Seek peace and pursue it

It's starting to feel like home here.
Mentally, I've shifted a little bit away from "OK, just try to adapt to things as they are" and slightly towards "Let's see, what can we do about this..." I have started to pay attention to my own happines again, and what control I have over it.
Friends help. Visits to or from them help even more! One of my best friends from college, Jennifer, is a PCV in Honduras (what are the odds? Next country over to the east!), and having been a volunteer for six months more than me she had accumulated some vacation time. And she and I plotted to put Guatemala in her travel plans, especially since our mutual friend Ben would be traveling with her. And then Theo came too, another of our best friends volunteering in the eastern part of Guatemala for the school year. What a fun reunion that was! It seemed so implausibly fortunate, the four of us together for a weekend, in a far-fetched corner of this little country, all having come from totally different places. Those are the time that I can almost feel my soul sighing in contentment.
En route to meet up with those three, I stopped in and stayed an evening with Brittany, my good friend from training. As we are both new volunteers adapting to our new town, new work, new family, new life, it was insightful to see how her adapting process was similar to or different from mine. What we have in common are incredibly warm host families, and I already count Doña Horalia and Don Miguel Angel, her host parent, as good friends. For sure, long conversations with and many hugs from Brittany before I hit the road again were wonderfully rejuvenating for me.
The feeling that my work has started to become more meaningful helps lift my spirits too. A lot of that is thanks to Kate, the volunteer whom I am replacing but is still here seeing her projects through to their completion. I think the most meaningful thing I've done so far was the workshop we gave with all the principals in our school district last week, on teaching local biodiversity and conservation in their schools. It all started with Kate's master's degree study of the bird species that inventory before, and it turns out there are 27 species endemic to this region of the altiplano (highlands) of Guatemala (i.e. aren't found anywhere else in the world). And with that information, and the collaboration and inspiration of several local community organizations, a series of educational fliers were made (called "láminas" - the closest analogy I can think of is they're like a page of baseball cards, only with birds or animals as the feature - widely used by teachers and popular as wall decor for kids). The big deal is, no one's ever láminas of local birds or animals, mostly just the most exotic species the producers can think of, hence generally African or whatnot. The most gratifying feeling came when Kate and I started hearing and seeing these principals get excited about using THESE láminas instead of the others in their classrooms - "It's great that we finally have a resource to teach our students about OUR communal forest, about what is up to US to conserve" - and hearing ideas about other ways these láminas will be used to further local conservation - "These should be put up in every Communal Committee office in the municipality to get people to think before cuting down trees in the communal forest that are the habitat for these rare birds..." I stop and think to myself, YES! That is what Peace Corps is all about! It took someone like Kate with the expertise and passion (and means of obtaining a budget) to collect this information, but ultimately an idea developed that's been motivated and guided, now about to be forever taken over by, local people who care about the implications. If I can have one project that blossoms into something half as fruitful and inspiring as this one...
And maybe that's a little intimidating. It's scary to me that Kate leaves in a months, all her projects wrapped up and me on my own to design new ones and figure out by myself how to work with all the different local committees, regional bodies, and community organizations she has worked so well with for two years. I know I'm incredibly spoiled to have had her example in the first place, much less three months of overlap learning as much as I possibly can from her - that's not normal in Peace Corps, although maybe it should be. Plus it's been nice having a friend around to talk to about everything in our work and community to whom I can relate completely, and she to me.
The fact that she's leaving sank in a little more for both of us when my host family threw Kate the first of possibly many despedidas, goodbye parties (which doubled as my host dad Arnulfo's early birthday party, and tripled as my belated welcome party.) (And quadrupled as as an excuse for for several aunts, uncles, and their kids who caught wind of it to come crash the party. :) The good news is, I could actually enjoy the food because the anti-amoeba meds are working wonderfully! (Unfortunately, the weight I lost probably due to them is back...haha) And I think I might finally be rid of the fleas, once and for all ... I cannot believe, and neither would you if I told you all the details, what I have had to do to get rid of the damn things. Hooray! It feels good to regain some sense of control in my life. But even as I write that, the words of a greeting card Jennifer used to have on the wall in our old college apartment come back to me and remind me that even when I DON'T feel in control, even when I don't see my friends in a while, even when Kate leaves, even when my projects stagnate, even when the fleas come back, it's alright:
"If you hold onto the handle it's easier to maintain the illusion of control ... But it's more fun if you let go and let the wind carry you."

