One year down

Okay, so I finally got my act together and re-wrote this entry, which I accidentally deleted a few weeks back. The month of April marked the completion of my first year of service. It was an absolutely crazy month with me traveling every day for nearly three weeks.

Welcome to the Jungle!
I started off with another trip to the Petén during Semana Santa (Holy Week). As I mentioned last year, Semana Santa is huge in Latin America, and especially Guatemala. The whole country pretty much takes the week off. Some other volunteers (and Hugo, a Guatemalan friend from the capital) and I decided to take advantage of the break to do a five-day hike and go check out some relatively recently discovered ruins. The name of the site is El Mirador and is inaccessible to vehicles, so you have to hike to it.

The trip up there was an adventure in and of itself. Jessica and I were arriving later than the rest of the group, which was going a day early to check out Tikal. Our bus ride up there was less than luxurious, to say the least. To summarize, it was a 10-hour trip on one of the hottest days of the year in a packed bus with poor ventilation and a cockroach infestation. How a bus gets infested with cockroaches, I’ll never understand. We made it in one piece, though just barely.

The mules that carried our stuff

Hittin' the trail

The hike was amazing and mostly flat, although that didn’t stop me from sucking wind for the first two days. It took me a while to get up to speed with the rest of the group. Our scrawny guide, Miguelito fooled us all with his five-foot-nothing stature and skin-and-bones frame. He hauled butt the whole way, all the while puffing on cigarettes when the rest of us stopped for water breaks.

Miguelito!

We think the distance from the trail head to the ruins was about 50 km (we kept getting differing reports so no one knows for sure). We walked for about four hours the first day and made it to the camp at Tintal, a smaller ruins site on the way to Mirador. The next day took about eight hours with some longer stops for water and checking out some other sights along the way.

Inside a Mayan King's tomb

Something Mayan...I was really tired at this point

We made it to the Mirador by about 3 p.m. on the second day, with enough time to explore some of the ruins near to our camp and watch the sunset from the top of a pyramid. Ashleigh, Jess and Kelsey decided to be adventurous and stayed on top of the pyramid where the plan was to spend the night. I was too much of a pansy and too sore to sleep on the uncomfortable ground and elected for the comfort of my hammock. It turned out to be an inspired choice as the girls got rained off the pyramid at about 2 a.m. and had to navigate a rather precarious descent in the dark to get back to camp.

Original Mayan paintings

This is how I felt at the end of each day

The next day was spent seeing more of the ruins, many of which are still undergoing the excavation process. We also got to see where the archeologists live and work when they’re there.

Taking in the view

On day four, we set out back the way we had come, cutting nearly three hours off our trail time for that leg of the trip. By that time I had hit my groove and wasn’t having much trouble staying with the group. We cut off another hour on the last day and made it back to Flores in time to enjoy a nice lunch together and a cerveza or two. I made it out with just one tick. Jess and Grant were a little less lucky and Jess even underwent minor surgery on top of a pyramid to remove one of them.

Having had to take bucket baths with swamp water, we were pretty stinky by the end

The next two weeks were a blur of hours upon hours spent traveling by bus and sleeping in a different place nearly every night due to various meetings and medical appointments. When I finally got back to Jacal it felt more like coming home than ever before (Don’t worry Mom, I won’t stay forever :o). I was elated to be back in my apartment and sleep in my own bed.

Passing the torch
The week I got back I was swamped with getting back into the groove at school, preparing for a visit from my program director and organizing a major sales campaign with Soluciones Comunitarias, my secondary project.

On Tuesday, Doñas Manuela, Candelaria, Emilia and Emilia’s son Chus and I went out to Todos Santos to put up flyers and do publicity for a sales campaign they were planning for the weekend. The trip was a bit of a fiasco because they hadn’t exactly planned much ahead of time, but everything turned out okay and they had a great turnout on Saturday.

