Hot Water Please

Here are a few more observations…

My main mode of transportation is old Indiana school buses. I take the Brownsburg, Crown Point and Tippecanoe Valley School Corporation buses on a daily basis. I think that I have found something to do when I get back, export old school buses to Guatemala. In addition to the daily yellow school buses I have to take “chicken bus” to get anywhere other than Santa Lucia. “Chicken Buses” are very colorfully decorated school buses that will take you any where you need to go. We all know that school buses are designed for 3 small children to a seat, well someone failed to mention that to the Guatemalans because they like to fit 3 large adults to one seat. Let me just say that I have become very intimate with several Guatemalans. For example, this past Sunday I, along with some other trainees, ventured to Antigua for the day. On the way home I was sitting with two oversided lovers with a little girl sitting on my lap and her mother straddling my legs. In about an area of one school bus seat there were four adults and one child! Another fascinating experience was my first trip to Antigua. When the bus left Magdalena all the seats were filled with three people and the aisle was almost full. Although the bus was bursting at the seams, we still picked up people, by the time we arrived in Antigua there were a good 120 people on the bus. Instead of thinking about money in terms of time, Guatemaltecos think about it in terms of people!

This past weekend I had my first experience with the drunks of Guatemala. My first experience was on the bus. I was sitting with this older gentleman and being nice was making small talk. Well small talk turned into a marriage proposal which I got out of by lying and telling him I had a boyfriend. My next experience was in Santo Tomas this past weekend. I had ventured down to meet some other trainees to watch as I described in my last post, people climb a greased tree. We had some time to kill, since we were on Guatemala time (Here in Guatemala if someone says it starts at 12 pm it will really start around 1 or 1:30 pm). Anyway, as we were enjoying our ice cream and cokes this drunk approaches us in fine form. As he gets closer it is apparent that his fly is down and he has decided not to wear any underwear. Oh yes this means that his “junk” was say Hey just like he was! The sad part of the story is he was not the only one not wearing underwear, there were a few more drunk who must believe it is easier not to wear underwear!

Guatemala is similar to the United States in the since that there are city people and non-city people. Today we had a trip to Guatemala City, the capital, with our Spanish classes. We had to visit the PC Headquarters, the hospital that the PC uses, and the bank. After all of this we had lunch at the mall! This mall was better than some in the States, a Zara, Bershka, Nine West, Nike, Apple, Tommy, and other big name stores! It also included a McDonald’s which provided a wonderful lunch (I don’t think I would ever say that in the States but man some hamburger sure tasted good)! After our wonderful lunch we went to the movie! We were all joking that our friends and family would ask what did you do this week, “Oh I ate at McDonald’s, did some shopping and went to a movie, sound like the Peace Corps to you?” The people I saw today were so much different than the people that live in the small towns throughout Guatemala. They are more liberal, dress just like us (maybe better) and are more progressive! It is amazing that there is such a difference, by that I mean, some people who live in the campo have and will never see a mall or a McDonald’s or anything like it!

I am really happy right now! I had this moment while I was riding the bus home on Monday where it just dawned on me how happy I am here! I know this was the right decision for me and right now I cannot imagine my life anywhere else! I might not love everything about my daily life but at the end of the day I go to sleep happy and fulfilled! (Although I cannot wait until I get a hot shower!)

A Litte Bit of Everything

I have officially been a Peace Corps Trainee for three weeks now! When I stop to think about it I feel as if I have already been here two years but at other times it goes by so quickly! This past week was another week of 6 hour Spanish classes but on top of that we began having 2-3 hours of technical training! During tech we learn about the different markets, how to use them, where they are, etc.! We are also learning about the community structure and where to start when we get to our sites. I am really excited because I am going to visit a PCV for 5 days next week, so I think I will have a better idea of what it is like in the field, which hopefully will clarify things!

My dining situation here has been an interesting experience. To begin with, as many know but few have truly experienced, you eat a lot of tortillas, but the differences comes when you are not just eating tortillas because they are there but using the tortillas as your utensil. When I first got here they gave me a spoon, fork and knife, but I soon realized they rarely eat with anything but the tortilla, so wanting to integrate into the culture I began to do the same thing! This was a good idea and a bad idea because now I am never given any but my tortillas so I am forced to eat them with every meal and this means I pick my meat up (like chunks of meat) and eat them with my bare hands! Sometimes I just laugh to myself thinking about how many hours were spent teaching me to be a lady when I eat, well sorry Mom and Dad those days are long gone!

