First days in Guatemala

I´m here! So far so good! This blog page took about 15 minutes to open.....this is going to try my patience and my wallet. After three days in Santa Lucia with a family training at the PC training center I arrived in Alotenango where I will be living for the next three months. It is a large town with around 30,000 peole. The main streets are paved, there are buses that are coming and going constantly from Antigua (about 15 minutes away). It is situated at the foot of three volcanoes, two of them active, but no risk. The town is bustling from early in the morning until night with children, buses, three wheeled taxis, dogs, firecrackers (for birthdays), blaring radios, propaganda from loudspeakers about the elections (sept. 9), and just about everything else. My new family is wonerful so far. There is the mom who runs a store out of the side of the house, the dad who works at the Nestle factory, and the three daughters who are around my age, one goes to law school in antigua, one is a spanish teacher in antigua, and the other is looking for a job and has her degree in business administration. The mom and one daughter are evangelical, the dad and another daughter are catholic, and the other daughter is nothing. The are wonderful so far and very welcoming and keep telling me to make myself at home, that they hope i feel comfortable, etc. They are very easy to talk to and we laugh a lot. The house is much larger than I was expecting with many bedrooms, an outdoor patio, a terrace, a living room, a kitchen, Australian parakeets, a fountain, a dog, and the store off to the side. My room is quite large with a bed, desk, dresser, and full length mirror! The house is two blocks from the main plaza and it was about a 10 minute walk to get to this internet place, which has the slowest internet I´ve ever experienced in my life. It takes about two minutes to open every email. Its driving me crazy. Any way....there are three other PC municipal development girls that are in my town with other families and we´re been going around visiting each other with the families. I´m going to go for a run with one of the girls, Kelly from washington dc, tomorrow morning. The nephew of my host dad lives in Bellevue! He went to the us illegally and works in a restaurant there. The mom cooks really good food and I´ve had lots of yummy tortillas, chicken, carne asada, macaroni salad, cabbage salad, mashed potatoes, sweet warm drinks, etc. There is no shortage of coffee. Tormorrow our first spanish lessons start in Kelly´s family´s house. I went over there earlier today and talked with her dad for a really long time about coffee growing here. He has a small coffee growing business that sells to Starbucks (antiguan blend) but it is very difficult. I told him about my idea for the direct trade business that i want to start some day and he thought that was great. We talked a lot about workers and globalization and all that. Tomorrow afternoon begins our technical training where we will go to the municipality for the first time. Tuesday we go back to the PC training center in Santa Lucia (one hour away) to meet with the rest of our group for medical training, shots, etc. So I live in Alontenago now and go to the PC center once a week by bus for random trainings. This morning I was awakened by a parade outside my window with all the kids from the school around here playing in bands and dancing. It was great to watch. Then later there were people dressed as disney characters dancing to music campaigning for the mayor. Very strange. There´s so much more to tell but my host sister is waiting for me to walk back home. I´ll write again when I can but I don´t know how much patience i can have with this internet speed. Thinking of all of you!!!!!