I've been so depressing lately.

I'm sorry.

So now I'm gonna talk about something completely cool and totally exciting that I did this week.

My site-ish mate (she's in the municipal head which is about an hour away by bus. She's not the closest volunteer to me but because she works in my municipality we work together) secured us funding and got the personnel together (and did basically EVERYTHING) so a group of 4 of us volunteers could host a GLOW camp in my town.

What's a GLOW camp? It stands for Girls Leading Our World (awfully cheesy. I know. It's rivaled by its partner the BRO Camp--Brothers Reaching Out), and it's the Peace Corps' staple girls' empowerment camp. 

We did a 4-day half day camp. I think next time I would love to make it longer during the day and more days, but this was amazing.

The first day the girls were impossibly quiet. We couldn't get them to participate in any silent games let alone speak up and voice their opinions. 

4 days, a self esteem taller, arts and crafts, and about a thousand dinamicas (aka theatre games aka my specialty) later, we could not get the girls to stop talking at the end of the day today. Admittedly they still moved in packs for games that required them to make decisions with their feet (Is this statement true or false and move to that side of the room, e.g.), but they were so, so much more confident, smiley, and chatty than they were on the first day.

A couple of my favorite things that happened in the whole camp happened today. One of the activities we did was tape a piece of paper on each girl's back and have everyone else write compliments on the papers of the others. 

We also did a diploma ceremony at the end. Complete with Pomp and Circumstance and a slideshow of all the photos from the week. This may seem extremely simple, but we had all the girls laughing and some were brought to tears as they were handed their diplomas. 

It just reminded me that in the world I live in, more formal graduations--high school, college etc. were always celebrated but almost expected. Here, simply to have your accomplishments recognized and your opinions respected can be a beautifully, unprecedented moment in the life of a young girl.

Enjoy some photos.

I've done a lot of soul searching about how to write this entry, and I'm not sure I've arrived at a conclusion, but I'm going to let it come out how it comes out.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with death, especially not the death of young people gracias a Dios, so I'm really bad at dealing with it in general.

Last Saturday (October 12), a young woman in our community died in childbirth. If you've been reading my blog or talking to me, I'm sure you  have the idea that the Maternal and Child Health project of Peace Corps Guatemala has something to do with deaths of this nature.

Maternal Health in Guatemala Generally

Our whole point in being here is to stop deaths like this from happening. Watch just the first minute of this. After that, it gets preachy and introduces very weird music. That's the reality that women here live in. Most women in my community give birth at home with the help of a trained (or untrained) comadrona (traditional midwife). The comadronas are trained to recognize warning signs and send the women to the hospital if they show signs of preclampsia, hemorrhage, breach birth, or anything else that could potentially complicate the delivery.

When women die, it is typically because the comadrona waited too long to send her to the hospital, because the husband refuses to let her be taken to the hospital, or because it took too long to arrive once the woman was sent.

That was not the case in my community. She started her delivery in the hospital. She did everything right. 

It was so sad too because she had come to the Puesto de Salud where I work the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, once for a consultation and once for an educational charla and to receive dietary supplementation for her toddler.

The Burial

I went to the burial. I didn't go to the church services or the house of the family, but I went to the cemetery for the actual burial. The cemetery in my community is beautiful and tranquil, up a hill, nestled among the corn stalks as tall as houses. And the view of mountains, the Santa Maria volcano, and the sea of corn behind make the site as gorgeous and peaceful as you could ever want.

The picture at the top is a random cemetery in Solola pulled from wikipedia. I didn't have the heart to take a picture of the cemetery and especially not of the burial. But almost all the cemeteries in Guatemala are like that--with the large, brightly colored crypts proudly displaying the names of the families buried there.

At least at the front. 

The back half of the cemetery is just mounds, unmarked graves where the poorer community members bury their loved ones. The most astounding were the mounds no more than 3-4 feet long where you know they'd buried children.

Guatemala has the highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the Western Hemisphere. And Totonicapan is the department with the highest rate in Guatemala.

62.5% of the children between 5-9 years old are chronically malnourished in this health district are malnourished (SESAN)

Less than 2.5% of children in the US are undernourished.

And 62.5% is the lowest rate in the whole department of Totonicapan,

Malnutrition is a word that conjures mental images of children in Africa with distended stomachs and prisoners of war with skin sticking to their fragile bones. And those cases are extreme and terrifying. But that’s not the only kind of malnutrition that is.

There are two main types of malnutrition: chronic and acute.

Acute is the kind that is immediately obvious in many cases. It’s the child currently in the hospital in the departmental head that is 7 months old and only weighs five pounds. It’s the four year old I read about in the newspaper who weighs 24 pounds. It’s the child that you look at and wonder how they’re still alive.

