standfast and back to site

So it’s been quite a while since I updated but that is because in-site my routines are pretty constant and relatively unexciting but enjoyable. My work week starts off with an exhausting early morning charla with different women’s groups on Monday and then house visits for several hours after. The rest of the week I do mostly school charlas, which I will have to find replacements for soon since the school year ends in October. I am hoping that the women’s groups I work with will be able to meet more frequently and I am also hoping to talk to the Doctor about forming health promoter groups again. I already brought it up, but it’s been a while and no action has happened so I’m guessing with everything else he has to do it has been forgotten.
That has been my work life. I was stuck in Xela for a few days because of mudslides about a week ago and that was frustrating but also nice because I’ve not spent much time there and there are so many cool places to visit. I am a creature of habit and did not see half of what I could have, instead sticking to the same couple of coffee shops, the Mennonite bake shop and the bookstore (where I went through as many of their Joan Didion collection as possible—while I was there I read Salvador, Run River and The Last Thing He Wanted). Melissa and I also checked out the museum in the central park, which was amusing only for the haphazard and random collection of items, ranging from vintage soda bottles to a variety of fetuses, including human.
In the last week my host sister had her birthday and in an effort to celebrate Melissa and I baked a delicious but ugly as sin German Chocolate cake. I will put up photos for the amusement of those who know how to make baked goods look pretty.

shelves, fleas and basketball

Now that I have been in-site for a month I am feeling a bit more settled and less glaringly new—not that I don’t have a long way to go yet, but I know which microbuses go to the communities I work in and how much they should cost; I know who to contact if I am trying to do health talks in schools, the women’s groups I have been trying to start are finally coming together and I am looking for different groups that would be interested in health talks and activities. Oh dear, I am still doing run-on sentences. It is just difficult to not relate everything to everything and punctuation seems like an inappropriate division of all that I feel should stay connected. Or I’m just being grammatically lazy.

In other news, I just fought a flea off my leg. I have been on and off questioning whether I have fleas or not, but once and I while I actually catch them at work. I have been lucky enough not to have a total infestation, just a few random bites—nothing compared to some legs that I saw at our swear-in ceremony or at the Huehue/Quiche welcome party last weekend. Of all the bugs that I fearfully anticipated before arriving in-country (spiders being at the top of the list) fleas did not cross my mind. I have really only associated them with cats and dogs, and since my parents were always vigilant about collars and powders with our pets, this is my first actual encounter with them. They are pesky and the itching can lead to sleep-loss but they pale in comparison to the brown recluse and its leggy cousins. Speaking of which, I am convinced I saw a brown recluse crawl across my suitcase the other day, but it may just be my brain turning every medium-size brown spider into worst-case scenario spider.

Today my site-mate Melissa and I finally braved the doorway of the carpenter and ordered bookcases and shelves. Living out of suitcases is getting old, and the word shelving has made it into our conversations almost ever day since we arrived in-site. I feel that this is a major accomplishment and will be even more pleased when these shelves grace my walls and may even merit a picture of my living situation, which I have avoided up until now due to the general bag-lady appearance of things.

The annual Quiche health workers event is coming up at the beginning of next month and to celebrate they hold various competitions, including basketball games where teams from each health center or hospital compete. I have always cowered on the basketball court; my teammates can depend on me not being where the action is and cringing if the ball comes too close to my body. I am mystified at the events leading up to me going to practice the last few days. I think that it is so that my co-workers have a chance to laugh at me. I was put to shame by women wearing long skirts and sandals while I ineptly ran about the court missing passes and hoping the other players forgot I was there. Oh well, its community integration if people are laughing at/with me, right?

finally a real PCV!

