So there's Quiche and there's K'iche'. I haven't quite figured out whether Quiche is the spelling in Spanish and K'iche' is the spelling in it's own language OR Quiche are the people and K'iche' is the language. But it's one of the two. And for the record, in Spanish it's not spelled like the delicious flaky crusted breakfast food. Instead it's key-CHAY, like keychain without the n and the enFAsis on the wrong syLAble. 

Anyway, we have to take K'iche' classes because the majority of our communities speak K'iche' as a native language. And they're hard. (Keep in mind, I took Arabic in college and I'm saying they're hard.)

I guess it helps that the alphabet is basically the same as the English alphabet. Although to look at it, you wouldn't know how to pronounce it at all.

For example: Xsaqarik. A simple "good morning" or Xokaq'ab "good night". Am I right? You had no idea did you? 

Mostly it's because of the glotales. You may be wondering what the ' is all about. (It looks kind of obnoxiously pretentious if you don't know what it stands for, right?) But anyway they represent glottal stops or the pause your mouth makes with air in the back of your throat when you say things like "mountain" but don't pronounce the T. Or actually the regular T in English has a glottal stop because of the way it's aspiraTed. There's an inherent sTop after the T.

Some of them are easy (the t' is the same) or k' which is just slightly more forceful than our K. But the q was literally described as trying to get gunk out of your throat. or the q' which is a pulse of air through the same spot as the q in the back of your throat. Try it. You'll see how hard it is.

You'll probably sound about as dumb as we did, spending about an hour and a half saying "Kchhaweee" "CCCCTTHHEEEE" "KAAKAKAKAKAAAA" ""CXACACXA" until we got the sounds it right. 

And then immediately lost it again.

I guess it's a process, after all.

This is my host mom.

Sorry, I couldn't help but choose this photo. I showed it to her and she lauged so I figured it was fine.


Carolina. She's certainly spunky. She's got a smile on her face about 95% of the time and has the best, most cackly laugh ever. 


She's a hard bargainer and will give you a no hombre or simply leave if she thinks she's paying 50 centavos more than the product is worth. 

She works as the ama de casa or a housewife but she also sells traditional traje (like the one she's wearing) at the local market. She taught me how to embroider the blouses and told me how incredibly pilas I was after I finished my first design.

She's incredibly generous and always shares food, supplies and everything else. She's excited about everything and willing to try anything. She's already told me she's going to cry when I leave. I told her that's two years away so let's not worry about it just yet. 

Definitely the person I'm closest with here in this community. Love her and her spunk to death.

She's a native speaker of Quiche and speaks Spanish fluently, though her grammar is limited. She never uses subjunctive and rarely uses past tense--only with certain verbs. She doesn't read. Two of her three children are living in the US with no plans of returning in the near future.

The craziest thing happened to me today. So I got a call from my boss at around 830 telling me there was going to be a reunion in our town with the mayor of the municipality in the afternoon and that I should plan to attend. Something about starting a project with the town. Building new stoves or something. Que se yo. (Dirk and Carlos, if youre reading I hadnt showed up yet because someone was s upposed to come fix the gap in my window thats so big that all the spiders in the world can hussle on through. But fijese que he never came anyway. So that was a waste.)

So I dressed up all fancy in preparation for meeting with the alcalde (or at least I put on business casual, which is a big step for me these days). The meeting was supposed to start at 230. At 215 about 60 women were already gathered on the steps of the towns catholic church to hear what the mayors had to say. At about 345 the alcaldes finally stepped out. Hora chapina. Exactly the hour expected.

They invited the health post staff to come up to the front and  the Cuerpo de Paz Rebeca. So I sat up in the front with the mayors and the community government as they announced the inauguration of a project where 78 families will receive better wood-burning stoves. Now, they won't have to endure the excessive smoke that the old stoves produce. They'll be able to save money and their children's lungs through this project.

And then, surprise! The alcaldes introduced me personally (by name, which was weird because this particular alcalde I hadnt met before) and said that I would be responsible for the capacitaciones that would accompany the project. 

