Sunday Was A Good Day

Monday 12.13.10

I woke up at 9:15, thanks to the earplugs that recently came in my first care-package from my mamma. My room was so messy, and usually when I look at my disaster of a room it gives me less and less desire to clean it, but for some reason I changed that day. I started a load of laundry, and by load I mean I took some clothes and put them in a bucket with soapy water to sit for a few hours until I could wash them by hand. Laundry is my least favorite of houseworks to do, like I recently told my friend Kax (say caash) who promptly laughed at me. But it’s one of those things that has to get done eventually because people here really REALLY notice when you’re not wearing clean clothes. Oh yeah, and I kinda like to wear clean underwear, too.

After starting my laundry, I decided it would be a good time to go for a run, because it was really sunny and beautiful out and I had nothing better to do. I put on my sunscreen, my hat, and my poor tennis shoes that need so badly to be replaced and I headed out for an hour. Now, when I say run I really mean walk/jog/run because I can’t actually run for an hour straight. Plus, the roads here are all dirt and rock and I have a tendency to roll my ankles easily, so I walk the flats and down-hills and sprint all the up-hills. While out walking, I somehow had forgotten how beautiful it is here, even on the roads, even with all the hillsides covered in milpa (corn plants, which by now are brown and more or less void of corn because they’ve all been plucked to dry by now), and even though the scenery doesn’t really change for kilometers, I still like it.

I got back home around noon and, rather than putting off doing my laundry, I finished it all! Then decided it was such a beautiful day so I set out again with my salmon-pink bucket to go collect more composting worms. I walked about 15 minutes to the base of a hill called Chun, atop which has a ceremonial Mayan Altar. At the base of Chun there’s cow pasture that belongs to Don José, the father of my counterpart, whom I happen to also live with. Nobody is every really bothered about things like trespassing; as long as you don’t take something that doesn’t belong to you you’re more or less free to wander through whosever land you happen upon. I figured that taking worms out of cow poop doesn’t really count as taking something that doesn’t belong to me.

Photo 1: My hand with a couple of the larger worms. They're not stretched out so you can't see how big they really are, but I'd say a good 8 inches. Plus they're laying a lot of eggs now.


Photo 2: The bucket I keep my compost in for now. I'm working on the design for a fancier home made out of wood but I keep coming across different styles and I'm not sure the one I want to make!



Photo 3: My backyard where I keep the bucket (the green plastic is to keep the rain out and keep the worms from drowning, as they did in my dream the night before which is what actually provoked me to go and check in on them). They're all happy, healthy, and gorging themselves on moldy hummus and horse poop now.

An hour and about 200-300 worms later I returned to my house to have a snack. I ate and relaxed for a little and when I went downstairs I was told that my friend Kax had come looking for me. I grabbed my basketball, put on my sports clothes and headed towards his house which was also in the direction of the soccer field. His sister said he wasn’t at home but by now I’d seen a bunch of other young guys heading down to the field so I went to join them. I met up with about twenty other people on the field and we divided in to teams and started to play. I’m not very good, but I did save my team two goals! The first one I was on defense close to the goal posts and the offender Yobani afterward told me “I thought I had a good shot, but there was Katy and I didn’t want to hit her”. The second save was much better. A corner kick: we were all lined up around the goal and one of the offenders next to me headed the ball right toward the center of the goal, luckily, it hit my head first to deflect it off-path and out of bounds. Everybody laughed. I was glad I could actually do something useful.

After the game ended I walked back home with some of the other players who live around my house. It was still light out and my neighbor Luis was sitting outside playing guitar. I joined him for a little bit but it was getting really cold so promptly decided to go inside. I took a hot shower and made guacamole and beans with cheese for dinner and went to bed early.

Like I said, it was a good day.

First Blog in a Long, LOOOOOOng Time

Wednesday, December 8 2010




Each week I say to myself this is the week I will start writing more, but instead of starting immediately, I say, and tomorrow I have all the time in the world to do it. You know the rest. So today is that tomorrow, and although I don’t have a lot of time, I figured I’d give it a start and hopefully I’ll have some interesting stories to share. So, getting off on the right foot, I’ll share some good things that have happened in the past couple months.

