poaquileña

Yes, I am alive! This is the first time I´ve been on a computer in over a week, but now that I´m here and settled, más o menos, I´ll hopefully be a little less out of touch. Everyone talks about how hard the first 3 months in site are, but I´m thinking that won´t be the case here. My first week went ridiculously well. Let me just mention right now that the precious tween in her traditional traje on the computer next to me is looking up pictures of Bon Jovi. Be still, my heart. Instead of a boring rundown, I´ll just hit some high points:

-Kaqchikel class. Absolute hilarity. Fortunately, we all stink at it so there´s no where to go but up. Our teacher, Israel, is rather patient. I´m also going to be giving an English class in our Centro de Salud every Thursday afternoon, but yesterday we didn´t get back from the nacimientos in time.

-Día de las comadronas. In other words, midwife day at an ONG here, Ixin Ac'uala'. Ixin Ac'uala' is a local branch of the Christian Children´s Fund...hmmm. The comadronas spent half the morning preparing an enormous pot of caldo, soup with veggies and an unidentified meat, and then did a little dance and some speeches. All in Kaqchikel, I understood almost nothing. I got to call off the raffle, which was a scream.

-Disinfecting the nacimientos of one of Poaquil´s aldeas, Hacienda María. We schlepped across the side of a mountain and down into the valley to the water source and scrubbed down the cajas and put a 60% concentration (!) of cloro in the main caja to kill whatever crap is in there. Apparently, this is done 2 times per year. There´s about 30 aldeas of Poaquil, and who knows how many nacimientos each one has. So that means this happens a lot, I guess. We went to two others, also for Hcda María, which was back up the side of the mountain and down into another valley. My new Converse kicks were not a good choice of footwear for this caminata.

-I´m going to skip over the week before this one because all it was were a ton of meetings and sessions, followed by swear-in at the ambassador´s house in Guatemala City on Friday. We all spent the weekend in Antigua, which was fantabulous. AND SAW HARRY POTTER! It was amazing.

All the doorways in this country are covered by curtains, cortinas, and they are sooooo necessary. There are these enormous flying ants here called sompopos, and they land on the cortinas (better than in my bedroom). I felt like I was in Super MarioWorld the other day, in Bowser´s Castle, knocking sompopos off the cortina from the opposite side instead of turtles across the net.

Peace Corps would be very pleased to know that my danger radar is fairly sensitive these days. I was on the camioneta, heading to Antigua last week, when 2 FULLY dressed and painted clowns boarded the bus. My first thought is, ¨well, glad I´m not carrying much money, because we´re all about to be held up.¨ Fortunately, that wasn´t the case and I was just a smidge paranoid. But, let´s face it, clowns are scary as hell.

I´m going to wrap this up by informing all of you I purchased my machete today. Such a proud moment for my parents, I´m sure. But you do really need them here...everyone carries them without a sheath or a scabbard, which is weird. The men just tuck the handle into their belt and it swings along with them. I hope everyone is doing well, and I´ll be back with more soon.

Nos vemos.