Volunteer Time

Hey, So we swore in today which makes us official volunteers, which is nice. We're all staying in a hostel tonight, which is why I have internet right now. To answer the question about Semana Santa, it's holy week, so it has to do with Easter. Also a little random tidbit: they sell used clothes down here that came from the U.S., and almost all the Guatemalan men wear them all the time. Yesterday on the bus the Ayudante was wearing a shirt that said Steve Blake's All-Star Basketball camp, and I thought of all you Blazer fans, and how you're probably mourning the trade with Blake and Outlaw (especially Alison). I guess the team's still doing well, which is the most important thing. That's all, sleep time, making No-Bakes tomorrow.

Finished Training

Hi,
I don´t have anything interesting to say, other than that as of an hour ago I have finished training. Tomorrow I swear in as a volunteer, and I´m going to wear boots that my host dad made for me, which I am very excited about. My site is really nice, and there are taller people there! The first week in my site will be Semana Santa, which is the biggest celebration of the year here, so that should be fun. I get to start getting to know my new host family, and my new town starting on Saturday. That´s all.

My work plus camionetta fun...

It's been a while...lets see how well I can sum up the last few weeks. Time does weird things right now. It feels like I've been here for six months, but it's only been two. At the same time certain weeks fly by. This week is going to be an interesting one to follow, time-wise. I think it's going to drag on because there are exciting things to wait for, but if we find out that we have to give a 2-hour lesson to our teachers this week, that may speed up the process. The thing is, on Tuesday we find out who our partner is going to be for the next two years, and on Friday we find out where we're going to be going for the next two years, and who's going to be nearby.

I don't think I explained this yet, so I probably better now. My program is called Healthy Schools. It is currently in the process of changing, because the old program wasn't working fast enough for our liking. The idea of the program is to install healthy habits into the elementary school kids all over the country so that when they are adults they will be practicing basic healthy hygiene and eating habits that will help their children thrive. So we work in schools to get teachers to teach lessons on health that get kids practicing basic healthy habits like hand-washing and teeth-brushing. The problem is that the program has been active for 10 years and at this point about 100 schools have become "certified healthy" meaning that they have changed their teaching habits and created the infrastructure in the school to support having healthy kids. The goal is to change all the schools, but there are something like 18,000 in the country, so if we kept working at the rate we have been, it would take a really long time. So, they decided to change the program.

There are now 3 phases. Phase 1 is the way that it has been for the last 10 years: one volunteer in a town working with 2-4 schools, very hands on in all the schools. This is the last cycle of this phase, in 2 years there will no longer be volunteers doing this. Phase 2: two volunteers working with a school district which has 20-30 schools, but putting much more of the emphasis on the fact that the school directors and teachers need to be doing most of the work. Phase 2 volunteers visit each school once or twice a month and don't really teach the kids at all, only the teachers and the school directors. Phase 3: two volunteers working with a whole state (like Connecticut or Florida, only much smaller because we're in Guatemala) with 30-40 schools. This is the least hands-on program, and the one that seems to have the most support from the Guatemalans who are getting it. The volunteers work with the superintendents of the districts in their state, and each superintendent picks their 2 best schools to have the volunteers work with. The idea is to change the schools that are going to be easiest to change first, to use as an example for the others. Also, to have the superintendents learn everything that we know, so that they can do our jobs, because ideally in a few years they won't need us anymore.

Okay, sorry about the length of that explanation, but that's what I'm doing now...Oh! I'm either in Phase 2 or 3, I'll find that out on Tuesday as well... There are 4 people in Phase 1, 19 in Phase 2, and 4 in Phase 3. The Phase 1 people self-selected a month ago. So anyway, the point is that I'm going to have a partner, and I find out who it will be on Tuesday.

New topic. We're supposed to give a lesson to the teachers on effective teaching techniques for some health-related topic this week. This may happen, but we'll see. The problem is that they were on strike a couple weeks ago, and so we haven't been there for 3-4 weeks, and they have no idea that we're supposed to be teaching them. So we'll see. Either way is fine with me as long as my group is prepared.