It’s been really really cold lately at night, so a month or so ago I bought an incredibly warm blanket and I haven’t had problems since. When I went to the store to price different types and sizes, the lady running the shop and I pulled it out of the bag to see how big it was, what it was made of, etc… We pulled it out and she said, l“ook, on this side there’s a beautiful flower”, I smiled because it was a nice print. Then we turned the blanked over and she said, as if teaching me something I could never have figured out on my own, “and on this side, there’s the Virgin Mary”. I barely held myself back from laughing thinking to myself well, of course it’s the Virgin…What am I going to do with this blanket, face up or face down? I finally decided to buy it after getting her down to Q225 from Q250 (about $30) and have slept wonderfully ever since. By the way, I decided face up.

I recently made friends with a few youths from the community, one who doesn’t like soccer so plays basketball with me whenever we have sports days, and one of his buddies who likes both. I taught two of them how to pass a volleyball correctly and they are both naturals. All I have to do is find one more person with a little control and who is willing to listen to a few instructions and I will have my long-awaited Concrete-Doubles volleyball game (not to be confused with sand-doubles or grass-doubles). Really, I’m just happy to have friends…even if they are only 17 years old.

I scored a goal in a pappy-fút game last week (soccer, but on a basketball court), the only goal for my team though so we lost. I am really enjoying soccer, and now wish that I had started playing it earlier in life. I feel like a dumb gringo when I ask how many people are on the field at one time, or when I ask how many minutes are in a half.

I have made a couple really good friends in my town. One is my neighbor, 20 year old Oscar who studies and works about 3 hours away so I only get to see him every couple weeks, but whenever he comes into town we always have really interesting conversations. His younger brother Luis gave me worms…composting worms. Another young guy in town is the brother of two co-workers, he plays guitar and so does his friend Luis, an 18-19 year old who is the son of one of my other co-workers, and they come to my house some nights and we play guitar and keyboard together. Once we got together in the church and plugged in a base, electric guitar, electric drum set, and two microphones to their speaker system and jammed for hours. They also invite me to play sports with them, even though I’m a girl and am terrible at soccer, we always play a little basketball too which gives me athletic credibility.

I have collected over a thousand worms for composting, each one hand picked from dried cow and horse poop that I find in the pastures around my house. It’s a great opportunity to hang out with the young children of the community who are out with the goats and sheet during the day. They usually have nothing better to do so they even help me. We count them one by one in k’iche’: jun, keb’, oxib’, kajib’, job’…even though I can only count to five.

It’s also avocado season, which means I eat about ten or more avocadoes per week. I could live off of guacamole, refried beans, and campo cheese for at least two weeks. I’m also getting ready to plant more cilantro because my last crop drowned due to lack of drainage in my planter, and also some mint, basil, and whatever other herbs I can get seeds for. This will be using the abono (compost) that my worms have been making me during the last couple months.

Now for a couple not-so-good things:

I have fleas in my bed and in my room. Last week I picked 23 of them out of my wool blanket and drowned them. Since then I have picked off about 10-15 more. I have a water bottle sitting by my bed called my “flee cemetery” just for this purpose.

I have been having some problems with communication with my counterpart lately, but after Flavio’s visit to me last week (Flavio is my Peace Corps boss) he helped me clear up a lot. We decided that my projects for this next year would be four:

1) Developing a system of accounting for the association and their small business projects
2) Environmental Education in the four schools in my Aldea
3) Promoting tourism and supervising it’s organization and development
4) Music classes in the school

I am most excited about #4, music classes! I’m going to teach them how to read sheet music, keep time, and play as a group rather than just fiddling around and sounding terrible together. I’m least excited about #3, but, as my program is called “sustainable community tourism”, I really should put some of my resources into that.

Well, I’m going to leave it at that for tonight. More positives than negatives which is always a plus. I’m going to try and update my blog on a weekly basis plus photos when I get the chance with faster internet. But any of you out there who are actually reading this – REMIND ME! If I know that people are actually keeping up with my life and are interested in reading about it it gives me way more motivation to actually write a summary. I crave communication with the outside world people, so be it email, chat, facebook, skype, whatever. I want to hear from you. Don’t you forget that.

Much luv as always,
Kat, aka “Talin”

P.S

PICTURE CAPTION: Taken three months ago when I went for a stroll to a neighboring town about an hour away. I talked with the señora (woman) for a little while then proceeded to my destination. As I was walking away I turned around and realized how beautiful the scenery was and I snapped the photo as a recuerdo (souvenir) of a typical walk about my town. It’s normal to see more sheep and goats than people during a 1-2 hour walk.