I had known that they would be building stoves. And I did say that I would help support them in the project if I could, but we hadn't really talked specifics. This was news to me that I would be responsible for all the traingings. But as I stood in front of the crowd (for San Ramon at least), hearing my god-awful Spanish accent on the microfono echoing in the plaza, I realized that this is exactly why I'm here.

I won't be giving the trainings all by myself, but co-planning and co-facilitating these trainings with my companera Alicia, who is the educadora  of the Puesto de Salud. Through planning and giving these trainings, I will be able to work with her to develop the kinds of traingings that we're supposed to be teaching to our host agency staff, and I will learn more about the community and the people I'm serving through the process. It's just a boon that the topic of the training also just happens to be perfectly in line with our project. What more perfect project could there be in my first months here?

I just wish they had told me more than 5 minutes before they handed me the microfono.

I see boobies all the time here.
Naked boobies.
Breastfeeding boobies.

I think its a really great cultural tradition that there is enough respect for women to allow them to breastfeed in public here. But it doesnt make it any less shocking when youre in the middle of talking to a woman about vaccinating her baby and she just pulls out one.

Or today when we walked into a woman's home to check on her newborn and found her completely naked and bucket bathing in her common area. She continued without shame. 

Working in maternal and child health here, I am more than certain that these instances will come to startle me less and I will learn to be much more of a health professional about nudity, but it still shocks me a little.

Side note and actually the point of this post--

Womens rights and maternity leave here are a million times better than in the US. Admittedly not a huge amount of women are working mothers, especially in rural areas such as where I live now, but let's compare benefits--

In the US, women cannot be fired because they are pregnant and they are entitled to up to 3 months of UNPAID maternity leave.

In Guatemala, likewise women cannot be fired while they are pregnant or breastfeeding. But in contrast, they are entitled to 30 days before birth and 54 days after birth as PAID maternity leave. They are also entitled to an hour of paid time to pump milk at their job in the first 10 months if they are breastfeeding.

Get it together, USA.

In Guatemala, there are two ways to bathe. The first is the classic bucket bath, where you fill a bucket with water and scoop it out to wet and rinse. That's what we have at my current host family, but I wanted to take some time to acknowledge the hilarity and ridiculousness of the Lorenzetti, which I had in my old host family.

It's this electric showerhead. Wait, you say. That doesn't sound safe. Electricity and water. Well, I mean I guess technically it is. As long as you don't touch it. If you do touch it, shooting pains. Up and down your arm.

I would know.

Anyway, showering in my host family now is even more of an adventure.

As you can imagine, living with a new family produces an early morning race to the bathroom to see who can be first to bathe.

So I always get up first so I don't interfere with their routine. This morning, I walked into the bathroom in the barely dawning morning to find the trash basket that contains all the used toilet paper (3rd world country-experienced people know what I'm talking about) tipped on its side. I figured the dog had just turned it over, but then it squaked a little.

I looked inside. Bam, chicken. I tried to just scare it without touching the ickiness of the trash basket but to no avail. I got a stick from outside and began beating the trash can on the side with it to scare the chicken away. Of course it ran to the complete opposite side of the bathroom and hid in the corner under the chair that they use as a toiletry cabinet.

The whole thing quickly deteriorated into me balancing on the side of the bath tub, prodding the chicken with a stick and dodging the German Shepherd who obviously thought this was just too fun a game to risist and was nipping at my ankles.

By the time I finally got the chicken out of the bathroom, the sun was fully up and the water was fully cold. And, needless to say, I was fully awake.

Never have I ever lived in such a rural place.

Never have I ever seen such a rural place.

So far, I am really estatic about the community I am living in for the next two years. The people are among the nicest I have ever met. Everyone from the staff at my health center to my host family to random community members have left a really positive impression on me.

The week that I arrived was the town's feria, which is the festival they have in every town to honor their patron saint.

The streets (now almost entirely empty at most times of the day) were full with people and joy and vendors and people walking around and singing. And bolos. Quite a few. I havent really seen any since then, but there were certainly a lot of stumbling drunkards during the feria.

And there were juegos...which are like carnival rides except look like they might fall down at any second. It was really quite a great bonding experience with the host fam. We went and played foosbal and FIFA soccer on the machines and walked around and ate.

