Swearing In

So we officially swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers on Friday. The ceremony was at the US Embassadors house in Guatemala City. Ill give more details later, but here are a few photos...

Happy Belated Birthday Mom and Dad

Dad and Mom in Lake Como, Italy

So my mother and my father share a birthday, March 20th. As I child I thought that not only was this totally normal but it also meant that you had to marry someone that had the same birthday as you. This caused great anxiety in my six year old life as I shared a birthday with the smelly French kid in my first grade class. It took me well beyond a reasonable age to figure out that shared birthdays were not a requirement for marriage. I actually tell this story in Spanish to a lot of people, its easy to tell and makes people laugh, however it backfired at me when I told our tech trainer. It turns out his son and I share a birthday and now he is trying to set us up. In high school I shared a birthday with my chem lab partner Alex and he is down here in Antigua right now so we are going to celebrate our  birthday together on Sunday.  Anyhow I wanted to wish my mom and dad a very happy belated birthday. In case anyone is wondering, my parents are probably the coolest parents in the world. Love you guys!

Chisec

So I'm at my site right now...its 91 degrees outside and I'm melting. It took three hours for my hair to dry this morning, but hey at least there was water.

Photos

Lake Atitlan

The Lake again

view from our hike

the dog came on the hike with us

Quiche woman weaving

Second graders at the school

View from the playground of one of the schools

This is what I meant when I said rural.

Enjoying Peace Corps

Adrian and me kicking it at the Mayan Ceremony

The Daily Grind

Julia thinks she may have lice...












Memo, Andres and Luz Maria
watching Aladdin in Spanish on
my computer

The H-Mom and H-Aunt and our dogs


My Spanish group at a coffee farm

Me, Julia and Crystal

Chepe, our Spanish teacher

While a lot of what we are doing seems to be Romantically adventurous, filled with soul searching revelation and the inevitable inheritance of several mother Theresa like qualities, the reality of chasing our Kerouac dreams frequently finds us trudging through the mud rather than floating in the clouds. We aren’t a group of dread locked Dharma Bums living communally amongst the indigenous Guatemalans, exchanging stories of creation while roasting freshly caught game over an open fire. I’m not worshipping any Mayan gods, weaving the cloth for my clothes nor have I become an expert tortilla maker. Actually my host mother saw a video of my tortillaring and she laughed, really loudly and then told everyone about it at dinner. The day to day of Peace Corps life is a bit more practical, but nonetheless enjoyable and adventurous in its own right.

The sun rises and sets and the same time all year long here, and the people wake and sleep with the sun. What this really means is that every morning I wake up around 4:30am to the sounds of the buses blarring the radio and blasting their horns as they drive down the main road. Most of the dozen or so people who live in my house are up within the hour and bustling around the kitchen or to and from the bathroom and my room is right in the center of all of this. Generally I role over, put my i-pod on full volume and sleep until about 7am. At first I tried getting up earlier, but this meant that I was last in line to shower after 11 other people. This resulted in me standing in the shower, completely naked and covered in shampoo right as the water ran out. As such, I now wait until the water supply is replenished before I shower. There isn’t a water heating system in my house, or rather there is no hot water tank. Instead we have a Calientador (heater), this is an electrical device of unknown safety standards, that sits on top of the shower head and heats up the water as it passes through the pipes. Every morning I battle with the Calientador, and usually it wins. The trick is to turn the water on just high enough that you have sufficient water pressure to rinse your hair, but not so much that the water doesn’t heat up. Easier said than done.

I won’t go into the details of Guatemalan coffee production and the politics involved in its exportation, simply put, most Guatemalans cannot afford to drink high quality Guatemalan coffee. So I hope you enjoy your cup of it, because I’m down here drinking Nescafé. Fortunately my host dad likes to drink tea, so most of the time I get to drink tea instead of instant coffee for breakfast. I somehow never manage to budget enough time to get everything done in the morning, so usually my host mom knocks on my door about ten minutes before I have to leave telling me she won’t let me go until I have something in my stomach. She likes to serve hardboiled eggs for breakfast, and I love to eat them, so its working out quite well.

Tuesday through Thursday we have class in our sites with the three other trainees in our groups. My group has tested at the advanced level so we don’t do very much grammatical language work, we mostly do technical vocabulary and cultural trips.

We always break for lunch around 12:30 so we can go home and eat with our families. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day here, although they’ve yet to catch onto the post lunch siesta. I’m trying my best to bring that into the Guatemalan culture. Almost everyone in my family comes home for lunch. The men come in from Antigua from work, and the kids finish school before lunch so they usually walk home in time to eat. Usually we have some sort of chicken or beef based soup. The Guatemalan diet is heavily reliant upon carbohydrates, and its not uncommon to sit down and discover that lunch is rice and potatoes served with tortillas. I try to eat as much of a balanced diet as possible, and my host family has taken note, joking that I’m so tall because I eat my vegetables and I don’t have a big belly because I don’t put sugar in my coffee. I don’t do dairy very well, and my host family has been very respectful of that, which makes me and my stomach quite happy. The vegetarians here are having to make a lot of adjustments. The concept of vegetarianism here is foreign and a lot of times our vegs have to pick meat out of soups or find themselves explaining that chicken is, in fact, meat. Thus far my avoidance of pork products has been successful, but then again plausible deniability works in my favor. If I can’t tell what it is, I assume its chicken. I miss our communal kitchen in Berkeley, but overall I’m getting by just fine as far as food goes. I’ve definitely taken advantage of the banana bread sold in Antigua and all the dried fruit and peanut butter and chocolate in my care packages. Major shout out to my mom and dad as I sit on my bed munching on the apple rings you sent me.