Lightning and Thunder Storms

Thursday 8.12.10

For the past few months I have been receiving an average of four or five hours of rain per day. There is rarely a straight 24 hours where we don’t see any rain at all. Lately, this rain has come in the late afternoon and night-time and is usually accompanied by incredibly frequent and close lightning which makes for some really loud thunder. I like it. I like sitting in my bed reading listening to the rain and thunder outside. I also made a mix of songs I call “rain songs” that I like to play on full blast when it’s just pouring outside which features the artists, amongst others, Beethoven, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Mozart, Queen, and Simon & Garfunkel . It’s usually so loud I can barely even hear the music even I crank it up as much as my speakers will allow me. I especially like it when the thunder is so loud it nearly shakes the house; I can feel it in my whole body.

We get here a type of lighting that I never really saw in the US before – cloud to cloud lightning. It’s very frequent, often farther away, doesn’t touch the ground, and harder to spot bolts because it’s often filtered through a few clouds. The thing I like about this lightning though is that I can stand outside and look up at the sky and see 20-30 or more flashes in a minute. I also like when it rains really hard because it drowns out the Evangelical Church music, the neighbors’ music, and my host sister’s music. Sometimes, when I get lucky, even the power goes out and then even if it’s not raining really hard there’s no power at all for the speakers. Except mine. Mine are rechargeable and run on batteries so I can listen to my rain-music even when everybody else is cooking their dinner by candle light.

The first time the power went out when I was in the middle of cooking my dinner I was annoyed. Then I started to appreciated the serenity of the darkness, and after we lit a few candles the small kitchen actually became quite bright and beautiful; naturally lit, and still very calm. Now I’m not bothered at all by the power outages, I can even feel my way to the drawer with the candles with no problems. All in all, I like the rain. It took a while for me to get used to rain every day, never leaving the house without my umbrella (even if it’s sunny and hot and I’m sweating in a short-sleeved shirt, it is 90% likely that I will need the umbrella in a few short hours), and constantly having wet tennis shoes. Now one of my pastimes is guessing when the rain will come each day. Will it start at 2pm? 3pm? Wait until 5:30, the exact hour that I leave the office each afternoon? My goal for the next two years, or really next 1 year 7.5 months, is to become an expert at predicting when the rain will fall.

A Funny Moment

Tuesday 8.10.10

Today I witnessed possibly the funniest thing I have seen since arriving in Guatemala over 7 months ago. My host sister Sely, age 13, and her friend Vicky had been horsing around in her room when they decided they were hungry. There was not much to eat in the house so the mom asked them to go across the street to buy some eggs to cook. They brought back about a dozen eggs in a carton, but not the type of carton we have in the US. This carton is flat, one-sided, and blue and probably fits 8-10 eggs by 8-10 eggs in each one. After they had unloaded the eggs from the carton into the official egg-holding basket, Sely proceeded to beat her friend on the head with the empty egg carton. Naturally, after only a few seconds the mom started yelling at her to stop, which she did with a giggle and a “what? It doesn’t even hurt!” She tore up the carton into four or five small pieces and put them in the fire. The Abuela, who had been seated next to the fire for this entire escapade, saved one of the pieces of carton from the fire and, as if trying to prove Sely right, started beating herself over the head with it. “Ow, hahahaha!” she said after she had done it once. She repeated herself three or four more times, “no, it doesn’t hurt, hahahaha!” she giggled as she tended to her forehead with her available hand. She smiled and giggled and beat herself a few more times before she became bored with her new activity and placed it back in the fire.

I wish things like this would happen every day.

Equal Opportunity

Sunday 8.8.10

I had a dream last night about equal opportunity…vegetables. Yes, my unconscious had the interesting idea to offer reduced-priced healthy foods to underprivileged families and individuals. I was at the Nob Hill grocery store in Martinez, driving around with my brother when somehow the news of this new program reached us. We, logically, decided to follow a long line of parked cars because of course this program would be so popular in my home town that everybody would immediately get into their cars and go to investigate it. We waited in line for many minutes (who knows really how long in dream-time we waited) until we realized it was a line for a drive-through bank. Whoops. We then decided, a little more logically, to go into the grocery store and ask somebody about the program. It turns out it was in the store so we meandered over to the fruit and vegetable isle to investigate. As in all dreams, the reality was a little strange – there were four buckets with different assortments of pre-mixed vegetables, I’m assuming pre-mixed for the purpose of achieving the ideal vitamin and mineral combinations, from which to choose. None of them looked very tasty, but I chose the second bucket which looked more green than the rest. The woman managing the station told me I should prepare my digestion system for that. I don’t know how it would really be possible to prepare one’s digestion system for anything, but I assume she meant there’s just a lot of fiber in the veggies and to be prepared.

