Feliz Cumple!

Happy Birthday to my fabulous parents! I love you guys!

So in exactly 5 days my parents are coming to visit me in Guatemala and then we're heading up to Playa del Maya for a little vacation in Mexico. A sort of big birthday celebration for all three of us. Can't wait!!

UV Water Purification

So its UV water purification day with my kiddies out in aldea Pecajba

basically

clean empty bottles + water + sun + 24 hours = more creative ways to reuse plastic bottles and clean drinking water.

poco a poco we're cleaning up the environment and improving rural health

Photos to follow!

UPDATE:

So I woke up Thursday morning feeling pretty shitty. I'd had a tough time falling asleep the night before and Chris and I have both been sick for the last few days. I hit the snooze button once but the second time my alarm went off Chris yelled at me to get out of bed and go to work, so on three hours of sleep I hauled my tired self the 20 minutes to the center of town and got on a micro to the school (thank goodness this is my one school that is off the main highway so its easy to get to).

I showed up at school and several of my second grade boys saw me and came running out of their classroom to open the gate for me. Their smiles definitely turned my morning around (although they probably could benefit from some serious flossing...) The school principal and I headed the purification project and with the hard work of the other four teachers and the enthusiasm of the children we were able to wash and fill over fifty bottles of water and place them on the tin roof to purify in the sun over the weekend. The students will now have enough water to drink during the week and Fridays are our new water purification day. After school we held a meeting with the parents in the community to explain to them the UV purification project as a way of educating them on better health practices as well as including them in the Healthy Schools project. They loved the idea and got a huge kick out of hearing me attempt to explain everything in Q'eqchi. Lots of smiles and lots of laughing.

Thanks to the dedication of these teachers and the support of the families in the community the students of Pecajba will have clean drinking water all year. Hands down my best day as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Peace.

Lago Atitlan, 3/6/09

Skype

So I live in the middle of the jungle (seriously 600 square miles with less than 200,000 inhabitants in over 200 villages) but on occasion, my little Tigo wireless modem will pick up a signal fast enough that I can video skype. Its pretty much the most amazing thing...well id say since sliced bread but its even better since sliced bread has yet to come to Chisec. Anyhow, if any of you are on Skype and wanna chat hit me up!

2010 so far

Alright, so its been awhile and while I’m sure that no one is complaining (does anyone even read this anymore) I figure that someday I’ll look back at my Peace Corps experience and think, what did I do in 2010? So for posterities sake… here’s what’s been happening since I returned from an absolutely wonderful Christmas vacation in Lake Tahoe and San Francisco.

(view from my porch)

Chisec, while normally a very tranquilo place decided to spice it up a bit and a few campesinos were lynched, some fighting ensued over land and an elementary school was burned. The gente threatened to run the police out of town after torching two of their cars, but that didn’t happen so aside from a few traffic delays, a little bit of gossip in the market and a few concerned calls from the Peace Corps safety and security director, nothing really changed in my daily routine.

Teacher protests have delayed the start of the school year in several departments in Guatemala, (perhaps they’ve been watching the news on the UC and CSU protests in California). Classes should have started at the end of January but some of my healthy school coworkers find themselves with empty classrooms and no work. Fortuately (or unfortunately depending on your political perspectives) the teachers of Chisec are working. I actually got the nerve up to ask a few of them why they were showing up for work. Turns out the school district supervisor told them that if they didn’t teach that he’d find someone else who would (again, no political comment on this, I’m just happy that the kids are getting an education and that I’ve got work to do).

Healthy Habits!

I want to be able to carry stuff on my head like these women

Q'eqchi women working in their Tienda, thats a baby shes carring by her head...

Chisec from the front seat of the mirco.

