Did March happen?

I realize it’s been quite a while since I’ve written a life update, and actually quite a lot has happened since then…more of which was out of site lol.  I’m looking forward to being in Cunen for most of April, though I realized that with Semana Santa (Holy Week) coming up, this will be yet another short work-month!  (At the end of which, Kevin will be here!  Happy for your shout-out?)

Of course the most exciting event was my parents’ visit during the first week of March!  It was a lot of running around, but such a great time.  They got to see my favorite playing-grounds of Antigua and Panajachel, shop and fill up an empty suitcase of crafts from Chichicastenango, and conocer lovely Cunen :)  Actually, even though we were only in Cunen for a few hours, I think they really loved meeting and lunching with my host family, touring my house and office, meeting my sitemates, and overall seeing with their own eyes that I am happy here!  But I was completely spoiled by all the amazing food and fancy hotels – I always forget that Guatemala is super cheap on an American budget and places I think are expensive are not for normal people with real paychecks!  I was sad to see my parents leave at the end of the week, but it was nothing like when they dropped my off at the airport in New York in August and all 3 of us were bawling – a very rare event if you know any of us ;)  The hardest part, however, was checking out of the most fantastic hotel in Antigua and then taking a chicken bus back to site.  And then hand-washing my clothes the next day lol.

That was followed by a marginally productive week and a half at site, and then I found myself back in Antigua for a variety of Peace Corps events: 50th-anniversary celebration, Nicole learns K’iche, and the ag Project Design Management (PDM) workshop

The PC anniversary celebration was very nice, though mildly boring.  I only say that because it was very heavily concentrated on swearing in the new group of PCVs (we got 2 newbies in Nebaj!) and recognizing the COS-ing (Close of Service, aka leaving after your 2 years are up) PCVs.  So while I found that aspect very interesting, there was no real reason for me to be there.  And they ran out of food!  I did get to see my host family from training, though – thank god I’d called them recently!  So I went to visit them on Sunday…a very weird experience.  Not with them – we had a nice lunch and caught up – but just being back in the town I lived in for 3 months but hadn’t been back to for 5…I seriously didn’t recognize some of it!  And back to Antigua afterwards was a serious pain as all the streets were blocked up for one of its MANY Lent processions (Antigua supposedly has the biggest Semana Santa/Lent celebrations in the world).

Then came 2 days of 1-on-1 K’iche classes, which was very helpful as a base from which I can now find a teacher at site that I can improve with.  Look what I can say:

Nub’i’: Nicole.  In voluntaria rech Cuerpo de Paz.  In aj Estados Unidos.  Kinel Cunen.  Kinchukun kuk’ le winaq ple tinimit.

Translation: My name is Nicole.  I am a Peace Corps volunteer.  I am from the United States.  I live in Cunen.  I work with the people of my town.

Obviously I need more work…!

Last but not least was PDM, a very interesting but extremely tiring workshop.  We each brought a Guatemalan guest – my official counterpart Juan went with Stephen and I brought Don Alejandro from the association I work with in the community of Trigales – and worked in groups to identify a community need and then take every step to turn that into a viable and successful project.  While it was a little awkward having Alejandro around because I don’t know him very well, I think he really enjoyed the experience and took a lot away from it.  And at least he is fluent in Spanish, unlike some of the other guests…good luck on your future project plans, Whitney! ;)

And now March is over and I am back at site for more normal times.  I should also mention that I’ve started cooking more – my host mom brought it up to me that I should cook more for myself, so now I only eat lunch with them, which is the biggest meal of the day here…one more step towards independence; now I just need to find my own place!

Here are some photos from March:

my parents and I on Volcan Pacaya (not shown is the horse that took mumsy to the top!)

Brynna, Emily, Carmen, and I super excited about PC’s 50th

La Merced church in Antigua following its Lent procession

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 :)

Milestones!

There have been some exciting milestones for me recently:

 

January 29th: 3-month anniversary of my Swearing-In

January 30th: 3 months at site!

February 11th (today): 6 months in Guatemala!!!

 

Maybe now I'm officially Guatemalan? Maybe not lol. But I hope you've enjoyed 6 months of updates :)

 

Convites, Conejos, y la feria de Cunen

So the Cunen feria, in honor of la Virgin de la Candelaria (a very imposing but kind figure in our Catholic church) officially ends tonight after 2 and a half weeks of celebration.  Here’s a rundown of the events that were held:

First Saturday and Sunday: town-wide lunch of traditional caldo and start of the baile folklórico de venados

Second Saturday: crowning of Cunen’s indigenous queen (she was elected on January 1st)

Sunday: children’s parade (part 1) in the morning, Señorita Cunen candidates’ parade in the afternoon (they were driven through town on “floats,” aka pick-ups decorated with balloons and such and decked out with an armchair and umbrella for the girl), and the Señorita Cunen competition at night.  All I can say is that it is completely unfair that I am not allowed to wear tank tops when these girls were strutting around practically naked all night!  I left early because it didn’t end until around 1am, but the winner was my host dad’s candidate for the organization Share Guatemala.