Soon after, my mom appeared and I felt a grand desire to eat hummus. I searched all over but could not locate the hummus and felt sad. I spent what felt like a good 15 minutes searching all over the various refrigerated sections of the Nob Hill to find hummus but it could not be found. It reminded me of the time I was at the Albertsons in Morro Bay, Central California, and asked a bagger boy where they kept the hummus and he brought me a package of some cheese spread. He didn’t even know what hummus is. That basically ended the dream, and I woke up hungry and wanting hummus.

Although the dream didn’t really have anything to do with offering lower-priced vegetables to lower-income families, the idea is very interesting. Here in Guatemala the staple foods are, of course, tortillas and beans. Coffee too, or really, hot sugar water with a tiny bit of instant coffee grounds added. Families that have enough money can afford to buy more vegetables and fruits and meats sometimes, but I’ve found that even with the families that can afford to buy a healthier variety and mixture of foods just don’t. It’s not their culture, and they don’t really realize the nutritional benefits of varying their diet. In my family, out of the 21 meals they eat every week:

5 are bread and coffee (almost always breakfast)
8 are eggs and beans, sometimes rice (sometimes the eggs have some onion, but more often plain)
2 are some type of spaghetti
3 are some type of caldo (watery soup with potato, carrot, meat, and very little flavor)
1 is some type of grilled meat
1 is cauliflower, potato, or green beans enveloped in egg and cooked
1 is something else, like fried plantains, box boles (the typical food in the Ixil region here) or fried chicken they brought back from Nebaj
Every meal is served with tortillas, except for the bread and coffee, and in my family the adults eat an average of 3-4 tortillas per lunch/dinner meal. Now, I don’t eat every meal with my family – just lunch. I make my own breakfast and dinner but I do understand one of the reasons they don’t always cook with vegetables; by Thursday, without a refrigerator, they are often no good to eat anymore. Nevertheless, it is still possible to cook very healthily up through Wednesday and then have your beans-and-eggs days at the end of the week.

I’ve been asked more times than I remember by a bunch of different people my plans for after I leave the Peace Corps. Where are you going to live? Are you going to go for a Masters or Ph.D? What kind of job are you going to look for? My answer has always been, and probably will continue to be up until the day I leave, “I have no idea”. But if I were to pursue a higher degree, nutrition would definitely be on my list of possible fields. I think it’s fascinating how micro- and macronutrients function together in the body, affect each other, and basically drive this intricate machine we call the human being. More than that, how the same foods affect each individual differently. One of the things I’d like to do during my time here teach some basic nutrition to the mothers in my town, and especially show them that you can add a great amount of nutritional value to your meals in an inexpensive manner.

One thing they could do is substitute agua pura at lunch for their fresca, which is basically tang or some other “fruit” flavored juice which they add a bunch of sugar to. They would save a bunch of money on the sugar and they could put that into buying a head of broccoli or some carrots they could eat with their rice. Another thing I could do is teach them different ways of cleaning and preparing vegetables to be eaten raw. The typical way to cook vegetables is to boil them until dead and lifeless, until they barely have any nutritional value remaining. But if they could learn how to add raw or half-cooked veggies into their diets they could be spending the same amount of money on the same foods, but getting more health benefits just by the manner of cooking them. But I think the most important thing I can do is somehow get the schools to buy fruit for snacks instead of cookies and crackers. The reason they buy cookies now is that they come from stores, and stores give receipts which they need to show the ministry of education when they come to audit the books. Fruits can only be bought in the open-air market from venders who surely don’t give receipts. I’d like to figure out a way to get around this for two main reasons. One, it’s just healthier to eat fruit than cookies and if kids get into the habit of eating healthy now, they’ll be more likely to pass it along in their adult years. Two, fruit creates only organic waste; cookies always come packaged in plastic which inevitably gets tossed into the street creating this monstrous build-up of plastic and trash just sitting in the streets and in the rivers.