A week with my cousin!

I had the honor of hosting my first visitor from the States! I had a great time showing my cousin around a selection of places including the good tourist attractions and spots off the beaten path (2 1/2 hours off the beaten path on a dirt road to my site). We started out in Antigua, taking in the colonial architecture, old churches, ruins, yummy food, and a lively nighttime atmosphere. Highlights included a “típico” breakfast of beans, fried plantains, eggs, fresh cheese, cream, tortillas, and coffee and salsa dancing at a hip joint.

We made our way to El Chol, enjoying the greatness of what is the Guatemalan public transportation system. In my town she accompanied me to my English class where she helped me run a game of Jeopardy using vocab words and simple grammatical questions. She reminded me that “quantities” is spelled with a “q” instead of as “cuantities”, as I had written on the board for the category. That is what living in Guatemala for 10 months will do to your English. We made the trek to La Ciénega where we baked an incredibly successful batch of coffee cake that thrilled all in attendance, so much that they all wanted to take more home with them and we were left empty handed. The usual pigs, chickens, turkeys, and dogs were underfoot and the fact that that community hadn’t received water in a month and the electricity project still isn’t finished isn’t keeping them down.

She got a great taste of the local culture during a big town activity that was the election of the queen of the intermediate schools games. The event included the usual parading of young girls in elaborate “fantasy” outfits and their speeches to the public. In addition there were demonstrations of poetry reading, oratory, lip-syncing, singing, and musical groups. It’s a great opportunity to see everyone from town all gathered together in the market in their usual fashion of all the women and children sitting on the ground floor and all the men and adolescent boys leering from above on the second level. Everyone comes dressed to the nines and you can observe all the social interactions and young couples in the making with text messages flying. We had a couple fun sporty afternoons with running, soccer, and basketball with my co-workers and English students and an enjoyable experience of making a pizza from scratch (including the dough and sauce) for a couple of my co-workers that came over for dinner and cards. Everyone loved her and thought how cool it was that she wanted to visit their town and I also received lots of comments on how pretty she is and inquiries on when she would be returning.

After saying good bye to El Chol, we made our way down the construction-infested inter-American highway in a crazy bus that like to pass other buses with oncoming traffic to Lake Atitilán. We had a splendidly tranquila night in the tiny town of Santa Cruz at the awesome lakeside hostel, La Iguana Perdida. We enjoyed running into other Peace Corps volunteers, having an amazing family style dinner with 4! kinds of curry, sleeping in rustic bungalows with no electricity, and doing yoga in the morning on the patio that was open to gorgeous lake views with towering volcanoes. We scored some homemade scones with strawberry jam before catching a boat to the other side of the lake to the hopping tourist town of Panajachel. Another tranquilo day with yummy food, souvenir shopping for awesome jade and coral jewelry, a live local reggae band with good social messages, and a crazy night out dancing to thumping reggaeton music.

We hit up the giant market of Chichicastenango a little ways north of the lake where we did some browsing of the beautiful traditional woven textiles and other artisan goods. Unfortunately I got robbed for the first time after being here for 10 months. I didn’t realize at all when it happened, but when I went to get on the bus as we were leaving, the 250 Quetzales that I had had in the front pocket of my jeans were gone. That’s about 30 bucks, so it’s not that big of a deal, but it is half my rent for the month. The market was super crowded and basically a body pack in some parts, so I guess it would be fairly easy to exact the cash if that’s what you do for a living. I was pretty ticked off though. We made our way back to Antigua for our last night, enjoying a very nice traditional Guatemalan meal with chiles rellenos, pupusas, fried plantains, beans, tortillas, and cheese. All in all we had a great time “paseando” and I loved having the opportunity to share the beauty, quirks, and charm of this country with people back home.

CODEDE, trainees visit, rain

This month it was El Chol´s turn to host the CODEDE meeting, the Departmental Development Council. So all the mayors from the eight municipalities came to our town, along with representatives from all the ministries of government, NGOs, senators, and representatives from indigenous groups, women, workers, small businesses, etc. It was a super long meeting but also good to be informed as to everything that is going on. The meeting was held in a primary school just outside of town since the muni here doesn´t have a meeting place. So of course, classes were cancelled for the day since it is perfectly acceptable here to cancel class for really any reason. I got there at 6:30 in the morning to help set up and the meeting lasted until 2:30. It was long and draining. They discussed all the infrastructure projects that the Council approved and all the mayors and representatives had chances to talk and discuss, at length. After the meeting, the mayor provided a rather elaborate lunch for all in attendance with options of carne asada, seafood soup, or whole fried fish. I had the opportunity to talk with representatives from the ministries that work directly with women´s groups.

This week the newest group of Peace Corps trainees in the Youth Development Program was in El Chol for the week for their field-based training. It was fun to get to meet the newbies, spend time with them, show them my house, and give them a few tips now that I'm a ripe volunteer with six months in site under my belt. I watched some of the presentations they gave in the middle school and was impressed with their execution. It was really cool because the high school invited the whole group a dinner and dance they were having to celebrate their school´s anniversary. So we all went and ate dinner with them and attended a Guatemalan high school dance. The dancing and intermingling were fun. Good times! The next night we collaborated to put together an intercultural talent show. They did some singing, folk dances, and lip syncing. We had some people sing “Yellow Submarine” (with my guitar), do a hilarious skit, and we did our own traditional folk dance of the “Electric Slide” and then taught it to them. They all whooped and hollered as we demonstrated the dance and had a little bit of a tough time learning but there was lots of laughing throughout the whole experience. It was quite amusing and good times were had by all.

So there were a bunch of tropical storms that passed over Central America. We didn´t get hit by them, but it rained a ton and the temperature finally dropped a little. In town the streets turn to rivers and the roads leading into town become pure mud. There just isn´t the infrastructure and drainage to handle the amount of water. I washed a bunch of clothes on Saturday and they didn´t really dry til Thursday cause the air is so humid.