By now I think everyone knows we got to our site three days late on account of my bout with amoebic dysentery. That was pretty uncomfortable, but it lead to us being chauffered to our site in style by our bosses in a Peace Corp Jeep Cherokee instead of spending 10 hours in a chicken bus. It gave us a rare opportunity to get to know our pretty cool Guatemalan supervisors on a more personal level, and it kind of saved my life. Even after I started what is almost a month long treatment to get rid of the critters throwing an unwelcome fiesta in my intestines, I couldn’t really eat for days. I had to take anti-nausea pills to keep things still, and riding for 10 hours on public buses would have been about the most miserable thing I could have imagined.

The community was held in suspense through the three day delay. We think they doubted that we would come back, because we told them we’d get here on Monday the 20th, and they began calling the health technician in town, our boss, Basilio, and us, starting Sunday the 19th. It’s nice to know they care, right? Our welcome was warm, and we sat through another presentation to the community, about half the size of the original meeting during our site visit.

Our first night here, we had random raw ingredients we’d picked up in the big city and no way to cook them. We had a bed frame with wood slats and no mattress. The first problem was solved by going to eat with our host family. The second problem had to wait a few days. The father of the family is the community leader whose speech I recounted in the post about our site visit. That said, you’d think he was all about community development and betterment and leading the people by example. You’d think.

Now, he has so far proven to be nothing if not kind, so the following is not meant as negative commentary, but rather as an illustration of the contradictions here. When we walked into his families kitchen/dining room, we were immediately seated in little wooden chairs around a raised hearth with an open fire. The floor is dirt, and the walls and ceiling are black as a smoker’s lung. He looked at us and said with a warm, shy smile, “Lots of people have wood stoves with chimneys, but we like the warmth of the fire here. It’s just comfortable; it’s what we’ve always done. We haven’t had any trouble with it.” I think he meant lung trouble. We sat around the fire and ate soup and tortillas with his wife, and numerous children and grandchildren. It was so surreal. The women here all wear the traditional traje. That is, a flowery embroidered shirt called a huipile, and long woven skirt called a corte, folded and tied with beaded or embroidered belt, a faja . Most of them have hair down to their waists that they tie it in a wreath around their head with brightly colored scarves or sashes. That combined with the dirt floor and open fire made me feel at one point like we had traveled back in time. Looking down at myself, over at Fletch or catching a glimpse of the cell phone on the table behind us were the only anachronistic give aways.

Our host parents both speak Spanish, but only half of their 6 children do. Their grandchildren, except for the oldest who are 17 and 18, speak next to no Spanish. Thus the conversation was a bit stilted, as you might imagine. The whole experience was rather tiring, but before we went to bed they explained that the next morning it was already arranged that we would go to Soloma in a hired van accompanied by a family members wife to bargain for a stove and a mattress. In the meantime we put our yoga mats down on the wood slats and our thermarests on top of them, crawled into our sleeping bags and crashed.

We’ve been in our new home here for two and a half weeks now. Fletch has lovingly nicknamed our house, The Clubhouse. I have to say, if only it were warm instead of incredibly drafty it could be described as cozy. For now I’ll just stick with quaint. It is basically a tin roofed wooden box on stilts in a cornfield. It is painted turquoise on the outside and we have one window that, on a clear day, looks all the way to Chiapas, Mexico. Our furniture is almost entirely wooden and hand made, mismatched orange, red, light and dark stained wood. Most of the men in our town are carpenters, and we were told numerous families donated the furniture. This is an amazing boon, as lots of volunteers have to wait months to accumulate any furniture since they either buy it or build it themselves. We are so lucky! The walls are uninsulated wood slabs–thankfully more closely fit together than the school house I worked in (refer to FBT pictures), but–with several spots where daylight comes through. We have a dutch door, so when we’re feeling social, we leave the top half open. Many a villager has dropped by to peer in at all our strange possessions, and they’ve all been curious about and mystified by the stove. But our most frequent visitors are the grandkids of our host family: Chaleo, 8yrs, his brother Alberto, 5 yrs, their cousin Delvin, 3yrs, and another cousing, Michelle, 2. We are like their own personal, exotic gringo zoo. They’re always peeking over the door, but since they hardly speak spanish we just communicate through playing around. They were pretty wary of us at first, but they’ve warmed up to us a lot. The boys constantly pick me flowers and make Michelle give them to me, so I put them in used candle glasses around the house. They’ve watched as we steadily fill the place up.

We did buy the stove and bed on our second day, but it took a while to get everything up and running. Making house here has proven to be a lot of work. Our first Friday we made a list of things we thought we needed, put them in triage order, and with the money we had left, went in search of basic house wares. This was a tiring process, both physically and mentally.

