Hello everyone.

It feels like it’s been quite a while, so let me try to catch you up. There are some paradoxes to Peace Corp we’ve been adjusting to lately. One is that the days seem very very long, yet weeks and months feel like they go by very quickly. The other is that I feel very busy, yet I have all sorts of down time. The thing is our heads are always working on all sorts of things, but we can’t take action due to constraints with host-country-nationals, or waiting for email responses, or our mandatory wait for grant application to be up etc.

In general, life here seems to have normalized for us as the rainy season kicked into high gear, and instead of lots of newness and fun, we’ve been going through lots of ups and downs. Ha, it’s worth noting that, after all my struggling to prove I could do it myself, little Michelle is now the only family member who helps me with my washing, which is not really much help at all. But it’s funny. The clubhouse feels more and more like home. Our latest additions have been, number one, a table at which to work and write. We were happy about it every minute for the entire first week after it arrived because our bed was really the only place to sit and work on things before it came into our lives, and as the rain has turned almost every inch of earth around us into mush we have stopped going outside so much. The table is well used. It’s somewhat symbolic of our ridiculously all-the-time-together life right now as well. Since it’s just a bit shorter than the end of our bed, we sit less than a foot apart while we’re both working there, and we both sit there much of the time. Our second and very newest addition, as of Sunday, is an enormous plastic tub. We’d been throwing the idea around since just after we got here about buying a big plastic tub and using it to take baths in occassionally. For a mere 40Q (that’s not quite $6) we have a mini-bathtub, and it’s a huge improvement over standing in one of our dishwashing tubs while washing off with a tiny, steamy washcloth as chilling winds blow right through the house. As uncomfortable as the aforementioned procedure was in-process, doing it actually did make us feel cleaner and help us sleep better. Now, we fill the giant tub less than a third of the way up and dump in a large pot of boiled water, curl into the thing which puts the water level at the top, and washing up outside of the chuj is now kind of enjoyable. Yay! This feels like a huge victory.

The thing is we have been fighting major battles against the cold, as I’m sure any of you who have read the posts about the camp stove already know. The last few weeks were very difficult, especially during the week and a half I had a horrendous head cold, could not sleep for all the congestion, and could not get warm at all. In packing to come here I thought I was being perhaps a little too cautious bringing fleece layering and long johns to a country that is mostly tropical, but as it turns out, I would be beyond miserable without them (I am, at this very moment, wearing all my long johns and fleece). At the same time as I was walking around feeling like my head was floating just over my body and freezing my #@$ off, we began to get the feeling that we were being used and disliked in these here parts.

It started off with our honey supplier, a pharmacy owner in town who sells us local honey that tastes amazing and which we use in large part for making bread. This guy is a ridiculously nice man who works on the local health committee and attends meetings with us regularly. He always seems overjoyed to see us in town. We were running low, so we went into his store to get some more of the goods. This is always a long procedure because the local honey is not on the shelf; it’s in a back store room that is kept locked and only the owner, not any of his 5 daughters running store, has a key. We showed up, he knew what we were there for and he scurried away and was back in minutes with our honey in the jug already in the plastic bag. So we get home, and it turns out, he must have been running down to the last little bit because the honey leaked out of the jug it was so watered down. But the real proof was in the fact that it didn’t even harden up after a night on the shelf. We always have to stick the jug in boiling water to get some out. It’s COLD here. We were so sad. It’s really disheartening when you feel like you’ve built a relationship with someone, and then find out they think it’s acceptable to cheat you. Not to mention, the honey is not inexpensive. And, maybe because we have so much time to think and think and think, the whole issue bothered us for days until we could get back in to town to talk to the guy. We felt we were letting him get away with being unfair if we didn’t say anything, yet we weren’t sure that returning unsatisfactory goods was anywhere near acceptable here. We talked it over with our q’anjob’al teacher, and he seemed to think, albeit hesitantly, that we could return the honey and talk to the owner. He agreed with us that the guy was indeed a really good guy in general. Just so happens that here, even really good guys will try and pull a fast one on you. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that being a little crooked is pretty well institutionalized. I’d heard others say things to suggest that, but I always just give people the benefit of the doubt, and maybe I shouldn’t? Maybe that’s just being too naive.