I'm sure you remember my description of the public buses here, and if not just scroll down a bit and you can read it, but some things have happened on them recently that I think deserve to be mentioned. They are still as crazy as ever, and as full as I described, but I did count the other day and I think that the maximum people that I've seen on one was probably closer to 85 than over 100. Still pretty crazy when you think that the maximum capacity is supposed to be 65 elementary school kids... But anyway, so the first thing that happened to me is that I fell...on a guy's face. I was standing up because of course in my jeans-that-are-actually-long-enough-for-my-legs the pockets are tiny and I can't put my hand in them when I'm sitting down, so I have to stand up to get the money to pay for myself. So I was standing, leaning my butt against the side of one of the seats to keep from falling, when the driver took a turn really hard and my butt slipped off the metal top part of the side of the seat. I fell completely onto the guy I had been sitting next to, with my butt directly on top of his face (it's a symptom of me being unbelievably tall here that my butt ends up close to people's faces a lot, but never this close...). We're talking about all my weight on his face. I slid off his face and onto the seat and apologized, and he laughed and...got up and left the bus immediately. All the people behind me were laughing pretty heartily, which was definitely deserved.

The second note-worthy event happened on my way to this little town in the department (state) of Alta Verapaz. I got sick from some food during an earlier part of the trip, and had thrown up in a restaurant bathroom in Coban, the capital. Unfortunately we had a two hour ride from Coban to our town. We were in a little mini-bus thing that is like a 15 passenger van, but with 25 people crammed into it. It's called a "coaster". Anyway, I was sitting one seat away from the window and sweating from the people and the effort of stopping myself from crapping my pants and vomiting at the same time... I asked the woman by the window if she could open it for some air, but she said that the air was giving her a headache. When I couldn't take it anymore I asked her to switch seats so that I could have a little air, and I told her it was because I didn't want to throw up on the bus. Unfortunately for both of us, that didn't quite work out... We switched spots, and I cracked the window, and the breeze felt like heaven on my face. It evaporated all the sweat on my face, which made me cold, so I closed the window, and started feeling sick again so I re-opened the window. It went on like this for about 35 minutes until my body couldn't take it anymore and I threw up. A lot. Fortunately I had the foresight after my adventures in the restaurant bathroom to carry a bag on the bus with me, so I didn't make a mess, but I did make a smell, and it wasn't a good one. The poor woman who had switched places with me spent the next hour of the trip with her face covered with part of her shirt. I then reverted to the age of 6 and started asking, "How much longer?" every 5 minutes or so to the volunteer who was taking us to his house. When we got there I tried not to bump anyone with my warm bag of vomit, but I don't think that I succeeded considering that there were 8 people I had to climb over to get out. So yeah, that was my low point so far...but look at the pictures I'm going to post of the place we were and you'll understand why I can say that the trip was really pretty awesome despite my sickness.

After that this last thing is pretty minimal, so I'll try to stop being so verbose. On the way back from Alta Verapaz we were almost home and were on a really really full bus. By some miracle I was sitting down as the third person in a seat, and of course there were 3 people in every seat. The only thing unusual about this situation was that the alignment of the people standing in the aisle was such that a man in the aisle was sitting on my arm. Strangely it was that moment that inspired me to write all of these travel moments in my blog. There is something about have a man's butt resting on your arm for 20 minutes without it being weird that is just a little weird. It wasn't his fault, he couldn't move, and my arm was just in a perfect place to support him, but it was strange. I realized in that moment that it was actually probably weird for him too, because only a giant like me would have arms in the right place to be supporting his butt. Normal Guatemalan's heads are at the level of my arms on the bus, so normally there's more of the butt-to-face issue than the sitting-on-arm issue. I would argue of course that the latter is less awkward, but it's all about what you're used to. Anyway, once my legs fell asleep I offered the seat to a standing woman and spent the rest of the trip in my more accustomed, butt-above-but-soon-to-be-falling-on-your-face mode.