakfast with Martín’s family. We had beans, eggs, tamalitos, and some hot “mush” (think VERY watered down oatmeal – i.e. I’m not sure mine actually had any oats, but I know there were at least some in the batch). Martín’s mother-in-law thought I might enjoy some Corn Flakes as well, which she put in my mush. And enjoy it I did.

At this point I should probably explain my purpose in coming to Paxtocá. I initially came to Guatemala to study at a language school called Ulew Tinimit in Quetzaltenango. It’s a Spanish language school which also offers K’iche’ and Mam. I came for the K’iche’.

One of the advantages of a language school like Ulew Tinimit is that in addition to five hours a day of one-on-one instruction, they also place you with a host family that provides you with three meals a day, during which time they will try to carry on small conversations to help reinforce what you learned in class. And it’s pretty cheap. Just $150 a week! That’s cheaper than rent in LA. Language schools in other parts of the country can run as much as $250 a week, and this is way cheaper than Tulane’s K’iche’ immersion program in Nawalá which is about $6,000 for six weeks (of course I don’t get college credit for my classes, so maybe it evens out in the end?). Anyhow, I’m sure you can do better in terms of the quality of education, but I feel like overall this school is a pretty good deal.

The problem with Quetzaltenango is that very few people speak K’iche’. A lot of people know K’iche’, but those who can speak the language usually prefer to speak to their children in Spanish. In this way the kids grow up with less of a stigma for coming from a K’iche’-speaking family. There are plenty of ladies in the markets who speak K’iche’ to each other from time to time (mostly when they don’t want their customers to know what they’re saying), but if you’re not buying something they won’t want to talk to you.

Given the situation, my school knew before I arrived that they wouldn’t be able to find me a host family in the city who would speak K’iche’ with me. I was only willing to commit to six weeks down here, so the school coordinator told me before I arrived that they would try to make it so I could spend my first three weeks taking classes with the teacher at the school and my last three weeks in a K’iche’ community a little further away from the city. So my school contacted one of the volunteer projects that they’ve worked with in the past, and that’s how I met Martín and Felipe.

Felipe is a 22 year old university student in Quetzaltenango, but he lives and works in Paxtocá. What is most important for me is that he is also a native K’iche’ speaker. As taking classes for five hours a day with my formal teacher at Ulew Tinimit is not very practical given my schedule in Paxtocá, Felipe has basically been put in charge of being my K’iche’ teacher while I’m in town. For that reason I will probably spend a good amount of my time here working closely with him in whatever he does. Anyhow, back to work.

My first day on the job was the real Independence Day, but as mentioned in my previous post, Paxtocá did its celebrating the day before. A lot of people headed out to other cities like Quetzaltenango to join in the festivities there (including a bus full of band students from one of the local schools here called Fuente de Sabiduría), but for those of us who stayed behind, it was just another day at work. For me that meant I met up with Felipe at the tomato greenhouse at around 8am. Felipe usually works there with just one other guy, Victor, who was also there. Today’s task was pretty simple: lower the tomato plants. At least that’s the easiest way to describe it, though it’s probably hard to picture what we were actually doing without a little more explanation.

The greenhouse is set up with rows of tomato plants strung up with long black plastic ribbons connected to a set of parallel overhead support wires. Each plant is pruned so that there are two main stalks growing from the base. Because tomato plants are naturally pretty fragile (as anyone who has grown their own tomatoes would know), as they grow taller we tie the ribbons that are attached to the above support wire to their base, and wrap them so the tension of the ribbons keeps the plants growing straight. As the tomato plants begin to reach the height of the support wires it becomes necessary to begin lowering the plants.

To lower the tomato plants we first untie the ribbon from the base to release the tension that had been holding it upright. As we ease the ribbon upwards on the plant it naturally begins to fall because of its own weight. Working with gravity, we gently lay the plant to one side so that it stretches for several feet just a few inches above the ground. We then take a hook to move the support ribbons that same distance along the support wires, and then retie them to the plants. Most of the time we don’t have to rewrap the whole thing, as most of what was already wrapped remains so, and the portion that isn’t wrapped is stretched out just above the ground.

By lowering the tomato plants we’re able to get another month or two of production out of them because they continue to grow upward from their new base. As Victor and I lowered plants, Felipe pruned some of the lower leaves. Once he finished with his pruning he joined in on the effort to lower the plants.

Anyhow, that’s probably a long explanation for what is actually a pretty simple task. After a full day of lowering tomato plants, the three of us who were working on it probably only got through three or four full rows out of well over thirty in the greenhouse. My payment for a good eight hours of work: I probably heard more natural K’iche’ spoken in those eight hours than in my first three weeks combined. That and I got really sunburned, despite the fact that I wore sunscreen and it rained half the day.