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.