Photos

I changed some of my online photo albums around with pictures from this past year, and added a bunch of new ones as well. Hopefully they are better organized now.

Pictures from the celebrations I just talked about.

Pictures from the school I work at.

Pictures from the volcano, including the observatory, the finca, and other field work.

Pictures with Visitors.

Pictures from the Bottle Wall.

Check back at these albums basically for the rest of the time I'm down here.

Week 62

That’s right; I’ve been living in Guatemala for 62 weeks, out of a planned total of 115. For 51 of those weeks, I have been a volunteer in active service, attempting day in and day out to further the three goals of the Peace Corps:

1) Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2) Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

In the day to day activities that go on here, it is getting easier and easier for me to fulfill the first two goals. After roughly a year of service, I feel like I am fulfilling my duties at my two host agencies to the best of my ability, and that I am actually meeting a need for trained men and women. And while I am not sure if I am helping the people in my village understand Americans as a whole, my friends and neighbors are understanding at least this American better than they did 12 months ago. The goal that I have been neglecting, at least over the last 4 months is obviously the third. I’ll try to catch anyone who still checks this on what has been happening down here, including Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, a lot of volcano field work, reinvigoration of projects at school in the second year, and visits from a few friends.

Happy Holidays

I spent most of December working at the observatory. It was nice to only have to focus on one set of problems while school was on break. After many meetings and discussions with observatory personnel and our bosses in the capital, I think we decided that my chief contribution to the day to day activities of the observatory will ideally be to find a way to get internet access from this remote location during the next year. All future advances in the technical capacity of the observatory really seem to depend on this, so I will be putting a lot of effort into figuring out how this will work (A LOT of learning about IT stuff) in the coming year. We eventually want to have a webcam and be able to send and receive data to be processed at the observatory. If you know of anyone with experience in this sort of thing that would be able to answer questions, I’d be interested in emailing them! I also spent a lot of time hiking with one of my counterparts, taking advantage of the wonderful weather of December to get to know some of the up close and personal aspects of Santiaguito.

Christmas was very different this year. This was my first Christmas that I have ever spent away from my family, which was difficult. Christmas Eve I hung around town, playing with kids and wearing a Santa hat. I bought a lot of fire crackers as is apparently the custom, and we all set them off. At first I was a bit apprehensive about playing with explosives and children at the same time, given my American senses of risk and danger, but when I saw one of the kids who will be 5 NEXT month toddle up to one of the neighborhood store windows, hold up his 10 centavo coin (about a penny) and ask to buy a small hand held device that shoots sparks out of the end, and then also ask for matches to light it with, I thought that maybe I was being paranoid. I realized that I was not paranoid when he proceeded to light the thing five inches from his two year old brother’s face. Thankfully, I didn’t see any children get burned, but with these kinds of things happening all over the country that day, I don’t like the odds…

I went up to spend the evening with a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer (Ashleigh Shiffler) who had her family visiting her at her site for the holidays. We went to mass, which was punctuated by large mortar shells being lit off from the park outside while we sang carols in Spanish and watched the neighborhood posadas come in during the service. It was nice to have an American family to spend the holiday with, as it made the whole thing feel a lot more like home. We all went to one of the family’s that Ashleigh is close to in her town and ate the traditional Guatemalan Christmas tamales which I had been hearing so much about all year (think a mush of cornmeal with raisins, some special spices, and a small chink of meat in the middle, prepared in banana leaves). Then we went across the street and bought the equivalent of about $30 worth of fireworks and at the stroke of midnight joined literally the entire town in simultaneously putting on one of the best shows that I had ever seen. After experiencing the pure insanity of a town of about 20,000 people all setting off fireworks at the same time, I see now why the United States of America has legislation in most states to prevent these sorts of activities. It helped that most of the houses here were made of concrete and therefore not as susceptible as our wooden dwellings back home to catching on fire, but with the amounts of exploding charges and the subsequent fall of burning metal shards, I am surprised that there are not more injuries associated with the holiday here. Everyone assured me that New Years Eve would be the same thing all over again.

Field Work

I had two days after Christmas to prepare for the arrival of a group of scientists who I would be working with for nearly the entire month of January. The group had members from Michigan Tech, New Mexico Tech, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We spent about two weeks in the field around Santiaguito collecting seismic data, thermal images, and high definition high speed images of the crater floor. I was also left in charge of maintaining a seismic station for the next four months down near the observatory, as well as four time-lapse cameras that are taking pictures once every five minutes during daylight hours from up on Santa Maria (the mountain overlooking the volcano). We spent New Years camping on Santa Maria, which gave us an amazing view of the fireworks: the whole Guatemalan countryside lit up with fireworks at midnight. It looked much more festive and a lot less dangerous from that safe distance and about 4,500 feet above. Then we went and spent a week at Pacaya volcano measuring the heat being emitted from the lava flows while another team was working on installing a GPS monitoring network to track changes in the shape of the volcano. Finally we went up to Fuego, where actually a rotating team had been watching a seismic network and monitoring the gas emissions with a sulfur dioxide imaging camera. I learned a lot, made a lot of contacts, and had a great time.

Back to Routine

February meant the beginning of the new school year. Like most Guatemalan public schools, we had and are still having a horrible time getting the operating funds deposited that the government promised for the school. As a result, supplies had to be purchased from local businesses on credit, arrangements have had to be made for paying electricity and water bills late, and teachers have had to be working without pay. The worst part is that there is a seemingly never ending series of meetings that the director and occasionally teachers are called into (meaning that the students are not in school either) that attempts to explain the problems, all with the same reason; the money isn’t here yet, keep waiting.