Monday: children’s parade (part 2) in the morning, some super expensive dance in the evening that I didn’t attend (who pays a Q50 cover charge outside of Antigua??)

Tuesday: marimba band all day, quemado del castillo – an incredible “castle” constructed of fireworks that were set off in a 10-minute domino effect!) – y de los toritos – “bulls” also constructed of fireworks, but set off while dancing around with a man inside.  You would think that sounds dangerous, but he was probably the safest, as the fireworks got extremely close to the crowd and even burned a small mark into my friend Jenny’s coat!

Wednesday (the actual day of feria): not 1, but 2 convites dancing through town all day into the evening.  One of them was followed around by the “internationally”-famous marimba band Los Conejos, who provided an excellent atmosphere for dancing all night!

Thursday: women’s convite during the day, a dance at night that I didn’t attend due to still being tired from the night before and then working all day!

Friday: another women’s convite that I got to watch from Jenny’s roof and during which I got a shout-out (“nuestra amigo de Nueva York!”) from that day’s marimba band, Miguel Angel Tzul :)

Saturday: not part of feria, but I went to a wedding with my host family and danced and drank quite a bit, which I’m pretty sure the whole town knows about by now…

Tuesday: another quema de toritos to celebrate the week-anniversary of the feria

Today: the last day of the dancing venados and assorted friends (including the monos).  While I’ll be okay without marginally creepy deer and monkeys in the streets, their accompanying cheery marimba music will definitely be missed!

Some photos:

my sitemates and I with some of the many dancing monos (we’re still not sure who has been behind all those masks, but they know we love taking photos with them!)

Los Internacionales Conejos singing up a storm

my host mom and I at the wedding

Now that feria is over, life is (unfortunately!) moving on.  I was in the department capitol of Quiché for a few days working on a really interesting education/literacy program with Save the Children, I started and plan to complete this week my community surveys for Peace Corps, and will make jam with a women’s group on  Friday to see if they want to start a small business with it.  And all next week I will be in Antigua for my training group’s Reconnect and Spanish classes.  Life is pretty good :)

Long-term and short-term future happenings

So I’ll start with the longish-term happenings first, as it’s kind of the bad news.  Our Country Director called all the ag and municipal development volunteers into a meeting at the main Peace Corps office last weekend (well it was a Friday afternoon, which is when my weekend usually starts!) to inform us that they will not be continuing the ag marketing or muni programs after my training class.  Actually after traveling all morning, Stephen and I walked into the meeting a few minutes late looking all frazzled apparently right after the Country Director made the announcement, to the entertainment of everyone in the room lol.  But more seriously, as Peace Corps approaches its 50th anniversary this year, the agency has completed a self-analysis and concluded that it needs to focus more on its strongest programs, namely health, youth development, and education, and phase out the more technical programs for which it can’t always find skilled applicants (i.e. marketing or economics backgrounds for ag marketing, city planning for muni).  There will still be food security, environmental, and HIV/AIDS programs for countries that need them, so the ag program in Guatemala will not be completely cut, just diminished.  I still find it hard to comprehend why PC would severely cut back on ag programs worldwide when I would imagine all of the countries in which the agency works have ag-based economies, but such is Washington policy.  We had already been expecting the end of ag marketing as the program was to be under review anyway this year with negative expectations, but it was a total surprise about muni, and all of them were quite expressive about how upset they were.  All in all, it was definitely a downer, but at least we got an approved night in Antigua out of it!

Other long-term bad news include an extension of the state of siege in Alta Verapaz, meaning at least another month of waiting for the volunteers with sites there.  On the bright side, I’ve also made the long-term decision that I want to go into photo-journalism in 2 years, but mumsy has made it clear that she’s not too keen on that… :)

The very short-term happenings are much more exciting: feria has arrived in Cunen!  It technically starts on Sunday, and the actual date is Wednesday, February 2nd (Happy Almost Birthday, Darren!), but the festivities began this past weekend.  Saturday was a town-wide (though really only for the Catholics, among whom I have honorary standing thanks to my host dad) lunch of traditional Cunen caldo and tamalitos de 7 camisas (tortilla dough rolled up with black beans inside) sponsored by one of the town’s cofradías – kind of like a religious brotherhood.  Then Sunday, members of the cofradía including my host dad drank quite a bit, donned their incredible costumes, and performed the traditional dance of venados (deer) all day, which will apparently continue until the end of feria!  I’m attaching some photos of the dancers in action.  The weekend’s activities afforded lots of time with the host family, sitemates, and new Guatemalan friends :)  More details to come on the ridiculousness that will become Cunen over the next 2 weeks!

PS - you HAVE to watch this YouTube video about Peace Corps that had me dying because of it's accuracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-wDq17zyN0

Hola dos mil once…oh hey 2011!

It’s a little late, but Feliz Año Nuevo!  People are still greeting each other that way, particularly if they haven’t seen each other since 2010, so I feel like it’s still appropriate :)

I held out a bit on a New Years update in case anything exciting happened since, but nothing really has lol.  It seems that the new year has not brought new work, but as one of my resolutions is to be more productive and take more initiative with work, hopefully that will change soon!  So far I’ve only managed to set my sitemate Kate up with more work – a Save the Children health project – not myself.

