Thanksgiving 2011

Well Thanksgiving has now come and gone. It was weird not to be with the family, but we made the best of it. Nine out of the ten people in my training group got together to celebrate, some of them traveling up to 14 hours by chicken bus over two days. Every person was in charge of one dish of food, so clearly I volunteered to make the stuffing. A couple people in the group are very conscious of what they eat and try to stay clear of anything that comes in a box and requires that you ¨Just add water¨. My selfless offering to make the dressing was received by skeptical minds who didn’t think I had what it takes to make a batch of top notch dressing.  But with a little reassurance from my mom´s ¨secret family recipe¨, that has been passed down for generations, the group agreed to let me take the helm. It took us all day to cook up our feast on the one tiny gas stove we had at hand, but our meal was complete with roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, spinach dip, homemade sweet potato pie, apple pie, apple cider, roasted vegetables and, of course, mom´s stuffing. To nobody´s surprise the stuffing, and mom´s recipe, received a barrage of compliments. 

We still had 3 days together after the celebration on Thursday and wanted to make the best of them. On my way into town the taxi driver could not tell me enough about El Prado, the lake that is just outside of San Jose. For most of the hour and a half drive we could see Volcan Tajumulco, the tallest volcano in all of Central America, but still Marco went on about El Prado. When we drove into town, a large sign was visible confirming the popularity of El Prado. This popularity was reconfirmed by each and every taxi driver that drove my fellow volunteers. Having seen the sign, having heard all the recommendations and after ousting the tallest volcano in Central America as the topic of conversation I knew this lake had to be pretty special. On Saturday morning we layered up, filled our thermos and set out on our ever exciting journey to El Prado. As we got closer we were eager to see what awaited us and were excited to watch the sunset over the lake and behind the volcanoes. When we finally arrived, we could not believe our eyes. Awaiting us was a green, man-made pond about fifty yards long and thirty yards wide...but at least we were able to rent rowboats. Unfortunately it was rather difficult to navigate the boats around all the floating dead fish, especially when your paddle scrapped the concrete bottom with each stroke. 

Somehow this picture makes El Prado look good...and not green. 

 I returned to site the Sunday after Thanksgiving and uploaded some pictures onto facebook that week. The truth about the stuffing was out...

My friend commented on the picture:

Kelly:  Matt you are such a liar. 'My mom's secret recipe' my ass. I'll never forgive you.

In other news I received 3 marriage proposals during the trainning I gave yesterday. 

Couple pics from my home visits in Chuasiguan 11-18-11

Pimpin out the chicken coop with 22 inch rims.

Last Friday, Don Juan and I walked about three hours to one of the aldeas, Chuasiguan, to do home visits so that I could meet the women in his group and check on their chicken coops. The walk should not have been nearly that long but he knew a ¨short-cut¨ through the mountains using the trails that the gorrillas made during the civil war...

Just thought this was pretty.

Their mother forgot to teach them how to smile.

Don Juan right before we started out on his short-cut.

Couple random pictures

I only have these 4 pictures with me at the office. I´ll try to add more tonight, or this week sometime.

(L-R) Maria Jose (22), Migdalia Amparo (24), Me, Monica Marissa (15), Veronica Gabriela (18)- My host sisters in Magdalena.

Cementary for Day of the Dead

Dawn, Sasha, Eduardo, Adriana, Christine in the PC van

Another picture from the cementary

2nd week in site

I have fleas. Mom can you mail me some of Emma´s frontline?

In other news, I met one of my women´s groups for the first time this past Friday. It is the biggest group I have and out of the 120 women that are in the group, about 75 showed up, and all of them with at least one baby/child and most with 2 or 3. The majority of the women don´t speak Spanish so my counterpart´s dad played the part of translator. The meeting started off pretty well I thought. All of the women sitting on the floor in front of me and my counterpart, his dad, and I standing at the front of the room. After I introduced myself the father translated what I had said into K´iche but was talking for much longer than I had talked. I asked my counterpart what he was saying, and he told me that his dad was trying to convince the women that I was not there to steal their children. Took about thirty minutes to get most of them to believe him. I´m off to a good start.

