Hello again, one and all. We are back at home in the mountains, and as per usual Fletch has put out something like 3 posts to my one. My excuse would be that I’ve been working like crazy since we got back…but so has he. There’s this thing that happens when I feel like too much is going on in my brain; I find myself standing frozen in the middle of the room letting everything race through my brain rather than actually doing something physical about it all–this after hours of sitting in front of a computer or already running around like mad. And after the frozen moment occurs, I decide the best thing to do is sit down with my book and ignore stuff for a while. I don’t usually see this happening to Fletch. I have my suspicions that while I’m spacing or ignoring things, he’s writing blog posts, as his computer tolerance is infinitely higher than my own.

That said, what have we been doing? As Fletch mentioned before my dad worked tirelessly for us during our stint in the states, finding us contacts that can potentially help us with, I think, every single one of our current projects, and in some cases adding more projects to the list. We have been working out those contacts since just after we touched down here. So much great stuff was generated during our trip home it’s given us a lot to work on. Thank you Rotarians for all the great suggestions and contacts after our presentation there. Fletch and I are finally getting paired up with schools in the states to be pen pals and share our experiences with the students. The first class to take us up on the offer is from Howes Military Academy in Indiana. Any other teachers out there are welcome to join in the fun. Also, I’ve been invited to write a monthly guest column for the Pharos-Tribune in my home town. Lots to do…

We literally stepped off the plane and into a contact meeting with a man named Mario–a successful, young business man who happens to have been an exchange student that lived with my Dad’s cousins almost twenty years ago. How random, right? The cousins were in Guatemala visiting Mario in August, but since we’d just arrived in site, and our site is WAY out of everyone’s way, we never met up with the Hoots. Thankfully, they left us Mario, who, if nothing else happens in the future, did give us a ride in his very nice, comfortable car from the airport to Antigua (yay for not paying for a shuttle!) and then took us to lunch at his cousins new, and quite delicious restaurant (yay for free lunches, especially ones that good!). Mario seems willing to try and help us in any way he can, our most pressing need at the moment being getting 7 boxes of computer equipment from the US to Guatemala as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Go Mario. He also seems willing to accompany us on some big volcano climbs and perhaps get us tickets to a Carlos Santana concert in Guate? We’re cool with both of those plans. Thanks a lot, Hoots, for our contact twenty years in the making. All that said, I hope we do see Mario again in the future.

After lunch he dropped us off at Fletch’s former host family’s house where we spent our first night back in country. The host family loved Mario, as he came in and told them, “I’ve brought them here because they said you all treat them well.” And that’s a fact, they do. Since we ended up sleeping two hours in the states before boarding our plane, then did this lunch thing upon arrival, we were close to half-dead within an hour of playing with kids. We took nap shifts, and then handed out the presents we got them in the states, BOOKS! They were all pretty stoked about that. I had almost no voice at the end of the night for reading aloud, over and over and over “Green Eggs and Ham”, “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,” and “Curious George”, all in Spanish, close to five times each. Books are pretty exciting here, as they’re really expensive compared to the salaries people earn so it’s not uncommon for people to own not a single book–a pretty foreign concept for Fletch and I, brought up on books by non-stop reading parents. It was great to see the kids so happy.

Here I should mention, I was kind of afraid of going home to the states, of being hit hard with culture shock and therefore not fully enjoy the trip. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to freak out, but thankful that never happened. We spent every moment possible with friends and family, most of that time in their homes sharing meals (i.e. us enjoying delicious, hard to come by foods from the US, yay!), and I never once felt overwhelmed. Then I worried maybe the shock would be in coming back to Guatemala. But that wasn’t the case either. We just went from family and friends in the US back to family and friends in Guatemala. It was awesome to realize we’ve adapted enough to feel at home in both places. A professor of mine, who’s worked a great deal in Latin America, gave me a piece of advice before I left to come here; “Just remember to think of them as two different worlds. Your goals can not be the same there as they are here. In the states my to-do list for a day is longer than my to-do list for a week or month there. You can’t hold them [the US and Guatemala] to the same standards.” I’ve remembered that often, but wasn’t entirely confident in my ability to do that. Now I think I have succeeded in doing that.

We didn’t linger with the family on Saturday morning, as the new PC trainee was moving in that day at 11 am, and we didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. I had the experience on the day I moved in with my family that their former trainee came by and it was really weird, as they’ve got this long established relationship, and the trainees (me in this instance) by that time they’re dropped off with family’s have been through 5 insanely intense days in Washington and Santa Lucia where the training center is located. When the girl’s bags showed up we hit the road. We ended up splitting the trip into 3 days of 4 hours each, which was really nice. We saw some PCV friends along the way and made it home not too worse for wear. We also avoided getting home on a Sunday, which is market day so quite impossible to fit ourselves and luggage in on the last leg of the journey. PLUS on Monday the post-office was open, and as you all know WE GOT OUR NEW STOVE! That was a fantastic Christmas Present from us to us.

