Site visit in one reallly long post

First off- I want to let all of you who dearly love me know that your text messages from the internet worked and made me extremely happy, even if I was to cheap to respond (or you had already signed offline by the time I checked my phone). Thanks so much!

This past week was a big one. I met my Guatemalan counterpart with whom I am going to work the next two years and got to visit my site. At first I was a bit apprehensive about my site placement. From the description it sounded a lot like what I hadn’t wanted in a site. But as we left the Inter-American Highway and wound up through the forest with deep gorges on one side and high mountains on the other, it was love at first site.

Although it is bigger than where I currently live, it has a small town feel. It has wide, nicely paved roads that will be great to bike or run on; these nice roads even stretch out from the town toward the aldeas. It is an athletic community, which has its own 10k every year. The population is mostly indigenous, which means that I will soon be learning to speak Kachiquel, which I am very excited about.

Every volunteer has a host organization and a host counterpart. Our host organization is the Ministry of Education, and our counterpart is the supervisor of 88 schools in the municipality we work in. Laura (my partner) and I have 26 schools out of those 88 that we work in. Luckily, four of those are already certified. Although I was a bit intimidated by our counterpart on our first meeting, a few borderline-inappropriate jokes soon set me at ease. The only problem is that every time he presents us he tells a story about an 18 year old PCV who worked there years ago and asks the school directors to support and help us because, after all, how they would feel if their children were in a different country all alone? Very sweet, but not helping our professional image. Still, he seems very pilas and dedicated to the program. During our week long visit to our site, we got the opportunity to present ourselves so some very large groups of people (something that I guess I’ll have to get used to) and have our first meeting with representatives from our schools. I still can’t decide how that went as there were many jokes made that I didn’t understand, and only about 1/3 of our schools signed up for initial visits. Contacting all of our directors and finding all of our schools will be quite an adventure.

I also found the house/apartment that I will be living in for the next 2 years! I got lucky and am taking over a house from the current volunteer there. The best part is that I can move in as soon as I want because it is in a family complex! Laura and I already cased all of the paint stores in town in preparation for the redecoration of our casas! I think Guatemala will be good for my indecision problems. In the US its torture for me to pick 1 out of the 20 different shades of white that you can find at Lowes. Here we found less than 20 different colors of paint in total. We could decide which colors we liked by walking around town and looking at the colors of all the buildings.

I decided to spend my first month living with a family that the current volunteer is friends with to help me integrate into the community and meet people. The moment I met them, I knew I wanted to live with them even though it will be bucket-bathing all the way. They are so sweet that they didn’t even want me to pay rent and managed to avoid the whole negotiation of rent discussion. Of course, as an American coming from a culture that is all about the exchange of goods, this made me very uncomfortable. I finally called them the day before I left to confirm that I could live there and tell them what I was going to pay them. “ Pay for what?” the wife asked. We’ll see how that turns out.

Guatemalans, from what I have experienced, are incredibly giving and generous. One day on our site visit, three boys from one of the rural schools that the current PCV works in came over and ended up showing us around town a bit. As we were walking, they disappeared into a tienda, from which they emerged with four mangos- one for me, one for Laura, one for the current PCV, and one to share between the three of them. I was deeply touched by this unnecessary and selfless gesture by such young boys.

The same type of hospitality was also extended to us by one of the families the current volunteer is friends with. We were lucky (and unlucky) enough to be in our site the day of the first big rain of the year. Coming from a meeting with no umbrella and wearing nice clothes, Laura and I tried to wait it out in the giant grocery store (yes I can buy cheese and yogurt and all kinds of useful things in my town!), but eventually decided we better make a run for it. I didn’t realize how high the water had gotten until I started running through the street and couldn’t find my way around the currents of water. I must have made a pretty good first impression in the town, running through the streets like a crazy person and yelling things that I hope no one understood in English. When approached the house, I quickly realized that we were on the wrong side of the street, and were basically held captive there by a foot or more of disgustingly gross water between us and the other side. I finally understood the need for the incredibly high sidewalks. I didn’t want to expose my nice flats to that filth, but also couldn’t bear the thought of going barefoot through the muck. So Laura and I ducked into a store owned by friends of the PCV to make a game plan. We were quickly invited in to drink coffee, eat some bread, and dry off while we waited for the water to go down. An hour later the rain stopped and we were on our way, down a makeshift gangplank placed against the sidewalk by our host, so we could avoid the last of the water left in the streets by the deluge.

This post is so long that I decided to give a prize for those of you who made it this far- something to ponder:

What is with the human obsession with death? Why does my host family run to our terazza to watch the funeral processions every time the bells start tolling? Men follow the casket on one side of the street, women on the other, and we stand and watch as the procession winds past our house up towards the cemetery. Are we just that bored??