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.