Wednesday, October 26, 2011

planning projects, aka I am almost done asking for help

Time is going so quickly! Next week is November, which means we shouldn't be expecting any more rain, woohoo!! We've had several days of sun, so I have clean, dry clothes and purified water (I hand-wash and line-dry my clothes so if it rains a lot nothing dries, I also purify my water using the solar ray method, leaving a 2-3 liter bottle of tap water on the roof for a full day of sunshine). Now that the rain has stopped we have clear, cold nights, with so many stars! With so little pollution (light or otherwise) and the altitude, I think around 6,000ft, the view of the stars is amazing but it is quite chilly. I am sitting here in a jacket and scarf but during the day a t-shirt is still fine.

I will be turning in the SPA application soon to be reviewed in November. When I turn it in I need to show a breakdown of how the money for the project will be spent and where the money is coming from (split between the community contribution, the municipal donation, donations via Friends of Guatemala and then how much I am asking SPA for) so if anyone would like to donate to the stove project in Llano Grande and has not done so already, please send that off in the next week or so (and email me to let me know that you did so, there is a bit of lag time while FOG processes the checks-- katemhoffer@gmail.com).
And a huge thank you to everyone who has donated!! I sent postcards as well, I hope they got there OK since the mail system here isn't 100% reliable.

This coming weekend is Halloween, which is not celebrated here, and November 1st is Todos Santos (All Saints day), which is celebrated. My sitemates and I will be celebrating both holidays in Antigua or near Antigua. There is a kite festival in a community about half an hour away from Antigua on Todos Santos. Kites are starting to pop up all over the place; many are home-made with different colored crepe-paper and sticks. The traditional belief is that the kite symbolizes the connection between the world of the living and the world of the dead, one end held by the person on earth and the kite up above in the sky. In Sumpango, where the festival is held, the best and biggest kites in the whole country are displayed on Todos Santos. I will be posting pictures next week!
People here also re-paint and bring flowers to the tombs of their relatives/ancestors and on November 1st they take lunch and eat in the cemetery. It is a day to celebrate ancestors and honor them by visiting and decorating their graves.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

down in the valley

Cunen is in a valley ringed by mountains. It has its distinct advantages, one of which is a marked temperature difference from the higher mountain towns where it is only warm in the middle of the day when the sun is out. For the last two weeks it has been like living in a bowl of clouds. The sun has been out three days in the last two weeks and only one of those days did it stay out for long. The clouds drift in and sit, making it impossible to see past the lower mountains surrounding us.
I have always felt the effects of a lack of sunlight pretty quickly; after a few days with no sunshine it is much harder to get out of bed in the morning and I have very little energy throughout the day. The cold that has accompanied this rainy spell makes it that much harder to get out and do things. The only time I am warm is if I am hiking around, or in bed with lots of wool blankets. I haven't felt sad during this stretch of clouds and rain but it does sometimes feel like living in a dream world that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.
To cheer myself up and try to still accomplish things I make lots of hot tea, read online news to remind myself that the world outside of the cloud bowl still exists, and listen to Stevie Wonder-- I think it's literally impossible to listen to Stevie and not feel at least a little bit happier. I've also been reading a lot, as always, but because the rain has caused a lot of landslides that keep me from leaving home I have had an usually large amount of free time. I recently read The Feast of the Goat, about the Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic. It was a nicely layered story with good characters and lots of real Dominican history. I also read The Help, Year of Wonders, The 40 Rules of Love, The Hunger Games and am currently reading The Last Novel. Those are just the books I've read in the last two weeks. It has been rather nice, but I am hoping that the rain holds off and I can get back to work soon.
My sitemates have been doing mostly the same, we all share books and when we get tired of solitary activities we get together and cook. Melissa and Nicole both really like baking, so I have been eating more than my fair share of cinnamon rolls, cookies and scones. We were on Standfast for about a week, which means we cannot leave our community, and Melissa changed it to StandFEAST which describes pretty accurately what we've been doing. I get tired of sweet stuff after a while and crave salt and veggies so I've made sure we eat at least one regular meal a day with vegetables in it.

