Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Adventures away from site

Where has time gone??  February is now over and I spent most of it out of Cunen.  Plus it’s now officially been 4 months at site (but who’s counting?) and my padres arrive on Saturday!!!  To underscore how excited I am about that, I’m pretty sure everyone in my town and the surrounding area is aware that the gringa’s parents will soon be here :)

But yeah, the last few weeks have been really busy and I’ve barely been home, so even though I’m leaving again on Saturday, I am very much enjoying this week here.  The week of Valentine’s day I was in Antigua with the rest of my training class for Reconnect, which was a blast!  Reconnect itself was only Monday and Tuesday and largely consisted of meetings very similar to training, but also included a 3-hour chat with the ambassador that we all really enjoyed.  Wednesday through Friday were Spanish classes and no joke, my teacher’s name was Elvira lol (though it sounds better in Spanish: El-VEE-ra).  Needless to say, it was fantastic being with everyone for an extended period of time :)  Some memorable times included: an Ugly Paca bar crawl where we all wore fairly ridiculous finds from the used American clothing stores; a Secret Valentine gift trade (Meghan got me a really nice mug with a photo of our Sumpango training group!); being told at Valentine’s dinner that although we were an even number of girls, we were not indeed couples and therefore didn’t qualify for free crepes (I tried explaining that things are different in the States but the waitress was having none of it…!); hanging out with a hippie we met at the hostel named “Horizon”; and just in general eating the NYC-like variety of food!

Another separate but exciting outcome of the week was that the Alta Verapaz volunteers found out that they could go back to their sites!  This of course included the proviso that narcotraffickers hadn’t overrun their town, but that was only the case of a few, and Whitney has happily been back in site since last Tuesday!  She’s the only one left in the department from my training group, as one guy left and the other girl got a site change, I believe due to the narco issue.

I was then back home that Saturday night through a hectic Monday afternoon, when I taught a group of housewives how to keep a control of costs of production of what their husbands farm…the usefulness of it for them was very questionable, but whatever; it’s a Save the Children goal.  The rest of the week I was in the department capitol of Quiché with the Save literacy program I mentioned last time.  It was really interesting visiting village schools with them and seeing how so many of the children practically only speak K’iche and are suffering when their teacher instructs almost solely in Spanish.  To combat this, the aim of the program is to increase literacy rates in both languages by providing books in each language as well as a motivating environment in which to read them.  I’m curious to see how it turns out, and will probably be returning to work in November with what was a great team.

As fun as that week was, I was ecstatic to return to Cunen on Friday in time for a little housewarming dinner party at my sitemate Kate’s new place, vegging out on Saturday, and hiking to the Cunen letters/Hollywood sign on Sunday (which totally kicked my ass)…all in all, exactly what I needed!

Como siempre, some photos from the past few weeks:

the road I take to leave Cunen and the fabulous surrounding mountains


getting ready to leave for our Ugly Paca bar crawl


me and my Sumpango girls reunited


Kate and I on the “e” of the Cunen letters


PS - today is the 50th Anniversary of President Kennedy signing Peace Corps into effect!  Send a PCV you know some love :)