Tomorrow is three months in country; I can’t believe how quickly the time is passing. Three months ago today I was in Atlanta just meeting all the other nominees/trainees now volunteers. We’ve certainly come a long way from there but it’s still only the beginning, and that is so exciting. I think the next couple months will feel a bit slower because I am just getting used to my new home here in the Western Highlands. The town is absolutely beautiful and I’ve been out to a few of the aldeas (smaller towns connected to the municipality) and will start doing workshops there next week. The two rural health technicians that Melissa, my site mate, and I work with are awesome, very “pilas” as they say here (literal translation is battery— think energizer bunny, that used to be an expression, right?). Today we were out visiting one of the aldeas that is prioritized because of high rates of maternal mortality and malnutrition. While we were out, we made plans for health talks with a few school directors and scheduled a meeting with community leaders to introduce our project and to insure their support of our presence in the community. We walked back to the highway because the health worker with a car had moved on to another community to do vaccinations. It took about two hours to get back, but it was a gorgeous walk through the mountains and the air was cool from the clouds hanging low around valleys.
I know I am going to be happy here because everyone has been really friendly so far. There is certainly plenty of work to do, and I do like to be busy. Also, I don’t know if I could be unhappy when I know there will be no snow in my life until 2012!! I love the weather here; it is never really cold or very hot. Another lovely contribution to my happiness is the French press I bought myself in Antigua. I drink fabulous coffee twice a day and there is a great bakery in town where I buy royales (similar to a scone but slightly less dense and less sweet). My other favorite thing beside the work is my free time to read and chill. Ben Harper makes me so happy, the more I listen to him, the more I love him. I’m listening to his album “Fight for your mind” right now and my host sister is beside me doing her homework. She is in kindergarten and is working on capital and lowercase letters and numbers. She reads everything to me so it took over an hour to write less than a page but it was fun because she is totally adorable and keeps asking me to translate what I’m writing, which is good practice.
I am currently in the middle of Madame Bovary and still haven’t figured out if I like it or not. The writing is good but the characters aren’t terribly likable or interesting. Perhaps things will pick up in the second half. Before this, I was reading “Mirrors” by Eduardo Galeano, who, as many of you know, is one my all-time favorites. It wasn’t his best book, it wandered a bit, but I still love him. It was a fairly feminist book, which didn’t surprise me since he is an amazing person and really political and if you are going to get into the politics of humanity it is difficult to ignore the participation, or rather the exclusion, of women in the history of politics. Perhaps in my post-Peace Corps travels I will get to travel to Uruguay and just wander around until I “coincidentally” run into him. Haha that would never happen but its OK to dream, right?
Well, I am about to continue coloring my health stories (one of our dynamic teaching methods) and listening to Mr. Harper. My host sister is done with her homework and is drawing butterflies now.
I wrote all this last Thursday but haven’t had a good enough internet connection until today to post it. I still stand by the sentiments of last week and will give more updates soon!

I just got back from Field Based Training and it was excellent! We had a great volunteer hosting us and all the presentations and activities had good attendance and, for the most part, good participation. I was in Totonicapán, which is a good bit colder than where I live now. That was not my favorite part of the trip but it warmed up during the day and the sky and mountains are beautiful at that elevation.
We gave charlas (talks) on disaster preparedness, nutrition with a cooking class where we made beet tortas, hand washing and soap making, family planning with a group of midwives, an HIV/AIDS workshop with a high school, and diarrhea and a home recipe for oral rehydration solution. We also walked around the local market and made a risk map (hygiene, food preparation, street dogs, standing water, and disposal of garbage) and presented it to the local health center. The groups were all indigenous and spoke Quiche but for the most part understood Spanish or had a member that was able to translate for us.
It was good practice giving charlas and thinking about how to become integrated into the community I’ll be placed it. It sounds like the first three months are the toughest but if I work hard to make connections with the health center, municipality and other groups that by six months I should have some enthusiasm and by a year, hopefully things will be going smoothly.
The other excitement of the week was the start of the world cup in South Africa. We woke up at six on Friday to watch the opening ceremony and sat in the comedor until eight-thirty watching the Mexico/South Africa game. The place we went for lunch had the TV on as well so we were able to watch part of the Uruguay/France game and on Saturday we left Totonicapán early in the morning and stopped at eight for breakfast and the Argentina/Nigeria game.
** I wrote this post a week ago and only just now got the chance to post it! Oh spotty internet… This week has been intense and interesting as well; our group did two more HIV/AIDS workshops and our individual charlas, which I felt went really well. On a more personal note I’ve gotten a lot more personal writing done, which is why I’ve been slower with email correspondence, etc. I’m feeling rather introspective because I really haven’t spent this much time outside of the US before and it is strange that I don’t miss it terribly but it does make me think a lot about life back home.

after agatha

Dear Everyone,

I’ve been in Guatemala over a month now! I can’t believe how quickly time is passing now that I sort of have a routine. Highlights of last week include: language evaluation interviews (everyone in our group moved up, so success on all fronts!), house visits with a local midwife, preparing and practicing health presentations and more language classes. We were supposed to have an activity on Saturday but, for anyone who hasn’t been watching the news, there was a major tropical storm and a volcanic eruption near Guatemala City so needless to say we were flightless birds for the weekend. Most of our activities for this week are re-arranged as well but not too much was cancelled, so life carries on.
Next week is Field Based Training so I’ll be doing a lot more presentations and in-site training, which is super exciting! This will be a lot more like what we’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis when we’re volunteers, except we’ll be working more with our Guatemalan counterparts and not so much with other Americans.
In other news, because of the storm there was a bit more relaxation time over the weekend, so when I wasn’t with my family I was reading and so far I’ve gotten through The Inheritance of Loss by Kieran Desai—an excellent book, beautiful imagery!! Also, This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald, which was disappointingly similar to his other books with less emotional impact. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was amazing; I loved the voice and use of graphics. Now I’m bouncing between poetry (Cesár Vallejo and a book of Guatemala’s best lyric poetry I found in the Peace Corps library) and The Count of Monte Cristo, which is so absorbing! I woke up early this morning and felt too chilly to get in a cold shower so instead I read for 45 minutes before breakfast.
Other highlights of this week were good conversations with the host family, FRIED PLAINTAINS and a lot of bonding within our peace corps training group over the schedule changes and figuring things out together.

