Carrying the cross... and Jesus too.

These last few weeks have been full ones, with a lot of work, a lot of planning, and a lot of thinking about how the next two years of service are going to go. As far as finishing up training goes, we taught our last lessons at the school here in San Miguel two weeks ago, and we spent last week building a three stoves, a floor, and a drainage ditch for the kitchen at the school which houses grades K-2 for the town. Our only remaining activity at the school will be an “environmental day” that we will celebrate this week.

I’ve been out to visit my site now twice, and I am definitely itching to get out and get started. I will be jumping right into work. In the school, I am expected to kick off a trash management education campaign. This will be a continuation of Adam’s solid waste management SPA project (Small Project Assistance funds from USAID for Peace Corps volunteers). In conjunction with the education campaign in the school, I think that I will be working with the COCODE (Council for Community Development) of the aldea (village) of Las Marias and the municipal offices of El Palmar to figure out some kind of sanitary landfill situation and/or recycling project for the community. I am slightly worried that the gap of time between now and when I will be arriving and starting work is a bit large and that the delay could mean more of a struggle to get people on board with the project, but there really isn’t much I can do until April.

I will be living with a family for the first three months of my service; however, I will be feeding myself and doing my own laundry, things I haven’t had to do so far and additional reasons why I am going to miss my present host family when I leave next week. Things have been wonderful here in San Miguel and despite my rants about being treated like a child, training has been a pretty comfortable environment. I am not expecting the rest of this experience to follow suit. I’m really going to miss the constant companionship of the other trainees, especially those who have been living in San Miguel with me. Having other gringos close by to complain too and laugh at the many awkward situations that we find ourselves in on an hourly basis is a luxury I am really going to miss. The closest volunteer to me will be about an hour and a half away, and he only has transportation in and out of his site a few times a day.

In addition to running around this week trying to finish up training activities, it has also been Holy Week. Semana Santa in Guatemala is a pretty big deal, and as we had been told and found out this week, the country basically shuts down for the week, unless you’re business is tourism. Schools and government offices are closed, and many businesses shut their doors. The way to celebrate things in this area is by making alfombras (literally carpets with designs made out of saw dust, pine needles, fruit, candles, and almost about anything else) and then having large processions carrying andarias (giant floats without wheels) that pass over the top of them as they move throughout the town.

Last Saturday night after coming back from our site visit a few other trainees and I went down to Antigua to work on an alfombra that was being made by one of the teachers from our school. When we went back to Antigua on Palm Sunday to see the processions, we couldn’t get close enough to see our finished product because of the amount of people in town. We took advantage of the lack of children in the school on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to complete our construction projects, and on Thursday night we had our own alfombras and procession of an andaria through San Miguel.

This was a pretty interesting spectacle for us because the gringos in town got to help carry our andaria. If you look at the pictures, you see that every one grabs a side and rests the thing on their shoulder. This works great as long as everyone is arranged in proper height order so you have a constant slope for the weight of the andaria is distributed evenly. Joey and I went on Wednesday night to the church to get measured for our place in line, and it turns out we are taller than everyone else in our aldea by a cool two inches, and taller than the average carrier by at least a head. This meant that in order to carry the andaria, we could try and stand up straight which meant carrying at least four other people’s weight (this proved to be impossible, the darn thing was just too heavy) or we could figure out how to slouch and get closer to the height at which everyone else was carrying it. We had four rotations of about fifteen minutes each, but somehow we almost always ended up carrying through two rotations. So we had half hour shifts from when we left at 5:45 until we got back to the church at 10. The only other comment I have is that my back is really killing me… still.

On Friday, I was awoken at 4 in the morning by the pounding of my host mother’s mighty fist against my window telling me that I had better hurry up and get ready because the bus was going to leave without us. By 4:30 I was sitting on the camionetta with my host parents, my host sister, two of my host brothers and six of my host nieces and nephews descending the hill to Antigua. The bus let us off on the outskirts of town because most of the streets were closed off and we walked about a half mile to where the really big processions were and saw a bunch of the really elaborate alfombras. As an experience, it felt a lot like going to see a combination of the Christmas window displays and the Thanksgiving parade in Chicago… at 5 AM. We took the bus back around 9 and had breakfast at 10. By noon, the family was ready to hit the road again to go back to see more and we took one of the last buses home at around 1 in the morning after seeing what I think may have been one of the final processions of the day, but who knows. It is no wonder that Easter Sunday isn’t as big of a deal here, they’re still tired from Good Friday!