Saturday September 15^th is Guatemalan Independence Day! The festivities begin on Friday night with the running of the torch! The running of the torch is where are the school children for the town go to the capital of the state, and light the town’s torch with the “Fire of Freedom” This is done because on September 14^th the leaders signed the Independence document and that night runners were sent with torches carrying the “Fire of Freedom” to all the towns throughout Guatemala! The reason that September 14^th is not Independence Day is that most Guatemalans did not know until the next day that they were free, so the 15^th is considered Independence Day because that is day Guatemala woke up free!

The day begins with a parade of all the school children in the town. There are dancers, marching bands (they are really good and of great pride to the community) and little Independence Day princesses and queens! The whole town comes out, there is a huge lunch in the town square! Later in the day the neighboring communities have a parade through town with the same kind of things as the first one! The highlight of my day was going to a neighboring town to watch the pallo asado, which is oiled pole! It is a 60 foot tree that has been striped of its bark and greased up from top to bottom! The idea of it is to get to the top, if you do you get Q500, which is about $70, a lot of money here! At first all of the drunks tried it then about an hour and half into it the serious men came out and it was awesome! My friends and I watched it for a solid three hours, it was an entertaining afternoon! (I am attaching pictures and a tube video of the event!)

Side note, this is all been told to me in Spanish so if there are some things that are not exactly correct please forgive!

This past week I had my first adventure picking flowers and pears! My host mom and I started the day hiking about 30 minutes up the side of the mountain to their orchard! When I say hike, I mean hike! We were so far up the mountain that I could see the outskirts of Guatemala City which is about 25 miles away! As soon as we got there I was put to work picking the flowers which were scattered all over the place. I never realized that picking flowers involved so much work, my back ached, my arms hurt, my feet were so cold that I could not feel them and I fell about a million times because the land is not terraced it is just a straight up hill you have to work on! Anyway it was my first experience with what I will be doing at least for the next three months!

I have been enlisted by my family to help throw this surprise party for my host sisters this Friday! She is getting married on Saturday, so I have been the person enlisted to make sure that everyone is dancing and having a good time! I think they think that I am this crazy American that loves a good time because sometimes I will just turn on my Itunes and dance around my room! There are times here you just have to let loose! So while my host mom is explaining my job to me, my host days turns on the stereo and starts dancing (salsa) and then drags me along with him! Let’s just say they might be rethinking their decision to make me in charge of the dancing!

Ok another long post so I will cut it off here, but if any of you have questions either leave me a post or email me what you would like to hear about!

Hard Labor

I had my first experience washing my own clothes today! I had to wash my underwear because our host moms do not do that, thank gosh that is all they do not do! So while I was washing them my host mom was washing clothes too and my jeans came up so I told her I need to learn how to wash my clothes because she would not be there to do it for me in three months! This learning/showing me turned in to me doing all the work, and work it was! They wash their clothes in the same sink like thing that they wash their dished, teeth, hands and food! It is called a pila, it is two sinks on either side of a large rectangle trough of water. My family is big enough that they have two back to back, so I was washing at one while my mom was washing at another when this experience happened. Let me just put it this way, I will not be able to help people because I will be washing my clothes all the time! In the time that she finished her bucket full of clothes I was just finishing my jeans! I will never again in my life complain about doing laundry!!!

I as I said in my last post my house is amazing! It is a two story house that opens up into a courtyard! Downstairs is the toilet and shower, along with the kitchen and living room! Upstairs is all of the bedrooms which all open up onto a balcony that over looks the courtyard! I am living the high life compared to most of the other trainees but with that said I am covered in flea bites and have to wear bug lotion to bed every night! I know that this is what I signed up for but it is really sad that I can sympathize with dogs now!

