Under Construction...

Note: This is my second post for the day. If you want to see what the past week was like, read the one before this.

The longer I’m here, the more I realize that Nueva Ixtahuacán is a ‘bodaciously small town’ (name that movie... I know Cari can... here’s another hint: ‘I could be at home right now drinking this monster eggnog my brother makes with lighter fluid...’). Like I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Nueva Ixtahuacán is called ‘nueva’ (new) because it was built to replace the Ixtahuacán destroyed by hurricane Mitch in 2000. The old city was considered to be in a zone of risk for the future, so the government took a part of Nahualá territory and gave it to the Ixtahuacán refugees. They were basically starting out with nothing, so the government decided to give them a hand with infrastructure. A lot of the houses look the same because they were government-sponsored. They’re all whitewashed buildings made of cinderblock and cement with orange corrugated roofs (I’m not sure what the material is).

The first thing I saw as we arrived at the entrance of Nueva Ixtahuacán was a large construction crane and a pile of building materials. That picture is a pretty good symbol of Nueva generally. Under construction. Sections of houses in some neighborhoods are still being built. People are adding on to what the government gave them (my host family, for example). The Catholic church is still in the building stages. Also, culturally Nueva is changing. The old city was dominated by catholicism, but evangelical and pentecostal churches have taken the opportunity to extablish themselves both physically in actual buildings and idealogically in the new city. Not everyone from the old city moved to Nueva. I get the feeling that the ones most deeply entrenched in tradition stayed in Antigua. I’m surprised at how open to change the people I’ve met here in Nueva are. Maybe that’s a naive perspective after only 3 weeks. I can see why it’s recommended that most serious cultural anthropologists stay for at least 6 months to a year in the place they are studying. I feel like I’ll barely be starting to scratch the social and cultural surface of Nueva by August. *sigh! *