On Easter, the other trainees from San Miguel and I cooked a lunch for our homestay families. Joey had the great idea to cook some American chili, and Briana made potato salad, and although we are not exactly convinced they actually liked the food, they all apparently appreciated the gesture.

This will probably be my last entry as a trainee, as we officially swear in for duty on Thursday the 27th, and I’ll be in my site on Monday the 30th, ready to get down to business. I hear that the Chicago area got pounded with some late Easter snow yesterday, so I hope everyone is dealing with that alright. If you need a break, just remember they call Guatemala the country of eternal spring, and where I’m going next week is definitely hot and tropical, so plan your visits now! Peace.

Just for fun

Just for fun:

American things in Guatemala that make me happy:

• Wendy’s, specifically the Baconator and Frosty. When I had a frosty about 2 weeks ago, I literally let out a moan of delight when the lovely chocolate concoction began falling out of the machine.
• Waffles at the waffle house. What a beautiful idea, to put a waffle house in Guatemala.
• Wrestling T-Shirts. 2 months ago I didn’t know who John Cena was. Now I am looking everywhere for a shirt with his picture on it.
• My mustache and long hair. Yes, I am sporting a blonde, dirty looking, mustache. It is disgusting, but we (the other Environmental Education Trainees from my cycle and I) have decided to celebrate Mustache March. It is actually probably the only time in my life where a mustache will make me more professionally credible than less.
• I also love riding in the back of pickup trucks.

P.S. My host mom can beat up your dad.

Peace.

Individual Directed Activity

I just got back from my first visit to my site. It wasn’t technically considered a site visit, because I still haven’t technically received my site assignment, which happens on Monday. So this was considered an Individual Directed Activity, although for all intents and purposes it was a site visit. I hit the camionetas (retrofitted school busses with lots of Guatemalan flair if I haven’t mentioned them before) at 8 AM Sunday morning and got to the entrada to Nuevo El Palmar (they call it Nuevo because Antigua El Palmar was literally cut in half by lahar activity about 20 years back, and it is bad for business to have a giant gorge running through your central plaza if you are supposed to be seat of a municipality) at around 2 PM that same afternoon. From the entrada, I proceeded to jump into the back of a pickup truck loaded with finca workers and headed on into Las Marias, the community in which I will be working for the next two years. Because I have a special knack for transportation screw ups, I decided that rather than get off in Las Marias proper, I would stay in the truck until it stopped, which was about two kilometers past town, but when I had been standing looking confused not to be in a town for about 30 seconds, people started asking me if I was looking for another gringo that lived around there, I said yes, and got a ride back into town where a little girl walked me to Adam Blankebicker’s front door.

Adam has done some pretty great work in the last two years, and it seemed to me by all the warm welcomes that I will have some pretty big shoes to fill and some pretty high expectations to meet, but at the same time I will have a community that is anxious to work with me on all sorts of projects. I got to witness an all community meeting where the Water Committee introduced Adam’s Small Project Assistance project (a special source of funds available to PCV’s through USAID), I had the opportunity to meet all of the teachers that I will be working with, talk with one of the two members of the Santiaguito Observatory staff, and even meet with the Alcaldeza (female mayor, one of the six in the whole country) of the municipality.

All in all, I am psyched to be looking at going into such a great site, with so many opportunities to work with motivated people. I am pretty nervous too, but I think that will die down once I start working. I posted a few pictures, and I promise to take more the next time I get out there, which should be in another week or so. Happy leap day! Peace.

Training Stories or Why I'm 14 Years Old Again

It’s been a few weeks since the last entry, and we have been super busy. We had to give a few classes in the last two weeks, to preschoolers and highschoolers and everyone in between. We are also formulating a project to do in our training communities, which requires a lot of meetings in an already tight schedule, but so far so good.

