palacio de los capitanes generales
me and my first host momma
brandon (roomie) with our host momma
catedral de santiago (where i went to church)
buxom mermaid fountain
spanish arc (complete with mountain background)
crazy cool chruch
peace corps HQ in Guatemala
and there rest of my photos, though not many yet, can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peaceteam/
settling in (7/14)
there is two entries below this one from previous nights that i was bored. actually, they're sorta depressing... the first few days sucked. really sucked. and i'm sorta glad i didn't have anyone to talk to, cause if someone woulda told me i should just go/come home, i probably would of done that. but life is good. it's slow, endlessly busy, frustrating, and overall, well i'm sticking with it because it looks like it might be rewarding.
it's interesting though, i'm now super close to the other volunteers living in my community (there's four of us at around the same Spanish level, which is the retarded level, and we all live in San Antonio Aguas Calientes) and one of them happens to be in his 4th year of Peace Corps volunteering. Rob served in the Kingdom of Tonga for 3 years (2 as a volunteer and 1 as a volunteer leader) and is now going to serve one more year here in Guatemala before he heads back to the states.
but the GUATE is awesome and i'm in love with this place already. i wish i had free time to go and enjoy everything my sleepy little village has to offer, but with at least 6 hours of Spanish each day and a few more for tech training, plus at least an hour of socializing, and then studying... ohhh well. things will loosen up soon i hope.
today is friday, btw! and i have language class at 8am tomorrow, but we're going to a neighboring town called Santa Catarina to check out a festival. should be fun, there's millions of fireworks going off now to celebrate the opening of the festival. well, there's actually millions of fireworks all day, every day here. let me give you a few examples.
a few nights ago i was watching a movie before bed on my computer; there's always a handful of kids that hang out right in front of my house where, coincidently, i have a door from my bedroom to. so i know they're hanging out there because i can hear them. so all of a sudden i hear a soft bang on the roof (i have a tin roof over my room, so it's easy to hear when shit is going on up there) and then a string of fireworks blow up... i nearly shit myself right then and there. good lord. then this morning i was walking across town to class, because it was at Kims host-home, and this kid behind me was tossing fireworks as he walked... the first one i heard was probably a few feet behind me and again, nearly scared the shit right out of me. plus i was dressed up fancy today, because we had a meeting with the mayor (senor alcalde en espanol), so i did a half-run for a few meters and looked super cool for all my neighbors.
but i hope everyone back home is doing swell! i'm settling in pretty fine here, finally getting comfortable enough to buy ice creams and bags of chips from the little stores all over town. they have these taco chips that are... amazing. and more kinds of lollipops than you could dream of, these ones are shapped like beer mugs with foam at the top and the foam...foams in your mouth while you suck on it! good lord, it's junk food paradise here. love it.
more updates soon, and hopefully pictures. kim and i are trying to find a day to wander up one of the mountain sides to take pictures from the Ecology Park. hopefully soon, but this weekend is packed (class saturday and sunday i'm off to antigua for my host sister's son's baptism... host nephew... haha i dunno) and next weekend is a Jesus festival that's suppose to be off the chains, according to my host dad. so we'll get up there when we get up there i suppose.
much love and send me emails you fools!
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into the GUATE! Part 1 (7/8)
hola mis amigos. i am now in Guatemala and it is absolutely beautiful. the first three days i spent at orientation in Santa Lucia, getting more closely in tune with my new friends and what the next three months have in store for us. right now i'm officially considered a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee) and my first three days are refered to PCTO (Peace Corps Trainee Orientation). after those three days, the following eleven weeks are now PST (Pre Service Training) and there's a million more acronyms that i can't even begin to remember. the trend seems to be that we love acronyms, we being used extremely loosely (i think they're ridiculously annoying, haha!) but life has been good/stressful/exciting/slow/fast/painful/fruitful/ect... it's been everything. i don't actually have the internet myself, so i'm typing this in my room from my new host families house into a notepad document and i'll toss it on the web next time i get a chance to stop by the internet cafe.
i stayed with a host mother (i couldn't really communicate with her so i'm not sure of anyone elses relation other than her 12 year old son and 26 year old son... and i'm assuming they were her sons) but i stayed with another PCT in her house, Brandon from SoCal, who was super awesome. we're both in the ecotourismo progam and had very little spanish language background, though he led most conversations with our dona (host mother... there's an accent on the n but iunno how to do that yet) and i sat and smiled blindly with some nodding here an there. the smile/nod system worked really well actually until she asked me a direct question and i kept smiling and nodding... haha!
but today was my first day with my new host family and they are awesome! i absolutely love them to death, though i can only remember mi madres nombre, su nombre es marina, and mi hermanos nombre, su nombre es christian. my host dad is super nice and i spent the evening with him trying to have conversations (which amounted to single statements by me, completely butchered, then a bunch of rapido conversation by him until he realized i had no idea what was going on, then a series of short, slow sentences accomanied by some fantastic hand gestures.) by the end of the evening i felt like we had actually accomplished some solid "get-to-know-you" time though.
the houses down here are super neat, my current house is completely open air with a little building in the front where the front door is and it is connected to a series of rooms which are my room, my brothers, and my parents. then there's another building further back on the lot with the bathroom and kitchen/dining rooms. and even further back is like... a house where a girl and her baby live. i still don't understand this relation, but i also can't remember my host dad's name--all in good time. but i got to walk around town (San Antonio) a bit with my host mother while she carried some baby (god, i'm sure this sounds retarded how little i actually know about what's going on, but i promise i'm not even making THAT much of a fool out of myself) and the town is so neat--tons of cool buildings and friendly people. and i even wandered over to the internet cafe a few blocks away to send out some emails, which i'm sorry if you did not get one but i was on limited time and slow computers.
