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