Thank you so much for the vacation mom and dad!!! You’re the best!

I just got back from the best vacation ever. Mom and dad flew me out to St. John in the US Virgin Islands. It was so nice to spend some time with my family (we missed you Ira, Carrie, ira, Claire, Noah, Erin, Ray, rayray, Christopher, Biz, Marie, Tim, Tina and Kiera!!!). I was lucky enough to spend a whole week with my parents, most of my siblings, the Grangers, Aunt Liz, the Ennis' and Corrigans in a beautiful tropical paradise.  We had a nice breakfast every morning in the outdoor kitchen, then split the rest of the morning between the pool and trying to hit/feed the iguanas with vegetables. After the iguana feeding, we made lunch and headed out to one of the many beaches on the islands where we spent the rest of the day snorkeling, playing kan-jam and practicing our handstands (Patrick is a champ). I don’t really feel like writing too much right now so I’m going let the pictures do the talking. All in all we had an amazing week; lots of family meals, family beach time, family snorkeling, family cards, family hikes, family drinking, only one family hospital trip and best of all family Umbros…

I was flying back to Guatemala the night before my birthday and was feeling pretty depressed about leaving my family, coming back to my reality of poor Guatemala, and having to spend my birthday alone in a hostel near the airport. Luckily, I have some pretty good friends who surprised me and met in the city to have a little birthday celebration, which made the transition back to Guatemalan life much smoother. I have been back in Chiquimula for about 4 days now and have been keeping busy. I finished planting one garden in la Escuela Urbana today and tomorrow, weather permitting, will finish planting at my schools in Patzam and Chicaxul. Well that’s all for now. Enjoy the pictures.

Oh and happy birthday Claire, Beth, rayray, Sean, Myles, Dad and Uncle Peter

view from the driveway

Beth and I

Daly's and Ennis'

picture from outdoor kitchen towards the main house

umbros and snorkeling

Dad and I whooping Pat and Mom

Brian, Sean, Me, Patrick, Beth

turtle

everyone

sitting with dad, practicing my fish face

coupl'a pals cathin fish

sitting co-pilot from St. Thomas to Puerto Rico

I was working at a school in Patzam and I told the director that they chose a bad spot for the garden becasue there wasn't enough sun. I suggested we move over about 20 feet. He thought that was stupid, so he climbed the tree with a machete and cut down all the branches. Guatemala, where any problem can be solved with a machete.

Escuela Urbana

I went back to la Escuela Urbana today to continue working on the garden. Today we finished the fence and finished forming the rows where we are going to plant. Now we're just waiting to get our seeds. Hopefully we'll have them by next week.

Workin it.

Pretending to work, but really just posing for the camera.

Everybody chipping in to clear out all of the rocks.

Almost done.

New House, Brothers and School Garden

I was finally able to move about 4/5 weeks ago to a new place closer to the center of town. The family in my old place was great but my room was always very dark and damp and kind of depressing. I now live in a much busier part of town, closer to my office, the market and the soccer field which is where I spend most of time. My room is now very bright and I even have a little patio where I am planting a garden.

About a week after moving in I was beginning to grow suspicious of some disappearing food. At first I thought mice but then decided that the missing food was too big for a mouse to carry off. My second thought was rats. A couple nights in a row I could hear something moving around in the kitchen and got up to check it out but was never able to find the culprit. Finally, I decided to put out some bait and see what I could find. I made a peanut butter sandwich, put it on the table and left the room. Within two minutes I heard something moving the plate around and ran into the kitchen to find a couple stray cats fighting over the food. When they saw me they snatched up the sandwich, jumped out the window and climbed the ladder I had built leading up to the roof. I now keep my window closed and usually throw whatever I don’t eat up on the roof.. it seems to be keeping them at bay. 

Bedroom.

Kitchen.

Kitchen.

Bedroom.

 

Two weeks ago I was the lucky recipient of two visitors, Sean and Tim. The first thing on our to-do list was to get them their first ever shoe shine. The little shoe shine boys didn’t really know what to do when they were presented with Sean and Tim’s converse sneakers but after a little running around they came back with some white polish that they rubbed onto the sole of their shoes. After getting their shoes shined Sean and Tim were feeling pretty bad for the little boys and decided it was time to take them to their first restaurant and buy them so good ol’ American Hamburgers. Unfortunately, there were no golden arches in site so we took the boys (which quickly grew from 2 to 6) to a nearby restaurant where we ordered a round of hamburgers, put it on Sean’s tab and left the waiters to figure out the rest. 

Shoe shine.

