De Paseo...Vacaciones...

The school year winded down in October, and I´d like to reflect on some experiences in summary. Even though I am on school vacation, until now I hadn’t gotten the ´´ganas´´ to update a blog, because it seems like the days pass by so quickly and even though life is generally slow here, something always seems to fill them, so, en fin, I am deciding to write some…
….top highlights of my service so far:
1. Experiencing the change of weather from rainy season to dry season, the latter also known as summer, although the current coldness experienced especially at night during this rainy to dry transition leads me to believe it would be wise to leave it at ´´dry season´´. Let me just say that I´m happy that if I wash my clothes in the pila, they are dry by the end of the day for all the sun.
2. Getting rid of lice and nits only after two women from town had picked out louse by louse from my hair for an hour and me crushing them with my almost-no fingernails on a wooden board, two shampoos within a week of each other (one for only Q5—less than a dollar—from the US, and the other is called Sarpiol from here that a friend in town ´´regalar´´ed me), a fine comb involving lots of brushing, and much washing of my clothes, sheets and blankets to finally rid them (for the moment!). Fortunately the flea problem in my bed has subsided, but usually when Cochinita is around those critters sometimes get me and love to bite around my waist, ankle and wrists. Apparently taking Vitamin B1 makes my blood less tasty to them.
3. Mountain bike ride from Panajachel to Sololá to San José Chacaya to Santa Lucía Utatlán (uphill basically the entire way) and back to Pana.
4. The process of implementing the construction of a hand washing station at my most rural school. I worked with some of the most amazing and sincere people I´ve ever met who are members of the school board, and unfortunately I found out they are changing. Now the school lacks the water tank because there´s not always water coming to school, like in the case of my house… (I´m not looking forward to the dry season.)
5. My students in 12th grade, Section A, from the teacher´s high school, leaving a project of soap dispensers in the boys and girls bathrooms (whereas before there was only one available in the staff´s bathroom).
6. Self-initiating a ´´Healthy Schools´´ table at the teacher´s high school yearly ´´Expo Mágico´´ or ´´Magic Expo´´ in celebration of ´´Día del Niño´´ or ´´Children´s Day´´ during which children all around the area come to participate in magic tricks, educational games, small scientific experiments and puzzles. A few of the high school students dressed up as clowns. My activities included food puzzles, a ´´personal hygiene´´ snake-and-ladder style game, ´´good and bad hygiene habits´´ memory games, my two cow teeth jars experiment demonstration—one with white teeth (´´having brushed one´s teeth´´) and the other having been soaked in coca cola (´´not having brushed one´s teeth´´), and a nutritional basketball game. The latter was most successful but I realize now that I will need more than myself if I´m going to have so many activities at my table if I do the same next year. Fortunately a friend from the junior high school helped me out towards the end. Adding a puppet show to the activities would be a nice addition.
7. Having talks with mothers of the three schools where I work on the contamination cycle, on kitchen hygiene using a fly trap bottle inside which you place coke or sugar water to attract the flies, on dental hygiene using hard-boiled eggs and real cow teeth from the market dipped in coke. Only at one school was I able to touch the theme of nutrition including the importance of foods that provide growth, energy and protection. The mothers, teachers and I all contributed money. We made a vegetable salad out of mostly raw vegetables (beets, celery, cucumber, tomato, cabbage, carrot, radishes, onions, cooked potatoes, hard-boiled eggs) with of course beans, rice and tortillas, and a ´´coctel de frutas´´ or fruit salad of apples, oranges and of course bananas to which sugar was added (like to most things here—including coffee). Afterwards, the students, mothers, teachers, and I all enjoyed this meal that included all three of the criteria of growth, energy and protection. The objective of the lesson was to show that every meal include foods from each of these three food groups in order to have a nutritious body. The women joked that maybe they would get a stomachache from eating so many raw vegetables, most with the skin, because they are used to eating them cooked and without the skin, but I explained to them that there is more nutritional value (vitamins) eating vegetables raw and with the skin.
8. My first Interpreting experience for a medical mission in Godines, Sololá, for US doctors as part of the organization ``Partners for Surgery´´ or in Spanish, ´´Compañero en Salud´´ was valuable, stimulating and revealing that I want to go into medicine! The day involved short consultations meant to assess whether there was need for a surgery in a hospital in Antigua. About 30 people arrived, a small number according to the doctors, 15 of which I helped interpret for (there was another PCV in another room interpreting). There was also a Caqchikel interpreter, so there was sometimes this chain cycle of English-Spanish-Caqchikel-Spanish-English. Very interesting, and I imagine a lot was lost in translation but the basic idea was understood.

