Whitman Direct Action is currently working with our partner community Willywood, Guatemala to aid in community-identified development projects. In June and July of 2012, a group of five students will be collaborating with community members to do water sanitation research in the hopes that Willywood can identify and solve water contamination problems.

Check out our latest projects in Guatemala in the student blogs below:

From 2011: http://wdainguatemala.wordpress.com/
From 2010: http://tierrafria.tumblr.com/

Here’s an excerpt from one of Sean’s entries last summer:

So Monica and I helped to kill an butcher a chicken on Sunday

—not tomorrow (duh!), and not last Sunday (we went to the beach!) but the Sunday which is now nearly a fortnight past.

Killing a chicken is a big deal.

Our family is fairly well off; they have four chickens and a rooster (down from five and two). That’s something like upper-middle class for this particular village. If they play their cards right, and none of their animals get sick or or sold or otherwise compromised, they can kill off a couple chickens (just one won’t feed the family) two or three times a year. Meat is a luxury and generally too expensive to buy. Killing a chicken, then, is a serious event.

The mother we were working with—Maria de Guadelupe, a standup Guatemalan and quality human being—took the chickens by their feet and used a plastic twine called pita to hang them upside-down from the branches of a tree just outside of her open-air kitchen. Both chickens did next-to-nothing when she took the head in one hand; when she used two quick knife strokes on the throat, nothing happened—

For the first three seconds, that is, until a red line faded in on the throat, the chicken raised its wings as if it was preparing to fly, blood started to trickle down from the open jugular, the dying bird began to wiggle and squirm, moving its head and flapping in furious staccato bursts, other unspeakable undignified dying things happened, some terrible noises of the sort you can only make through an open trachea clogged with your own blood happened, me covering my mouth happened (once the noises started, that is), and, in the time it takes a chicken to review what rudimentary animal memory he has of his uneventful chicken life roughly one hundred times (less than five minutes maybe?) it was dead.
Same goes for the rooster. Less noise and less fuss in general. Even Guatemalan chickens stay gender-normative (the rooster died with remarkable dignity and macho stoicism) until they’re dead.
We cut down the condemned before the other farm animals had time to move in and lap up all the murder-juice lyin’ around on the dirt. The first thing you do with a dead chicken is immerse it in a pot of boiling water—it helps to get rid of both germs and feathers. The next half-hour we spent plucking; the feathers we put in a big plastic bucket to be recycled into pillows. The scaly skin on the feet is also shucked off at this stage. What feathers we missed Maria de Guadalupe roasted off with a quick pass over the open fire.

Next step: wash the chicken. There aren’t a lot of sinks to go around in rural Guatemala, because sinks require running water and plumbing and water heaters and plumbers and other things that require time and money and technical education which the campo is so badly wanting for. What there are plenty of are wells (mostly shallow, some with mechanized pumps) and the ever-present pila: part basin, part stone washboard, part basic dishwashing area. Pump water from the well into the pila; lay down your dinner-to-be; scrub vigorously with an old sponge and some blue dishwashing soap and douse it in water scooped with a shallow plastic bowl.

Once you’ve washed the chicken, you can begin the cutting. Start with the head and feet; once they’ve been de-taloned and de-beaked, they’ll be ground up with tomatoes, bread and roast pumpkin seeds into the Guatemalan mole sauce. This is also the part where you gut the chicken; make a long vertical cut to unzip the abdomen, reach up into the neck to the gizzard, and pull out the whole digestive system inside-out. Gall bladder, kidneys, and a few other organs are no good to eat. The rest get ground into the mole using a two-speed blender (blend and don’t blend) that’s probably the most advanced piece of kitchenware in the house.

There’s a lot of boring butchering that goes on after this, along with more washing, boiling, and routine kitchen tasks. The meal is difficult to eat—we struggle with expressing our gratitude, with explaining that we’re struggling to express our gratitude, and with the fact that our hosts are giving up a sizable chunk of their livelihood for a couple of gringos they’ve known for all of three days. This is something that we will likely have trouble with the entire time we are in Guatemala: the idea of giving for the simple joy and sake of giving, without expectation of something in return. We are given to constantly, selflessly and effusively, and we have no idea how to react—they don’t expect (or want) us to reciprocate the favor, and their constant kindness dwarfs and demolishes the petty material constructs and concerns that we’ve known and held onto for most of our plush first-world lives. We’re still working on getting our heads around it, but we’re thankful for their kindness—for their kindness, and for two days of chicken and mole, which is one the best (and most satisfying) meals I’ve had since I’ve arrived in the country.