Getting my life in order....

Baby blankets, stickers and toys for the babies and children at my health center.

This past week I had the chance to help my friend Kate, a PCV in my training group, with her camp. The camp was a week long with different themes everyday. About 450 kids signed up, so you can imagine the amount of work that needed to go into this camp. The camp was a great success and a lot of children benefited from participating. The last day the kids received t-shirts and there was a little party, unfortunately my bus broke down on the way to Kate's camp (go figure) and I wasn't able to go :( Overall, it was great to see other camps so I can get an idea of what I might want to do for next year.



I had my Project Specialist, Ana Isabel, come and visit me this past week. She had the chance to view the apartment I want to live in. The only problem is the cost. Even though I live in a pretty rural site, the amount of living here is almost ridiculous. Unfortunately, there are no places to live here in Chiquimula, so the cost of living here is doubled. So the plan is to move out the 1st of January. I know my host family doesn't want to see me leave, but I also need my space. I live in a really tiny room and I have no work space. There is also no place to wash my clothes because the sink is always filled with dirty dishes, so instead of taking my laundry to get it cleaned I can finally have a space to do it myself... mom would be proud :) Since this apartment is newly renovated I have to buy everything... bed, dresser, tables, chairs.... so I'll be broke for a while. For Chrismas, I asked my parents to buy me a bed... lol.



I received a package from my grandmother this past week. Granadmas really know what to pack, its like they have this sixth sense. Games, puzzles, magazine, chocolate, stapler (that was essential, I needed one!), clothes, socks, stickers, toys, key chain, hair clips.... everything I can use or donate. Also, my awesome grandma has been collecting baby clothes for my health center. Tomorrow I am going to present all the baby blankets I have so far to my professional nurse. They are building a new maternity wing to our health center. The baby blankets would be a great incentive for mothers to have their births here instead of having them at home.



This week I am really going to go full speed ahead with my work here. I think I have a pretty basic level of Spanish to start running my own groups, besides my Health Promoter groups. This week I am going to talk with my educators and have them pick out 4 groups they think would really benefit from my program, I am going to put up a flyer in the women's municipality office at the muni to see if women are interested in cooking classes, gardens, health projects, etc. I am goung to talk to the director of the health commission to see if he would like me to train men in small towns how to build stoves. I also really want to work with the midwives here. The past couple of months have been a bit stagnant, and my goal is to make 2010 a busy year! But we will see.... this is all in retrospect.



It is a beautiful, quiet, Sunday morning here in Santa Maria Chiquimula and it is going to be a blessed week!

December = AIDS awareness month

Trying not to struggle through my Spanish...

My counterpart, Brenda and I

My Health Promoters and all the spectators right before the icebreaker!

The ribbons I gave to my health promoters during the workshop.

In honor of the 1st of December, I gave an HIV/AIDS workshop for my health promoters. I involved my counterpart, Brenda who is the rural health technician in my health center and my sitemate, Valerie.

Like many of my health presentations, you never know what to expect. Due to the lack of available space at my health center the meetings are normally held outside. This happened to be the case for this workshop. Well, for about the first 20 minutes of my workshop there were at least 70 people watching (people off the street, people waiting for consults)- we were pretty popular - which made the first icebreaker with my health promoters pretty hilarious:

The icebreaker is to get the participants confortable with the topic of the workshop, since we will be talking about sex, condoms, penis, vagina, homosexulaity, etc. The icebreaker is called "I wash my fruit" and starts with one person repeating a dialogue that we give them about how they wake up in the morning and 'clean themselves' so-to-speak. The dialogue goes like this in Enlgish: When I wake up, I wash my face, I wash my hands, and I wash my _____ (insert a type of fruit and the fruit represents a part of your body). So I said "peaches" and I pretended to wash my boobs :) Well.... when you have 70 people watching you, you can imagine the amount of laughter. People used banana as their penis, grapes as their scrotum, strawberries as their breasts, watermelon for their butt... it was so funny, they had a great time.

Overall, the workshop was a success. They were really motivated to try and get groups together in their community to participate in the same workshop. So I challenged them when we come back to meet again after the new year to give me at least one group that would be interested in hearing this workshop. So I am crossing my fingers that they pull through, I would love to stay busy and it would be amazing to spread the importance of HIV/AIDS education! Go Health Promoters!

Xela Ugly X-mas Sweater Party!

My sitemates and I. Steven and Val (minus Zane)

Everyone anxiously awaiting for their gifts.

The whole group with our beautifully tacky sweaters.