After lunch we have a few more hours of class followed by the occasional trip to the internet café or the market. I usually come home after class and hang out and study or work on my presentations for an hour or so. Around six I have tea with the women of the house, and whichever kids are at home. They like to talk about how chubby they are all getting or how skinny I’m getting. My host aunt likes to joke about the other volunteers and finding me a husband. She’s picked out another one of the trainees because she thinks he’s cute because he goes to mass with his family and his hair is curly. Other major topics of conversation include how one can purchase San Francisco, my height, and the size and coverage provided by my bathing suit. The host fam is great and its not uncommon for them to burst into song at the dinner table and they’ve dubbed me snow white and the kids my seven dwarves. Yes Kate, life here is occasionally like a Spanish language musical.

You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. –The Rolling Stones

FBT visual style

Just a few photos from FBT...

the party van
mayan prayer ceremony

the whole healthy schools group

Field Based Training

Field Based Training

The Peace Corps is really into acronyms and we just got back from FBT (field based training) in Totonicipan with our APCD (Associate Peace Corps Directory…our boss). Sunday morning PC picked us up in their microbuses, unfortunately they aren’t techno-colored VW vans and we drove four hours up into the mountain highlands. For the first time since we arrived in Guatemala we all stayed together in a hostel. Needless to say some serious bonding went on, and we plan on challenging the Eco-tourism group to a dance off now that we’ve gotten a good week of practice in. Think America’s Best Dance Crew meets Dancing with the Stars meets Sabado Gigante.

Anyhow, we got a lot of work done on the trip and I feel like I’ve finally got a really understanding of exactly what I’m going to be doing for the next two years. Basically we will be working as Public Health Facilitators in the Escuelas Saludables (Healthy Schools) program. Escuelas Saludables is a joint Peace Corps and Guatemalan Ministry of Education program and we are in the process of incorporating the Guatemalan Ministry of Health into the project. Unlike most PC programs, the Escuelas Saludables program is actually in the process of creating and passing legislation to include the right to health education into the Guatemalan educational system.

Each volunteer will be responsible for several schools in the area surrounding their site. Most schools will be within two hours of where the volunteer lives and are accessible by foot, bus, or pick up truck. The roads to the schools are not paved and are either incredibly dusty in the dry season or pure mud in the rainy season, but the schools in rural areas have the greatest need and thus we’re going to have to learn to love the adventure this challenge presents. Within the school the volunteer is responsible for certifying the school as a Healthy School. There are many requirements for certification, the basics include latrines or flush toilets, faucets and sinks for a hand washing, some form of running water either through a rain catching system or a pipe system, a working kitchen with a functioning stove and ventilation system, a full curriculum of health lessons taught three times a week and basic personal hygiene of both students and teachers.

Currently most of the schools we will be working with don’t have water, many use open fires for cooking and there may be one latrine for over 100 people and no sinks to wash hands. These poor health conditions create a myriad of problems: malnutrition from lack of both access to healthy foods as well as no nutritional education, respiratory problems from cooking over an open fire without any ventilation system as well as every digestive system problem imaginable caused by lack of purified water for drinking and lack of any sanitation system. We’ve got two years to initiate and motivate the school, the community and the municipal leaders to plan and complete several construction projects, train the teachers in health education and establish basic hygiene habits in the children. The primary goal of the program is to create a sustainable health program within the school and a broader knowledge of healthy habits and practices at the community level.

Despite the incredible challenges of Peace Corps service, by no means are these tasks insurmountable. The sixteen volunteers in my group are incredibly motivated and have experience in teaching, social work, and medicine and collectively we’ve completed over a decade of community service work. We’ve been educated at the best universities in the country; Johns Hopkins, Yale and UC Berkeley to name a few. Everyone has previously studied Spanish and many speak other languages including German, French, Portuguese, Hebrew and Creole. We have an incredible language training program for both Spanish and the various Mayan languages spoken in our communities. Our training program covers everything from cultural understanding and integration to specific technical training in grant proposals, culturally appropriate teaching methods, public speaking and organizing and presenting community meetings. Returned Peace Corps volunteers, Guatemalan and American Healthy Schools program leaders, Guatemalan educated doctors and current volunteers in the Healthy Schools program as well as other Peace Corps programs train us and we have the opportunity to work in local schools throughout this training period.



The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. ~Nelson Henderson