5 months mark in site

Hello, blog, after so many months! I have ´´located myself´´ in my new home of about 2,500-3,000 people for the next, now 1.5 years of my life. ´´¿Ya se halló?´´ they ask. I say located myself because that is an expression that many locals in my town ask me, ´´Have you located yourself?´´, especially when I first arrived. It is an interesting way to describe it, and it is one look into rural Guatemalan expressions. Sure, I think I´ve located myself since I got here. It is amazing to realize how time passes, while still things seem so slow here. Many times I like the slow pace of life here which means time to enjoy laying in my hammock reading a book (I´ve become a voracious reader here), but it also means that it´s hard to accomplish things however much one wants the ball rolling.

I wish I could summarize my first 5 months in site in one blog entry, but that´s tricky, and yet I´ll try. I will say that since I arrived I have lived in a cute, cozy little light blue house of two rooms (the living room/kitchen and bedroom). My ´´casita celeste´´ was completely furnished with furniture, shelves (an uncommon find in the common Guatemalan home), incredible bed, gas stove (also uncommon in the Guatemalan home because they use wood-burning stoves, sometimes supplemented by gas ones), and the uncommon toaster oven. But I don´t have a fridge, and sometimes I fantasize about getting one, but who knows, it´s kind of fun not relying on one just for the sake of it. I will mention that many of the neighborhood kids come over and we will bake banana bread, cookies, apple pie, and ´´pizzas.´´ I also don´t have a TV (didn´t in the US either but ironically I live next to the cable guy in town and almost everyone has a TV here). I suppose I lucked out, replacing a volunteer and getting the added benefit of belongings of another one who finished her service a few months before the one I replaced.

Over the course of the first few months, I painted the inside of the house (with the help of my site mate PCV in a neighboring town). The kitchen is ´´golden yellow´´ and the wall that is shared by the kitchen/living room and the bedroom is ´´mandarin orange´´, and the bedroom is ´´fuchsia pink.´´ I like to think of the ambiance as parallel to that of the cycle of the day when one arrives at my house. Well, when I arrive at my house because I arrive alone, if not with my adopted street dog ´´Little,´´ known to Guatemalans as ´´Cochinita,´´ the little dirty one (she´s not that dirty though has fleas like almost every dog here), or if the family compound dog ´´María´´ isn´t already found sleeping on my small patio with her puppies (she knows that I will feed her). Back to the paint, picture arriving at my house to a blue-skied façade and upon entering you are hit with the sun, and as you walk to the bedroom you will experience the sunset of orange and then pink. Well, that was the idea I had in mind. Maybe I do have too much time on my hands.

Looking out of my house from my front door, my garden area is a huge, (nicely?) overgrown and secluded area with, to the right, a peach tree that is currently being suffocated by a guisquil plant—Guatemalan veggie that´s not so tasty—grown by the owner´s older relative and, to the left of the garden, one finds many coffee trees.

Walking out my door on my patio to the left you will see my pila sink to wash clothes and dishes, from which for the first month in site water ceased to gush out (my situation was that I had water for one hour/week). It got to the point where my neighbors let me wash my clothes in their house, or that they brought water in a ´´tinaja´´ bucket. What a nightmare, for my first few months in site, the end of the dry season, to hardly have water. That seems like a dream to me now, in the middle of the rainy season, where I find it an amenity to be able to turn my one bathroom faucet on at almost any hour now (hot water faucet doesn´t exist here except in fancy places) and wash my hands (también con jabón—yes I´ve been too much in my ´´Healthy Schools´´ mode) without the little bucket from the pila. Anywayz, de repente, even now water could just not be there when I turn the faucet. Even more fun, like a game, is when I flush the toilet whether I will hear that ´´clunck´´ sound which means the water´s turned off. It´s usually always a surprise each and every time prefaced by the question, ¿hmm, will there be water? As for showering, I have an electricity-powered shower head, a nice change from my first 3 months in my training town of bucket baths. Taking showers is another game, adjusting the knob to that perfect equilibrium of hotness of the light dimming. If the light becomes brighter thus the water cold, I lose, but if it remains dim with low pressure and still hot,I´m a winner. I don´t know if that makes sense. Anyway, I´ve taken only one bucket bath since I´ve been in my house (only because the power was out for the first half of the day), and I actually enjoyed it because the pressure on the shower head isn´t super if you want some warm water. There was something very natural and thus enjoyable about remembering what a bucket bath was like at this moment. Who knew I could write an entire paragraph about water?

If you walk ´´recto´´ directly out of my yard, there is a rooster and hen coop owned by my neighbors, from which the calls of the rooster can be heard at all hours of the day (not only during the sunrise and sunset, as goes the misconception). I remember once my neighbor Doña Isabel carrying two chickens by the neck, and I asked her if they were for lunch, to which she replied affirmatively.

The scenery surrounding my small town is beautiful, hills and mountains. In and around town amongst the mostly small one-level lamina roofed and block houses, one can find corn (edible ´´elote´´ which with time turns into maíz—made into tortillas, the Guatemalan staple food), beans, coffee, and all sorts of trees like peaches and limes. It also vale la pena to mention that as one walks through my town, most greet in a usually sing-songy Spanish, for example, ´´Buuuueeennnoos dìììììaaas, que le vaya bien,`` as one notices the chickens and stary dogs romping about.