 

On Friday we met up with a couple of my friends and hiked up a volcano outside of town. Volcan Pacaya has been active in recent years and is known to frequently spit lava which can be seen at night. Hoping to see the spitting lava, we took the afternoon tour which turned out to be a pretty poor choice. While climbing up the volcano the tour guide stopped us 6 or 7 times to take in the beautiful vistas over lagoons, forests, other volcano peaks and distant cities but because we took the afternoon tour all we saw were clouds, fog and rain. What started out as a disappointing tour due to the clouds turned out to be pretty cool once we reached the top of the volcano where we were walking in a desert of volcanic rock.

After Antigua we headed towards Lago Atitlan where we stayed for two nights. The first night we stayed in a nature reserve a couple hundred yards away from the lake and the second night we stayed in a nice hotel on the side of a cliff, right up against the water. The hotel, La Casa del Mundo, was built about twenty years ago and since then the water level has risen 18 meters leaving balconies and flights of stairs submerged in the lake, which makes for a pretty neat scene… It was so nice to be able to pal around with Sean and Tim, I can’t wait for my next opportunity to see family and friends from home. 

Brothers on Pacaya.

Sean in the chicken bus.

Underwater balconies.

Palin around.

 I recently started working with one of the local schools to build and plant a garden, but the only land that the school had available for us to use is the spot where they have been burning trash for the past 15 years. We started clearing the trash last week and it took us five hours to dig out all of the melted trash. There are 36 kids in the class and they are pretty amazing. They have worked for the whole school day and then stayed an hour after school ended two days in a row to keep working on the garden. We started with the bamboo fence today, but ended up being about two bamboo shoots short. Here are some pictures.. 

Trash.

Clearing trash.

After we cleared the trash and leveled the ground.

Everyone brought their own bamboo.

First couple posts.

In America you get suspended for bringing a knife to school. In Guatemala you are encouraged to bring a machete to school.

Going to leave with a quick story. Yesterday I was digging a garden in my friend’s backyard when I felt a stinging in my hand, kind of like a bee sting, but when I looked at my hand I didn’t see anything. After digging for about five minutes I started to feel more stings all over my body, on my legs, arms, back and stomach. I didn’t see anything on my shirt but when I looked at my lighter colored pants I noticed that I was covered in ants. They were everywhere and they were biting relentlessly. I started pinching them off and swatting them but it wasn’t enough. I ended up having to strip all of my clothes off and run inside to the shower to get them off my body. I now have pretty good sized bites all over my body. I miss the nice ants in New Jersey.

Security?

RIP Charlie Ennis

Security?

Where to begin? Peace Corps Guatemala has gone through many changes over the past month. The security of volunteers in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guate, Honduras and El Salvador) has been under review in Washington for over a year...which makes you wonder why they continued to send volunteers here in the first place. At the end of January we had an all volunteer security conference where they confirmed many of the rumors that had been circling around the PC community. PC Guatemala is cutting its volunteer population in half in order to make security more manageable, and they are relocating the majority of the remaining volunteers to a more centralized location. 

How are they doing this? The next two groups of volunteers due to COS (Close of Service) in 4-6 months are being forced to COS in the next 3 weeks. They also offered every volunteer the opportunity to COS right now with full benefits, as if they had served their full 2 years. Although it is very tempting to return back to the comfort of family, friends and health, having served only 6.5 months, I don´t feel as if I have earned it yet. Luckily, I am not one of the many people who have to relocate. A lot of the volunteers who are being forced to change their site have decided to go home because of the lack of time that they would have in their new site. It takes an incredible amount of time and energy to adjust to a new site and to gain the trust of the people living there, which is one of the reasons volunteers serve for 2 years. 

This being said, PC Honduras recently shutdown and it looks as if PC El Salvador is on the same path, so I am lucky to have the opportunity to stay in country. 

These security issues have resulted in many of my friends returning to the states, which isn´t very fun for me. In the beginning of January there were 225 volunteers serving in Guatemala. The suit from Washington who came to speak to us at the conference told us that their aim was to get that number down to 100, which has been a blow to morale for the PC community that has decided to stay.

Anyway, these PC security rumors/issues are all I have heard about for the past month, so I don´t want to dwell on it anymore. 

This past Monday I taught one of my women´s groups how to make homemade soap using water, vegetable oil and caustic soda. Obviously, I had no idea how to do this before last Friday. I got in touch with another volunteer who does know how to do this and she gave me some good advice. 

1. You should add an aroma which can be done cheaply by using flower pedals, lemon peels or cinnamon sticks 
2. The color of the soap is bland, so I suggest adding a color dye to the mixture 
3. Instead of buying a gallon of fresh vegetable oil you should go to a fried chicken joint and buy their used oil, I promise there is no odor

Taking her advice I decided to use lemon peels to give the soap a nice fresh scent. What color goes best with lemons? You guessed it- I bought two packs of yellow dye. Lastly I went to a street vendor and tried to buy his used vegetable oil, he thought I was crazy, but before long I found a vendor who didn’t care how crazy I was as long as he could take my money. 