This predicament has really hurt my ability to work as well. This year I will not be teaching in the classrooms, but more coordinating efforts between teachers to implement environmental lesson plans into their own teaching, as well as serving as a resource to them for ideas or occasionally team teaching lessons. I am mainly focusing on helping them meet the requirements to be certified as an Environmentally Friendly School by the end of the year, as well as coordinating efforts for the construction of our bottle project.

I talked a little bit about the bottle project last year, where we are having students collect plastic soda pop bottles and fill them with inorganic garbage. This serves several educational purposes, including separating trash and raising consciousness about how much trash is produced by the community, but the hope is that these bottles will serve a purpose in their own right by making up a large part of the building materials for a structure. This lowers the cost of construction and (hopefully) enables communities to build things that they need. We are still currently deliberating on exactly what structure we are going to build with our bottles, but the initial goal is to collect 4000 bottles and then make up the difference for the number of bottles we need for whatever the project is after we reach this goal.

I have also been doing a little school work of my own. Through the magic of the internet, I am able to sit in via video conferencing on a Volcano Seismology class that is being offered back in Michigan. I can see the whole lecture, ask questions, and even get homework assignments. The best part is that I am able to apply what I learn immediately to interpret the data that I am collecting! In my second year I will be submitting monthly reports on the volcano’s activity, happenings at the observatory, and my research progress to my superiors at INSIVUMEH (the Guatemalan equivalent of the United States Geological Survey) and Peace Corps. This means that I actually know enough now to be reporting my own interpretations, which is pretty exciting, and I’ve produced two now for January and February.

So that’s basically what is happening around here. I have also been very slow with posting pictures, but I will have some new ones up soon! It’s strange, but I have lived longer in this house here in Guatemala longer than I have lived in any one dwelling since I left my parent’s house for college. With that amount of relative permanency, it is easy to forget that I’m living in a “foreign” country sometimes. At the same time, I can’t believe that I’ve been here a year already! One more left…

I miss you all. Take care, and if you get a chance, drop me a line and let me know how you’re doing as well. Peace.

Rapid Fire!

Hey Everyone,

I'm on a roll! Check out my web page (updated today) and especially my House Tour on the Family and Friends page. Its a Powerpoint tour of my house here in Guatemala. Miss you all! Peace.

Hectic Holidays

"Everybody else just calm down. This financial meltdown will affect you ONLY if you own a house or are paid in currency." ~ Steven Colbert

Thank goodness. I rent and am paid in birds (Quetzales is the national currency, and they are also the national bird).

I meant to post this very soon after I heard it back in October, but one thing kept coming up after another. Before I knew it, I had let almost an entire quarter of a year slip by. This in no way means that nothing has been happening down here; on the contrary things have been busier than ever. The ironic thing was that I had put off updating this blog until I got internet access towards the end of October, but since I’ve been back online it seems like I actually have less time to post pictures, update the blog, and write emails than before. I used to have to budget my internet time very specifically, whereas now I can chat with friends, check news, and even use skype to make video calls back to the states from my bedroom. I’ve actually become much worse at responding to correspondence!

So I think I last left off with tales of Jared and Jimmy’s visit. October was a tough month. My best volunteer friend here went back to the U.S., so it was a little rough figuring out a new support system for days when I just needed to vent, but everyone has got to move on. It was kind of a wake up for me that even though it seems like I’ll be here for an extremely long time, 27 months is not forever, especially looking at it from the end of month 11.

October was the last month of classes for the year, which meant that it was pretty much impossible to get anything done other than help the kids and teachers prepare for final examinations. From 4^th grade on, the kids need to pass these exams to move onto the next grade, so there was a lot of stress. That didn’t stop us from celebrating Día de Niño (Children’s Day) on the first of the month, and then we had a lot of parties celebrating the year during the last week of the month after Finals were graded and we were waiting for the graduation ceremony. They have a Graduation for the 1^st graders and the 6^th graders, and somehow, I ended up helping about 18 guys tie their ties. Most of them had never worn one before.

Through an amazing donation from the Sunday school classes at First Presbyterian Church in Elgin, I was able to go with the director of my school up to Quetzaltenango to buy a TV and DVD player for the school to use next year. The teachers were absolutely thrilled, as this means that they will actually be able to play movies and show clips to the students next year. I’d say about half of the students actually have Televisions in their homes, but the children’s programming on Guatemalan Broadcast TV is pretty poor and basically limited to Dragon Ball Z and Yugi-Oh, so the possibility to watch something educational will be something completely new. We had some money left over, so we decided to use it to buy some DVDs and a few more books to add to the collection that was also sent by First Pres earlier in the year. These added resources are really going to make a difference in the quality of education that the kids here in Las Marias will be getting, and I would like to pass on the many thank yous from the faculty and students here back to everyone at First Pres in Elgin. I will be taking pictures of the students and school again when classes resume in January, so be watching for the TV you all bought!

The end of classes meant that I had a bit more free time, so I took a little vacation the weekend of Halloween and went to visit a friend of mine from Michigan Tech who is serving right across the border in Peace Corps Honduras. He lives about a 15 minute walk from some really great Mayan Ruins, so we explored those, and then went to a Halloween party. It was neat getting to meet a different crowd of Peace Corps Volunteers, talk about similar challenges, and get some new ideas.

