The rainy season continues...world map...oatmeal scones...

We gave another AIDS workshop in the department of Sololá. It went really well. It’s interesting to see how different communities react to the topic. For example, this was an indigenous site where some people speak Kachikel, so when we did the activity “Lenguaje de la Calle” (street language) people used some words in Kachikel. We stayed at a volunteer’s house and I got to meet some volunteers that I didn’t know. It’s always fun to share experiences and common frustrations and hear about the situations in people’s various sites. I continue to be impressed by the fascinating people that join the Peace Corps and what they have done in their lives. That weekend there was a group in Panajachel celebrating various occasions, (including my birthday). We went out dancing that night and I think I burned a million calories, but replaced a few with some late night street tacos on the way back to the hostel.

The trip back to my site was long and rainy. The clouds cling to the peaks of the surrounding green hills and settle in the low valleys. Along the sides of the highway run rivers of mud that look like chocolate milk and cut away at the road. The roads are in really bad shape now and covered with giant potholes from all the water running under them. The sights on the side of the road have become commonplace and I don’t much notice them as anything notable anymore…kids carrying loads of firewood bigger than they are, women carrying water on their head from who knows what source, guys carrying 100 pound sacks of corn on their backs with a strap around their forehead, old men sitting on cinderblocks chatting with bottles of illegally manufactured potent liquor, boys playing soccer on the road with goals marked by tree branches, and little girls in brightly colored woven skirts with big brown eyes and dirty faces peering out from tin shacks.

When we were only five km from El Chol, the micro I was on turned to the side of the road to avoid a passing car, and got stuck in the mud on the side of the cliff. I was the only one who yelped, so then everyone laughed at me. So all the passengers had to pile out, careful to not slip in the mud on the steep slope into the rickety barbed wire fence. Then we had to wait in the darkness in the rain for a pickup truck to come from town to pull us out and it made it a nine-hour trip home from the lake. I’m ready for rainy season to end – ready for my clothes to dry, ready for the mold to disappear from my walls, ready for my roof not to leak, ready for the water from my faucet not to be brown.

My site mate and I are starting a project to paint a world map on the basketball court of the elementary school in town. Geography is not a strong point here, it’s not like there are maps and globes in the classrooms, so we think it will be a good way for kids to see the countries of the world and orient themselves within it. And having it on the basketball court you can play those games where you call out a country and everyone has to race to that country, like we always played with the states back in elementary school. It should be fun. We have a template in squares, so you just measure the lines on the court and paint accordingly to the squares. We’re gonna have to get all the kids together to clean the area first and try to pick off the stuck-on gum and get them to participate in the painting as well.

The latest baking adventure in La Ciénega was oatmeal scones, which turned out superbly. The way that the clay oven works is that you put a bunch of firewood in there, let it burn down to coals, and then push them out. The only problem was that since it is the rainy season and has been raining a ton recently, all the firewood was wet, so it took a long time. Then to make the second batch, we had to burn a second pile of firewood and wait for that to become coals to bake the rest. In all we baked 110 scones. I brought the photos that my dad had printed out of the lunch we had when they were visiting and gave them the pictures that they were in. They were thrilled since they have very few family photos. I also showed them the pictures of my family when they went to Lake Quinalt and a bunch of new photos of my niece, which they loved and asked for me to give them some again.

We continue with our monthly inter-institutional meetings to coordinate with the NGOs that work in El Chol. There was little presence at the August meeting, so we came to the conclusion that the development professionals needed to be reminded of the meeting with a text message a couple days before. So I did that for the September meeting and there was more presence, but still not everyone. This is very frustrating. We have also started taking notes at the meetings to keep track of what we talk about and document our agreements and obligations. It was my turn to write the last meeting notes and it’s funny, that to create a five page single-spaced document in Spanish doesn’t even faze me. I still have my counterpart review it before I send it out, but my Spanish is definitely gotten a lot better. I have to say, becoming fluent in Spanish is one of my proudest life accomplishments. So I sent it to all the email addresses that everyone had given me, and about half bounced back. When I asked at the meeting if the rest had received the document, not one had checked their email to open it. Not one! Text messages are definitely to mode of communication here, email is not. And now the signal at the good internet café in town is down “til November” to remodel, whatever that means and the other internet place in town takes about 30 minutes just to open your hotmail account.