It all sounds so exotic as I write this, trying to remember myself before I came to Guatemala, but I´m just a normal person living in a normal place. You can see my pictures in Picassa for more of a visual, listed under ´´Más de mi casita azul´´.

Yesterday was an interesting moment that reminded me to keep up the task of blogging. As usual, I was waiting for a pickup truck (´´picop´´ in Spanish, or just ´´carro´´) to come home from one of the three further out towns where I facilitate the Healthy Schools program in elementary schools. One of the teachers gets in the last spot in the front of the pickup (the more comfortable location) while a few guys are in the back sitting on huge avocado sack mounds in the ´´palangana´´ or back of the truck. I animate myself to the task and jump on the back, somewhat sleepy, as I hold on to these sacks as the truck bumps to and fro, up and down. I think to myself, how wacky this situation is, to be sitting on these avocadoes, and imaging what someone in the US would think of this. To my 8-months eyes in Guatemala, mostly it was weird because avocadoes are out of season. I remember when they were in season, they only cost 1Q, but about a week ago they were costing 4Q.

My weekly routine consists of giving two 45-minute classes (two of my five work days) at a teacher´s high school in my town SMV (where the Mayan languages Kiche and Tzutijil are spoken) and visiting three elementary schools located in surrounding smaller ´´caseríos´´ or towns. These elementary schools are currently realizing the Healthy Schools program (the other three work days). For the elementary schools (where the Mayan language Kiche is spoken), I will generally visit each one once a week or once a month to meet with the teachers and maybe observe health classes and add a dynamic like a song or suggestion. I also go to see that the students are carrying out the systems of hand washing before snack and brushing their teeth after it. Two of the schools have two classrooms with about 25-30 students in each school (that is to say, multi-grade classrooms with three grades in one classroom and three grades in the other), and the third has four classrooms (one kindergarten, one first and second grades, one third and fourth grades and one fifth and sixth grades). I visit the elementary schools less frequently because I am a second generation volunteer, and ideally these schools are more independent. Once a month I am to give health talks to mothers of the students at each of the three schools. So far, I have given two types of talks with all three mothers´ groups (one on kitchen hygiene which included them making a flytrap using a 3.3-liter soda bottle (I know so big compared to the US), and one on dental hygiene which included me boiling white eggs and soaking them in coke overnight and having the mothers brush them clean---it´s all about the hands-on activities!). I´ve only done two because the first three months I was getting used to being here, and likewise they were getting used to me being here. It is interesting how long it takes to build confidence here, maybe because it is in a rural area.

Today was an even more unusual day. I began the day of ´´lo normal´´ going to the high school to give one of the two weekly classes on the Healthy Schools program to the students there who will become certified elementary teachers when they finish 12th grade. (We played a Jeopardy-style game to review some material covered). Afterwards, I met with the PC mason in the small center of town, consisting of a Catholic church and its adjacent parochial salon, the almost finished new municipality building (which has taken them more than 8 years to complete, hearsay) and basketball court. I have been trying to get him to come to my town for 5 months, since I arrived. So, imagine the unusual part of this. We go in his ´´single traction´´ pick up truck to the first school in a small town I will call Caserío C, to write up the plans and materials list to convert their latrines into flushable toilets. Then we drive on to the second school in small town Caserío T, to examine the kitchen remodeling they want to realize (as background information, elementary schools here have kitchens—usually they have ´´estufas mejoradas´´ or stoves with the wood-burning component but enclosed with a stovetop metal part and a chimney for the smoke to go out—because the mothers of students come to make a snack. The school day here is much shorter than in the US. It is from 7:30 am-12:30 pm and snack is around 10:30). Then, we leave his truck parked and make the 1-2 kilometer trek down to Caserío P, walking down because the roads are so bad from the rainy season that only a ´´double traction´´ car will make it. As we walk down, the misty fog comes in, announcing the predictable arriving afternoon rain, leaving dew drops on our hair and eyebrows as we discuss the process and continuation of the three desired projects I hope become a reality at all three schools. These roads are so bad that 1-2 kilometers feels more like 5 kilometers. But at least it was downhill and not the uphill I halfway attempted once before a car showed up. The view, on a clear day, is gorgeous, with the ability to see a bird´s eye landscape all the way to the Pacific coast. Between Caserío T and Caserío P, there is a part (30 meters long) where only a pickup truck can fit, with cliffs on either side. Dangerous but exciting. At Caserío P, he makes an assessment of the desired project of hand washing stations there. As you may imagine, we waited for a pickup for the return trip—which turned out to be an adventure because it began to rain and we were soaked standing up holding on to the bars of the pickup). This is the first time I have visited all three elementary schools in one day. In the end, it is decided to plan to get the hand washing stations project set up as a priority because the other two school s already have hand washing stations. This means I have to write the grant, which comes directly from a US institution, meaning I have to complete it in English. There´s some more drama involving this day, but it´s mostly interpersonal amongst the schools´ characters involved and it would be hard to catch up with it.

Word, I will try to keep this blog updated more often. There´s still so much I haven´t said, but at least I´ve planted some of the background here to give more context. With all the crazy ups and downs, I´m enjoying this experience. It is a one in a lifetime experience. 27 months of my life here is not much as compared with a lifetime. It´s worth every second, even the difficult moments. It´s hard missing loved ones at home, but I realize now after these 8 months in Guatemala who at home are truly loved ones based on those who respect me for my aspirations and independence to come here and try to make a (if even small ´´gotita´´) difference in the future of Guatemalan health.