First we had to price out the list and see where we could find the best deals. We often get stuck with what we call the Gringo Tax. People way overcharge us because they think we are rich Americans who won’t know any better. They are wrong on both accounts. Also, the “big city” for shopping is a mountain town so, except for it’s main square, every street is on a steep incline. The way stores work around here is as follows: there are always too many for any given area; they all carry almost identical goods; if they don’t have what you’re looking for they’ll send you to the store next door–but since they’re nearly identical that store will likely not have what you’re looking for either. If you are gullible, inclined to walk a lot, or just holding onto hope, you will go from store to store looking for the missing key items. If you are extremely lucky, you might be successful in finding them, but many times you are not. Just so you know, baking powder is not available locally. We checked every tienda we saw. For that, we have to make the two hour trip to Soloma.

The other thing that just wears on us when we go to town is all the staring. Children, adults, even the elderly all sit and downright gawk open-mouthed at our mere presence. Try to interact with them and, if they are children, they will run away and hide. Sometimes they scream while they run, other times they squeal and giggle nervously. The adults will occassionally talk to us, but just as often they will sit and continue gawking, utterly incapable of responding. We can’t help but start feeling like circus freaks. Our counterpart told us we’re the pretty much the first gringos to make it to these parts and stay. There have been a few passing through, but that’s it. So we are a walking spectacle. The statement, “You ain’t from around these parts,” come to mind. Even when we’re at the internet cafe minding our own business working on the computer, there is usually a crowd of children right over our shoulder staring at us and our computer screen. Forget about privacy. It’s just comforting to know they can’t read anything. All the staring, and also all the drunks that like to practice their English, wear on us. We are getting better at escaping the bolos, but there are just so many of them. As a side note, we found out in a health meeting that alcoholism is second only to acute respiratory infections as the biggest killer of the general public in our municipality. And we are here to teach preventive health. I don’t know how we’re going to touch that subject.

Our first Saturday, the day after the big shopping trip, we didn’t leave home. It was a beautifully sunny day, and our host dad and his brother-in-law installed a hanging shelf in the kitchen corner of our casita, so Fletch was around to watch and chit chat with them. My chore was to get the washing done. But much like Fletch, that really meant just standing around chit chatting while some one else did the work. That happens a lot here.

My host mom from Pastores showed me how to do hand washing, but these women thought it was the most hilarious thing they’ve ever seen when I tried to wash. And they only let me try it after much insisting on my part. First of all, they have corn to plant, compost to spread, animals to take to pasture, houses to clean, food to prepare, and kids to look after. I had one task: laundry. But they played it off like it was no big deal for them to do the washing. As their daughter, Reigna, told me, “I wasn’t doing anything anyway. I can wash.” And she did, with her infant strapped to her back. It’s exasperating, but also, I am just really uncomfortable with them washing my clothes. I got them dirty. I can get them clean. And secretly I’m afraid they would end up gawking at our underwear or something, and the thought of it too annoying to handle. Women here are about two feet shorter than I am, so when I wash in the pila I’m basically doubled over, and while in this incredibly uncomfortable position, nothing I do is right. I don’t use enough soap. I don’t scrub long enough. I don’t get all the dirt out. I picked up a disgustingly muddy pair of pants and fought with them for quite a while until I got the mud out. I was so proud. I looked at Reigna and said, “See, I can wash them.” She looked at them for a second and said, “Those aren’t clean. Here, let me have them,” and she rewashed them.

Since then it’s kind of been my personal challenge to never let one person do all the washing for me. I always insist on helping. But all the women in the family seem to conspire to use up the sinks so there’s no room for me. This has turned into a game for me. When I finally wedge my way in, they have already picked out all the jeans and heavy washing, and they allow me to wash our sox and underwear, always offering to clean them more thoroughly for me afterwards if I should have trouble getting them clean on my own. Laundry does take me half the day. However, it takes their daughter, Lucia, almost all day to do the family washing. She wraps a plastic apron around her waist, plugs the radio in to an extension chord coming through the kitchen wall, fastens the antenna to her pony tail for the best reception, kneels down, and scrubs clothes all day on a huge flat rock in the middle of the stream right next to their house. Hours on her knees, scrubbing away. Can you see yourself doing such a thing?

