This morning was the first without rain in long time, so we took this opportunity in the sun to get a lot of chores done around the house. We:

• Washed our laundry in a basin, by hand (an hour or two)
• Burned all of our plastic trash from the last 2 months (another few hours)
• Repaired the hose that brings us our water from the stream (damaged by the storms)
• Hung all the laundry to dry
• Finished and hung the Horsey Tire Swing (swing = t’urt’urich in Q’anjob’al)
• Swept the house
• Washed all the dishes in the stream & cleaned the stove
• Split some firewood
• Took all the wet laundry in when it started raining

That is what happens before noon in Guatemala when it’s chore day. Oh, and for you that were wondering about “burning plastic trash”, we stand UPWIND. This baffles the locals, who wonder why we don’t just burn it in the cooking fire in our kitchen like they do. Um, yeah, that’s going to be in our health lecture tomorrow, I think.

We went on a hike with Manuel and his family yesterday, to see the derrumbes (landslides) that happened in OUR valley. Luckily no one was killed, but a pig died, crops were lost, and one of our favorite hiking trails just got a lot more challenging. At the right, you can see where a bridge was taken out by a small slide, and we now have to ford the river. I wasn’t fast enough with the camera to get Manuel’s oldest son carrying his youngest across the river on his back. Then we talked to another local who showed us a bigger slide that stopped right above his brother’s house. “It’ll probably go the rest of the way in the next few days,” he said nonchalantly. Then he showed us a slide that almost happened, but stopped for some reason. If you click on this last picture to enlarge it, you can see where the earth is cracked across the path and up into the corn field. All the ground on the left is about 6 inches lower than the ground on the right; just a tiny bit more rain and the whole thing would be down in the bottom of the valley. I do not know why they are all standing on the side that is about to go.