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring…

You know the saying, “when it rains, it pours”? That’s pretty much been my life the last few weeks. For one thing, the rainy season has begun in earnest (“Finally” say the people in my community, for their crops… “Lamentably” says I, even though I know they need the rain). Some mornings are nice and sunny, some mornings are foggy and cold, but inevitably by 5:00 if not earlier the sky has clouded over and it’s pouring. The roads are turning to mud, and the dust problem we had a month ago is a distant memory as all of it has washed away to leave huge holes in the road instead. They’ve been working on getting the road paved from the city up to and past my community, but they’re so behind and it makes for an AWFUL traffic wait. At first it was a dependable no-more-than-two-hour wait, didn’t matter if you were hitching a ride with 15 other people in the back of a pickup and it was pouring rain. Now they’ve got some system by which they close the road for hours to work and let the line of waiting vehicles build and build till they let them all through at one previously-arranged moment. “The cola opens at 2:30 today” is, for example, what one might hear those who are waiting saying to each other, or saying into their cell phones explaining their truancy to whoever’s on the other end of the line (“cola” is a word for tail but also for line). So while the thunder and lightning are fun and watching everything green up and the corn get huge fast is encouraging, the rain is decidedly not my favorite season. I guess I’m just not used to such wetness and all its glitches! I’m sure anyone who’s lived in Seattle or any rainy place is probably laughing at my exasperation with the rainy season, and I’m sure once I’m no longer in it, so will I. Everyone and their uncle’s got a cold, the laundry never dries, shoes and pants are impossible to keep clean (and hence the laundry problem!)… The nastiest of the nasties of this time of year is the intestinal infection, and yes, I fell victim to this one: the rain means everyone’s got to be especially careful with food preparation (rudimentary or no sewage management, rains washing things into crop fields, insufficient cooking or disinfecting of foods… you get where I’m going with that). So in the other sense of the “when it rains it pours” expression, it seems like once one parasite or virus comes along to pester me, along come all the others just to keep the first one company! If it’s not a relapse of fleas, then it’s a cold, or a high fever, or amoebas or other gastrointestinal maladies, or who knows what else! At a certain point you just throw your head back and shout up to heaven, “Why me??” Hehe, yes, we all have our moments like that. The important thing, I know, is to maintain the ability to laugh at yourself through the whole debacle. (I’m working on it – it helped when the big Mother’s Day meal we had with the extended family actually gave everybody gas and indigestion, so we were all sitting around laughing at ourselves while holding our stomachs and trying to figure out whether it was the milk in the mashed potatoes, or that we didn’t add garlic to the veggies, or what!) And it also helps to look for the ways other people do what they can to help me out. My host mom Emiliana, for instance, has been faithfully brewing me a bitter tea to take before every meal to help calm the stomach, and did some of my accumulating laundry for me when I was in bed with fever. My host sister Ixchel has been keeping me company while I iron all my clothes (a final attempt to kill any flea eggs) and brewing me hot lemonade with honey for sore throats when the two of us were sick with colds. The other folks at my work in the park have been awfully kind about letting me stay at home in bed when necessary, asking after me when they cross paths with my family or neighbors. And the Peace Corps Medical staff have been at my beck and call, so Mom: consider your daughter well-supported there. My last entry was about thanking my lucky stars: while they’ve been receiving a little grumbling on the feedback line recently, I guess there are still plenty of reasons in my life right now to thank them.


P.S. Some seriously outdated photos... been meaning to get these up for a while.
My last night in my training town back in March... Lili and I took out the camera, took some last pictures together.

Patty, Jaime's host sister who became a good friend of mine too, at our Swearing In Ceremony. Hard to say goodbye to such quality people!

Brittany and I, clearly paying close attention to the ceremony... :)

And then some first impressions of my new home, when I first arrived:
The forest of Totonicapán... it's so beautiful!! Pine-oak forest, sun streaming through... I feel right at home, except for the whole mountains concept.


One of many nice sunsets from my house in my little mountain aldea. I´m pretty sure this photo will soon be obsolete as I know I´ve already taken prettier ones, just haven´t gotten 'em to the computer yet!