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!

Response to Onjaatje

Ondaatje’s mix of poems, prose-poems and prose creates a vivid sense of what is happening in the story. It is ordered in a mainly chronological way, showing the progression of Billy the Kid and Garrett’s story, moving from friendship to an adversarial relationship. The poems capture the humanity and emotion of the characters with some storytelling elements while the prose sections provide a more traditional, clear sense of what is happening. The two forms complement each other, blending at places where poetry is a continuation of the story in prose and also where the richness of the language in prose feels like poetry. In blocks of prose like page 17, although visually resembling standard fiction the use of repetition and metaphor continue the poetic language of the poems that precede it, “But it was the color and light of the place that made me stay there, not my fever. It became a calm week. It was the color and the light.” It also softens the character Ondaatje is setting up for Billy the Kid, revealing his desire for calm and the simple pleasure of color and light. The repetition of the phrase, for me, created a feeling that was similar to guided meditation – repetition of a simple line, focused on the immediate elements of the surrounding environment. Ondaatje sets up the characters to be the gritty legends of the West while humanizing them, layering the fantastical with the trivial. For example: “He began to dream for the first time in his life. He would wake up in the mornings, his sheets soaked in urine 40% alcohol. He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldnt tell what they planned to do. His mind learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him” (28). This description of Pat Garrett is lyrical in the sense that it builds him up with poetic excesses (the flowers did not literally watch him.) It is also gritty and raw, describing his sheets soaked in urine, which was nearly half alcohol. The portrayal of death in the poems and prose also adds to the feeling of myth, but also hints at the rather desensitized killer that Bonney was: “believing then the moral of newspapers or gun / where bodies are mindless as paper flowers you dont feed” (11). By putting this at the beginning Ondaatje reminds the reader to keep this aspect of Billy the Kid in mind but then he does not return much to how he imagines Billy thinking about the murders he committed. The pictures and poems in the voice of the people in Bonney’s life add to the feeling of documentary but on the whole this book is more literary than documentary and imaginative rather than factual.