26 July 2010

This month has been strange because we have spent so much time away from our sites for work-related events. We had the 4th of July party plus the two days before it, and then we just finished a week long series of classes at the office that is called reconnect. There were two days of health related training and then three days of Spanish classes. The end result of this week is that I know how to say a lot of things in Spanish that sound perfectly harmless, but can be taken to mean something completely different. Also that I feel like I haven't worked with my schools for a month...

Today will be my first day back, and I think it should be okay, but it has potential to be frustrating. I'm going to a school that had already been in our program for two years, but with a volunteer who was doing a lot more teaching the kids than I do. According to the principal, they know nothing about most of the program, so I have to start with them as if they have never had a volunteer before. So today I'm giving them a presentation about "What is Healthy Schools." Ideally it goes the same way it always does, but we'll see.

I recently took a trip to the city of Huehuetenango which is in the department of Huehuetenango (the capital cities often have the same names as the department, in case that seems weird). I visited some Mayan ruins which were beautiful and later went to a fair and rode a ferris wheel. I would like to mention that the ferris wheels here are run at about 10 times the speed of the ones in the US, so it's a little different than you might expect. I posted some pictures of the ruins on facebook if you're interested. I had a strange realization moment while I was in the ruins. It was my dad's birthday, and I remembered while I was there, so I called him from the top of one of them. When I started to describe to him where I was, I realized how different my life is right now than it has been in the past. Ruins are pretty common here, so I hadn't been thinking about the fact that nothing like that exists in the US. Makes me realize how my perceptions of normal have changed already...