Right now things are pretty slow. I will be working with 7 women´s groups for the next three months until the schools open up again and then I will be working with 5 schools and a few additional women´s groups. Now I am just meeting the women and doing house visits to see how everything looks and decide what I will focus our meetings on. I think a lot of it will be infant nutrition. Most mothers put coke and coffee in their baby bottles. Yikes.

Don´t know if I wrote about this previously, but in my training town there was a guy who wasn´t all there in the head and he used to call me Santa, and every time I walked by his house he would yell ¨HOHOHO¨. My new town is much more religious than my old town and I have been told by 3 different families and one pastor that I have the face of Jesus Christ. Make sure Grandma hears about that one. Guatemalans can´t really grow facial hair so I am quite the anomaly. During both of the women´s group meetings that I have had so far, little kids have come up to me and pet my face. Even my counterpart asked if he could touch it.

Things are going pretty well in my new house. I live on the first floor and a family of four lives above me. There are two boys, 5 and 9 years old. The boys standing on chairs so that they can watch me through my window is about the extent of my interaction with the family. They especially like to watch when I´m sitting on my bed reading. Those little guys could watch me for hours.

I´ve been trying to put pictures up but the internet is too slow here. Gonna try to do it from my computer later tonight.

Welp, see ya later.

Totonicapan

Hi All,

Sorry I haven´t updated in a while. I just moved to my new site and home for the next two years in Totonicapan. Apparently I am now living in the poorest town in the poorest department of the third poorest country in the world, but I´m sure there are lots of different studies with conflicting statistics...nevertheless it´s pretty poor down here.

Last friday we swore in as Peace Corps volunteers, said bye to our host families and moved out to our new sites all over the country. My first host family in Magdalena Milpas Altas was amazing. We had a great time together and it was hard to say goodbye, lots of tears.

I arrived in my new site, a small town in Totonicapan, on Friday and it´s been a bit rough. My host family does not compare to my first family in the least. I live on the 1st floor of a 2 story house and the whole family lives upstairs. There is no reason for me to go up there nor for them to come down so it´s been pretty awkward. I asked them two nights ago if I could eat dinner with them one night this week becasue I want to get to know the family and they said that would be great and that the next night we are having tomales. So the next night came and there were balloons all over the place and lots of people coming into the house..I was getting a little overwhelmed casue I thought you were going to have a welcome party for me but about an hour later the father came downstairs to my room and gave me a tomale and a cup of coffee..I asked what was going on upstairs and it was a birthday party for their 5yr old son. Unlucky.

It has been getting a little better each day. Yesterday a girl from my work invited me to accompany her family for the celebrations for Todos Santos/Dia de los Muertos. So last night I sat on the top of the mountain in a graveyard ontop of mounts of dirt that were covering bodies with a Mayan family. The girl from my work was the only one in the family that spoke Spanish and we spent about 2 hours translating different things between english, spanish and k´iche. It was really amazing to spend some time with a Mayan family and to celebrate such an important day in their culture. They said a couple Mayan prayers and lit tons of candles and we ate in the graveyard with their deceased family.

On another note I have had bananas, tortillas and avacados for my past 4 meals. Down to my last belt loop already.
Anyway I´ve got to run for now, but I´m going to try to post some pictures online soon from the last nights with my previous host family and hopefully a couple from the graveyard.

Matt

More pictures.

Just a couple more pictures I wanted to share with everyone.

Brother Marvin and his new muscles.

Me and Eduardo, one of our Spanish teachers.

A Mayan ceremony.

Mayan ruins.

Mayan ruins.

Baby Blue follwing me down south.

First pics

Right now we are finishing up our second month of training and getting ready to find out where we will be living for the next two years. They have our sites assigned and are going to tell us on Oct 13^th. Everyone still feels a little underprepared for some of the work, but for the next week and a half we will be concentrating our training on chickens. Yesterday we killed and dissected some chickens to gain a better understanding of what we’ll be working with. The four people in my town also met a family who has some property up on the mountain where we will be giving vaccinations to about 60 chickens this coming week and also helping them to build better chicken coups.

Enough of the serious stuff, right now my little brother, Marvin, is standing behind me playing a fake trumpet to the Rocky theme song. He’s been doing it for ten minutes. I have watched 3 Rocky movies, 2 Rambo movies, 2 Home Alones and Karate Kid in the past 2 months. They are a couple years behind but at least they go for the classics.