So where to start? We just got back from a weeklong trip to visit four different volunteers in their sites and to see what kind of work possibilities there are in our program. Basically the answer I came away with is that I can do whatever I want as long as I am working. Ideally, the environmental education volunteer works for two years with three (in my case two because of the MI program) schools and attempts to get them to a point where the school can be certified as an Environmentally Friendly school, which means that the students and teachers become environmentally “conscious” and the physical building of the school becomes a place where trash and other human waste are managed properly and hygienically.

Now, the school system here is run a bit differently than back home. First off, school theoretically runs nationwide from January 1st to the end of October everyday from 8:00 AM to noon, with a week vacation for Holy Week, and then maybe a two week vacation in July when there is usually a two week break in the rain fall as well (it is supposed to rain from April to August or September almost nonstop). This schedule can be interrupted at any time for any number of reasons, from teacher strike to a teacher calling in sick to a “hey, I don’t feel like school today” day. I am told that you almost have to ask on a day by day basis whether or not there will be school the next day, and sometimes that isn’t even reliable.

Considering that we are not expected to teach whole classes or even be in schools every day of the week, even if there were some sort of reliable schedule, we could possibly have a lot of free time. This is where secondary projects come in. We have free reign to do any sort of project that our community may deem necessary, so basically I could be doing anything from building a school out of bottles to digging garbage dumps to building guitars to organizing youth groups to … well you get the idea. The things I just mentioned by the way are all projects being carried out by other Environmental Ed volunteers. This is extremely liberating in the fact that I will really be able to pursue projects my strengths will be able to complement, and a little daunting in that I will be majorly responsible for pursuing community development projects at my site. This would be less daunting if I hadn’t arrived in country hearing so many botched development stories from so many different sources. I guess it either means I will be prepared to avoid mistakes, or that I will avoid the small mistakes and find my own gigantic ones!

I found out that I will be visiting Adam’s site at Las Marias (outside of El Palmar, south of Xela/Quetzaltenango, and most probably my future site) on Sunday of this week, so that is pretty great. I have a ton to ask him and I am glad to have some time away from the regular rigors of training.

This is probably a good point to address what training is like on a day to day basis. I think the best way to describe it is that I have become a 14 year old boy again, only now I can grow a beard. I actually made a list with one of my friends and training site mates, Joey Delgado (http://guactalk.blogspot.com/) of things that made us sure we were 14 again. Enjoy!

1. My mom does my laundry because I can’t. It’s not really that I can’t it’s just that I don’t beat the living hell out of every piece of cloth against the stone, and therefore she doesn’t believe my clothes are clean when I wash them.

2. I have to be home before dark. I stayed at a friend’s house to watch the super bowl. I told my host mom I would be home late. She called me at 7, I told her the game was about half way over. She called me at 8, I told her there was still a whole other quarter. She called me at 9, I told her we were going to be leaving shortly. She called me at 9:45 and I was walking home in a place without cell reception and didn’t get the call. She met me at the front gate, and the first thing she asked me was if I had been drinking. When I told her truthfully that I had not had even a sip the whole night and that she could call the host mom of the volunteer whose house I had been at with the other volunteers from my town, she said it was good, because if I had been drinking she would have been “muy muy enojada” or very very angry. She then proceeded to only lecture me on the dangers of walking home after dark, and especially so late after dark. In my defense, I was still home before 10. In her defense, walking home from the next town over in complete and total darkness was pretty freaking terrifying, even though I was with two other guys who are also bigger than 90% of Guatemaltecos.

3. I spend my weeknights (and most weekend nights as well) doing homework, playing video games, reading books, and going to bed by 9:00. There just isn’t anything else to do when your whole family is ready for bed by 8:30 and gets up at 4.

4. I get woken up on Sunday mornings (the only day I could feasibly sleep in) by my dad blasting his favorite music on the radio. The only differences are that instead of being woken up at 8:30 by Oldies 104.3, I’m woken up at 5:30 by “TODA MACINA!!!! PURO ÉXITOS!!!” (big base voice yelling) which is Ranchero music. For those of you who don’t know, that’s the tuba polka music.

