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."