SO I haven't gotten my act together enough to post more than once a month, but this is an improvement from once every 4 months... Now I do have good excuses though. Work has gotten busier and busier lately; my coworkers at the Health Center and Posts finally realized that I'm here as a resource and and are all asking for collaboration on different health talks and series of capacity building talks. Its wonderful, and just what I've been hoping for all along, but also kind of overwhelming with everything else that is going on. K'iche' class is still happening twice a week in the evenings and giving into popular pressure from our Guatemalan coworkers my sitemate Melissa and I will be giving English Classes once a week as well.
Aside from work in-site my sitemates and I have recently gotten close with a family in town because all the young people are about our age and unmarried (gasp) so they have time to hang out with us and do fun things like play vollyball in the park. Most people our age here are already married with a few children, so my hopes for making friends my age were not high at all and this has made life in site a lot more fun! The last two weeks were the town fair in honor of our patron saint, the Virgin of Candelaria. There was the burning of the torito (look up online or see my facebook page for some entertaining videos and photos!)and los internacionales Conejos, the most popular marimba band in guatemala, came and played at our fair! Melissa and I were doing a translating project for the organization Hearts & Hands which is based out of Canada and works in Uspantan (the municipality next to ours) building improved woodburning stoves, schools and hopefully in the future latrines and other infrastructure projects. We invited some of the volunteers from Canada to come to see the Conejos and it was definitely a scene with that many grigos dancing in Cunen's central park!
Last weekend was my dear friend Elizabeth's birthday so I headed over to Xela and visited her in site, along with a few other friends. We don't see each other as often as I'd like since its a bit of a journey from where I live to pretty much anywhere but we keep in touch and visit usually at least once a month. There was a delicious birthday dinner and then we all went to bed fairly early to get up and hike Volcan Santa Maria the next morning.
The hike itself was grueling and showed me how far I have to go to actually be in shape but the view from the top made everything worth it! We camped the night and packed up after watching sunrise and our guide pointed out all the different volcanoes that were peeking out from above the clouds. I think the furthest ones we could see were the volcanoes closest to Antigua.
This weekend will be much calmer, I am thinking a hike to the waterfall tomorrow with a book. I also can't miss Sunday morning market because I've been out of fresh fruit and veggies for the last week and I'm tired of street food and oatmeal.
And, on an unrelated note (to life in Guatemala) congratulations to the protesters in Egypt!!
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