anita

It has been quite an adventurous week here Guatemala! I spent the first week with family and such, running all around Guatemala City, going to concerts, and traveling around a tiny bit. Sunday, the 12th, we went to the beach and had a lot of fun (except I got terribly burnt) and with that ended the Guatemala adventures with the family...Monday I was dropped of in my new home in Comalapa where I was soon aquainted with everything that was going on. I´m working with a program that is hoping to build a parkish area for the citizens of Comalapa to use. There´s a garden, a tree nursery, a soccer field, a playground area, and a soon to be basketball court/volleyball court. Our head guy for this tiny part of a bigger project is Mateo, a tall Texan whose vision has made this whole Chimiyá project possible. The website that tells a little of all this is http://www.longwayhomeinc.org/

At the house there are the two most beautiful dogs in Guatemala (Che and Suz) and the most adorable kitten, Chimi. Right now it is only myself and Amelia (23 years old, a Kiwi) volunteering, so along with Mateo and his girlfriend Cat we make a small family of 4. We make it really fun though...yesterday we sang songs while Cat played guitar, all by candlelight because we have no electricity as of now in the big house (Amelia and I have light by solar power in the little cabaña) Toilet flushing is only done with a bucket of water collected from the previous night´s rain, and when eating lunch or dinner, we can expect daily rice or noodles with cooked vegies. Amelia and Cat have taken to making cakes or some sweet every night, so as Amelia says, we eat like kings. On Monday after getting dropped off, Amelia and I immediately set of to work on our lesson for the next day, as a class of 20 from a nearby school emphasizing incorporating Mayan culture into learning was to come. We decided on a lesson of Geography of the World Cup countries, Central America, and Guatemala as well as an English lesson. We had quite a time drawing the world on the white board that we had, but ended up doing such an excelent job that it´s still up. We planned activities and such and our Tuesday lesson went off swimmingly. 1/2 the class went with Mateo to garden (as another mission is to teach the youth of Comalapa to grow foods organically as opposed to dumping tons of pesticides on their crops) and 1/2 came with Amelia and I to learn what we had to teach them. The kids were super enthusiastic, knew all the Central American countries like none other, and loved teaching us how to say the things we were teaching them in English in Cacshikal (spelling?), an increadibly difficult Mayan language to pronounce but spoken by all in Comalapa in addition to Spanish. Once the kids left at about 1pm, Amelia and I spent the rest of the day in the garden and vivera (tree nursery) weeding everything. Wednesday was a big day for Amelia and I not only because snake sighting #6 took place, but because we got to start constructing an adobe oven from adobe blocks and mud; hard work, but fun and very satisfying. The oven itself is being built for use for the community and the area we were working was very close to the park´s playground equipment and so Mateo had me taking pictures of the 50 or so kids that were running around. The kids went wild over having their pictures taken and stayed still only long enough for me to take their picture before making a mad dash toward me, wanting to see the results. The children are so small even if they are 9/10 years old just because the Guatemalans are a small people (children from about age 6-12 come to our park area almost every day). By 5 that afternoon, with our adobe oven almost 1/3 finished, we stopped for the day, exhausted from working and getting dirty. Chile that Mateo had promised to cook for us finally was served at 9:30pm (though the beans were still a bit crunchy) and we sang love songs that Cat knew in Spanish with her playing the guitar by candlelight; we ate our chili happily with cornbread mixed in (an apparently characteristic Texan meal). Amelia and I ran up to our little hut area around 10ish, trying to beat the rain. Every evening, anytime between 4pm and 10, it starts pouring buckets of rain (side note: as Amelia is from New Zealand, she has THE funnest accent and expressions...for pouring rain for instance, it´s "pissing rain") the whole night. As we have tin roofs, we find it a nice backdrop to fall asleep to every night. A guy helped us start the adobe oven and ended up having to stay where I was going to, so Amelia and I have been rooming together quite comfortably (I know you were worried mom, and now we´re together just as you had wanted anyway!). Our days have thus been filled with lots of work that needs to be done. Today Amelia and I took the day off and went into the main city part of Comalapa to participate with the kids in the big parade...we were the only gringas (white people) in the parade, but it was fun even though it started to rain halfway through. This whole week is a big festival for San Juan(after whom the town is named, San Juan Comalapa), and so there are a ton of activities going on. We then got to have lunch with all the teachers of Comalapa with the mayor which ended up being an entire hall of people eating, so it wasn´t just like we got to chat with the mayor himself. Then we watched a dance for about an hour and a half in the hot sun, but the dance was really interesting because it was made up of 40 people sporting the outfits of 20 different parts of Guatemala. After baking in the san and running some errands, we ended up here at the internet cafe from where I am writing right now.

We have to leave soon, so hasta prontito!
annemary