I spent a good chunk of time in November in and around Mexico City as part of a conference on volcanic gases. Michigan Tech was able to put up the money to send Jemile Erdem who is working at Fuego and me, and we both learned a lot. It was neat being able to go back to a city that I knew. We got a chance to put some of what we learned into practice with a two day field trip to Popocatépetl, a big volcano about 40 km south of Mexico City.

I spent a week in Antigua at an In-Service Training session for Peace Corps, and it was really nice to see my host family and some other far away volunteers again. However, returning from that trip meant celebrating my first Thanksgiving away from my family, but with the help of some other volunteers, we made the best of it by cooking an entire dinner here at my house. It was actually perfect. We didn’t have a football, but we did have a Frisbee, so we played a little Ultimate. The next day we went swimming out at my river, which is heated by the lava flow coming off the volcano.

December has already been super busy. I’ve been doing a lot of preparation work getting ready for a pretty large field campaign that will start the 28^th of this month, the same day as my friends Annie and Ryan’s wedding back in Illinois. I’ve spent some time hiking and scouting out some locations, and I also went up to visit a fellow volunteer Kurt Bradler at his site that is only about 6 km away from me, but due to terrain difficulties and bad roads it takes about 2 hours to get there in a car. I’m debating on finding out how long it would take to walk one of these days…

So that is basically what I have been up to. Please check out the new pictures I posted, and I will do my best to write soon after Christmas, but just in case, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Peace.

Counting Blessings

September has been a very busy month. I have actually been doing a bit of traveling thanks to a lull in school activity and a visit from some friends from the U.S. of A.

I got a chance to visit the ocean for the first time since I have been in Guatemala, which seems strange since I can see it on clear days on my walk to work. I joined up with a group of friends traveling to the coast, and we met up in Antigua early one Saturday morning to head down to the beach town of Monterrico. After lounging around for the afternoon, we set out on a hike to find some Leatherback turtles that supposedly were leaving their ocean homes to lay their eggs on the beach. We had gotten sold on the hike by a local guide who promised detailed information and who seemed to be very knowledgeable about these marine turtles. However, when the time came to head out hunting, he ended up leaving us with two teenage kids who didn’t know a turtle from a log and ended up just asking other people on the beach who were collecting the eggs themselves. This was a bit shady, because although they all assured us that they were collecting the eggs to sell to a hatchery in town that was set up to combat egg poaching, no one was writing down any information or even seemed to be taking good care of the eggs (they carried them in plastic shopping bags). After a good 45 minute hike up the beach and passing two nests, we finally found one female who had just started laying. The guy who had found the turtle first had “dibs” on the eggs, but he let us watch and even catch the eggs as the female deposited them in the nest! This was an extremely weird feeling, and especially being uncertain of the fate of the little guys, I’m still not sure that I recommend the hike, but if the babies end up in the hatchery and not in some Capitaleño’s soup, it probably is a good thing that these people are doing.

The second week of September was my school’s week long celebration of Independence Day. We spent four days doing talent shows, a scholastic bowl, a beauty pageant, and a field day. I was privileged to take part in all the festivities, and it actually was pretty fun. On Friday we had a running of the Antorcha, which commemorates the arrival from Mexico of news that Guatemala had won her independence from Spain. To celebrate this, I got up at 3:30 in the morning to supposedly leave town at 4 AM. Well, what I had forgotten is that although the teachers at my school are usually very punctual, we were dealing with other Guatemalans. So the bus that we had chartered for 4 AM showed up at 5 AM. I boarded the bus with my teachers and a whole bunch of students and their families, and we set off for Panahachel, at town on Lake Atitlán. We arrived at about 9 and had until 2 to enjoy the lake and the tourist town. I ended up hanging out with my director and the other male teacher while all the female teachers bought tourist trinkets. We left of course an hour late at 3 PM and didn’t get back to our town until 9 PM. When we arrived, about a kilometer out of town I got off the bus with all the students and some of the parents. Several of the students had makeshift torches that were constructed of coffee or soup cans screwed onto branches or broom handles. Inside they placed cotton whetted with gasoline, which were then set ablaze and handed to the 8-12 year olds. The kids then set out running and blowing whistles or screaming at the top of their lungs. We ran through the whole town, about a 3 km run, as people stood by the side of the road cheering. This apparently served as a summons to the school, where the winners of the talent shows reenacted their performances and all other winners were recognized individually. Following that, we had a dance party in the school yard, and I finally went home and fell asleep with my clothes on at 11.

The next day I left site again, this time not until 5:30, and headed into the Capital to pick up my friends Jared and Jimmy (fellow Augustana Alumni). We headed back to my site for a few days, took a brief tour of Xela, and then we even took a day trip to Lake Atitlán and back to the town of Panahachel again. They came bearing gifts: a replacement camera!!! It was purchased by First Presbyterian in Elgin, and I really don’t know how to thank them enough. It’s amazing that the congregation could be so generous, and I am humbled by the interest that my home congregation has shown in my work down here. I’m incredibly blessed to be supported by so many people. To those of you from church that are keeping up with me via this blog, I really can’t thank you enough for such an incredible gift.