But as expected, New Years in Pana was pretty awesome, and I was a little upset to return to site after 4 full days/nights at that incredible lake.  There was an excessive amount of eating, drinking, lounging around, and sunbathing (I’m finally starting to be kind of morena!), all of which ensured a good time had by all!  It was also really refreshing seeing so many of my friends from training, many of which I hadn’t seen since the end of October.  It’s so weird that I’ll see them again in just about a month for our Reconnect at the PC office.

In fact, I was lucky enough to be with my friend Whitney at Pana, though it was actually quite unlucky for her.  Her site is out near Coban in Alta Verapaz, where, as you might have seen in the news, the government declared a state of siege in December to combat the heavy influence of drug-trafficking gangs in the region.  As a result, Peace Corps consolidated all the volunteers in both Alta and Baja Verapaz, so Whitney was able to take a little vacation way farther than normally allowed.  They’ve been out of site and waiting since just before Christmas, and it seems that those in Baja Verapaz will be able to return this week, but those in Alta Verapaz, where the issue is concentrated, have to wait at least another week!  I feel terrible because while I’m not really working and a consolidation would be a sweet vacation, Whitney and a lot of the others were actually making progress!

Another kind of unfortunate event is that my quasi-sitemate Jared has decided to what we call “early terminate” and go home early.  We were all pretty surprised as he only has about 9 months left, and will miss him quite a bit.

But anyway, on the bright side, it’s summer here and I’m sunburnt and not freezing in the snow!  Moreover, this week’s photos include:

1) a woman weaving in Santa Catarina, one of the 12 towns on Lake Atitlán named after the 12 Disciples; 

2) me and my two closest friends, Whitney and Noor, on New Years Eve (the sparkley dress was originally bought as a joke for Q20 at a paca, FYI mumsy!);

3) the lake at sunset; and 

4) my adorable little host brother…it’s too bad he’s too shy to dance in the children’s convite during the upcoming feria because he loves to dress up and dance to marimba music, puro convite-style!

¡Feliz Navidad!

I hope everyone had as wonderful a Christmas as I did!  This whole week has actually been pretty great…

Monday: on my last day of work before the holiday vacation, I completed 2 of the 3 Peace Corps community analysis tools with my group in Trigales.

Tuesday: I met up with Noor in Quiché and we went to Chichicastenango (about 30 minutes away) for their feria.  I was pretty sure that that was the last day of their tradition where men attach themselves to this massive pole and fly around it, but it turned out that it was one of the only days that week they weren’t doing it!  It was still quite a fun daytrip and I of course managed to drop a bunch of quetzales on Christmas gifts for myself and my host family :)

Wednesday: I was violently ill and spent the day in bed reading and watching movies…which wasn’t too bad once I stopped feeling like death.

Thursday: daytrip to Uspantan to help pick out animals for our American-style Christmas feast.

Then the holiday celebrations began!  Friday was Noche Buena (aka Christmas Eve), which here is more important than Christmas day itself.  I went to Uspantan to spend the evening with Stephen and Mary and a family they are friendly with to get the real Guatemalan experience…and what an experience!  The night began with dinner and hanging out, followed by Catholic mass and incredible fireworks immediately after – though we were at most 50 feet away from where they were setting them off!  Then we headed back to their house to wait until midnight, when literally the whole town set off fireworks in sync…as Mary said, it looked like a news reel from the Gaza Strip with all the bomb-like noise and lights!  We set off our own cohetes (little fireworks) and estrellitas (sparklers) and succumbed to the tradition of eating tamales and drinking ponche (like a hot fruit punch).  The war-zone feeling continued during the walk home across town, this time accompanied by bolos (drunks) in the street and a serious stomach ache from everything I’d eaten!

As I mentioned previously, yesterday we had a more American-style celebration, though with a Guatemalan twist: we (not me) actually killed our dinner!  With all the neighborhood kids watching outside the gate, Stephen and Cara first did the rabbit and then the duck…I thankfully missed some of the more gruesome parts while searching for firewood.  Stephen swore that rabbit was the best meat he’d ever had (it was at his house during training that we watched the murder of a rabbit and chicken), and maybe I just felt bad for the little guy, but I didn’t like it that much.  The duck, however, was fantastic.  It ended up taking forever to cook and we didn’t dig into it until after dessert, but we literally attacked it…think Dee and Charlie with “the hunger” in that It’s Always Sunny episode!

Now that Christmas has gone and went, December and the year are almost over!  Wednesday we head  to Chichi to pick up the new cell phones Peace Corps is issuing us, and then back to Panajachel and the lake for New Years.  It seems like most of my training class will be there, so I can’t wait!

Anyway, just ate a late dinner of sweet bread and tamales – that’s ALL people eat on Christmas and the days after, but I actually like the non-Christmas ones better!  I’ll leave you with a few photos:


some of the craziness in Chichi

me, Mary, and the family with our sparklers at midnight

Mary’s dog Mojito playing with our Christmas duck while it was still alive

the rabbit cooking on the fire pit