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??

Exiting Stuff: My Partner and Texting!

I have very exciting news! After weeks of anticipation, we finally found out who our partners are going to be. Our Peace Corps program is very different in that we will be working in pairs, so it won’t be the stereotypical, only gringa for miles around experience. I was really lucky to be paired with my friend Laura. The coolest thing about this pairing (well one of the coolest things) is that Laura and I have a mutual best friend back at home. Because Laura is from Texas, I am from Florida, and our mutual friend is from California, I hadn’t met her before Peace Corps. I had only been told about a thousand times how much I would like her before either of us even joined Peace Corps. It’s like being set up on the ultimate date.
In other news, I was finally really appreciative of the business-casual-but-outdoorsy type clothes I invested in for Peace Corps, when a morning workshop with teachers was quickly followed by a dusty hike through the mountains in the hot sun. My Patagonia flats really pulled through, though the girls that were hiking with us in their jellies seemed to have no problem. We finally found what we were looking for- the spring that is serving as a new water source for our school. Unfortunately, it appears that their water is being stolen from the tank at the spring and not making it to the school. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.
At school they were also getting ready for the town festival in a few weeks. Every town has its own yearly festival according to the town’s saint. It was interesting to have my evangelical host dad explain to me how almost every town is named after a catholic saint and even the ones who aren’t, have their own saints who the whole town celebrates in a yearly festival. Only then did I realize how many San Somethings there are around here.
Another important news flash! I just found out that any of you can text me for free from the internets. You just have to go to www.tigo.com.gt and click on mensajitos then enter my phone number and text me for free. I can even respond to you back on the computer! So that’s another reason for you to ask for my digits!

monte-day

All Monday plans were canceled at the last minute…including school…again. I was pretty frustrated at being faced with what I felt like was another day being useless. But then my host family suggested that we aprovechar my free day and go visit their land in the monte. They have been promising to take me for a while, but I haven’t had a totally free day. So in the morning my host mom, aunt, baby sister, and I set off. For the trip I put on my tennis shoes, Berta put on her platform sandals. I carried the diaper bag, Berta carried the baby, and Estella, a machete. Sweet. Their land isn’t far outside of town, but out there it was sunny, windy, and quiet. Beautiful. On their land they plant corn, frijoles, and now they have cilantro- my favorite! They also have peach and avocado trees. I had lots of fun being tall, knocking down avocados with a big stick, and making Berta take pictures. But then host-grandfather, who had been tillin’ the land all morning, had to show me up by climbing up into an avocado tree to bajar some aguacates. Thus, to my list of life goals I added, “to still be able to climb trees when I am an anciana.” (Other life goals include becoming a tuk-tuk driver and growing my own cilantro). Besides the avocados, we also gathered some frijoles, a chilecayote (looks like a watermelon, tastes like…?), and food for the rabbits. I was wondering how we were going to get it all home when Estella produced a big piece of fabric. I loaded up our harvest, tied together the corners of the fabric, and loaded it onto my back. I have never felt so legit in my life. Walking home I realized that if someone were to take a photo of me at that exact moment, it could probably be in one of those Peace Corps brochures that I spent so much time pouring over while I was dreaming about becoming a PCV. I’ve still got another month until that actually happens, but for a day of being useless, Monday turned out to be pretty great.

What to do when there is no school...

Thank God one of the other volunteers lives with a teacher in our school. Otherwise I would have spent all last night preparing my presentation, gotten up at 5:15 am, and arrived at the bus stop just to find that there were no teachers going to school. Even now I will have a bunch of extra food that I bought for a snack. Rule number one of giving teacher trainings is that you MUST bring a snack. This will be a lot easier when I have a kitchen (maybe with an oven…or toaster oven?) to make things myself, but for now there are plenty of bakeries everywhere that sell all kinds of delicious sweets and carbs. As if the tortillas weren’t enough. It is to the great frustration of all the female trainees that while the boys just keep losing weight from all the carbs, our bodies react in the opposite way. But I digress…

There was no school today. The teachers in our school finally decided to go to the strikes that have been going on since school was supposed to start maybe a month ago. The main reason, as I understand it, is that the government likes to wait 3 or 4 months before paying the teachers, and they haven’t sent school supplies or snack for the students. Let me stress that this is only how I understand the situation. In teacher meetings they speak really really fast and I can’t always understand the specifics of the debates. Anyway, for us no school means no work, so we had to postpone the teacher workshop that we were supposed to give this morning.

Instead I got to go to the town health center to talk to them about water regulation and quality. I found out that they really only test for E. Coli in the water and that although they do the testing, it is the municipality that is responsible for treating the water with chlorine. With a scarcity of funds a constant problem in the muni, I am not sure how often this treatment happens. In the community I work in, I don’t think the nacimineto (spring? natural water source?) is contained in a tank or structure, so water treatment isn’t really possible. It is also the most contaminated in the area, so it is really cool that Peace Corps recently donated a water filter to the school. However I don’t often see the kids drinking water… Anyway todo bien interesante and makes me excited about our work here.

On a less serious note, the pictures I am posting are real proof that I have a mysterious admirer who misses me and spells my name wrong all over the park (I am only joking, those of you who are worried about someone stalking the gringa). And FINALLY I got to take a picture in the molino (mill). The only problem was that the molino man was not as willing as he had said he would be, and only let me take a picture when my host mom told him it was just of the corn. He moved out of the way and I felt bad so I just snapped one quick one. He said he is tired of people always taking his picture and my host mom said “as if he were good looking. Ha.” I love her. I am also putting up pictures of a beauuuutiful sunset over the volcano . Enjoy.

