First Guate Post

16 January, 2010

This is my first blog entry from Guatemala, and as such, I'm kind of expecting it to suck. To avoid that, I'm going to try to keep the chatter to a minimum and just talk about Guatemala-specific things.

I live in a house with a family. There is a couple who is expecting a baby in April, and the parents of the dad-to-be. Oh, and we have a 3 month-old beagle puppy. Our house is pretty sweet. The main entrance is a door that is part of the garage door, but opens separately. When you leave the garage, you are in the living room, which is bordered by open air because there's a courtyard in the middle of the house, and there are no close-able windows or doors between it and the living room. My room is on the other side of the courtyard. There are upstairs rooms on both sides of the courtyard. That's enough of that...

In Guatemala the water is not safe to drink or ingest without first being boiled. Also, there are many places that don't have running water all day. To address this issue, someone invented this thing called a "pila." For those of you who have never seen one, I'll try to post a picture soon. (LONG DESCRIPTION STARTING, FEEL FREE TO SKIP TO ***) It's basically like three sinks that are all connected together. The middle one is deeper and doesn't have a drain. The other two are shallow and each have a drain. The tap is over the middle one, so when there is water, the middle one is filled all the way up. This way there is at least some supply of water when the water is off. The right hand side of the pila is used for washing dishes, which means that's where all the dirty dishes are piled. The left hand side is for washing your hands. To get water you pick up this plastic dish, scoop up some water, and pour it over your hands. Then you scrub them with soap, then you rinse with the plastic thing. ***I don't know why I'm going into so much detail, I think I'm going to go back and put a big label so that impatient people know what to skip...

The people here are wonderfully nice, and despite the fact that I am clearly an intruder in their space, seem happy to say hello to me whenever I am around. Basically, I say "Buenos(as) ____ (dias, tardes, noches)" to everyone that I pass, and they almost all genuinely smile, and respond in kind. It's pretty awesome. Granted, I hear a lot of laughter after a few steps, but I think it's all good-hearted.

I have Spanish class almost every day with three other trainees who are at my level. One day a week we all go to the Peace Corps headquarters (where I get my mail) to get classes on health, safety, etc. Starting next week we're going to be having more and more classes about our program, which is called Escuelas Saludables (Health Schools). They have a lot to teach us...

I eat a lot of beans here. A ton. Black beans. They are absolutely delicious. Who knew...? Also hand-made corn tortillas, completely different than the ones you can buy in the states, much more delicious.

The other day I was laying in bed in my room in the afternoon after class and a car drove past our house with a megaphone blaring an advertisement. It was advertising English lessons, and all the words were in English. In the background it had little kids singing the alphabet song......wrong... They got the letters right, but they had the timing wrong, it was really weird. Let's see if I can communicate this. Normally the song breaks the alphabet down into these groups: ABCDEFG-HIJKLMNOP-QRS-TUV-WX-Y and Z. I came in in the middle, but they had it broken down to OPQ-RST-UVW-XYZ, which as it turns out, does work with the song. That was the most surreal moment of my experience so far.

The most pure was yesterday. I was in a town near mine with several other volunteers after we finished our class, and we met up at a little park. There were a couple little girls playing together, and one of them asked one of the other volunteers to play with them. She went to play, but they needed more people, so I volunteered. We played duck-duck-goose, or as it is called here, pato-pato-ganso. After a couple rounds the other volunteers got bored, but I played with these girls for another 15 minutes or so. It was wonderful to experience that kind of acceptance that you get from really young kids (I think they were probably 5 or 6) when you let yourself really play with them.