5. The girls get together for sleepovers. There is only one female volunteer living here in San Miguel and only one living in Magdalena (the next town over), so they get together every so often for “girl time.”

6. We sleep in bunk beds. On our field based training, we literally slept in bunk beds like you would a summer camp and in order to avoid hearing the girls talking in the next room about what crushes they had, us guys told dirty jokes.

7. My mom packs my lunch. I really enjoy this actually.

8. My mom wakes me up if I hit the snooze alarm.

9. My mom takes care of me when I’m sick.

10. My mom tells me to go to bed if my light is on past 9:00 PM.

11. I am currently reading The Lord of the Rings, although it is only because I just finished The Brothers Karamazov.

12. I have to do chores. These are slightly different than the ones I did as a teen though. For example, I sweep, not vacuum. I push the vegetable wheelbarrow around town on Sunday mornings while my mother sells them instead of mowing the lawn. I put water on the dirt instead of the lawn because the grass is fine, but the dirt gets dusty if we don’t water it. Oh, and I can’t leave in the morning before my bed is made.

13. The topic around the lunch table is always either soccer or WWF wrestling, and I am dead serious.

14. Every one of my friends is either single or has not seen their significant other in 6 weeks, and are also preoccupied with bodily functions, so almost any complete sentence ends with somebody finding a way to make it dirty. All our minds are “in the gutter” as it were.

15. The single greatest joy in life is once again ice cream, cake, or candy.

16. We had a 3 hour sex ed talk, which included watching a baby being born, AIDS testimonies, and our Medical Officer wearing a giant condom hat.

17. The only professional tools I have been issued thus far are markers, glue, scissors, tape, and poster board.

18. I occasionally babysit little girls of ages 8, 6, and 4. At least they’re cute.

19. Pizza = Special Occasion

20. Someone else wants to know where I am at all times. Gotta love the Security Officer.
Hope you enjoyed that. Sorry it was so long. I put some new pics up on the facebook album and I hope to put more up next week along with another blog post after I get back from visiting Adam. Until then, thanks for the emails, the comments, the wall posts, and the thoughts and prayers. By the by, I was pretty nasty sick for about a week and a half with some weird lung stuff, but I’m on antibiotics and decongestants, and I am feeling a lot better, so thanks for the thoughts there too. I miss you all, and please keep emails coming! If anyone wants to call me for any reason, my number is on facebook, and its 15 cents a minute on skype, just call after 8 PM because otherwise I might be busy or with the family.

Peace.

Week 2

I am now completely done with 2 full weeks of training, and only 9 more to go! We met our teachers that we will be working with last week, and this week we should actually have some time to figure out what it is exactly we will be doing. There is some talk about helping some of the teachers finish a grant to get a water tank and purification system set up at the school as well so that the kids don’t have to bring a 3 liter bottle of water every Monday so that they will be able to wash their hands. We are scheduled to be in the classrooms with our first lesson at the beginning of next week, so that’s pretty cool. The closer I get to actually working the happier I will be.

My homestay family is awesome, and apparently also related to almost everyone in town. Jesse, Joey, Briana and I are basically famous, as everyone knows us and our bowel habits. Apparently I am winning because I haven’t been sick yet, knock on wood. I’m not sure if that means my mom’s cooking is safer, my stomach is tougher, or if my body is just saving up for a really knock me off of my feet sick in a few weeks. No use worrying I guess… even though there have been three dead birds around my house this week… just kidding, my host mom says the neighbor kids are shooting them with sling shots.

So about what exactly I am going to be doing here:

I will supposedly be assigned two schools to work with in the hopes that I can help the teachers develop a plan for an environmental education program. Exactly how I go about doing this, whether it is me giving talks to kids, running workshops for teachers, or just helping the principle find out how to go about getting multiple bins for trash and recyclables will depend on my site. As of right now, I think I will be taking over a site from Adam, a PC MI from the GeoHazards program at MTU who is COSing in April, so eventually I am going to get to talk to him and find out the info on the schools that he has been working with to see what I am going to be able to continue and where I am going to have to figure some new things out.

