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!