After slogging my way through a rainy and busy week of charlas, the Friday of being ill I gave up. I put on all my warmest clothes and decided I would just stay in bed and sleep all day. I didn’t feel fully conscious as, on this same day, people kept stopping by the house with a myriad of questions. They would say, “oh, pobrecita (you poor thing)” when they saw that I was in bed and ill, but they didn’t go away without getting what they wanted and they wouldn’t talk to Fletch since they all claim not to understand him. That includes our friend who came to borrow money. Stupid, stupid, stupid. At the time, Fletch and I agreed it seemed like an okay thing to do. By Sunday we both agreed it was quite an idiotic thing to have done, and on Monday we were swearing over and over to one another that such a thing will never be done again. Our friend had told us when she would pay us back. BUT, it seems that in addition to doing a little watering down of the honey, it is also customary for people just to tell you what they think you want to hear. They won’t tell you the truth if they think you might not want to hear it, which in effect means they just lie to you to your face. This is really disconcerting! Especially if you’re me and your pet peeve in life is someone who can’t just tell it to you straight. So our honey man cheated us, and our friends were lying to us. I spent most of the weekend in bed as it rained and rained and rained. But then on Sunday there was a bit of a break, where the sun didn’t actually come out but the rain stopped. I felt like a walk would do me some good, and Fletch was happy I was feeling up to it, so off we went.

On our way up the hill out of the main part of our village and into the hills beyond, right at the edge of a cluster of homes, live 3 very chatty sisters with some 16 children between them. We always say hi to them. They sometimes invite us in for a hot drink or to chat a while. On this Sunday, they asked us where we were going even though we almost always tell them the say thing, “We’re going for a walk.” This day one of the sisters decided to add, “Well, be careful up there, because lots of them [the people just outside of the main part of the village] think you’re miners and that Manuel [the president of the health committee and our local guide] is showing you around. They say they want to pistolear him for showing you where the mines are.” Can any of you guess what that verb means without me giving a translation? So I asked this woman, “Did you tell them we aren’t miners, that you know us and we just like to go walking to get exercise?” The woman replied pretty unconvincingly after a pause that lastest a few seconds too long, “Oh yeah, we told them we know you, and you’re a very nice couple working here in town.” We’ve heard from several people they are trio of busy-bodies, which I am inclined to believe. Even though they are nice to us, they complain constantly about their lot in life and have never ONCE come to a health talk we’ve given even though we invite them every time we talk to them. Oh, and they live less than 100 yards from the health center where the talks take place. So their news was really annoying to us. I had visions of the rock-throwing incident going through my head once again, and that was a very un-fun day. We set off walking, and their news just served to make the two of us immensely paranoid about the group of 5 young guys walking behind us at a steady distance. We decided not to go to the top of the hill, and not to enter the woods. We got to our host family’s milpa (corn plot) and turned around to meet the guys head on. We were nervous about the interaction since we’d spent the last 20 minutes being overly paranoid, but we whipped out some handy phrases in Q’anjob’al that made them laugh through our nervousness. And then found out they’re cousins to our host family. Ridiculous.

Even so we trudged home rather annoyed. People were cheating us, lying to us, and spreading rumors. Grrreaat. But just before we reached the busy-bodies again, a very kind man we’ve grown to like a lot, Don Simon, stopped us as he was heading home with his daughters. They talked with us until it was almost dark and sent us home with corn from their field. The cultural norms here can be grating, or just down right infuriating, but then we seem to run into someone who goes so beyond his or herself to be kind, to talk to us, to send us away with a gift of food. This happens frequently, and it’s really humbling. It quiets our inner annoyance at things.