Saturday we were also rewarded with a big treat: BATHING! WOOHOO! There is not a house here equipped with running water, so there are definitely no showers. In fact, there is one shower in town located in the health center, but it has no water heater and is fed from an icy mountain stream. Fat chance I’m ever getting in that. The locals do a full body cleaning about twice a week because their process for doing so is pretty time consuming, and perhaps as a function of that, it’s pretty ritualistic. As I mentioned before, we arrived here on Wednesday, it was now Saturday. All the days in between we heated water to wash the basics as quickly as possible before throwing on a layer upon layer of warm clothes and jumping in bed. We were feeling pretty gross. The locals bathe in a small adobe hut. You have to almost crawl in the door, wiggle out of your clothes while kneeling in front of a rock pile heated from underneath by a wood fire that has burned down to white coals, and leave your clothes on a wooden plank just inside the door. Along the back half of the hut, there is a raised wooden platform where a large tub of steaming hot water and a tub of equal size with ice cold water sit. You sit on the platform and each person–yup, you go in two at a time, more if there are little kids to scrub– gets a little bowl to mix the water to their desired temperature and wash with that. The effect is that of doing a sort of bucket bath inside a natural sauna. Remember, it is almost always wet and cold here, and we were disgusting. I practically ran to jump in the chuj (pronounced choo, like the end of a sneeze), but Fletch was pretty hesitant. Once we got in and situated–the place is not big enough to stand up in–it felt amazing, and Fletch became a big fan. It was the first time I’d been warm in the middle of the day. I don’t think I can describe in words how excited I was, to be warm, to have tons of warm water, to be washing up. It also felt ridiculously funny, like everyone whose ever called us hippies is totally right, because here we were bathing in an earthen hut/natural sauna, and I felt we really were “communing with nature”.

The chuj has become one of our absolute favorite parts of living here. Last week we had a day with nothing to do, so we started the day reading and “working” in our house, completely bundled up against the cold. My feet went numb inside my thick socks and boots, and we decided we should go for a hike to warm up. It was about 10 am. Just after we started out it began to rain, but we hiked for well over an hour before returning home. It continued to rain, harder and harder, and once we stopped hiking we cooled off. There went the feeling in my feet again. We knew it was our day to chujear, as they say, so we just sat tight, bundled up in our house working on projects and drinking tea and coffee all afternoon. When they knocked on our door to say the chuj was ready, we leapt out of our seats, threw all but our base layers off and practically ran through the little path in the corn field to go to the chuj. It’s awesome. You stay warm literally for hours after getting out. We were flipando with happiness.

The town leaders have decided they should build us our own chuj because that of our host family is, for them, a bit far from our house, which gives sicknesses a chance to “stick to us” as we walk back to our house from bathing. Nobody wants a sickness sticking to them. However, we wonder what it will be like to have our own chuj close to the house. We aren’t sure they will be okay with us bathing all alone, because as it is, our host mom, father, and sister usually all come to check on us at least once to make sure we aren’t suffocating or drowning depending on the translation, that the fire isn’t too hot, that we have enough water, etc. etc. etc. It’s pretty funny. Anyway, you should all know the chuj rocks. We might just have to construct one in the US when we get back, and then you can all try it out if you come and visit. :>) On the days we don’t do the chuj, we have perfected a system of bucket bathing in our house. Included is a picture of our “shower”.

Our first Sunday, I was totally stoked to actually go out shopping for our own food. It had been SO LONG since we cooked for ourselves. We bought bags full of fruits and vegetables and beans and rice, amongst all the stares and whispers. During Sunday market the streets are packed with pushy men, women and children carrying ever expanding loads up and down the steep streets as they bargain from stall to stall. Almost all the talk was in Q’anjob’al, but it didn’t take a genius to figure just about everyone we passed was talking about us as we heard sprinkled through their conversation, “Temux….gringos….gringos….gringos….Temux….Temux…gringos…”.

Surviving the market felt like no small feat. But the biggest feeling of victory came when we returned home, and I put all our loot in a tub full of chloro-water to wash it. I looked down and thought, “After seven weeks of being sick and having no control over my food FINALLY here is my ticket to health!” I had to take a picture. I will admit, I shed a few tears of joy. Yes, I cried over my fruits and veggies. Let me tell you, they taste wonderful. In other news on the food front, I’ve figured out how to produced some fine loaves of homemade bread in spite of the chilly draft. The fact that I can make bread again has made us both immensely happy. We only eat tortillas during home visits now. YAY! Eating them less than three times a day allows me to like them rather than dread them. I have also started home roasting coffee, which has been surprisingly delish and much easier on our PC budget than buying pre-roasted and ground beans. Huehuetenango is second only to Coban in the quality of their coffee beans, and Guatemala is third in the world in quality. Yay for me. : )

All in all, we feel like we have once again lucked out. Wemight be one of the sites farthest away from everything convenient in this country, and ironically in one of the PC sites closest to the US in all the world. We might not have running water, in the traditional sense, but it would be a lie to say we don’t have it all, as water is running down the mountain on all sides of us. The sound of it lulls us to sleep on the nights we don’t hear rain. We might not have flushing toilets, or steaming showers. But we do have an immense appreciation for the little things. We do laugh A LOT here to not go crazy. And we have a community that is pretty thrilled to have some gringos. Whether they listen to our health talks or not, whether we change one single thing here or not, the next two years can not help but be pretty interesting.