I think that Jimmy and Jared enjoyed their trip despite a lot of uncomfortable traveling, and I sure learned a lot about hosting people. I’ll be including a little list of things to consider if you want to visit Guatemala in a separate entry based mostly on our experiences. For my part, it was great to have people from home come visit and experience a bit of my life. I think the main thing that their visit did for me was verify exactly how crazy I have become in the last 9 months. I must be pretty well adjusted to life here, because things like jumping on a 5 hour bus ride where my knees are literally under my chin or walking for an hour and a half to get somewhere seem second nature to me. My sense of time has completely changed, as was evident by my absolute inability to give accurate times that a journey would take; most of my traveling involves leaving someplace at dawn and going until I get there, so trying to incorporate multiple destinations in a single day really taxed my logistic skills. I also realized that I have been getting very upset over very small amounts of money, like when a bus tried to change one Quetzal more per person on our ride up to Quetzaltenango. One Q is like 15 cents. I should probably let that stuff go, but when you live your life on $275 a month, and 2Q is one percent of your monthly income, 15 cents seems like a lot larger quantity of money.

After an early morning trip to drop off Jared and Jimmy in Antigua, I headed back north on the Panamerican Highway to Santa Clara La Laguna which is the site of a fellow Environmental Ed volunteer to celebrate Joey’s birthday. We had a cake and even a little spontaneous dance party in the kitchen. It was really nice, and I think Joey had a good time. The next day we headed up to Chicamán for a welcome party for some of the new volunteers in the department of El Quiché, and with hopes of a river tubing trip, but due to recent heavy rains that wasn’t in the cards. It was a nice weekend though, despite the heavy traveling, with the only down part being the robbery of my external hard drive which I had been carrying to send some data to the volunteer I replaced. It was in my backpack which I allowed to be put on the roof of a microbus because there wasn’t room inside. It would have been fine, but the driver kept stopping to allow people to climb on the top of the bus, and one of those passengers happened to have a razor blade they used to slash open my backpack and steal the hard drive and my USB pen drive as well. At least every time I get robbed I have less to lose; if someone wants to rob me next time they are going to have to bring a truck, because the only things I have left worth stealing are my bed and refrigerator!

This week is finally a return to normalcy for me, and a chance to rest my aching spine by staying off of busses for awhile. I returned yesterday to a celebration at the Basico (think Junior High) in my site. They were commemorating their 4^th anniversary of being a school, which basically involved a beauty pageant, but with a twist as it also involved two male contestants competing for a separate title. The categories here were sportswear, talent (mostly dancing while lip-singing), evening wear, and speech. The moms in the crowd really went nuts for the two guys. Check out another upcoming entry devoted to the oddities of Guatemalan beauty pageants. Tuesday and Wednesday there were parties all over town, and fireworks going off every so often. Judging by the focus around the Catholic Church, I deduced that it was some kind of holiday, but asking around town no one knew what holiday it was, just that it was the 24^th of September. At about 7 PM on Wednesday night I started hearing a lot of big fireworks, so I decided it would probably be a good idea to go for a walk. I got up to the church and saw a procession starting its walk, so I almost impulsively joined in. I’m not really sure where that instinct came from… maybe I’m adjusting even more than I thought I was. On that note, Peace.

Spring is in the Air

As most of you back in the United States are enjoying the last dog days of summer and preparing to welcome the changes that come with autumn, here in Guatemala the air has more of a feeling of spring. School here runs (theoretically) from January to October, so going into September means that it feels like May back home. The “winter” here is ending (although it really is technically summer as we are still in the Northern Hemisphere), school vacation and an end to the rains and occasional hurricanes are in sight, and people are beginning to make plans for the good weather months.

School is all a buzz right now with preparations for Independence Day celebrations, which for Guatemala is the 15th of September. I’m told there will be parades, performances, and all sorts of other festive activities, so that should be a fun blog post next month. However, with the preparation for these activities there really isn’t much time for me to be in the classroom giving lessons, especially because end of the year exams are the first week of October. So right now I am contenting myself with helping where I can when I’m at school, and just trying to get kids to pick up after themselves during recess.

Work around town is starting to ramp up as well, as on the other side of the village they are getting ready to put in sewers and a paved street where right now there is just a dirt road. They do have sewers currently, but apparently they are old and have been breaking down and backing up recently, so this project (which was slated to begin in June) will be a welcome relief to many people.

The rains this year have been particularly destructive to our streets around town, most of which are dirt or crude cobblestone, so our village council is scrambling to try and figure out which areas need the most attention with the most urgency. The town is basically perched on a cliff above a pretty large river, and many of the poorer families live very close to the edge. There are also several streets and paths that pass very close to the cliff, and there is a major problem with erosion going on at several key locations around town. I’m not really sure what they’re going to be able to accomplish though; they have already received notice that there are no funds for street projects left this year because they all went to the sewer/street project. The council has asked my help in scouting out possible organizations that could fund small infrastructure projects, but I’m starting from scratch as the Peace Corps hasn’t traditionally been involved in road building here in Guatemala.

I’m looking forward to the end of school because it means that I will have more time to focus on the volcano. In addition to trying to get started on some new data collection, I also have been asked to help with some field work being carried out by the national office, which should be very interesting. In addition, better weather will bring with it more visits from other scientists, which means more field time and a steeper learning curve for me.

I think that’s it for this round, Peace.

Plans and promises

August has felt a lot like starting over here in Las Marias. After being gone or busy for most of July, including a wonderful trip back to the U.S., it is nice to get back and get some work done. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that great of a homecoming. I arrived back at my house to find that someone had broken in while I was gone and made off with a good deal of my stuff, including my camera, so unfortunately I won’t be posting anymore pictures. It was a tough blow, especially because I had been using the camera for my research efforts, but the community has been very sympathetic and offered very heartfelt apologies; everyone seems to think that it reflects badly on them personally. My landlord is putting bars over the windows to make the house safer, and all my neighbors have been on high alert ever since I’ve been back, but so far no one has any leads on who the culprit may be.