The other three volunteers who live in my town and I had to give another charla to 4 classes in the local school about a balanced diet. Wanting it to be fun for the kids we did a skit about astronauts. We all ran into the room with our space uniforms and tinfoil helmets on and told the kids we needed help fueling our ship to make it to the moon. The 4^th and 5^th grade classes loved the asteroids and aliens we had attacking the ship but the 6^th grade class was way too cool for us. It also didn’t help that we went to the wrong classroom and neither the teacher nor the class had any idea why we were there and didn’t bother to tell us until after we finished our 30 minute space skit. Pretty awkward trying to explain yourself when you are wearing tinfoil on your head.

I don’t have much time now but I wanted to share some pictures with you guys too. Took to long to upload them all but I´ll upload some more this week. So here they are…

Marvin me and Monica with their honor student banners on.

Our first group pic.

Me and sister Monica (15yro).

Second Email Home Sept 9 2011

Hey Everyone,

I hope you are all doing well.

Things are starting to get interesting here. I was sitting on the toilet the other night (for about the fifth or sixth time) thinking about how great it would be to have a normal bathroom experience when in comes running the biggest rat I have ever seen in my life. I jumped off that toilet screaming like little red riding hood and kicking like a school boy. I kicked the door so hard that the family came running to the bathroom to see what happened. This thing was bigger than Beth’s guinea pig. When my host mother finished laughing, she got me a rock and put it in the bathroom so that I can smash it next time it visits me.

National and Local elections are coming up this coming weekend, Sept 11. The PC is worried about some of the towns that have municipal seats, one of which I live in, so they are evacuating us to other ‘safe towns’. I highly doubt anything will happen, especially where I live but I am excited because we get to have a 3 day slumber party with the other trainees in our class, so that should be a nice break from my usual monotonous night life of laying in bed reading. If anyone has good ideas/suggestions for a hobby to pick up please fill me in. There really is nothing to do once it gets dark here besides read or play board games, and playing Trouble gets really old really quickly (I played seven games in a row last night).

I had to give my first “charla” to a sixth grade class of 42 students last week which was pretty interesting. My topic was the importance of washing your hands. I started with a skit to get things going. “Hi my name is Matt and I work with the PC. Right now I am living…uh oh I don’t feel so good” then I went to the corner of the room, the “bathroom”, and pretended to have diarrhea, lots of farting noises and toilet paper. Without washing my hands, which I covered with glitter to look dirty, I offered everyone cookies. One little punk said he still wanted the cookie so I wiped it on my butt until he changed his mind. I was pretty nervous about giving my first presentation in Spanish but the kids got a kick out of my skit and it went pretty well.

A couple of nights ago my host siblings and I went for a walk up the hill to a spot where we could see the whole town which was pretty cool, we could see all 20 or so lights that exist. The 15 year old girl, Moni, was playing with a lemon the whole time and as we walked back she peeled it and asked me to break it up into pieces for everyone to eat. The verb she used was ‘partir’ which to me sounded a lot like ‘patear’ which means- to punt. I was a little confused, but reassured myself that nobody eats fresh lemons. I asked her if she was serious and she confirmed. To everyone’s surprise, I punted that baby as far as I could, never to be seen again. Needless to say, they were not very pleased, but at least I won’t be confusing those words again.

Anyway, those are my stories this time. I hope everyone is doing great. Keep my posted on all the good stuff going on at home.

Happy Birthday Ira, Loren and Pat!!! I love you!

Cheers,

Matt


 

First Email Home Aug 21 2011

Hey Guys!