In addition to this, I will be working with CONRED and INSIVUMEH (the Guatemalan equivalents of FIMA and the USGS) to help monitor Santiaguito Volcano. Again, what this exactly entails will depend on what is going on there now and where people want things to go, but apparently the Tech group that was just down here put in some new equipment. In addition, there are supposed to be plans for a workshop sometime at the end of next year that we might have a chance to help get some things rolling on, but again, that’s all in the future.

In the meantime, I am enjoying my training community and my training group, and I am especially enjoying the chocolate covered bananas which are sold in the next town over. We pass by the place almost any time we want to go into more civilized areas, so I have been eating quite a few, and I am in fact on a first name basis with the girl who works the counter.
Thanks so much to those of you leaving comments or writing emails, I love hearing from people. I may be a little slow getting back to people just because I am only really on the internet once a week, but I promise that I will respond soon! Peace.

First Week in my Training Site

Things this week that made me realize I was really, truly, and honestly going to live in Guatemala for two years:

1) Watching Volcan Fuego send out a plume of ash while I was standing in line for a rabies vaccine.
2) Seeing a rat that looked to be bigger than a small cat take a walk through my bedroom.
3) Hoping into the back of a truck to hitch a ride up the mountain to my training site.
4) Laughing my head off as I had my first go at tortilla making. I dropped two on the floor and made three horribly thick ones before I turned out one that was palatable. Meanwhile I had four grown women, and three pintsized ones enjoying the show and commenting how funny it was that the three year old who was afraid of me a week ago finally warmed up to me because her tortillas were better than mine.
5) Sitting on my host family’s porch watching fireworks from a village across the valley as I played with my host mother’s granddaughters that live in our compound.
6) Going for a run with Joey around San Miguel’s fútbol field while watching the sun setting in between Agua and Fuego.
7) Walking the streets of San Miguel selling vegetables with my host mother and her two granddaughters and meeting almost the whole town because everyone is related.
8) Talking with Jesse, Joey, and Brianna, the three other trainees that live in San Miguel, and realizing that the whole town not only knows our names, but probably our pooping habits.
9) Finding out my childhood was a bit of a sham because I never learned how to spin a top with a piece of string, and finally learning how to do it from one of the special education kids up the block.
10) Watching the AFC championship game at a gringo bar in Antigua and having to go home before the NFC championship game because I wouldn’t have been home before dark (our “gringo curfew” during training) and if I had been late my host mom would have gotten mad and probably sent me to bed without supper… yeah, I feel like I am 12 years old again.

I really love it so far. Jesse and I met with Bill Rose and Flavio Linares on Thursday to discuss our placements, and it looks like unless something crazy happens I will actually be taking over Adam Blankenbicker’s site at Las Marias on the slopes of Santiaguito volcano, just south of Quetzaltenango/Xela. Finding this out makes me the first in our training group to know their assignment, only about two months ahead of schedule. On Friday we had a chance to visit Jem (another Michigan Tech student who got here about a year ago) and her site in Panimache near Fuego (that she took over after John) on Friday and all it did was get me really psyched to get going in April. We also got to see the last Tech delegation of Greg, Rüdiger, John, and Lisa, and I got to meet Adam for the first time as well. More when I get it, but as for now, here’s the first set of pics. http://augustana.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2030286&l=dd257&id=33102227
Peace.

San Miguel de Milpas Altas

¡Hola Todos!
Well, I’ve been an official Peace Corps trainee for a whole week now, and it feels like it has been a month. PC Guatemala changed last year to site based training, so instead of everyone living in one community and going to a training center every day, we are all spread out in different host communities within an hour bus ride/walk/both of the training center where we meet once a week for general sessions. The majority of our training however (i.e. technical – where I learn my job, and language – where I learn to mejorar mi Español) is done in a group of four at our host community. The three other people in my training group are Jessie from Tech, Joey from TX, and Briana from MN. We’re all going to be mejoraring our Espanish together as well as learning the ins and outs of Environmental Education Peace Corps style in the beautiful (if isolated) community of San Miguel de Milpas Altas.

