Tuberculosis is a pretty nasty disease, even nowadays. If you get treated correctly, you won’t die, but the treatment is onerous- 9 months of solid medication, and during that time you can’t drink alcohol or caffeine. This is what Nick, our buddy and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer, just found out. He’s finishing his service this week, and as part of the exit medical examination, they run a TB test. Turns out, he’s positive (but asymptomatic). What a nasty thing to pick up in a third-world country! My dad had a friend that got asymptomatic TB when he was in the Air Force, and it basically wrecked this guy’s career because it took him off of flight status for over a year, even though he felt fine. That is a funny coincidence to me, because Nick (my friend) and Tony (Dad’s friend) are the two biggest people I’ve ever met. Nick was more fortunate than Tony, though; Peace Corps is allowing him to extend service to a third bonus year, and transfer to China. I guess the Chinese government is more forgiving of that sort of thing? Nick won’t be flying airplanes, though.
side note: I just spoke with the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and she says that before HIV, tuberculosis and malaria were always “…neck-and-neck to see which was the most common infectious disease in the world.” Last year, Peace Corps Guatemala had 8 volunteers come up positive for latent TB. That works out to about 4% of us per year.
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The closest “city” to where we live is the departmental capitol, Huehuetenango. We joke that it’s like Dodge City in the wild west days- when you get to the dusty bus terminal, it’s a carnival of people, livestock, stagecoaches (ok, buses) and it always feels like a gunslinger is going to call someone out. They have a crooked mayor (like every Guatemalan city?) and the word on the street is that he’s stealing so much money from the city that they can’t even pay the trash collection bill. At least, that is what these student protesters are going on about, amongst other things. True or not, the trash isn’t getting collected, as seen here in this picture I took walking to the grocery store. Stinky! So what do you do? Well, if the students handing out handbills aren’t getting the job done, there are intermediate steps before an all-out civil war. The next one for us is riots and setting police cars on fire. Let’s not get hasty, here!
Back at home, we continue to find more interesting bugs. We were sitting sround the wood stove talking to one of the neighbors when Emily said, “Look at the size of that thing!” It wasn’t the Death Star (awesome quote), it’s was the biggest cave cricket I’ve ever seen, meandering across our floor. His legs were a good two inches long. Here he is, seconds before I threw him out for drunk and disorderly conduct.
Speaking of home, one of Emily’s favorite things to do is read. Luckily, that is something she can continue to do in Guatemala. Books are expensive here, but all the Peace Corps volunteers trade books all the time, like an informal book club. Here’s Emily reading in the sun in our front yard, with a friendly piglet that happened by.
Our greenhouse continues to grow. The watermelon, cantaloupe, and pumpkins are growing really quickly, and amaze all comers. The tomatos are slower going, but are starting to make a strong show and I need to get them staked in the next few days. The cucumbers are so-so; a lot of them never sprouted. That’s sad, because cucumber is one of my favorites. We never even got sprouts for the peas, most of the beans, the oregano, the chilis, or the spinache. Hmm. Learning curve, I guess. I re-tilled those spots, and replanted with red onion and broccoli (which grows better in cold, and will get moved outdoors once it sprouts). But every other day, someone new comes by to oooo and aaaah about the stuff in the greenhouse.
More firewood came two days ago. This is good, as the cold has returned, and we went without for a few weeks. Thing is, firewood is sometimes hard to come by. We had promises from a few leña (firewood) vendors to bring some, but they never showed up. “All firewood sellers are liars,” Lina told us. Yep. Anyways, Nas Palas finally found a good deal from a guy that owed him a favor, so he bought a truckload- literally. We pitched in a huge chunk of our monthly income to get two tareas to last us a while. We don’t use a lot of firewood, but going without is annoying. How big is a tarea? I am not exactly sure, it’s some cryptic quantity that is an armlength by waist high by a certain length. Tarea literally means “work”, so maybe it’s also the amount of work a woodcutter should do in a day? Anyways, we now have a stack about 20 feet long and waist high. We’re good to go. The trick is that the truck dumped this mountain of wood (our two tareas, plus six for Nas Palas’s family) at the bottom of the hill. Nas came up to me, and explained that he was paying his sisters-in-law to carry it up the hill and stack it at the houses, since he had to work the fields all day, and we should probably do the same. Nas is the ONE legit person in town I trust, so I figured he was right- not only because we were scheduled to be in meetings all day, but because the last time I carried wood, it about killed me. So, yeah, we paid a team of Guatemalan women the equivalent of $7 to carry our wood up the hill. Part of me feels guilty/ lazy, but the reality of it is that they did a better faster job than I would have, and they’re desperate for some work. That $7 is two full days of paycheck here.
We will finish up with a “cute native kid” picture, mandatory in all Peace Corps work. This is Delmi, daughter of Regna, Emily’s buddy. She comes to our house sometimes to visit. Originally, this was a good thing, since she could crawl freely on our wooden floor instead of everyone else’s mud floor. But she started walking last week, so now she toddles over, knocks on the door, and stumbles in when we open it. She likes to play with Emily’s stuff, too. Here she is, wearing Emily’s hat.