Before I forget, I have a cell phone here which can be used for international calls, but to buy credit here is expensive. It is pretty cheap to call me from skype or you can call from any phone but I don’t know what the charges are. To call me from the states dial:

011-502-4013-7732


Traveling here was miserable. From Albany to D.C. I was on a tiny plane which had two seats on either side of the aisle. We were getting ready to pull away towards the runway and I had both seats to myself. Then, at the last minute, they reopened the door to let one more passenger on who was a wonderful specimen. He was a townie from upstate New York, wearing a Gucci sweat-suit that was four sizes too big, which was a miracle in itself because I didn’t know they made clothes that big. He had been out all night drinking with his buddies and took a taxi right to the airport. He was such a healthy guy that we could no put the arm rest down in between our two seats because he took up his whole seat and one third of mine.  My flight left at 545am. It was pretty obvious that he was a polite gentlemen when he whipped out his computer and started watching a movie with no headphones on so that everyone in the surrounding area would be able to follow along…

I got into Guatemala about ten days ago, and I stayed with one host family for the first three nights. The couple had four young children and everyone was very nice. I was nervous about leaving the first family because I thought my luck my turn, but the family I’m with now is great. My host family is:
Dona Florencia. Don Martin, Amparo, Veronica Gaby, Maria Jose, Monica Marissa and Martin. They are between the ages of 12 and 24 and between the weights of 70 and 80lbs. The tallest girl in the family is the same height as the middle of my rib cage (and is taller than their farther). I went to church with them the second day that I was here and I asked if I should dress up formally and they told me I should. So at seven o’clock we walked to church together, me in khakis, a shirt and tie, and them in jeans and soccer jerseys. They got me pretty good. In church I realized that the next two years will be a window into Patrick’s life. I was at least a foot taller than every single person in the church. I have only seen one basketball hoop so far and the only reason I noticed it was because I hit my head on the hoop.

The house I live in is pretty nice. You open a door directly off of the street and enter an uncovered corridor. A door on the right leads into their house and a door on the left opens in to my room which is about the size of Beth’s room at home. Not a bad deal. Connected to my room is the kitchen, which is where the tv is and where everyone spends most of their time. Yesterday was Marvin’s 12 birthday and we all sat in the kitchen while he opened his gifts, 90 percent of which were socks. My first reaction when he tore through the wrapping paper only to reveal a pair of tighty-whities was to take them from him and put them on his head. A risky move, but it was met with a burst of laughter.

Me and Marvin with his new underwear on our heads.

I am very lucky and ended up with one of the nicer houses out of our group of ten. There is no running water except for the shower which uses gravity powered by a barrel which collects rain water on the roof. All of the clothes/dish washing, teeth brushing and hand washing is done in the pila, which is a concrete structure with three bays. The middle bay is filled with rain water and the bays on either side are empty and are used for the above. I am one of the few in the group that has a toilet, but all of the toilet paper and whatever else gets thrown in a bucket next to the toilet. A nice soothing aroma.

My family does not have any animals, but most of the families have chickens wandering around and cows/goats/pigs tied to trees or to old car tires. There are not many traffic laws here. Even the one way highways have cars driving the wrong way on them when there are breaks in traffic, and they quickly pull over when traffic continues. The roads are also shared by horses, cows and hundreds of stray dogs. The police are pretty corrupt here and don’t really do anything. They all walk around with huge machine guns with is pretty unnerving but I have not felt like we are in any danger except when we got out of the airport. Guatemala city is really dangerous. We had a police escort take us out of the city, but now I am in a small town which is very safe. Driving through the city was something new to me. I saw two cars with gun turrets on the roof and men standing in position, and just about every business had a couple of security guards standing out front with shotguns. And a lot of the commercial trucks have a guy sitting in the front seat with a shotgun for protection as well. (but don’t worry the town I am in now has the same/similar crime statistics as Newark De and some other small Midwestern town which I can’t remember at the moment).

Right now I live in a mountain town and can see two of the six volcanoes which are in the surrounding area. It is very beautiful most of the time, but right now is the rainy season and it has rained every single day so far except for one. The weather is usually nice until about 2/3 and then it starts raining and doesn’t stop until sometime in the night. It is very loud on our tin roof, sometimes loud enough that you can’t hear each other talk so everyone just goes to bed.

Welp this is a pretty long email and I doubt anyone wants to read anything more so I’ll save it for another time. There is an internet café in my town but it is closed by the time I am done with class. Every Tuesday we drive to the peace corps office in a nearby town for the day and I am usually able to use the computers there for about a half hour or so. I have been bringing my flash drive so that I can save emails to that and type up responses when I have time on my laptop. Sorry if it takes a while to get back to anyone.

I hope everyone is doing well!

Love,
Matt

p.s. happy belated birthday Brian!
Pps I already got diarrhea!