You can't have Christmas without having an ugly sweater Christmas party! As part of welcoming the new volunteers, my department, Totonicapan, along with Solola, threw together a Christmas party in honor of Steven, the only new volunteer in Toto. Ironically enough, Steven's site is Santa Maria Chiquimula, which leaves 4 PC volunteers in my town! Gotta say, our site it pretty cool :)

We celebrated the party in Xela, the nearest city to Toto. We exchanged x-mas gifts through a "White Elephant" exchange. We weren't allowed to spend more than Q20 which is equivalent to $2.24. The most interesting gifts that night were probably a g-string thong, a hand held mirror with a picture of a chippendale-type half naked man on the back, plastic yellow contruction hat, and a nasty looking fruit cake.

There were baked cookies, egg nogg and pleanty of Guatemala's finest ugly sweaters!

Gracias a Dios... A-maine!

Noah's Ark - Guate Style

All the children waiting for the parade to start

Cute little girl dressed as a clown, standing up in the back of a pick-up (safe, I know...)

All the Angels and Noah... can't have angels without Noah!

I experienced my first Evangelical Church experience. My host mother invited me to attend church with her and her girls. I went, a little reluctantly, only because once you form some sort of bond with a particular church here you are pretty much telling everyone in town what church you belong to and after my experience I think I'm stuck.

I have to say, I have never been in a church with so much sadness. After praise and worship everyone was on the floor crying, wailing, it was so sad I started tearing. I wasn't sure if the tears were for forgiveness, hardships or if that was how they worship here. To my surprise I understood almost all the sermon, I kept thinking to myself this would help with my Spanish. The best part was when they would say Amen, they pronounced it A-maine (like the state). I smiled from time to time at the odd sounding word because the enfasis was on the 'maine' part.

An embarassing part of my attendance was when the pastor introduced me to the congregation. Then he asked me to participat in a "caminatta", a parade. Well, I couldn't just say no. The more I think about it, I should have. This parade was for all the children in the church, to celebrate "all the lovely children of the world" so to speak. They asked me to be an angel. I think, no, I know I was the oldest "child" in that parade, and also the tallest. I walked all around town, dressed in all white with angel wings. On top of that the pastor had a sound system on his van and was using a microphone to announce to the town that I was an American working at the health center... if I already didn't stand out enough. There were a few times when I contemplated running down a side street or using the excuse I "need to use the bathroom" and never come back. Well, I didn't. But as soon as it was over I went home and retired my angel wings :)

Overall, the parade was really cute. The kids were dressed from anywhere from princesses, ducks, clowns, rabbits, lions, and the majority were put inside a pick-up truck decorated as Noah's Ark. I'm not sure yet if I'll call this my church, I guess you could say I'm still looking... but it was definitely an experience!! A-maine!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The group minus 3, and minus the Guatemalan at the end :)

Our T-Day "family" that evening

We were bored and decided to make up "Guatemalan Interpreted Dances" I won, haha. It was really stupid, but I acted out giving birth, breast feeding and having "my baby" on my back. I was representing all the women who have babies here and their "phases" of child bearing.

Well.... Thanksgiving has come and gone. As much as I was missing all the traditional T-day food, my fellow PC friends and I were able to make do of our version of a Guatemalan Thanksgiving. We were able to hash out stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn bread, mashed potatoes, apple pie, rice, veggies.... and turkey!! Yes, we ate turkey :) My friends Ferney and Phil bought a turkey and to the best of their ability, plumped that sucker up. I remembered a story my mom told me when she lived in Peru. She told me they would feed their turkey beer to help marinade the meat before being slaughtered. Well before I could actualy find out the logistics to this new phenomenon my friends called, they started months before Thanksgiving.... come to find out that my mother's family only started 3 days prior... lol. Well, the turkey had the ride of his short lived life, one that he probably never remembered :) The turkey was a nice 13 pounds. The turkey was sent to the bucher and then my friend gutted and sewed up the turkey herself... gross. Another reminder we are in Peace Corps.

There were 10 people that came for this dinner.... by the time we were about to serve dinner, there were 25. While we were preparing dinner everyone was enjoying wine, relaxing, excited to eat "American Food" and earlier that day Ferney invited his host family for dinner. Well when you invited someone's family, you invite your WHOLE family. Let's just say the wine kicked into a lot sooner and we were all quietly freaking out that we didn't have enough food. We put out heads together and told ourselves we would probably not be eating dinner tonight... much our dismay. If I wasn't laughing so hard at this sudden change of scenery I might have shed a tear. I whipped up a famous American Tradition called Onion Rings.... the thought behind this was that they wouldn't know and it could serve as a plate filler :) Everyone manned their stations: turkey, rice, salad, potatoes, veggies, gravy, rice, onions rings and we formed our very own "Thanksgiving Soup Kitchen". Instead of "this is so good, what great turkey, pass me some more potatoes" you heard "salad me!, turkey me!, rice me!, that is way too much gravy!, we are missing a potato person!, where is my wine?!" Needless to say given our circumstances, we all ate that night, and we were all stuffed! It was totally the story with the boy with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread! God was good :)