Lemon peels from 15 lemons didn´t quite have the effect I was hoping for, neither did the yellow food dye. And the fried chicken vegetable oil… well, that turned out pretty much exactly how I expected, although I was hoping against my own judgment that the other volunteer was right and that used oil would be odorless. Our mixture resulted in a large bucket of what looks like something I am far too familiar with now, diarrhea, and has an overwhelming odor of fried chicken. But don’t listen to me, you be the judge…

 

 

 

Stirring up some soap

First time wearing goggles and latex gloves

Palin with my girls

 until next time...

Christmas and New Years 2011

It has been a while since I last updated and I’ve been all over the place since. Unfortunately a death in the family brought me back to the U.S. Even though it was a terrible reason to have to return the states it was a great surprise to be able to spend Christmas with the family. On Saturday the 17^th Sean and Beth (with the help of my other siblings) bought me a ticket to return back to the states on the following Monday. Keeping with the Christmas mood, we decided to make it a surprise and didn’t tell my parents. Unluckily, Mom and Dad were not too impressed with my trumpet playing outside of their bedroom door when I arrived home at 2:30a.m., in my defense it has been years since I have practiced. The announcement of my homecoming was met with a shrill yell coming from my dad’s side of the bed, “WILL YOU JUST GOT TO BED!!”  After a couple more toots on the ol’ horn we decided it would be best to reveal myself before we gave dad a heart attack. A couple hugs later and everybody was back down in the kitchen to celebrate my homecoming with a nice cheap bottle of bubbly. 

Mom and I, after waking her up at 2:30a.m.

After trying to get over the fact that I probably wouldn’t see most of my family and friends for a little over two years, I was thrilled to be able to return after only 5 months. It was great to see all my nieces and nephews before they doubled in size and didn’t recognize me, although Christopher was convinced that I was still “in the jungle with the dinosaurs” and that both me and Sean were “Uncle Sean”. I was lucky to be able to see a lot of my cousins, aunt and uncles and all of my siblings, parents and some good friends. Chris, Pat, Myles and I spent a day in the city, soaking up as much of America as I could, we all proudly wore “I <3 NY” T- shirts. 

Pat, Me, Borat, Myles and Chris. 

Me, Kiera, Pat, Sean, Xavi, Emma, Tim, Tina Brian. 

Me, Ira and Tim.

My time home flew by and I was back in Guatemala before I was ready. It took me about 24 hours to get back to my site after landing, mostly because I had to stay in the city for a night. I got back to my site and was feeling pretty lonely and depressed after spending so much time with everyone at home. I was quickly greeted with my host siblings Denealson 5 and Brian 9 who asked me if they could have my used toothbrush. It was good to see them but didn’t help much with the loneliness. I had plans to visit with friends for New Years, but couldn’t wait. I called them and we planned to meet up a day early, which meant I would only be staying in site for about 12 hours before taking off again to meet up with friends. The one night I had in site met me with a pretty nice earthquake. The biggest one I’ve felt down here, or ever for that matter. There was no structural damage that I know of to my house, but it did sound like there was a Mack Truck doing donuts around my bed. I was out of here by 7:30 in the morning. 

I met up with 6 other PC volunteers and 4 of their visiting friends at Lake Atitlan for New Years. The lake is unreal. It only took about 3.5 hours to reach the lake which is in the mountains of western Guatemala and is surrounded by 3 enormous volcanoes, which make for a beautiful view. New Years was great, lots of fireworks being set off by everyone in town right in the middle of the street (which at times was pretty scary). This seemingly tropical atmosphere was a great change for most of us who are located in high mountain towns and needed a break from the freezing nights and piles of blankets we need to sleep.

Lake Atitlan

Kayaking with Christine and Adriana.

Friends and I watching the sunset.

Sunset behind the volcano

Adorable.

Adorable.

Adorable.

Today was my second day being back and since I was feeling so lonely and bored I thought going for a run might cheer me up a bit. Running in the mountains is not easy and the whole ‘cheering me up’ thing wasn’t working too well. But on my way back to my place I was stopped by 3 kids who grabbed me and wanted to play soccer. The soccer game gave me a laugh and made me feel better. Later in the night Brian and Denealson were in my room and I gave them Hershey kisses that my mom so kindly mailed to me. Denealson wasn’t sure if he wanted to eat it since it looked like “Popocito” (a little poop) in his hand. He then ran upstairs to show his parents. (He did eat it and loved it. He comes back about every ten minutes to ask for another one). Well I’ve got lots of work to do so I better get going. I’ll try to update more frequently in the future…

Brian and Denilson with their popocito