Most cases involved people having cysts, some more detrimental than others. Some involved children with retardations, some because of an infection received as a baby from which nothing could be done, which is so sad because it demonstrated the importance of not only taking care of a medical issue rapidly when it happens, but also making me realize the importance of my work in health prevention in children. A few children had the ´´cleft palate´´ (´´palador hendido´´) lip and needed another operation. Many women had problems with their periods as a result of too many children. Other cases were for gallstones (´´calculos biliares´´) which needed operations. Others were of children with hernias, more common in boys but there was at least one girl with one. One interesting case was of an older woman who had a horrible skin infection below her eye (the only picture I took because the doctors wanted a visual). According to her and her daughter, it was a result of a piece of wood from carrying firewood that got stuck in her skin below her eye there some many years ago and she thought she had taken it out but somehow it hadn’t and so they waited for years to get it fixed, each year it getting worse. Who knows the validity of the story, but it makes me realize again how amazing it is that people will wait so long before getting medical treatment, in this case for poverty, for nerves or other reasons.
One of the two doctors even performed two simple cyst surgeries right there in the school where the medical mission took place. I was told that performing surgeries like this the day of the consultations is rare, and I wish I had taken pictures. One was on a woman who had a cyst in her nose which was an easy operation, and the other was on a woman who had a cyst in her hand which was trickier because it was stuck to a tendon.
9. I joined the Christmas championship basketball games on the team ´´Stars´´ (some of the team´s names are in English or come from US basketball teams—like Heat, Spurs, Wizards, Sundae, Revolution, Central, Djleaks—while others are in Spanish or the local Mayan language Tzujtujil—Sajbin, Chavajay (the latter two are last names in town), Nisvem (I heard each letter represents the first letter of the players´ names), TZ, Chuacrus, Chuixoral, Rosario (the latter three referring to the same sector in town), Estrellas Visitecas. Anyway, I realize how community-uniting these games are and it is fun to be the only gringa and the tallest one on the court, even if I can´t really play and haven´t since elementary school, although everyone believes I should be making all the baskets because I come from the country where the sport was born. All of the teams have these fancy uniforms, including our team, but they misspelled my last name Cooklin on the back of the jersey, which I find more than anything very funny than a nuisance.
10. Workshops at ``Pura Vida´´ (see http://www.puravidaatitlan.org), a local NGO based in San Marcos La Laguna started by a German that provides a recyclable and useful solution to inorganic trash by creating infrastructures out of it. I plan to tell teachers about this for school infrastructure projects.
11. Lots of awareness of the gift of giving, becoming closer with people in my town and having conversations is priceless.
12. Going to my town´s market (´´plaza´´) more, whereas before I was working visiting schools when it was happening.
13. Fresh produce. Eating new fruits like the anona, jocotes, and camotes. On market days (Monday and Friday in my town and Tuesday and Saturday in neighboring town), having fresh produce available that is grown locally, thus only eating what is available (mostly there are seasons with fruits—except for the always available bananas…*cough* you may remember the United Fruit Company?). For example, the season for apples just ended whereas oranges, mandarins, coconuts and jocotes are in high abundance. In the past two weeks, I´ve had two coconuts, drinking the mouth-watering milk and eating the lusciously juicy meat. I can´t wait for mangoes to make a come back in January! I also don´t have a fridge, and there is no need for it with so many market days.
14. Learning little by little the languages Kiche, Tzujtujil and a mixture of both, and getting a kick out of townspeople, especially the older ones, laughing at me every time I try to speak.
15. As I write this, drinking the coffee that came from, if not from out of my yard, then from the land owned by the family of the house.
16. The joy of el azar or randomness, including the occasional but short-lived electricity outages, surprise visits to my house, and question of whether at any moment I will have water.
17. The beauty of ´´paseando´´ and hiking.
18. Visiting another volunteer near the warm climate of El Palmar, Quetzaltenango, for Thanksgiving with fellow volunteers, and eating a fresh ´´chompipa´´ (female turkey-- I don´t know if I ever thought about the gender of the turkey I ate in the US before I became a vegetarian). I´m not really vegetarian anymore here mostly because the meat industry here is locally based and also because it is embedded in the culture and I want to accept and try out new foods that are given to me. Anyway, this turkey came from the back patio of a site mate volunteer who is in the town neighboring mine. We also ate so many potluck side dishes, including stuffing, green bean casserole, potato casserole, cranberry casserole, pineapple cornbread, eclectic vegetable salad, mac not cheese dish (using nutritional yeast), beet gazpacho, and if that wasn´t enough, for dessert: apple pie, chocolate cake, Sarita´s Neapolitan ice cream. The next day, we swam in one of his rivers, Nima Dos… so much fun, and I got burnt. Mmmm, it was so warm. After visiting San Felipe, the night involved a dance party and a limbo competition. Fun times.
19. Looking forward to going home for two weeks for Christmas and New Year´s.
20. Hoping for more positive experiences including a successful and productive year in 2009!