There’s a neat old lady on the other side of the village that we’re friends with. Matal lives with her one son, the other 9 children being grown up, and manages to get by with farming her plot and raising chickens, turkeys, cows, and what have you. She’s a little fireball, and is NOT afraid to say what’s on her mind. That comes in handy from time to time; for example, in one of our health lectures we were talking about the alien topic of family planning. At one point she stood up, wagged her fingers at the others present, and said “It is NOT a sin to talk about this stuff! We need to learn this!”

For months, we bought fresh eggs from her. Those of you that have been following the blog might remember, however, that one day last fall she came to our house almost in tears. “I came by to tell you I won’t be bringing any more eggs,” she said. “All my chickens just died from the plague.”

This is a big problem for her; egg sales is one of the only ways she gets cash to buy the things she can’t grow or make herself. Luckily for her, my Aunt Ellen was on the scene to save the day, and came up with a bold plan: give Matal the two tiny chickens we’d just been given that morning. They were possibly contagious as well, and if they went to OUR coop they might kill the chickens we already had. Matal’s birds, however, weren’t going to get any deader.

Imagine our surprise, then, when Matal came to see us yesterday with a bag full of eggs. “Here, these are for you, from Jaime and Emily.” Yep, she named the two chickens after us, and they have grown up to be good layers. She brought us a pile of eggs, in part to thank us for the favor we did her months ago, but also because she is the kind of independent person that doesn’t want handouts or to be beholden to anyone. I like that, and it does even more to strengthen my opinion of her.

In other news, we had some visitors this weekend. Fellow volunteers Zach and Dan made the arduous jouney out to see us, so we enjoyed a weekend of fine food, casual conversation, and movies on the laptop. We gossiped about what other volunteers were up to and compared notes about how things were going in our sites: work, survival, everything. The difficulty traveling in Guatemala makes it hard to spend time with other volunteers, so it’s always nice when it happens.  

We took them hiking up to Saq Jelap, a cool mountain ridge up the valley from us, and saw this awesome view. It was especially clear, and not only could we see Mexico, but we could see Tajumulco as well. It’s the tallest peak in central America, a towering volcanic cone 14,000′ above sea level. Even though it’s about 12 hours away from us, you can make it out in the distance if you look just to the left of where the foreground trees reach above the mountain ridge (click photo to enlarge). We made a pact to climb it in early March.