Smells like my mom´s kitchen

Between searching out ingredients and skyping my little brother for cooking advice it took me all day- but I finally did it. I achieved a lasagna. My family took me to bargain in the market for the veggies, or more correctly, I took them to bargain in the market. My host aunt is a master negotiator, so I let her do most of the talking. There was no ricotta cheese to be found here in ******** (like that? I’m not supposed to name my town for security reasons. It makes me feel important and mysterious.) But I didn’t think it was worth the effort to bus it to the closest city just for ricotta cheese. I almost let this missing ingredient spoil my plans, but decided to forge ahead when I found the one and only hunk of mozzarella cheese in all the pueblo. The other thing that I was lacking was an oven. Well that’s not exactly true. We have an oven. It is used to store things…like salt. But gas is more expensive than fire wood so we don’t ever use it. My family was entirely ready and willing to go out and buy gas just so I could cook them some strange food. Luckily this was not necessary due to my intrepid skill at baking over a fire- huge shout out to Camp KOH…for girls and many Challenge trips. Despite the fact that I still need to perfect my recipe for homemade spaghetti sauce, I’d say it turned out pretty well. And yes- my family still ate it with tortillas…and sadly, so did I.

Skinny jeans were not made for playing soccer…

That was lesson number one of field based training.

Other related lessons include: empty street + rocks = great cancha (soccer field), and kids love to juggle with the gringos…no matter how awkward they are. It’s been a few years since I’ve broken out my soccer skills, and I must admit they are a bit rusty, but one of my favorite parts of FBT was getting to play with some of the others PCTs. Hopefully I will get more chances during my time here to use sports as a way to cross cultural boundaries and meet people. While Twin takes on the entire continent of Africa with this mission, I will do what I can with Guate.

The rest of the week was spent traveling to schools in other areas and observing ricon de salud after rincon de salud. We happened to time our visits right with carnival and were attacked quite viciously by children with handfuls of glitter and confetti…one of us even had the luck to have an egg cracked over her head. Those kids are ruthless.

During the week we toured some awesome PCV houses. One thing that I absolutely can’t wait for is to paint the room(s) in my house when I get it. Seems random, but you gotta have something to strive for. I was surprised at how nice the houses were, many with mini-fridges and guest beds (hint-hint potential visitors). It was great to get to know the other people in my training class better, especially because soon I will be paired with one of them to work for 2 years. I also found the best calzone of my life in Tecpan. And I don’t think it’s just because it was something other than beans and tortillas.

We got the opportunity to participate in a training workshop for teachers and school directors in the healthy schools program. It was encouraging to see the enthusiasm of the volunteers and teachers and get to visualize how our project works. Peace Corps is in the process of making Healthy Schools a sustainable program through implementing trainings at higher levels in the education system and hopefully eventually mandating the program by law. It’s exciting to be part of a project that has seen such results and that is working so diligently towards being sustainable in the education system even after we leave.

P.S.
I have included a picture of me in a very tropical, relaxing looking location that may make some of you again ask the question…did you really join Peace Corps? Maybe this picture will help you understand my life-strategy of making friends with ecotourism volunteers. They have water parks. Even if the one slide is deathly terrifying in its sheer speed and the shallowness of the water at the end- it’s worth it.

Gotta go. My fam is making choco-bananos for my study session this afternoon.

BEST BIRTHDAY EVER

I want to thank everyone who sent their love and birthday wishes from far away to help make it a wonderful day! For an entirely random reason, school was let out at 10:30, so I had a day to enjoy myself! I am finding, however, that school gets let out early for very many entirely random reasons. I got a phone call from Eli in Jordan at the exact moment that I was trying to buy a cuaderno, so I was the rude American on the cell phone at inappropriate times talking loudly and obnoxiously in English. That’s how much I love my twin. It was also fun when Jess called me while I was on the bus and she thought the ayudante was yelling “revolution, revolution,” when he was actually yelling “guate, guate.” I treated myself to an extravagant lunch that probably cost around $10 (Yes- that is what I consider extravagant) and even some Yogen Fruz (which I still can’t believe exists here)! All of this stuffing of my face was followed by pampering of my face with a facial at an organic macadamia farm. Mmmmm Macadamia oils…

But besides a video involving snow and tu-tus, it was my host family that really made my day. They said nothing about my birthday all day, but then came out with this huuuge dinner, bought me a beautiful cake (these things are expensive here), set off firecrackers as I was lighting the candles, and gave me presents. It was incredible. Firecrackers are a huge thing here. I often wake up to them around 5:30 am. They are used for basically any special occasion, and I felt like a real Guatemalan to have my very own firecrackers bothering the neighbors. As for the presents, my family makes their living partly by sewing, so they sewed me not one, but two BEAUTIFUL bags. I hate to make generalizations, but time and again, Guatemalans are just the most giving, generous people.

This birthday high was carried over yesterday when our group had our first training session with the teachers at our school. Our school has no running water, so if teachers want their kids to wash their hands, they have to send them down to the public pila (a big pool of water used by the community) to wash their hands and then hope they come back. So today with the teachers we made “Tippy-Tappies,” which are like makeshift water dispensers out of old bottles. Whether or not they will actually be used, we had a ton of fun bonding and lighting things on fire with the teachers. I will be sad to leave this school in a month.