There have been a few days where the rain held off for long enough to safely get to the communities where I work. I have been pleasantly surprised by the commitment of the health promoters I am training. The groups have shrunk with time, but the people who are still attending the health talks are genuinely interested in helping their communities. Volunteerism is not as big here as in the states, so convincing people to sign up for a program where they will be doing health education for free was rather difficult. Now, after almost a year of working with the different groups I have three health promoter groups in three different communities. One only has three members, but they are really involved and have already given several health talks independently, even on days where I had to be somewhere else working. Another group has about six or seven promoters that show up regularly to meetings and they have been invaluable in doing all the house visits necessary before completing the SPA application. It has also been a great bonding experience to hike all over the mountains together visiting houses and joking and sharing our snacks. We even joke and laugh together, which I wasn't really expecting since they are from a very small, reserved community that is not hostile but definitely not warm to outsiders. In another community there is a group of eight to ten people that come to the trainings but its been a while since we had one. They live in one of the harder to get to communities and the road gets washed out when the rain is bad.
I was able to skype my friend Peter, who is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon, earlier today. It has been a really interesting experience staying in touch and comparing experiences. It's a great support to have someone that understands many of the frustrations of PC life (there are a lot of shared experiences, but also many differences) and its a reminder of how different each posting is. Signing up for Peace Corps, you don't really know where they're going to send you and my experience would be drastically different if I were living somewhere else. I am happy that I am where I am.

Monday, October 3, 2011

ain't no sunshine...

Oh I cannot wait for rainy season to be over. I think I have made it through the day with dry feet maybe once in the past week. And there are new mudslides pretty frequently on the main roads, so I haven't been out of northern Quiche since the beginning of September. The weather should improve towards the end of the month; I just have to aguantar (tolerate/bear) a few more weeks. The only thing that saves this season from being unbearable is the fog that rolls down the mountains and hangs over everything. It is really magical looking; especially in the afternoons before the rain when the dark thunderclouds gather behind the mountains and in the valley the clouds are low and misty.

The Hearts and Hands group was awesome, as usual. I really enjoy watching the group dynamic develop over the week. By mid-week each person has their tasks mastered in the stove-building process and my job as translator isn't so much to help them understand each other to build the stove, but to let the volunteers get to know the Guatemalan technician and the families who are receiving the stoves. It was an especially fun group of Canadian volunteers because all of them had been on a H&H trip before so they were already comfortable with the work, each other, climate/food changes and it was a smaller group than usual so we all bonded quickly.

Things are moving along with the stove project in Llano Grande. I met with community leaders from the Community Development Committee to put the final touches on the SPA application this morning. We only need a few more letters/signatures about municipal support and contracts for skilled labor and we'll be able to send it off for review.

Melissa and I started teaching English again after a summer break that was then extended to include the weeks around elections and independence day. It is fun to be working with our students again. I was impressed to hear how much they remembered after a few months without classes. We did a review class last week and will be starting with new material this Wednesday. They can introduce themselves, ask where someone is from, describe their families and hometowns and other things that are useful for basic conversation.

Sunday, which is pretty much always my day to relax, do laundry and go to the market was extra special this week. While walking the market circuit Melissa and I paused by an ayote. It is pumpkin-like gourd that Guatemalans prepare by boiling in cinnamon and brown sugar for Dia de los Santos (Nov 1st). We stood for a while and debated the pros and cons of buying it. It was huge and it was clear it would be difficult to break down for recipes, but I love pumpkin things in the fall and have been thinking about all the deliciousness that I am missing out on back home. We asked the price (10 quetzales, about a $1.25) and decided that it was worth a try. Several hours and one grater accident later, we were enjoying pumpkin bread (3 loaves) and ayote prepared the traditional Guatemalan way (enough for about 5 people) and we still had a fourth of the raw ayote!

It has been far too long since I put up pictures, I often forget to take my camera with me to events and then when I do take pictures the internet is so slow because of the rain that I haven't been able to upload any. I will work on that the next sunny day that I am around and at the computer.