My boss from Peace Corps came out and helped me give a workshop to my teachers. It was a bit stressful having to plan an entire day’s worth of activities, but the workshop was a success, and I think everyone learned a lot and had a good time as well. That, plus a whole box full of books that First Pres of Elgin sent down, has put bumped up my street credit around the school, where up until this month I have kind of been feeling like someone that the teachers just put up with.
I’m pretty sad that the school year is almost over, as we are entering our final quarter, and school will be out for vacations after the second week in October until January.

In response to some pretty diligent requests on the part of a group of guys that works for one of the coffee fincas (think plantation when you read this word), I have started a small English course that meets Tuesday and Thursday nights. I’m thinking of it as kind of a pilot program; if I do alright as a teacher, I’ll probably start offering some more classes as my schedule allows because people have been asking me to teach English since I got here. The bottle project is going well, but I am still not sure if we will have enough bottles by the end of the year to actually build a bodega. Everything else is just kind of trucking along… life is busy and good. I’ll be going up to visit a friend’s site on Wednesday to help her give a workshop to her teachers about trash management lessons, so that should be fun, but other than that, not much new to report. I hope everyone’s getting the most out of the end of summer and that those of you going back to school have a good start. More soon, Peace.

July: The month that got away…

I hope I don’t keep saying things like this, but July is flying. I have been meaning to write for a long time, but one thing follows another and it seems like there is never enough time. I last left you all with news of work revving up here, and it has continued to do so. Teaching lessons and the bottle project are both going well at school; although I have not been in over three weeks, so that could be a rude awakening for me when I show up on Monday. I have not been slacking, but I have not been at school.

On Friday the 20^th of June, we had our Teacher’s Day celebration. This consisted of going to a restaurant with all the teachers from our municipality and having a lunch and some presentations of awards. Of course, I am in Guatemala, so we also had to perform for one another. I was actually up in front of everyone twice, once with all of my teachers as we performed a dance to Thriller (check it out… ridiculous!) and the second time I was pulled up without knowing what it was for with my director. As it turns out, we had to prove our masculinity with a “campesino yell.” Think the high pitched crying noise that one might hear in a ranchera song, very stereotypically “Aaaaiyy Haaa,” and you’re just about there, you just have to add a gringo doing it in front of 500 of his “peers.” I won a clock, although I am not sure that it was because I was best, only the most unique.

On June 25^th a small group from Michigan Tech arrived to try and get some work done on Fuego and Santiaguito. We spent the day getting supplies and arranging last minute details and on Thursday the 26^th we set off for Fuego. After some mighty driving by one John Lyons and about an hour and a half hike we arrived to our camp site in between Acatenango and Fuego. From there we would climb every day up the side of Fuego to our observation point on La Meseta with a great view of the cone… or it would have been if it hadn’t been so blasted foggy. We spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights camping and each day we set out full of hope that today would be the day that the clouds would part and we would be able to see the volcano and get some work done. Unfortunately it is the rainy season here in Guatemala, and we were under a tropical depression the entire time we were on the mountain. We had about an hour of actual visibility, and the rest of the time we sat in the clouds with all of our equipment waiting for it to clear up. The Care Bears, Rainbow Bright, and any other beloved cartoon characters that I grew up watching are liars; living in the clouds is not fun. It is cold, windy, and boring.

We were originally going to head immediately to Santa Maria to try and get some thermal images of the Caliente dome of Santiaguito, but due to our less than great prospects of actually being able to see the dome from the top of Santa Maria due to the lingering tropical depression, the group decided it would be better to try their luck a little later in the week before they had to head home. This meant that I was able to attend an all volunteer conference at our training center in Santa Lucia on “Working as a Professional in Guatemala” as well as go to the fourth of July party that the Peace Corps had for all of us volunteers. It was a great time and the first chance I have had to see a lot of fellow volunteers in one place. There are kind of a lot of us for such a small country, but everyone seems pretty active at their sites, so I guess we are doing something right. I just need to try and remember a lot of new names…

On Sunday I did end up making the trip with the Michigan group up Santa Maria. We left Xela at 11:00 PM and started our ascent in hopes that we would get some good pre dawn images of the dome without a lot of ambient heating of the ground from sun light. We arrived at the top around 3 AM and set up a tent to protect us from the wind and dampness because, you guessed it, it was cloudy. We sat in the tent until about 8 AM when we finally gave up and got ready to head down again, utterly defeated. Graciously, the clouds decided to give us a break and we got about an hour of observation time in and hopefully some good shots with the thermal camera.

I got back to my site on Monday at around 3 in the afternoon, and my neighbors spent a good amount of time teasing me that they thought I had left for good (I was gone 12 days and I had told everyone what I was leaving for and to please watch my house). After I was home about two hours my neighbor from behind came to my door asking if by any chance I had seen an “animalito” anywhere in my house since I had been back. This intrigued me, so I asked what kind of little animal she thought I might have seen in my house, and she replied, “A duck.”

“Well, no, I don’t think so. I imagine I would have noticed a duck in my house, the house is not very large.”

