stoves, health talks and justin bieber

As I predicted in the last post, life has been terribly (wonderfully) busy in the last few weeks. I had a week doing regular work in-site after Spanish week and then it was a long but fun week with Hearts and Hands, a Canadian organization that works in Uspantan (the municipality next to where I live). The other two times that I've worked with them the groups have been primarily made-up of middle-aged and retired people but this trip was a high school and a few teachers.
By the end of the week I was entirely exhausted but so happy to have participated again. Each time is so different and I think this group was my favorite (shout-out to group #2/5 if you see this!!). My team and I did some great bonding over the course of the week. Each day we got out work done a bit more efficiently and with more jokes and fun. On April 1st (April fools day!) my team took control of the walkie-talkie and sang some J. Bieber to the other teams as they worked. I know it was greatly appreciated. The goal was to finish four stoves a day, and although we didn't meet that goal the first day or two we were finishing four with extra time left by the end of the week. It was also great to watch my group get more comfortable interacting with the Guatemalan families, most of the time they didn't really need me to translate to communicate with the kids. While I explained how to maintain the stoves to the families Kayley, Janine and Aaron would be playing Frisbee or coloring with the kids. The week ended with a nice goodbye dinner and a thank you/ cultural night that went wayyyy too long. I was on stage translating and started losing hope of it ever ending when it had been 3 hours and there were no signs of it stopping. Guatemalan ceremonies are always really sweet but then they go for hours and hours and that would normally be space-out time after an hour or so but since I had to translate I had to pay REALLY close attention to everything that was being said. Oh well, all-in-all it was a wonderful week and I miss my awesome team!!
This past week was back to normal work, I had several women's group meetings and some health promoter meetings. The picture I put up is of me and my coworkers in Chutuj. Now I'm off to one of the communities for an afternoon health talk, today's topic is trash management: health and the environment.