That same weekend, Mary Claire, who works with the Sol Com on a regional level, came up for the group’s tri-monthly meeting. After observing how the group was functioning, we decided that my services were really no longer needed. Chus and the ladies are now capable of taking full responsibility for their businesses, and it was at the point where my involvement was more of an unnecessary crutch than anything else.

It’s a little sad because working with them usually turned out to be fun, even if it was somewhat maddening at times. But it’s great to know that the project has reached a level of sustainability and to see them take control.

Another Smack down
Dr. Sergio Mack (known as Smack to us volunteers because of his email address) is the director of Healthy Schools for Peace Corps Guatemala and came up to Jacal for his second visit since I started my service. My teachers always get a boost in motivation after seeing him, and it couldn’t have come at a better time as I’ve been having a bit of trouble in that area.

My teachers at Buxup were lagging behind putting together their Health Corners (a clean, organized and hopefully decorated place in their classrooms where the kids can keep their hygiene supplies: toothbrush, towel, soap, etc.). After a somewhat disciplinary visit from the superintendent, five still hadn’t finished, but by the time Sergio came, you better believe they were all done.

This is a good health corner

This is not

Working with this school can sometimes be frustrating because they’re really not lacking anything in the way of infrastructure. The only thing really standing in the way of them getting certified by the end of my time here is that only about half of the staff actually implements the program with any degree of dedication. But I have seen some marked improvements since Sergio’s visit and that’s encouraging.

In Taj Buxup, we’ve been having trouble getting funding approved for the kitchen project. In a stroke of luck, a representative from one of the organizations we are soliciting showed up in the middle of our meeting with Sergio. Being the dynamic salesman he is, Sergio made a convincing pitch to the rep and I think it’s going to help our cause. We should be getting more information on that this week.

What's cookin'?
We did an official count of our bottles today and we've collected more than 3,000! We only needed 2,500 for the kitchen, but the teachers decided to continue collecting for use in future construction projects at the school.

A child knows...
So after we counted up the bottles I was sitting around waiting for my teachers to show up to our weekly meeting that I had confirmed yesterday. No one was around because there were a million other things going on and no one had bothered to mention that bit of information beforehand. All-in-all it was actually a very productive day, but in that moment my frustration level was rising, and as I sat on the curb groaning while I watched some second graders messing around with a pile of burning trash, one of the pre-schoolers came up behind me without saying a word and started giving me a shoulder rub. No joke, I almost cried.

Oink! Oink!
Guatemala finally got its first two confirmed cases of swine flu in the capital and while the hysteria hasn’t quite reached the manic level that it seemed to in other parts of the world, there’s still quite a bit of confusion as to how we should be handling the situation in the schools. I gave a short presentation to the mothers in Buxup last week at the beginning of a nutrition talk I had already planned. I just tried to impress upon them the importance of taking preventative measures, while trying to calm any unnecessary panic that may have been brewing.

Drawing pictures of healthy foods

I was scheduled to give the same talk on Monday in Taj Buxup, but suddenly the superintendent is enforcing a mandate that was issued a week and a half ago, which everyone was ignoring until now. The directive issued by the Ministry of Education states that schools should suspend all extra-curricular meetings and activities that call for large gatherings of people until further notice. The thing is, classes are still in session. That’s a large gathering of people. So why can’t we have meetings? Working within the confines of such an unorganized educational system, these are the kinds of questions that plague me on a day-to-day basis.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!
I hope all the mothers out there had a wonderful day on Sunday. Here’s a special shout-out to mi mamá. Thanks for all the care packages filled with greatly-missed Trader Joe’s products and People magazines (it’s important to stay informed). I love you and miss you!

Connected
Also, I broke down and signed up for wireless Internet. I’ve been spending a small fortune in the internet cafés and this way if the signal is slow, at least I can be doing other things around the house while it’s working. I can’t really believe I’m in the Peace Corps and have wireless Internet, but almost nothing about this experience has been what I expected, so I guess it’s just another chapter in the story.

That’s all from me for now.

Peace out,
Kristina