So I’m almost half way through my Peace Corps service (march ’09-march ’11) actually a bit over half way through my entire time here in Guatemala counting the first three months in training. My friend Dave described the first 15 months as a lot like being pushed off the edge of a pool into the water and having to learn to swim in order to survive. Sink or swim, I guess. I definitely did a lot of sinking in the beginning but my head is finally above water and I’m really enjoying the experience now. I’ve gotten bossy enough with the bus drivers that I no longer end up shoved in the back with the chickens and old Guatemalan men falling asleep on me. They actually have started saving the front seat of the micro for me now. The cat calling has mostly stopped, I thought this was because the guys got bored of whistling at the gringa, but turns out that someone started a rumor that I’d gone home and gotten married to my big scary American boyfriend over Christmas and that he was gonna come down and beat up anyone that hit on me. (I’m just gonna roll with that one). Work in the schools is going very well. Despite some rough beginnings last year with the two school district supervisors, they’ve proven to me that they are really interested in the health of the villagers and I have a lot of confidence that they will continue to support the Healthy Schools program after I leave. Three of my four schools are very motivated this year, it’s the last year in the 4 year Healthy Schools program and they are working very hard towards getting their certification at the end of this school year or early next school year before I finish my service. Its an uphill battle for sure, we need to build a kitchen at one school, latrines and a stove at a second and a water tank at the third but the communities are behind the projects and the teachers are working hard to finish their grant applications so I am confident that we can accomplish the goals we’ve set out for the year. The last three months have really given me an appreciation for the Guatemalans that I live and work with. There have been some wonderful break through moments both professionally and personally in the community and I have to say I am loving my time here in Chisec.

(my teachers working hard during our training on project design and management)

More to follow later in the week, I still wanna update y’all on a lot of new projects I've been working on :)

Also count down to the quarter century of me celebration:

Bruce and Dorian's arrival: 18 days!

Vacation to Mexico: 22 days! (also my 25th birthday)

Tony comes to visit: 27 days!

Waaay to much fun!

So I got a new computer and I've been having way too much fun with the photo booth program. This is what boredom has brought me too.

2009 Book Awards

So heres my 2009 Book Awards, based off of the 33 books I've read so far this year. The complete list is printed on the right side of my blog. To start off, a few of my favorite quotes about reading...

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. -Mark Twain

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. - Anna Quindlen

Medicine for the soul. -Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes

Best re-read:

East of Eden, John Steinbeck. 

 I read this for the first time in high school and it is a constant topic of conversation between my best friend Katie and I. Steinbeck’s hopeful account of the human condition holds its place in my top 5 favorite books of all time. Timshel, baby.

 

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected."

Honorable Mention: The Things They Carried -Tim O'Brien 

 

Best non-fiction:

Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson  

   Mortenson was robbed of this years Nobel Peace Prize. While Obama continues to send troops into the Middle East, touting the importance of war before peace, Mortenson has taken a more radical approach towards the war on terrorism, education. He is creating a future filled with opportunities rather than dispair for the children of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change."

"I've learned that terror doesn't happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death."

 Honorable Mention: Tender at the Bone -Ruth Reichl

 

Book that makes me feel homesick:

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan 

Also a re-read from high school. Tan’s collection of short stories explores strong mother- daughter relationships, love, family and understanding of the past. Set in the foggy hills of San Francisco, she leaves me teary eyed and wanting to snuggle up on the couch at home with my mother.

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

 

Guilty Pleasure:

The Twilight Series, Stephanie Meyer 

  Four truly horrible works of literature, but this is the guilty pleasure category and I enjoyed this vampire sci-fi fantasy series of relationships between the dead and the undead bordering on pre-teen pornography. Personally I’m more of the werewolf type, team Jacob all the way.

 Honorable Mention: The Sex Lives of Cannibals -J. Maarten Troost

Biggest Disappointment:

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz 

 I expected the winner of the Pulitzer to offer more than just footnotes, Spanish lenguaje de la calle and poor character development. There were some chapters in Oscar Wao that I did enjoy but overall it left me feeling as though Diaz’s new style and edgy language were simple a cover for a lackluster plot and over stereotyped characters.

 

Biggest Surprise:

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides 

 Recommended to me by several people, I’ve been anxious to read this book for a while. Eugenides takes a story filled with incest taboos, pre-teen sexual exploration and the difficult coming of age of a pseudo male hermaphrodite and creates a story of love and pain, growth and family, and grief and hope, that is remarkably relatable to all. He shows us that normal only exists in fairy tales and that it’s our differences that bring us together in this shared experience of life.

 

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

 Honorable Mention: The Time Travelers Wife - Audrey Niggenegger

Book of the Year:

The Cider House Rules – John Irving 

Irving’s tale of Homer Wells and the St. Cloud’s orphanage guides the reader through such an array of emotions you finish feeling that all the compassion, the love, the wit, the hate, the anger and the confusion of this characters is somehow a part of you. One of the most sincere novels I’ve read and by far my favorite of 2009.

"“Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be many”"

Honorable Mention: East of Eden, John Steinbeck