“All right, well, if you see it, will you catch it and bring it over?”
“Sure Doña Sofia, I’ll bring your duck if I see it.”

Thankfully the mystery was solved about 15 minutes later when the duck turned up at my next door neighbor’s house. It was a close call though, because two of the dogs seemed to be ready to make off with the thing like a chew toy, but they couldn’t get to it because it was hiding behind a piece of discarded fence material. There’s never a dull moment in Las Marias.

Another fun story, there is a nick name that gringos have for the bluebird school buses that traverse the country and serve as our main form of transport in Guatemala: Chicken Buses. Now these buses are referred to as chicken buses because they are used to transport everything, from people to, well, chickens. I have personally experienced many chickens running underfoot on these buses, as well as dogs and pigs tied to the roof racks among other assorted oddities. However, on my way to Xela this weekend I had my first experience of riding on a bus where there were more chickens than people. I noticed a funny smell when I got on the bus at my stop, which isn’t in itself anything out of the ordinary. For this reason it took me a good five minutes to realize that all the boxes in the over head racks and under the seats were filled with about 50 newly hatched chicks each, and that these “animalitos” were responsible for that high pitched squeaky sound I had originally blamed on the bus itself. Ah livestock…

Our training group has our “Re-connect” conference next week. This is basically a chance to bring us all back in and talk about how the first three months of service have gone and make sure that none of us are too crazy yet. And after that, I fly home to celebrate the matrimony of Jared Paul List and Brooke Lindsay Allen. I’ll be stateside for about 7 days, from the 23^rd at 9 PM until the 30^th around 8 AM, so if you call my old cell phone number, odds are I will answer it during those times. I’m already seeing it as a whirlwind trip, and I will try to see as many people as I can, but if I miss you, please know that it was not on purpose. I’m going to be a little lost adjusting to all the bright lights and fancy machines of the United States… I hear they have these machines that control the climate of entire houses, and these other ones that wash dishes all by themselves. I hear there’s even one that runs around a house and sucks up dirt right out of these things called carpets… crazy. It’s been a little over six months since I’ve been home last, which might not sound like much, but I am a little worried that a week isn’t going to cut it. Wish me luck, and maybe I’ll be seeing some of you soon. In the meantime, here are some new pictures. Take care! Peace.

Mother's Day

I really don’t know how to start this entry. It has been awhile since my last update, so I feel like I have to write something, but honestly life has been pretty routine over the past two weeks. I get up around 5 AM every day, and depending on the day have one of two standard schedules. Three days a week I climb into the back of a small semi trailer to ride with the workers through the coffee and macadamia nut fincas, stop by the finca office for a cup of coffee and head up to the volcano observatory to spend the morning collecting data, talking with the observers, and basically getting to know Santiaguito. The other two mornings, I go for a run while the temperature is still cool enough to permit it, and then head to school which starts at 7:30. I use my afternoons to do planning work, go shopping, and generally prepare for the next day, and I usually run up to Xela or down to Retauhueleu to buy harder to find items like cheese and peanut butter on Saturday or Sunday.

My house has become the coolest place in town to hang out for anyone under the age of 12 who isn’t out playing marbles. I am usually surrounded by anywhere from 6 to 15 kids just hanging out on my porch, playing with the giant floor puzzles that Adam left for me or climbing my trees to get a fruit called a cushin (it has a green husk that holds a lot of big seeds inside, and you eat the tissue that surrounds the seeds, and it is kind of shaped like a giant bean pod). My best friend in site therefore is currently an 8 year old boy named Oliver.

Work is going well, and I feel that I am setting up some decent projects for myself. The trash management project with the municipality has taken a back seat as of right now, for two reasons. First, I am being kept very busy with my primary responsibilities at the school and the observatory, and second because the municipal offices have been pretty busy with another project that I have nothing to do with. I plan on meeting with the mayor at the end of this month when my boss from Peace Corps comes out to visit me to try and figure out some kind of time frame for this project, because I do think the people of my village are very interested in finding a solution to this issue.

My first big holiday in site happened last Friday, when the school had its Mother’s Day celebration. Mother’s Day here is always celebrated on the 10th of May regardless of what day of the week it falls on. It is a very big day in the schools and classes were basically canceled in order to have the celebration. Students got together and performed dances, sang songs, and read poems to the assembled group of mothers, and the teachers prepared games for the moms to play. My game ended up being a watermelon eating contest, which ended up being a big hit. I had 15 mothers get up in front of everyone and inhale melon. It was very fun to watch, and I would put the woman who won up against anyone from back home, she was a champ.

The celebration also culminated with a mother beauty pageant, which was very interesting. The teachers called for volunteers on the spot to participate in the activity, and they had to come up in front of the group and perform a talent. The more conservative contestants spoke about what a wonderful privilege and great responsibility motherhood is, and this got a lot of the other mother’s crying. A few of the mom’s didn’t have anything, so after some hooting and hollering from the crowd, they ended up saying they would dance if they had a partner. Obviously the funniest person to dance with would be the giant gringo standing in the back taking pictures, so I suddenly became part of two contestant’s talents. The winner of the pageant was a mother who got up and sang a song about losing her mother, which made almost everyone cry. Apparently tugging on people’s heartstrings was a more effective technique than making them laugh, but maybe I shouldn’t take it so personally.

I hope everyone had a great Mother’s day back home. I got to call my mom and grandma, so it was almost like being home… okay, not really, but it was good to talk to them anyway. Peace.