What a great opportunity to walk into the community when it's at its most exciting point of the entire year! I'm still meeting people and trying to find a social scene here, but it was lovely to see faces and hear voices in the first few days even of my time here.

I cannot believe it's the two week anniversary of my arrival in site. I feel like the time has absolutely flown.
Ive learned a ton about my site--

• The people are absolutely the nicest. I sat next to someone on a bus who ended up giving me her phone number just so she could research and tell me when a basketball league is starting in the next town over.
• Theres no trash pickup and people just burn it--including styrofoam and plastics. I cannot for the life of me do that, so I just end up taking my trash with me on the bus into the main city about an hour away and mysteriously dumping it in the trash can outside the Sarita ice cream store.
• It's strange to me that you can't buy any fruit here or eggs (although one tienda guy sells potatoes and guisquil out of his kitchen) but you can easily find any number of packaged goods and ICE CREAM.
• I have spent a lot of time so far basically just following people around trying to keep up. I dont feel like I know my community well still, so there is definitely a ton still to learn
• I learned how to make guipiles from my host mom. Or at least one kind. There is one way that is embroidered and the other that is woven--she taught me the embroidered kind. Which is still really cool.
• This weekend is Xelas Feria, which is supposed to be the biggest feria in Central America. It is also Independence Day on the 15th, so its going to be one big ol' party. More on that later.
  
• 
  

I got to my new home last Tuesday, almost a week ago. We took a windy, curvy road through the mountains, without seatbelts with people we had only met the day before. I got to my homestay family, and my new apartment was four concrete walls--and nothing else. And immediately I had to depend on the help of complete strangers to help me find literally everything from a food to a wardrobe, to a stove to literally a bed.

Now, keep in mind that none of the following things exist in my town
A supermarket
A produce market of any kind
A panaderia
A tortilleria (All my fellow voluntarios probably just gasped because they know what that means)
Any street vendors.

Its weird. Its completely different than any other place Ive been in Guatemala so far, but Im sure there are many other rural places exactly like this. But that being said, how was I gonna find anything to unpack into? Or anything to sleep on?

I made a list in my journal that was ''things I need to buy'' and it was literally like ''a bed, pillows, sheets, blankets, trash can, stove, wardrobe, plates, pots, pans, food...'' literally everything.

So. This is how you get to any place where you can buy furniture. You ride in the back of a pickup truck to the nearest town. There's a market there (thank the Lord for fresh produce), but are there any muebles? That would be too easy. So you get on a camioneta and ride it into Xela (the city of Quetzaltenango. We'll have several talks about this, but I'm calling it Xela from now on). Then you hop on a Microbus to get to La Democracia, this half-covered, half-open air market, where you can buy furniture.

Now, you have to bargain. In Spanish. When you don't know the value of the things you're trying to buy. You ready for that? Good.

Now. How do you get it back to your home without a car? The choices are these-tie your brand new, shiny bed to the top of a camioneta, get it down and transfer it to the back of a pickup truck OR pay a guy to drive you solita back to your home with your new purchases and make small talk in Spanish for the awkard 45 minute trip.

I gotta say though, as overwhelming as it has been to buy stuff here and to get everything at least minimally arranged in my room, my health center staff and my host family have been the most amazing of all. They've all wanted to help me buy everything from a stove to a bed, from food to pillows, and I'm so greatful for the warmhearted people of Toto.

I still don't have blankets or pillowcases and haven't really figured out what to do with my trash, considering they burn it here.(Which is yet another entry. So. Xela and trash burning, also the Feria and the cumpleanos de the abuelita. so much to write. And PICTURES. Coming. I promise.) And I spent my entire Friday night working on curtains and haven't finished the first one. Of course. Handicrafts.

Two things to take away from this entry--
Poco a poquito has become my new life.
I have never appreciated having a bed more than I do at this moment.

Also, I finally got my address, so send stuff whenever!!! It's on the Wishes page. You'll laugh when you see it. Although it's not quite as good as my friend's which is something like ''One Apple, The Brocoli Farm'' then her city, department, etc.

Alright that's it,

Ramble McRambly.