My kitchen!
My living room. Note the fake couch/bed and concrete block shelves :)
My bathroom
My room
My rooftop; with the pila (or washing machine, I guess you could say)
The mountains surrounding my town. Note the faint "Chiantla" written with white stone in the mountain, wanna be Hollywood style
With the other Chiantlecas at the literacy training
With new friends at literacy training. Maria, the one on the left, rocked a puma jacket with her traje (traditional costume) every day
Teaching syllables
The women at our Dia de la No Violencia event
The Muni marimba playing at our Dia de la No Violencia event
March through the streets
The stilt walkers that accompanied us on our march. The quetzal costumes don't have much to do with preventing violence, but it at least got everyone's attention
Inside our community room
The registration table. For women that can't sign next to their names, they use the inkpad to stamp their thumbprint.

Although many days in the office and many evenings at home have consisted of doing nothing – literally – I feel happier with every day that passes here in my site. I feel like I am, for once, learning to relax and take things a day at a time, which is easier said than done, especially coming from Washington DC where sometimes, things feel anything but relaxed! But poco a poco, as they say, I am meeting people in my town and finding things to stay busy. I just finished my second week of literacy training (and am now officially able to teach!), which has been very interesting in some ways (like learning how to tie together the teaching of letters with important themes for women in rural areas, like domestic violence) and NOT interesting when discussing things like inverse syllables. Regardless, I’ve met some great people through the training program and it’s been a nice way to jump-start my service. Everyone is super curious about the gringa who is going to teach how to read and write in Spanish…they ask me some really great and funny questions, like why I always carry my water bottle with me. One of my new friends told me that it looks weird; I was laughing hysterically when she said that. They’re also super surprised at how I’m able to write well in Spanish, which I try to explain to them is easier than writing in English because the words are spelled exactly as they sound; there’s no “there-they’re-their” or “two-too-to” kind of rules that make it hard.

I’m also going to start volunteering with a youth association here in my town, which will be great because I miss working with teenagers. The staff at the youth association has asked me to give them English classes, not something that grabs me necessarily, but if they are asking and willing to commit to learning than I am definitely happy to teach – plus it’s a good way to make friends! And I began running again in the mornings, with one of the men on the municipal city council, which has been great. He has showed me some beautiful areas to run, although running through the mountains I definitely feel the altitude and lack of oxygen hit me pretty hard, but vale la pena! (It’s worth it!) Definitely beats running in circles around the soccer field.

In my office in the muni, we planned an event for the Día Internacional de la Lucha de la No Violencia Contra la Mujer (International Day of the Fight for Violence Against Women Day…or something like that, it’s a mouthful). A bunch of women from the communities of Chiantla came to attend a presentation on violence against women, and then we did a march through the streets with signs. It was a really fun activity, especially because violence against women is a huge problem here, and many of the women traveled from really far away communities to take part in the event. See, the department of Huehuetenango is broken up into various municipalities, including the one in which I live, and the municipalities are broken up into smaller communities. However, most of the 100+ communities of my town are in the mountains and as far as 3-4 hours away. So it’s great to see community leaders participating in these outlying areas, which lack good transportation and many basic resources.

In other news…
- I told my office coworkers that I wanted to have them over for dinner one night. They asked what I was going to cook, and I said, pasta probably. They asked me in a giggly whisper if it was really true that there is a kind of pasta called “penne” (pene means penis en español)
- The volunteer who I replaced gave me a bed, stove, and many other household things that she was using in a temporary apartment before heading back to the US. Once she left, I had to move the stuff over to my apartment. I asked my coworker to help me get some guys in the muni to move everything. She ended up getting the men, including one of the police officers, along with the municipal ambulance, to move my stuff. On a Monday workday morning. Talk about a good use of public resources!
- I opened an egg carton while making breakfast one morning and there were feathers stuck to the egg. Food just doesn’t get fresher than that!
- As you may remember in a previous blog post, my host aunt was wearing a shirt with a funny English saying on it (“my boyfriend is out of town”) Since then, my training group and I have been keeping a “Best Of” T-shirt with stupid English sayings list (Guatemalans buy these shirts for really cheap at used clothing stores, and pretty much never have a clue what they say). Some of my favorites since the aunt/boyfriend t-shirt: “Proud to be Irish” (worn by the young woman who used to babysit for the kids in my hose family’s house); “World’s Best Dad” (worn by my favorite store owner…a female one); and most recently “You’re Better Off Without Me” (worn by a very stocky guy at one of our community meetings). My friends texted me the other day with a good t-shirt sighting: “Do I look like a f---ing people person?!”…I think that one takes the cake!!
- And finally, my best friend Becca was the first to book her trip to come visit, which will happen during Semana Santa (Holy Week) in late March. I can’t wait!!