There are two principle kinds of acute malnutrition: Marasmus and Kwashiorkor. Marasmus is the skin sticking to bones, anorexic looking malnutrition that comes from low calorie content. Kwashiorkor is the other kind—the one with the pot-bellies that children mostly in Africa get. It comes from lack of protein in the diet.

Here in my municipality, there are 14 children currently suffering from acute malnutrition. And between 1000 and 1500 children in Guatemala running the risk of death from having such acute malnutrition.

For us, (despite the high number of acute malnutrition cases) chronic malnutrition is the biggest concern, obviously. With a rate of 62.5%, that means that over half of children ages 5-9 are physically underdeveloped for their age.

Weight and/or height delays form the primary symptoms for diagnosis, but the development delay is also echoed in mental capacity. For children, especially under 2 years of age, chronic malnutrition could have drastic effects.

Fortunately the government is using a two-pronged approach of supplementation and growth monitoring for all children under 2 in my municipality. The program has just started, but it seems to have a great deal of potential.

Children still fall out of the monitoring window after they turn two. This is when the malnutrition gets worse in our district—after age two, when they are no longer receiving supplementation from the government and when their parents are not bringing them in for height and weight monitoring.

A great barrier to combating malnutrition is that many parents don’t think their children “look” malnourished, so they don’t have any concerns.

I’m still getting a handle on what malnutrition means in my district and in my work, but working to give young children the chance to lead a healthy life makes me confident in the work we do here.

...comes the pooping.

I felt like it was finally time to write this entry since I've been promising Lauren Chambers for over a month that I would. And besides. I haven't had diarrhea in like 3 weeks. I think that might be a personal record since touching down on Guatemalan soil.

So. When someone burps in the US, what do we think? Something like:

• Phew, what did you eat?
• Want a mint?
• I see you've just enjoyed that nice fizzy beverage.
• Think you had enough beer?
• Cuz you're once, twice, three times a lady... 
• And the list goes on.

But it's normally a well-wishing thought. Or a hope that someone has just put something enjoyable into their body and has had a pleasant release.

Burping for Peace Corps Volunteers means something entirely different. You see, intestinal infections run wild among PC Trainees and Volunteers. As my father so kindly announced to all of my relatives at a party the last time I was sick (Jokes. Love you but you know you did. I heard about it from people who weren't even there.).

And these "Gastro-intestinal symptoms" are almost always accompanied by some rather foul smelling (and tasting, for that matter) gasses. And, of course, it's also accompanied by the phenomenon that Carmen Roth has so delicately termed "throwing down" (and sometimes its partner in crime throwing up just crashes the party. It's the best.).

But seriously. When someone lets one loose in a room full of people, it's a danger zone. 27 Volunteers in a room for hours at a time, we ran the risk of explosions. It was deadly. 

I imagine it to be something like if you gave all of the McCalley six ladies a dinner of beans, followed by a huge bowl of Moose Tracks and then sat on their stomachs.

So, when we're all in a room together and someone burps, the thought that someone enjoyed a nice Coke never enters our mind. Instead, we think:

• So, you got the poops again, huh? 
• It was you  in the last training... I knew it.
• Dammit, again? We're definitely not sitting together at lunch.
• EVACUATE

....yeah. It's that bad. You can't even imagine.

Anyone who's not living under a rock knows a lot more about this than I do. But I hear that the government's stopped working or something. What else is new?
 
JK kinda. But any details on WTF is going on over there would be greatly appreciated.

At first when I heard about the shut down, I was thinking well thank god I'm over here because now that won't affect me at all. Then I realized that I'm a government employee and maybe should worry a little.

But about one thing the government has its head straight on budgeting and realized that it would cost more money to evacuate all the Volunteers than to just leave them here. And then they realized that in order to keep Volunteers here, they have to keep all the in-country staff--the Safety and Security Coordinator, the Programming Staff, the Medical Officers, etc. So literally nothing changes for me right now. Except that we keep getting reassuring emails from staff that they are, in fact, still working.

The only thing that scares me a little is the last sentence of the action plan: 

• "Volunteer living allowances and other subsistence payments – These can be paid if they are obligated prior to the beginning of the funding hiatus. Otherwise, they can be paid only out of carryover funds." 
• 
  

This means that if for some reason the hiatus goes for a really long time and the carryover funds run out, then we won't be getting paid.

But I have a feeling they would evacuate us long before that. And that it wouldn't happen anyway. There doesn't seem to be much risk of this shut down going for months and months on end.