Expectations, Wedding, and a little Indiana Jones

The last three weeks have been pretty great. I feel that I am settling into a routine, and that I am feeling perhaps a little too comfortable already, for only having spent four weeks here. Adam left for the States on Sunday, so last week was really all about him saying good bye to people and passing the torch as it were. There were a lot of tears; Adam really did a great job here over the past two years and has set a pretty high set of expectations to live up to, which is great for me because people are already looking to start working!

Last Friday Adam gave his final presentation at INSIVUMEH to our bosses, Gustavo Chigna and Flavio Linares, as well as a couple of other interested parties around the office. It went well, but a large part at the end was dedicated to future work, which is code for what they want me to do. It was good to hear them voice their wishes and I think that I will be able to jump on board.

I honestly wasn’t expecting to be able to jump into work this quickly, as most people I have spoken to about Peace Corps life had me expecting to spend my first three to six months preparing an action plan and getting to know people, but I am finding that I am meeting scores of people every day (which is tricky because I am bad with names as it is, and being introduced to 12 people who tell you their first, middle, last, and mother’s maiden names, the majority of which are slightly difficult to pronounce usually leaves my head spinning by the afternoon. Luckily most people are very understanding and willing to tell me their names a few times.


Friday night I got to spend some time with some other volunteers in Antigua, which was nice considering I hadn’t seen them since we left for site. Saturday I headed up the mountain to my training community with my friend Joey for my host brother’s wedding. He’s been unido (literally united, but used here to signify a common law marriage) for a few years and has a child of about 4, but they haven’t had enough money to get married in the church until now.

It was a very interesting wedding, as it was a blend of catholic and evangelical practices. I should probably start here by explaining that Guatemalans generally fall into one of two religious identities: catolicos or evangelicos, and these very often compete with each other. If you are not catholic here, you are evangelic. To be Evangelic means that one does not drink, generally does not dance, and goes to culto (service) at least once a week. Practicing Catholics go to mass when the priest can make it to town or travel into a bigger city for Sunday mass. Sometimes these practices are also suplimented by traditional Mayan beliefs, but the areas in which I have lived are too ladino to be able to see much evidence of this.

Weddings are said to either be evangelico or catolico based on the form of entertainment, not necessarily based on the church service. Catholic weddings usually include drinking and a marimba for dancing, evangelic weddings have more of a prayer service for a reception, and usually no one dances. In this sense, my host brother’s wedding was evangelico despite his having been wed in the Catholic Church by the parish priest.

The reception was actually much more fun than Joey and I had been led to believe that it was going to be. The wedding singer did focus on Christian music, but he was an excellent singer and apparently has a radio show out of Guatemala City. His preaching breaks were very well done and aimed at practicing good family life, and were peppered with a lot of humor. It was also great to not be treated like a guest in the house for once. We were allowed to help set up, serve the other guests, and to clean up when everything was done. We ate with the immediate family after all the other guests had been served, and we got to share in some of the jokes at the end of the night. We both agreed that we were pretty lucky to have gotten so close to these people.

Sunday morning we met up in Antigua for breakfast with the other volunteers that were in town again, and before I got on the bus, I bought bootlegged copies of the Indiana Jones movies. They are very good quality and have both English and Spanish language tracks, so on Monday afternoon I had a screening for some of the neighbor kids of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I figure that there is no better way for me to share American culture than by exposing kids to real quality American cinema, and not just the Steven Segal crap they see on TV, not that I have anything against Steven Segal.


I actually got to feel like a trained professional that people have been telling me that I am on Friday and Saturday when Gustavo came up to the observatory and told me that I was going to spend the rest of the day installing a DOAS (Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy) system from NOVAC (Network for Observation of Volcanic and Atmospheric Change). It was actually the same type of equipment I had helped install when I was in Mexico last summer, so I knew a lot about what we were doing and was actually able to contribute some useful ideas. We ended up staying the night up at the observatory and working again Saturday morning.

When I got home on Saturday afternoon I was planning on just doing some laundry and taking it easy, but I was treated to an impromptu marimba concert on my frnt porch. One of my homestay dad's brothers came over with two of his buddies and just started jamming. I was able to pull out my computer and record a few songs, so if I can figure it out, I'll try to post the files.

This weekend marks the end of my first month, which also means that I only have 100 more weeks as a Peace Corps volunteer, so I’m going to buy myself an ice cream cone, and some tortillas for the week. Peace,

Kyle

Fire and Water

Week two in site is coming to a close, and I stayed in my little village the whole week if you don’t count trips to run into the nearest town to check e-mail and buy vegetables. It was my first week alone at site, and I think it went really well. At my school, I sat in on a few classes and went to a PTA meeting, and my biggest headache (literally) came from a low beam in the principal’s office that I am the only one tall enough at the school to have it be a bother. After my school director commented that Adam was the only other person to have had a problem with said beam, I named the beam “Mata Gringos” or gringo killer, and got my only intentional laugh involving the load bearing pain in my neck of the week, the others all came from more slapstick situations.

At the volcano observatory I started trying to take some gas measurements from Santiaguito, but visibility is usually pretty sketchy and almost impossible after 9:00, so I am lucky to get an hour of actual observation time, and it hasn’t been cloud free yet so the data isn’t really good. I did get to know the observer on duty a bit though. He’s in his late thirties I think, has lived in the area all his life, and likes to talk. I’m pretty sure he’ll be a really good resource for when I want to start community interviews. I get to work with the other observer next week, as they work every other week, and I hear he is pretty cool too.