The next day, Monday, we were escorted to the village near the rock-throwing incidence by the teenage daughters of their local community leaders. We thought this to be a good move that might discourage rock-throwing in the future. They’d sent their daughters because they were not confident in their own Spanish speaking abilities, but their daughters speak it quite well. It was a very funny, gathering. The community leaders are, big surprise!, all related, the girls who came to get us cousins. They led us through one of the muddiest, winding mazes of corn we’ve been in yet, up the hill to a community we’d never seen. There, we were led into a big open room with a dirt floor, where there were two chairs, and no other furniture in view except a table near the far wall and a bed pushed into an alcove. We sat down and were handed atol and a sweet roll each, then family members began flooding in the door and around us in a big circle watching us eat, sitting, squatting, leaning against the wall, the table, the bed, kids of all ages milling around. They wanted to know what we were doing here, so we explained we’re here to give educational health talks. They asked us engaging questions about health for some two hours. The men who’ve been to the U.S. threw in their English from time to time, and then the kids started asking us, “How do you say…txat, in english?” “Bed,” the list went on and on to everyone’s amusement, and when we were pretty tired and ready to get home before the sun went down we started the litany of polite excuses to get us on the road. But they had to feed us one more time before we left, chilicoyote (a local type of squash) and corn. We left stuffed and tired, in a parade of some 15 kids swarming in circles around us, running in front of and behind us, laughing and squealing. The sun was setting beautifully, orange and pink and gold spraying over clouds a few miles high. We felt accomplished and happy. Suddenly all the boys in the group disappeared in front of us, and we were left with two adorable girls following behind us and giggling. We crested a hill into our village, and all of them were clustered together and sang in unison, “Give me money! Give me money!”

Ughh, really? I’m so tired of this…I explained we were there to be friends if they wanted but we don’t have money to give them, and it’s kind of rude to ask like that. Sadly, I knew they didn’t understand what I said. Just then a familiar figure came walking down the road and greeted us, so I quickly asked him if he’d do me a favor and explain to the kids in Q’anjob’al what I’d just said in Spanish. He obliged, and as soon as he finished the kids all sprinted off home…

There’s so much to do here, really two years doesn’t seem like that much time. We’ve almost finished three months of service, and everything takes so long to come to fruition. I’m looking into helping our escorts from the neighboring village (mentioned above, the cousins) find scholarships to become nurses’ assistants per their request. I’m involved in the planning of a girls camp in the department of Huehuetenango for 13-17 year olds to take place sometime early next year. I’m having a heck of a time getting anyone to respond to my inquiries about Fair Trade cooperatives, but just got a new contact, who is supposedly a Returned Peace Corp Volunteer (RPCV for short) from Guatemala working at a Fair Trade organization in the US. We’re slowly learning more Q’anjob’al every week. Pedro comes to our house 3-4 times, and in exchange we provide him with coffee and tasty breakfast. We’ve been giving health charla after health charla, and meeting more people every day who claim they’d like to get in our educational talks too. So we’ll see how everything plays out. We’ve got one more week to go before everyone from our training group heads back to Antigua for a week of follow up, “processing” which we do a lot of here in Peace Corp, and remedial Spanish classes. You can bet we’re celebrating Halloween in style and eating tasty food at every turn while there.

So this is the way we go here, up and down, up and down, up and down. The highs feel very high, and the lows pretty low. Though I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Just as we started to get down again, we slept in on Revolution Day (October 20) and were woken up by family members as they came to get us to help them/witness the slaughtering of their pig. The sun was shining for the first time in over a week and the process provided us with a day to just hang out with the family. It was bizarre, and really kind of fun. Look for the upcoming post from Don Jaime, known in some circles as Fletch, in others as Jim. Here’s the man himself, learning q’anjob’al. He turned our first test into a competition. Then he was sad, because he lost. hehehe. But he’s been a pretty good sport all around.

Peace, guys. We miss you.