This and that...

I´m a little late on both of these, but...

Happy Father's Day Daddi-o and Happy Mother's Day, Mama!

Dog bites woman
I know it´s been forever since my last post, but life’s been rather eventful since then, so hopefully this will be a good read. A little over a month ago was the Bienvenida (welcome party) for all the new volunteers in our department. It was held in the Cumbre, a cold, secluded region on the other side of the mountains, perfect for hiking and campfires. Problem is, it’s a five hour trip for me to get there, so once again, I crashed a couple nights with my friend who lives near Huehue and only about an hour from the Cumbre instead of doing the 24-hour turnaround.

Friday evening we went for a walk in the hills around her house, using a trail she’s used many times before. On the way back home, we passed by a homestead with a dog standing out front. It looked skittish and not too friendly, but I didn’t pay it much attention as we passed it.

That turned out to be a mistake. We continued walking, and I was in the middle of telling a story when Spunky (the neighbor dog who was walking with us) got into a spat with the other dog, which redirected its anger at me, came running up from behind and nipped me in the back of the leg.

The freaky part of it all – and I’m not making this up – was that just 30 seconds before I had been saying what a pain in the ass it would be to get bit by a dog here, because most of them are strays and you don’t know if they’ve been vaccinated against rabies, which means you have to go to Xela (pronounced Sheila) or Antigua to get the shots. It was really weird.

Well, Katie didn’t recognize the dog, so we couldn’t track down the owners to find out if it had been vaccinated. And because it broke the skin (barely), I had to get up at four a.m. the next day to go to the hospital in Xela (two hours from Huehue) and then make it back up to the Cumbre for the bienvenida.

That trip went smoothly for the most part. They even gave me the second vaccination, which I would need three days later so that I wouldn’t have to come back down (It had to stay cold, so I carried it around for two days in a mini red cooler that I bought at the Guatemalan version of Wal-Mart. I was tempted to tell people I was carrying a donated organ to see if I could guilt the drivers into not making me pay to ride.).

New Huehue volunteers

Out of tunes
So I made it up to the bienvenida, and headed back to Jacal the next day with Erica, my site mate, and Juan José, the dentist from the capitol, who’s doing his residency here. We had to walk through the quite-crowded market to make it to the bus terminal.

It was a hellishly hot day and when we made it to the terminal I decided to buy a drink before getting on the bus. I took off my backpack to get out my wallet, and that’s when I noticed that the outside pocket was open – the outside pocket where I had stupidly shoved my MP3 player and left unlocked.

In the market someone had unzipped the pocket and grabbed my MP3 player without me ever realizing. Luckily I still have all my music on my computer, but I was (still am) really pissed at myself for being so dumb. Lesson learned, I guess.

Thankfully my parents sent me an Ipod shuffle as an early birthday present and I had to suffer through only one bus ride without my music.

On the bus after losing my MP3 player

Rio Azul
By far one of the coolest parts about living my town is the Rio Azul (or blue river). It’s a big rushing river about a 20-minute hike from my house and is absolutely gorgeous. In fact, it’s the only clean-looking river I’ve seen so far in Guatemala, although I’m assured it’s still contaminated on the microscopic level (it’s a fact we struggle to get across to our teachers and students: virtually all water in Guatemala is contaminated).

Nevertheless, it’s not too dirty for refreshing dip, and I've done a couple of day trips out there, most recently with Erica, Katie and Juan José and his friends when they came to visit. Check out the pictures:

Me and Katie racing (Juan José and Wilmer are refereeing behind us)

Mmmmmm...sandía

Birthday bash
Two weeks ago a bunch of volunteers from my training class met up in Xela to celebrate all the June birthdays. Aside from losing my wallet and all my credit/debit cards, it was an awesome weekend. It was great to spend time with all the people I hadn’t seen since training.

Katie and I traveled there and back together along with her puppy, a mostly Black Lab mutt named Katzaj. We got some great looks from Guatemalans staring at the two crazy Gringas on the bus with a half-grown dog lying on their laps.

Working hard at hardly working
Progress at school continues in infinitesimal increments, but it continues. Poco a poco, as we like to say here in Guatemala: little by little. The school calendar is sporadic and unpredictable, which makes it hard to maintain structure within the Healthy Schools program.

For instance, classes were canceled for Wednesday and Thursday last week because of a last-minute teacher training that nobody knew about until the day before. Since I don’t go to school on Fridays I basically lost out on the whole week and the kids lost out on two of what are supposed to be three weekly lessons. Having so many days off can make it hard to stay motivated.

But I’m preparing my first formal teacher’s training which will be a four-hour long workshop I’m holding in a few weeks. I’m going to be presenting new teaching techniques, orienting them to all the Healthy Schools materials and hoping to get my teachers a little more excited in the process.

Ping Pong bonding
In more positive news, I’m starting to build stronger personal relationships with some of my teachers. I’ve been helping to train Profe Juan (the one who orchestrated the trash pick-up day) in ping pong. Yes, ping pong. He recently competed in the department (state) games for teachers and won, so he advances to the national games, which will be in July some time.

Mi hogar
In case anyone’s interested in where I’ve been living for the last two and a half months, here’s a picture of my “apartment.” (Really it’s a room with a private bathroom in a house where the owners rent out two rooms and keep the other two for their kids to use when they come home from studying in Guatemala City):

(The bathroom is behind me)

The courtyard...it's a bit of a fixer-upper, but all-in-all, not bad

(The first door on the left is my room)