My afternoons have been full of hand washing laundry and cooking dinner without the aid of appliances. I have decided that I am a lousy cook. It isn’t that my meals aren’t palatable, but that they never end up in the same place that they started. For example, I was going to make boiled potatoes and carrots with a fried sausage on Monday night, but it ended up being something much closer to hash. I over cooked the potatoes, under cooked the carrots, and didn’t quite have my act together with the sausage. As nothing was burned, I cut up the carrots and left them in a minute longer while I grabbed some butter, threw it on the potatoes, mashed them up and mixed in the sausage and finally the carrots. It just goes to prove that butter can fix anything. The rains at night are pretty crazy. They usually are done by around 10 PM, but as this is typically loooong past this guy’s bed time, I don’t get to enjoy the quiet of the evening.

When the rain starts, everything stops. People close up shop because no one will come in. If people are visiting somewhere when it starts, they typically wait wherever they are until it stops, and the owners of the location are very hospitable. I was in a little comedor today in the town close by when the rain kicked up, and if I hadn’t been able to point out the micro that was just leaving to go back to Las Marias, I am confident that the lady who runs the place would have made me stay the night, because by the time it ended up stopping all the buses were done running for the day. The people look at me like I’m a moron when I go out in the stuff; the gringo who doesn’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain is supposed to be teaching them about the environment. Oh well... Peace.

Life under the mango tree...

I successfully swore in as a Volunteer in the United States Peace Corps a week ago Thursday, and the first week as a volunteer has been an interesting one. The weekend of swear in was a lot of fun, as our training class basically got to just hang out in Antigua before going out to our respective sites throughout the country. Some people left Saturday, others Sunday depending on how far away their sites were. Initially I was pretty apprehensive about the move because there are no buses out of San Miguel Milpas Altas on Sundays. This left me with the prospect of hauling two back packs and a huge nylon bag full of crap over the two hills and thirty minute walk that stand between San Miguel and the nearest transportation. The packing process was pretty hilarious actually, as my host mother Doña Lidia decided that the best way to transport all of my stuff was to put it into one bundle that stood about a meter tall and weighed easily 75 pounds and carry it all using a milcopan (head strap) in the traditional way. I obviously am not nearly as Guatemalan as Doña Lidia thinks I am though, because when I tried to lift the bag in this manner my neck nearly snapped off at the shoulders. Thankfully, I was able to arrange transportation out of San Miguel last Sunday morning with Jesse’s host grandfather.

I got into Las Marias just before noon, having made great time (about 4 1/2 hours by bus from Antigua), dropped my luggage off at the house where I am spending my first three months, and called Adam, the volunteer who I am replacing to let him know I had arrived. He surprised me by telling me that Drew, a civil engineering Masters International student who did his work in Jamaica and who I had gotten to know briefly while he was working on his thesis this fall up at Tech, was visiting with his fiancé. So I slipped my swim trunks on and headed off with them to Antiguo Palmar, the old site of the municipal head that they moved do to intense lahar activity in the mid ‘80s. The river that cut a canyon through the town thirty years ago and then again about ten years ago is heated at its source by a lava flow from Santiaguito and cooled down as it descends by a series of tributaries as they enter the main river. The locals have set up a few make shift damns to trap the water and form a series of pools that make great heated swimming holes. After a few hours of enjoyment, Drew and his fiancé left for Xela/Quetaltenango (different names for the same town) which is about an hour away, Adam went to his place, and I headed home to arrange my things and settle in for the first night.

I have spent the rest of the week setting up my living conditions here. They are very comfortable, in fact I think a little too comfortable, unless you take into account the mango tree. I seem to have arrived right in the heart of mango season here in Las Marias, which is great because it means an abundant supply of humongous (seriously the size of my two fists put together) juicy mangos. However, seeing as my lamina roof is placed directly under one of these delicious fruit trees, I have been besieged by mango bombs morning, noon and (the worst) night. The five pound terrors fall down onto the tin roof with a sound like gun shots right above my head. During the day I have already gotten used to the noises, and I’m not here that much during the day anyway, but when one falls at 3 or 4 AM… let’s just say I am very glad to be slightly dehydrated due to the heat and not as well fed this week at these moments, it’s that startling. I really hope that the mango season is a short one for this particular tree.

I’m going to be working the next few weeks on figuring out where I fit in to this place they call Las Marias. The work that I was worried that I would have to start immediately upon arrival seems to have lost its urgency in the past two weeks, which is a huge relief. I can start slowly and build up my own steam without having to jump on Adam’s train as he is leaving. It is intimidating enough walking around with him as he says good bye to what are now good friends while I am saying hello and struggling to remember everyone’s combination of four names that they introduce themselves with and which of these correspond to the nicknames they are called by and known by around town. At least everyone is friendly and most are very patient, and everyone expresses to me how much they hope that I like the place. The person who seems to be the most interested in speaking with me is the town drunk who I have to walk by three or four times a day, but I am hoping that will change as other people get to know me.

I hope that April and the beginning of the baseball season finds you all well. I am happy to report that although I don’t have any place that is close where I could catch the occasional game if I so desired, the news paper does have a small section where they usually put one story from the big leagues as well as the scores from the previous day, so I will be able to remotely follow the great American pastime as long as I occasionally supplement my diet with occasional trips to the internet café. Let me know how you all are doing, I really like getting emails, and I promise that I will respond!! Peace.