THE Julia Child of Chiquimula

Well.... kinda. My host mother, bless her heart, is a woman of many talents. Besides making 500 tamales she bakes and decorates cakes. After taking about 10 classes or so of cake making she is ready to take on the world of baking! Her cake making methods are baking the cake in an oven, tracing charactertures on rice paper and using pre made frosting to color them in, then literally throwing coconut shavings and spinkles anywhere and everywhere until the cake looks like a little kid's art project. So, she took on a huge baking project: making 4 cakes for a 1 year old. So I gladly helped, and I have to say... I've never seen her cakes look this good.... mind you, there is a little bit of her cheesiness lingering, but it was a blast making these cakes! It took up about 6 hours to finish!

... so I guess I can cook...

So part of my work here in Guatemala is to train health promoters. Basically they are volunteers who are an extension of my job. When I'm not in the health center, or the health center is closed and too far away for medical care, these health promoters are trained to act as a liason between the people in their town and the health center. Right now I am training about 20 health promoters ranging from the ages of 16 to 45, both men and women. I train these health promoters once a month over various health themes. Yesterday, Friday, I had my nutrition themed workshop. Usually the health promoters are split between 2 days, but everyone decided to meet Friday. Anna, another PC volunteer who lives about 30-45 mins from me came to help me out. There is no room in the health center to hold my health promoters so we set up the presentation outside. Well.... it was hot that day. Anna did an icebreaker and then I followed by making a "Live Olla" which is Guatemalan's version of the US' food pyramid. I went ahead and bought everything I could think of as far as fruits and vegetables, rice, beans, eggs, cheese, corn, butter... everything that my town could buy in the local market. Then I had every HP pick 3-4 items and told them to put them in their designated group (energy, growing, protection). Afterwards, when I felt they could place any type of food in either one of those categories I taught them how to read nutrition lables. Yea... a little complicated, but I told them only a few places to look and made it easy for them (ex: look at how many portions, fat, sugar, vit/mins). I also gave them examples of popular canned drinks and bagged chips that the children and adults like to drink and told them how many spoonfuls of sugar as well as how much fat was in each item by using a stick of butter. Well... they were shocked! There is one little bag of chips here, only 14 g in weight that almost contains one stick on butter!! How gross. Then I made them little ribbons with little dash marks so they can measure the children in their towns for malnutrition. The children need to be more than 1 years of age and by measuring the middle part of the upper arm they will be able to determine if these children need help. After all this I cooked for them! I made pasta salad with veggies, cheese, oil, vingar, salt and pepper (very simple... they love using mayo here). I also made apple sauce and french toast. They loved the french toast! Needless to say after all that, and being in the sun for 4 hours... I had a huge headache and was exhausted. But, I was thrilled because I was done with work and I have a great vacation to look forward to!

10 Days!

10 Days from today my wonderful boyfriend, Charles, will be visiting me in Guatemala! He will be here for 13 days! The first 3 days we will be in Antigua. Saturday we are going to take a tour of a coffee farm (for the coffee fanatic in Chuck :) Then we will have lunch with my host family at their home. Sunday we made reservations at a 5 star restaurant called Panza Verde (Green Bellied) to celebrate our 1 year anniversary! Monday we wake up at 4:00 am to make a 8-9 hour bus ride to Tikal, Peten. Here we will see all the Mayan ruins! (this is where they filmed Apacolypto). Early morning Weds. we will make another long trip to Panajachel, Solola and stay at the beautiful Lago Atitlan for 3 days (we'll need a lot of relaxation after that looong bus ride and waking up really early or the past 3 days). Saturday we will leave the lake and make our way to my site, Santa Maria Chiquimula, where he will see my town and we will have lunch with my new host family. They are all excited... they are going to make caldo for him (it is this awesome soup they make here!) We will then head back to Xela and meet up with a bunch of my friends to prepare for our volcano hike. Sunday and Monday we will be hiking the tallest peak in Cental American, Volcan Tajumulco! It is something like 2 miles long! We head back to Antigua Monday night , relax Tuesday, then Charles is off Weds. morning :(

This is a MUCH needed vacation! I am definitely looking forward to resting my brain from thinking in Spanish and just enjoying the beauty of Guatemala :) Then a month after Charles leaves, my parents will be here for Christmas!!! So excited! So I am counting down the days and hours until Charles gets here, so sooon!

So hopefully I'll be able to upload those videos this weekend, and I PROMISE!... I will be updating my blog more frequently.... I have no excuse!

Mountain Tena

This past weekend I hiked a mountain in the town of one of my fellow PC Volunteers - Phillipa. She lives about 2 hours away from me. The mountain was called Tena (Tenah), I forget what it stands for. The hike took about 4 hours. It was a pretty steep incline to the top. It was a nice workout :) Nov. 15 & 16 I'll be hiking Volcano Tajumulo, the tallest peak in Central America with friends and Charles! I can't wait!

Town Fair

Well for those of you who follow Facebook. I've uploaded pictures from our health center deparment-wide beauty pageant and from the Quetzaltenango soccer game. The health center beauty pageant was pretty nuts. It was basically like Miss America but with live fireworks (in the building) and women that don't smile. My health center came in 3rd. The soccer game was pretty awesome. They are called the Xelaju (Shay-la-who). Over the weekend I'm going to try to upload videos from those 2 events with a better internet connection so you can all see how crazy this stuff can be!

In September my own had one of their 2 town fairs. This one was the smaller of the two. Vendors come all over to sell anything from plastic toys to weird deserts. One of the highlights of the fair was the live music. There is a huge white Catholic church in my town that has a fairly large courtyard. There were 2 stages set up with 2 bands (both playing at the same time, of course). BUT! What threw me off and kinda freaked me out were the people dressed in weird masked-costumes dancing in a roped-off stage in from of each band. People were gathered around all the dancers watching them dance. SO.... my next goal is to be one of those masked dancers for our next town fair. I would be dancing for 5 days, from 8am until 6pm in some freaked-out costume! Then the last day there is this big unvieling! My sitemate, Zane, who works in the town hall said he would ask around... I'll let you guys know :)

I SUCK at this blog stuff

So I've been meaning to update my blog and realized I've waited over 2 months to do that... clearly a lot has happened, so for however long it takes, I'm going to try to fill everyone in! I swear I'm going to get better at this!