Also...

Mr. and Mrs. McAvoy,

Ame always shares her packages with me and they are the best! Thanks so much for all of the treats! We ALL appreciate your generosity!

America Serves

change.gov

Summer Vacation

I know, I know. I'm a terrible blogger.

Here in Guatemala, the school year starts in January and continues through October, leaving the kids (and me) with a break in November and December, just in time for the kids to help their families with the harvest.

Summer vacation has been wonderful for me. Towards the end of the school year, I was feeling really drained and discouraged and the break has given me a nice opportunity to reorganize, plan for the coming school year, and work on secondary projects that I didn't have a lot of time for during the school year. I've also worked a lot on making my house feel more like a home. I painted, made some furniture, and "crafted" a lot and I love the results. Having a comfortable and cozy home makes having my friends over even more enjoyable.

I've also had plenty of time to hone my baking and sewing skills. I bake something almost every night (since I don't have a refrigerator, I can't save food for very long). I think the best part has been realizing how few ingredients are really needed to make some delicious food (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast can do so many different things) and how little you really need to rely on all of those fancy kitchen appliances. Not that a KitchenAid mixer wouldn't make everything much easier and quicker...but I've been mixing everything with fork, rolling out dough with an empty wine bottle, and haven't used a microwave in a year.

Since the volunteer I replaced left me all of the furniture necessities, one of the first purchases I made in my site was a sewing machine. It is old. But, it is sturdy (not a single piece of plastic) and it gets the job done well. The pedal took some getting used to (there is really only one speed and it is fast), but I am much more confident with the machine these days and have been working on some Christmas gifts for my PC friends!

I have also taken advantage of the time off from school to travel. A couple other PCVs and I headed to Copán, Honduras for Halloween. We got to hang out with some pretty cool PCVs from Honduras, visit some Mayan ruins, and eat some amazing food. You can see pictures here and here.

A couple weeks later, Kristina and I headed to Mexico for a week-long vacation. We spent a couple days at some ruins in the jungle in Palenque and then headed to the Caribbean beach of Tulúm in the Yucatan peninsula. The ruins at Palenque were incredible. One of the best parts is that they've uncovered more than just the "center" of the city, so you can see the living quarters of normal people...something I haven't seen at the other ruins I've visited. Tulúm is also home to some seaside ruins that made for some great pictures. The trip was amazing and very relaxing and you can check out pictures here.

In November, I also had the opportunity to take two of my counterparts to an HIV/AIDS prevention workshop at our training center in Sta. Lucia. I took the principal of one of my schools and a young English teacher from the middle school that I hope to work in this school year. Both of them loved the workshop and are really excited about starting to do HIV/AIDS prevention work here in our community. We are already planning two workshops for the first week of January! The first one will train all 16 of the teachers at one of my schools and then they will give the workshop to between 150 and 200 parents only three days later! It's a big project to start with, but I'm glad to see that both of the women are so eager to start working on prevention here!

Last, but certainly not least, MY FAMILY IS COMING IN TWELVE DAYS! It has been almost a year since I have seen them and I could not be more excited. They'll be here for almost two weeks and we'll get to spend Christmas in my site and travel around this side of the country a little. Plans even include water skiing and climbing a volcano. My community is also ecstatic to have them. Everyone wants to know when we're eating with them and if they can speak Spanish and if everyone is tall and blue-eyed like me. I'm so excited to finally get to share my life here with someone from home, especially the fam!

So I've been doing some rearranging and decorating of my house lately and I took some pictures to show all of you, but my computer won't read information from my camera anymore. I promise to keep working on getting the pictures up and in the mean time, here's a list of stuff that's been going on lately:

- Gender and Development meeting where I officially became the Camp GLOW chair
- Environmental Education workshop with two other PCVs (Joey and Kyle)
- Site visit from my boss
- Gender, Self Esteem, and "Adolescence" workshops with my 5th and 6th graders
- Guatemalan Independence Day (Sept. 15)
- Lots of planning for a Sexuality and HIV/AIDS workshop which got canceled : (
- Camp GLOW meetings
- A lot of baking in my new toaster oven.

Sorry that I haven't been very good about updating lately. School is almost done for the year and I have much better internet access now, so it should be picking up again!

Peace.

Another incredibly busy month has kept me from updating as often as I'd like. I hope to be able to sit down and write an adequate update sometime in the very near future, but until then, here's a quick summary of what has been going on since June...

- Camp GLOW
Camp was amazing! I am so thankful to have had the incredible experience of working with the GLOW committee to help provide a fun and informative weekend to teenage Guatemalan girls. I've accepted the position as Chair for GLOW and cannot wait to get started planning for the next camp!

- Amoebas
Somewhere around the end of June / early July I ended up in the hospital after fainting several times one morning. After a couple fun tests, I found out I had amoebas and a bacterial infection. Once I started taking the meds to clear up everything, I was fine.

- All Volunteer Conference and 4th of July
One of the best times I've had in country. All of the PCVs in the country met up to celebrate the 4th. It was the first time since swearing in that I had seen some of my training classmates. The food was excellent (dill pickles and Chex mix!) as was the music and company.

- Reconnect
Last week, my training class returned to Antigua for another week of training and Spanish classes. Although I can't say that I enjoyed 7 hour days of presentations and Spanish class, it was so much fun to hang out with all of my friends from training again.

I'm back in site for a while now and ready to (hopefully) make some serious progress at my schools before preparations for Guatemala's independence day and the end of the school year (school ends in early October) take over my teachers' schedules. I know that sounds ridiculous, but we take our time preparing for things here in Guatemala.