We came stumbling in to Temux about 12pm Monday with all our bags, two big boxes of stove parts, plus a bag of produce hastily purchased to get us through until the Sunday market. A man herding his sheep left them a while to help us carry things to our house. And from that moment on we had the bottom of our door latched with kids hanging over the top, peering in at everything coming out of bags and boxes, watching the general goings on. I got two words for you: Gringo Zoo. In all honesty everyone was pretty thrilled to see us come home. Kids were squealing with joy, the adults were all smiles. As happened when we were supposed to show up here to live our Peace Corp boss, also on vacation at the time, began getting calls to see when we’d be back. He assured them everything was running on schedule and we’d be back in a timely fashion. The day we arrived we were invited to come live in Temux forever, or at least buy some land where we could build a house and come visit from time to time. At least we know we’re wanted here. : )

Monday was sunny but cold. We unpacked, cleaned up, did the curing burn for the stove which definitely excited folk’s curiosity. At one point when we’d finished putting the clubhouse back in order it was quite uncomfortably cold inside, but the stove was burning in the yard so I took my book and sat out by the warm fire reading. I was very sad when it was dark and cold and I had to leave the stove burning in the yard. So we divided tasks for the next day: Fletch went into town to buy the supplies we needed to install the stove ASAP, and I washed all our dirty clothes and made bread. By mid-afternoon the stove was put together in the house, just as the cold outside was topped off with rain. To celebrate our inaugural blaze we busted out our hidden bottle of wine, accompanied with some cheese we’d picked up in Huehue and grapes bought in town that day. We like to think we’ve cultivated a kind of life we call “ghetto gourmet”. We drink the wine out of old jam jars because we’ve continued to be too cheap to buy glasses, and the jam and peanut bar jars just keep accumulating. I guess that leaves money for a modest wine stash doesn’t it?

The weather proceeded to be nothing but wind, fog, rain and, to break it, up occasionally driving rain from Tuesday afternoon until today. By Wednesday night the front wall of our house was wet at all the board joints and water was running down the wall. That had never happend to us before but lucky for us, there’s a huge crack in the floor at the wall, so we didn’t have to worry about water accumulation. It was as though the weather Gods wanted to show us how nasty they could be competing against our stove. We would have been pretty miserable without it. We’ve found the kitchen half of our house actually feels very cozy on days like that if we both have the wood stove burning and bake something in the oven. There’s an appreciable difference of temperature between outside and inside (amazing!), and with warm currents running through the house we’ve been able to spot drafts we need to weatherize that we couldn’t identify before because air was running in and making us cold from every direction before. For example, there is a huge draft that comes up right under our work desks which we’d never noticed before but probably made us miserable in a secret, insidious way until now. We are busting the caulk out on spots like that.

The stove has so many wonderful things about it, like, now our clothes dry in under a week while hanging inside. In the fall, when we hit rain spells, things would hang about for two weeks, and we still had to wait for the sun to come out and finish up the job. NOT anymore! Also, on these terrible weather days when we sit around and work and read and drink tea and coffee I can take forever to drink one cup of coffee and have it warm from start to finish because the stove is an enormous hot plate. It also makes toast as Fletch demonstrates here. We love toast. This stove is great. Happiness is our little camp stove.

Unlike this post seems to indicate up to this point, we actually did not just sit around and admire the many functions of the stove all week. That was merely what we did in our free time. We’ve been working on hooking up with a group in Florida that made some 5000 mid-wife kits last year to try and get them to donate a small portion of the remaining 1000 kits to our local project. They seem like they might be happy with that idea, which would help us a lot. The kits aren’t as complete as the ones we had in mind, which is why there are specific items we’re still looking for people to donate, or, if they want, to donate money to purchase up to 130 of any given item. When we spoke to one of the women in charge she sounded kind of sad, as they found out after the fact that many of the kits that were sent through apparently reliable routes last year, somehow found their way into the wrong hands. The kits were in some cases disassembled and sold for parts, and the midwives didn’t actually get to use them at all. Welcome to the twisted world of development and foreign aid. It’s so sad, but true. We can get the kits directly to the midwives, and if it works with us there might be other volunteers in our program who could benefit from the program.

We’ve sent numerous inquiry emails about shipping for the computer center, and about selling the women’s handmade bags. We’ve also scheduled a meeting in Antigua the end of this month to meet up with a Rotarian from Oregon who started a stove project in Central America, working largely in Guatemala and El Salvador, to tour the stove factory near Antigua, see how these tiny, inexpensive, efficient stoves are made, and think about whether or not they’d work way out in Quixabaj were everyone is dirt poor and cooking over open fires.

A few days after we get back from that meeting, with the Rotarian’s intern in-tow so she can see what it’s really like out here, we’re all planning on taking a trip out to Quixabaj, first time since September, before the road collapsed. I feel like we really owe the village a visit, but I’m also kind of dreading it a little. It’s hard. Hard to get there, hard to see people living like that, hard to feel like the talks we give are worthwhile since they’ve now come 5 months apart, hard to fight the extreme male chauvinism of the place. It’s also hot, and we sleep in the health center, where at night the secret inhabitants come crawling out…giant cockroaches. But at least in the health center there’s an indoor toilet, and it’s not a latrine. There are some nice folks that live there too, and really if we didn’t go back I’d just feel like I was abandoning them, same as everybody else has done over the years, if they even knew about them in the first place. You know their own mayor has never even been out there?

So as far as January goes, it’s a short work month but awfully full of business. Going north for the holidays was a fantastic break. We were so so SO happy to see everyone we got to meet up with, to rest, to enjoy the life of convenience, ahh to visit “hippy” grocery stores again. And coupling the visits with presentations, while getting a break, helped us gain the needed motivation to get back here and into action. Thanks to everyone who gave us gifts of warmth this year: thermal underwear, smartwool socks, hats etc. They’ve all been put to great use this past week, I assure you. Thanks to those of you who felt like slipping us some dinero here and there, to pay for gas from place to place, and buy us our favorite soaps, contact solution, toothpaste (and that’s not just me buying products; Fletch-o is a very particular kind of guy;). We returned well equipped for the next few months. I admit, it was a great relief to both of us to come back and feel like things around us were suddenly affordable again switching from the dollar to the Quetzal.

Thanks everyone, again and again and again, thank you for just being there for us, loving us and supporting us in all the ways you all do while we’re down here. We love you, and are already back to missing you.

Peace out, for now.