mi vida guatemalteca

I’ve been in country now for a little over two weeks which is still super-new, as I am reminded every time our group meets PCVs who have been here a year or more. Language classes are going well and yesterday instead of a technical training session we went to visit a current volunteer in the Healthy Homes project. It was exciting to see how comfortable she felt in her community and in the work. We visited a school where she had the students make their own shampoo out of water, aloe vera, shampoo concentrate bought in Guatemala City and little bit of salt and fragrance. The students were around 10 or 11 I think and really excited to have us in the class, they let us practice “filleting” the aloe leaves and invited us to play a chaotic game of soccer at recess. They had Kaqchikel words hanging around the classroom and I asked one of the girls to teach me how to say some of them. I’m not sure how well I did but we both laughed when I messed up and I might get the opportunity later to actually learn some Kaqchikel (if that is the language spoken where I am eventually placed).
On Tuesday my host mom made Pepían which is a local specialty and it was delicious! It is meat (beef for mine but I think it can vary) and a sauce made from some special blend of peppers and spices that looks a little like mole. My host family and I get most of our bonding time around the dinner table; after dinner we usually sit and talk for a long time, I’m definitely going to miss them when we get our new locations.
Last Saturday we went together for lunch to Chimaltenango where the youngest daughter goes to school. It is a slightly higher elevation there, it was a little cooler and there were lots of pine trees. It was a beautiful day and we had a picnic outside of her dorm building. My host mom picked up Pollo Campero (kind of like KFC) and brought mangos from home. We didn’t stay long because she had homework but it was fun to see a little more of the country.
We´ll be seeing Guatemala City soon and will be doing field based training in another department (similar to states in the US there are 22 departments in Guatemala).

First post from Guate!

Dear Everyone,

I’ve been here in Guatemala for about two weeks now and things finally slowed down enough to write a bit. I am staying with a host family in a town near Antigua and this will be home until the swearing-in ceremony at the end of July when I become a real Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)! The next three-ish months are the most intense in terms of scheduled activities, when I’m off on my own without the PC framework it will certainly be more emotionally intense.
I have language class six days a week for either seven or four hours; some days are half language and half technical training. Yesterday and today we spent the afternoon in technical training learning about health statistics in Guatemala and projects Peace Corps has started to combat a few of them. For the first year we will be doing talks to increase awareness in rural communities about basic hygiene and infection-control (hand washing, water purification, food preparation, etc). The water here is so bad we aren’t even supposed to brush our teeth with it and its not only bad for us, Guatemalans aren’t supposed to drink it either because it is so contaminated.
On a more personal note, I already feel like part of the family here. My host mom, dad and three sisters are awesome and so welcoming! I’ve already had a lot of great conversations with all of them except the youngest, who is away at a boarding school all week. My host mom makes great food, tons of corn tortillas, beans, eggs, tamales and sometimes meat and vegetables. A crazy coincidence is their dog—he’s a black lab named Shadow, in English, not Spanish!!
The other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) are great, a good support system and they made my birthday a blast. We went up on another trainee’s roof, had cake and tea her host mom brought up, listened to music and watched the sunset. Twenty-three doesn’t feel that old but maybe it’s just the transitioning cultures that makes me feel like a kid again (being led around, learning societal norms, living with a family…). Whatever it is, I feel great here (fingers crossed, the PC Guatemala staff said we’d all get at least a little sick at some point) and am so excited to learn more about “Hogares Saludables” (Healthy Homes). It used to be Rural Home Preventative Health but that is a mouthful, the new name transmits the same basic message with a catchier title. The only thing I miss (beside family and friends!) is a good cup of coffee. The best beans are exported and most Guatemalans drink instant coffee; I almost got misty-eyed on the bus the other day thinking about a good latte from Nicholas’s downtown but then I realized I was getting emotional over a beverage and changed topics (mentally). Well, that is all for now, besos y abrazos de Guate!