My daily routine will shock most of you that know me well! I go to sleep around 9 o’clock and get up…wait for it…6 or 6:15 every morning! I am actually the late riser in the house because everyone is out the door by 5:30-5:45 every morning, except my dona! I get up and eat breakfast, try to chit chat with my dona and then head off to my six hours of Spanish class. My 6 hours of Spanish is followed by another 2 hours of tech training! I have a distant memory of my Peace Corps recruiter telling my boredom is the biggest problem in the Peace Corps. I am really thinking he had no idea about the training program in Guatemala! I am so busy I feel like I barley say Hi to anyone in my family until 6 o’clock at night (oops, I mean afternoon)! Although the weekdays pass quickly the weekends are quite slow! There is not much going on other than hanging out or doing laundry or washing the floors so once those things are done which is normally by lunch time, they day is still young with nothing to do! This is when I totally understand about the boredom! You can only read, write in your journal or letters and study so much, which still leaves lots of time!

Magdalena is a very interesting town because it is a fairly large town with 2,000 people but it is primarily farming community! At first I didn’t think anyone worked here expect for in the stores but them my host family explained to me that most people in town that do not own a shop have land above the town on the mountain side and grow different products there! So pretty much they work in June and September then again in October and May, the beginning and the end of the growing seasons! There are two growing seasons here in Guatemala. The farmers plant one crop during the rainy season and a different one during the dry season.

For being a very conservative, mainly Catholic country the amount of PDA that young people display here is amazing! One afternoon after lunch I was returning to one of the other trainee’s house for our afternoon session of Spanish and there was a couple on the corner making out or sucking face as the Guatemalans called it! About 2 and a half hours later when I left they were still there “sucking face”! Every street corner you pass there is more than likely a young couple making out, I wish I knew how to stay “Get a room!”

Well again this is a long post so I will leave it with no more! I have figured out that I can save time in on the internet by writing a head of time and copying and pasting, which means I have a lot of time to write!

GUATEMALA!

¡Púchica! Wow! I am finally here in Guatemala, the land of eternal spring! I think that this country might be a hidden treasure of the world! It is beautiful, the land and the people, everything! I arrived in Guatemala City on August 29th just in time for the mid-afternoon rains, something that occurs everyday here May thru October. We hopped on a school bus and made our way to Santa Lucia Milpas Altas, a small community about 20 miles from the capital but about a 45 minute bus ride away. My group and I then began our three day orientation to Peace Corps Guatemala. The orientation is pretty much an overload of information that you will not remember for the life of you but should. We had language test (AHHH), thankfully I was placed in intermediate which means I am where I should be by the end but also means I have to advance two levels by the end of the three months! After the three day orientation we beginning our training.

PC Guatemala has a new kind of training which is called community based training, which means that we are divided into ten communities around Santa Lucia based on our tech program and our language ability. I am part of the Agriculture Marketing tech group and I am living in Magdalena Milpas Altas, about a 45 minute walk to the training center in Santa Lucia! They do not call it Milpas Altas for nothing! Milpas Altas means Tall Corn and they are not kidding! The corn stalks have to be at least ten feet high, I am not joking! Magdalena is a community of about 2,000 people, primarily farmers so some kind (my family grows fruits and flowers)! It is situated on the side of a mountain which results in incredible views!

My host family is awesome! It consists of my mama and my papa along with my two sisters (23 and 20) and my brother (17)! In addition to them my papa’s mother and my mama’s father live here, too! So in all there are eight of us! My first day here, which was Saturday, September 1, my mama’s father moved in too. He had a stroke and is now paralyzed on his left side of his body. This came as a shock to the family and the Peace Corps because PCVs have been working with this family in the agriculture sector for about eight years (mainly with the grandfather)! It was a hard adjustment for me and for the family. Such a huge change in the living situation all within hours of each other! I live right in the middle of town so every morning around 4:15 or 4:30 I am woken up by the blaring horn of the bus to take people to work/school in the capital! What can you do, you gotta love it!

Guatemala is everything I expected and more! I expected the most obvious things, the lack of organization, the dirtiness (trash everywhere), homes made from different materials, but what I did not expect is the openness and kindness that everyone shows to one another here! I will walk down the street with another gringa and everyone will say Buenas Dias or Buenas Tardes, it is incredible! The view from my balcony and the street throughout Magdalena provide a view that is indescribable! In the morning the view is clear as can be but by mid afternoon the fog has rolled in creating a mysterious feeling around the mountains!

This has been a really long post so I will not bore you with anymore but I should be posting again soon so keep checking!