i think my favorite thing about the GUATE so far is probably the mountains. and the VOLCANOS! right now i'm up about 5 thousand feet from sea level, which is absolutely perfect (Santa Lucia was 7k ft. and it got waaaaay to cold at night when no one has heaters/air conditioners in their house.) but the scenery is unbelievable, i have to pinch myself all the time to make sure i'm not dreaming. anyways, volcanos, we have three of them around our town and one of them is constantly blowing up ash, it's ridiculously cool! my goal before i leave here is to take a stick and poke it in some lava (sorry mom, but it will be impossible to stop me :-p)
anyways, i'm getting along well and enjoying myself as much as i can with the frustrating language monkey hanging over my head. mi dona keeps telling me that i will be perfect in a year, so i've promised her i'll come back to visit here in a year and show her how good i am haha. i don't have many picture yet since my time has lacked any sort of freedom, but my host family has a million photos from PCTs they've hosted in the past so i'm sure i'll have too many to count by the end of this three months.
anyways, until next time. hasta luego mis amigos.
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PART TWO! (7/9)
the previous was written on saturday, january 8th. now it is sunday, january 9th and i've had a bit of a ride. i woke up from a dream where i was back in the states with people close to me--only to realize i'm in a small, cement room; in a country where i don't know anyone very well; living with people that call me miguel (that's not even my name!); eating food that i've never even seen before; and ulitmately not able to really communicate with anyone in any sort of meaningful way. in fact, the larger part of my communication with my family involves me making awful hand gestures (which i'm worried i'll make some sort of offensive one in their culture), getting frustrated, and then trying to explain that it was not that important... which i can't even do and leads me to get more frustrated. so, if in a similar situation, you can guess how much energy i had to get out of bed. but after laying there for nearly an hour i finally talked myself into taking a shower--i've gone from one day at a time to one situation at a time. thank god this family has an electric shower (i know, sounds dangerous but we used them in puerto rico too) they sorta suck but way better than taking a luke-warm bucket bath in the morning, outside, where the temperature is ~55 degrees. yes, morning, freezing bucket baths were part of my first three day host stay. bleh!
luckily my host mom must of sensed i was not feeling too good in some way or another (i said i'd be up around 7 and didn't open the door to my room until 830...ish) so there was no surprise breakfast, i had cornflakes with a cup of coffee! then the neighbor kids came over (maybe a relation, not sure) and i played with them in the street for about two hours. i would of played with them all day, because they speak so much slower and constantly which was awesome for me trying to pick up what they were saying, but around 11 their mom decided to buy them ice cream and the sugar rush caused them to go nuts! i bet this was some sort of joke on me, but having three kids hanging on me while i try to walk around was no longer any fun so i tossed their ball down the street and snuck inside! lunch was really good too, dona made rice and grilled chicken with this dark, seasoned broth and it was splendid. the thing is, the only way i know how to say i'm full is to tell them my stomach is fat, so everytime i'm done eating my mom laughs at me and calls ME fat a bunch, haha.
but after lunch i had no idea what to do. i asked my don if he needed help, since he was putting up a new roof over some open space, but he declined and told me his son was helping. even though christian had left to go play soccer all afternoon... and i asked my dona if she wanted help cleaning and she told me "no, i should go hang out with jerry" who is the old guy in our training group that lives down the block from me. but i didn't want to hang with jerry, for a number of reason i don't need to get into, the most important of which is that going and speaking english with some old dude is not going to help my training.
after laying in my room and napping/reading/looking words up in the dictionary, i decided i need to go walk around town and accomplish something today. find out where the ice cream stop is, check out where all the internet cafes are, wander around the central park and get gawked at, anything constructive. on my way home i ran into a PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who was in town visiting her training host mother! she knew i was a trainee from a mile away, with my down head, defeated look, and overall uncomfortable presentation. so we stood around and talked for a bit, mostly pertaining to how much she loves working here in the Guate and how the first week of training is absolutely awful for everyone and goes by soooo slowly. many words of encouragement and tons of fun promises later, i was back to a postive attitude and headed home.
my dona also let me know that a volunteer that stayed here last year was coming to visit tuesday, though i'll be back in santa lucia all day getting more shots, sitting through more lectures, and ultimately wishing i had more freedom. but they're staying for dinner so i'll at least get to see them for an hour or two. after emails from friends and family back home, talking to current and former volunteers has been the best thing to raise my spirits. the process of entering and getting into the groove a training is absolutely emotionally exhausting. i want independence but can't have much because i'm more or less helpless at this point. the most independent thing i've done is walk around town today, by myself. and even then, it's a very small town with not too much space to cover.
at the end of the day, i'm doing good! any time i can look up at the stars or across the mountains and volcanos around me, my attitude always moves to positive. i finally get back to spanish class on monday and am excited to start learning seriously. i'm going to spend as much time as i can working on this, so i don't feel so ridiculously different and alone all the time. totally excited!
send emails and much love everyone!
ps, late addition. at dinner tonight i tried to thank my host mom for washing my clothes but instead thanked her for wearing my clothes. extreme confusion at the dinner table ensued. will not do that again... hopefully. haha
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