Today is actually our first group training day where we have had to travel back to the training center in Santa Lucia de Milpas Altas. Actually everything around here is named “de Milpas Altas” because all their Milpas are very high up in the mountains. My GPS tells me that we are at an elevation of 6,505 ft above sea level, and 1,898 miles from my parent’s house in IL – and I believe every bit of it.

My room is great, I have my own little building right inside the family compound, and directly across from the kitchen. I live here with my host mother and father, who are both in their late fifties or early sixties, their second son and his family which consists of his wife and two little girls (who I have spent the last two nights playing with, meaning I lift them up into the air until I get tired and then they play with my camera), and their daughter who is fourth oldest in the family out of five, four dogs, one pig that lives next to the toilet, a goose who lives behind me, four birds which are just here to be pretty, a goat which I have not yet seen, and a bull who watches me when I sit on the toilet. We have electricity almost all the time and running water once every five days, and a freaking gorgeous view of the valley below us, so it is pretty much a paradise. I took my first bucket bath this morning, and it was warm and refreshing, and I only used about 2 gallons of water. My host mom, Doña Lidia, sells fruit and vegetables that she buys in Antigua up here as well as some delicious tamales (which are slightly different from Mexican tamales in that they have a much more mushy inside that does not hold its form when you unwrap the banana leaves, think cream of wheat, but instead of wheat use corn or potatoes) so the food is great. I’ll post some pics later.

So I got up this morning at 6, got clean, ate my breakfast (tamale again, mmmm tasty), and met Briana to walk down the hill to get the guys at 7:15. Usually our day will start earlier, because if the training session starts at 8, and we have a half hour walk to get to the place where we ride the bus for half an hour, we need to be leaving earlier, but our language professora Mirsa came to get us today. It is a big day, because along with the Presidential Inauguration, the director of the Peace Corps is here. We got to meet him at staging, and he is here visiting us as well. Apparently this is a pretty big deal, and he doesn’t usually do this (I guess he heard that I was coming). The rest of the week we will be meeting in our village church or right outside my bedroom for our language lessons, or meeting with the rest of the Environmental Education trainees at one of the three schools we will be working at throughout training.

All in all I think that this Site-Based Training is trying to be a miniature version of real PC service. The main differences being that we each have four site mates instead of eventually one or none, and we go around to our schools in groups instead of alone. They say it gets us much more prepared to do the real thing because we have a trial everything, including community integration. So far, so good. More to come later. In the meantime, que les vayan bien. Peace.

End of Staging

Well, I have just completed a day and a half of staging, and tomorrow morning we (the other 35 volunteers in my training class and myself) get on a plane for Guatemala where we will spend the next three months as Trainees. Hopefully all 36 of us will still be around in 12 weeks for the swearing in. Everyone is pretty cool, and it will be great to hang out with most of these people in Guatemala for the next few months as we all go through the training process.


As far as updates, my assignment has already changed! Apparently my research will be more easily facilitated if I am part of the Environmental Education group... so ecotourism is out. I still am not sure exactly how this will affect me, but I guess that is part of the "Peace Corps experience."

We are headed for a smaller town outside of Antigua called Santa Lucia Milpas Altas. We are supposed to be there for the next three days in a "retreat" where they will test our Spanish skills and assign us to our training sites. This concept, as far as I understand it, is relatively new. We are all placed with homestay families and we will be moving in with them on Saturday, but rather than do language training all together in a group, we have all of our training in communities around the training center in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas. Class sizes are limited to either individuals or maybe only 4 or 5 (still have no clue as to which) and are held "locally, like in a church or in your host family's courtyard," and only meet with the whole training class on Fridays (if even then... we are all pretty confused about this and the staging staff has not explained it fully). Apparently this type of "In-Site Training" has proved to be much more successful in the last year or two in boosting language learning rates (probably because you can't speak English to people every day and you are much more isolated from other trainees). In any case, it seems like this training will be different than the ones I have heard about. I'll be sure to explain this more clearly as soon as I understand it myself.

This will probably be the only entry for at least a week or so because of all the settling in bugs that I have to work out. In the meantime, for anyone that is worried, know that I'm being well taken care of and learning a lot. Peace.