First of all, I apologize for not updating for almost a month! I´ve been pretty the past few weeks and just haven´t had time to sit down and type! Luckily, I´ve been enjoying it!

One of the activities that has kept me busy recently is a camp for girls that I am helping to organize called GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). The camp was started in Romania and several different PC host countries have the program. I´m working with an AWESOME group of women (mostly other volunteers and some guatemaltecas) to put on the camp for teenage Guatemalan girls in the Tecpan area. I´m working with a little sub-group to give a workshop on nutrition and exercise during the camp. I´m pretty excited about the opportunity to work with the team and the Guatemalan girls. The three day camp starts this weekend and I can´t wait!

I´ve also started working with a group of indigenous women in a small town where one of my schools is. The group currently has over 500 women participating in about 6 small aldeas (smaller towns) that surround the town. I´m going to be helping with cooking classes (I´ll be sneaking some nutrition lessons in there...) right now and in the future, we hope to build some green houses and start some small family gardens. The women also work on crafts, but I´m not much help when it comes to weaving.

Things are also going pretty well at my schools. With Mother´s Day celebrations (a BIG event here) and preparation for the fair in my site (takes me back to my marching band days), I feel like we haven´t really accomplished a whole lot. But...I know that it takes time to get integrated into the school communities and that Healthy Schools isn´t everyone´s priority all the time.

About a week ago, I moved into my own house! I´m pretty excited to start decorating and making the place look like my own. I´m living in the same house that the volunteer before me did. Its a great house and the best benefit is that I didn´t have to move any of the furniture and other things that the last volunteer left behind for me. The weekend after I moved in, a bunch of volunteers from my training class came over to celebrate all the June birthdays we have in our group. It was great to see everybody and I was so happy to have my house full of people (it´s really cold and echoes a lot when no one is around).

The guys had a grill going on my roof and my friend Katie brought her puppy. It felt so much like home! We also ate some toasted ants that my friend Kristina brought from her site. At first I thought I would just eat one. It was worth it to me...I´d be able to say that I ate an ant for the rest of my life. Then I ate two more. Then a handful. I can´t say that they tasted good...but they weren´t terrible. Just crunchy and salty.

Here are a couple pics:


That little black dot in my hand is the ant!


Grilled corn on the cob...yummmm....

This past weekend, I went to a fundraiser that another volunteer was holding at the lake. I met some other volunteers that I had never seen before, saw some of my training class friends that I haven´t seen since swearing in, and even got to do a zipline. The sun was shining and there was a gorgeous view of the lake all day! Perfect!


What a beautiful day!


Getting geared up for the zipline...


Superman style...with shoes in my hands. Lovely.

Thats all for now...

Peace and Love.

The family that I am currently living with is really involved in the community and enjoys having a rather large social circle both here and in Xela. The volunteer I am replacing jokingly referred to them as the Paris and Nicole of my town. One of their recent activities has been planning and executing the annual Reina Indigena (like “Miss Indigenous”) pageant here. The pageant was this Saturday and included two runway walks (daily traje and traditional traje), speeches on indigenous women’s rights, tradition, and environmental action in both Quiche and Spanish, and a presentation of a traditional Mayan ceremony.

It was wonderful to see the girls giving their speeches up on stage, passionately defending their culture and traditions and begging the audience to recognize their rights as indigenous women. It was even better to hear them doing it in Quiche. But who is listening to them? The mayor showed up an hour and a half late and left twenty minutes later (after being recognized various times by the hosts, judges, and contestants). The audience was small, made up mostly of other indigenous women and a few of men and young boys. In fact, my host sister and I were two of only three women in the entire building not wearing traje. There is absolutely no support from the ladino population, the part of the community that holds all the public offices and to which most of the professionals belong. When their parents hear them talking about their rights as indigenous women, do they support and stand behind them or do they fear that with an education and a voice in the community, their daughters won’t make as good of mothers and wives? Do their teachers, who are protesting the government’s push for bilingual (Spanish / Quiche) education, hear their students’ call for the preservation of their tradition and culture?

Here are a couple pictures from the evening:


This is a little girl in the traditional traje of Olintepeque. Adorable!


This is my host mom.


This is last year´s Reina Indigena


These are some of the contestants in the traje they wear for every day use.


These are some of the judges wearing the traje from Xela. It´s a full skirt, not a wrap-around like most trajes. I like it because you can actually move your legs in it and it reminds me of my Dutch dancing costume a little. Unfortunately, its super expensive.


Here´s a picture of the traditional ceremony that one of the contestants did. I think it is kind of interesting that above this beautiful display of the Mayan culture, there is a giant painting of the Catholic church. It kind of adds to the story, showing a little bit more of the history of how the Mayans have been descriminated against...how their culture and tradition has been repressed.


And another shot of the ceremony.


On Sunday, I traveled with the local dance group to watch them perform. My host sister is the leader of the group and the volunteer I am replacing participated in the group. Since I first came to visit my site, everyone has been asking if I plan on dancing with the group or not. From the beginning, my answer has been no. I explain that dancing just isn’t my thing and that I am interesting in being involved in other activities…just not the dance group. I thought that would be sufficient, but I am still get asked all the time. Sunday was my host families (supposed) last attempt to convince me to join the dance group. After more than four hours of watching twenty three girls dance basically the same three dances in costumes and masks, I can confirm, again, that I will not be joining the dance group.

Here are a couple pictures of the dancing: