Here's the new text logo for a t-shirt that I designed in Adobe Illustrator

Taking advantage of the fast internet available to us in Antigua, I decided to upload all of our vacation pictures from 2010. Don't worry, we've been working as well. The organization we've been collaborating with provided us with a couple of DVDs worth of images that I conveniently left back in our site. I'll upload those in the next few weeks, or as our slow internet where we live dictates. We've been without a camera since early 2010 up until a couple of weeks ago, so having a record of our work during that time is quite a relief.

Alright so our camera is broken, does that mean we can’t write? Well it kind of takes the fun out of it for you all. I’ll try to give you an idea of what we have been doing the past couple of months, which have actually been busy, without boring you to death with giant walls of text. I believe that you all know that we began giving hygiene talks at the end of January in a new community. We work in the school with the kids and their parents. They are very participatory and the director of the school is very supportive of our work (she quizzes the kids and the moms and dads afterward!). Working there has been something that we really look forward to doing.

I'm sure you've all heard by now about the terrible 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile earlier this morning. I was looking at the information on the United States Geological Survey site and thought it was worth posting.

Our camera is out of commission, at least until I figure out what’s going on with it. So no new picture updates for a bit. Everything’s going well, we’re soldiering on with work in a new community and I’m studying for my CCENT certification after passing my A+ exam this past week while [...]

For those of you following the blog, you may remember that I started a small computer lab project working with Don Livingston from Computers for Guatemala, funded with donations from family and friends. My Health Center director, the program manager of “Healthy Adolescents”, and I went to go pick up the computers almost six [...]

We recently had the chance to make it out to El Limón to finish documenting the final results of our USAID Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant. Without further ado, here are the results.

On December 3rd, we celebrated World AIDS Day with our Health Center. As the name implies, World AIDS Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS Pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection on December 1st. So why did we hold the event on the 3rd? Because this is Guatemala! We thought we could get a bigger audience on a market day that was a bit farther away from the last day of the town festival (November 30th). To mark this occasion, we held a small presentation and information station by the main bank, Banrural, in our town square.

Last Thursday, December 10th, Sarah and I had the chance to visit the home town of the closest volunteer living near us. It’s about twenty minutes in pickup in the same valley in the foothills of the Cuchamatanes, the mountain range that extends into the neighboring department of Huehuetenango. Her town is considerably [...]

Here are a few highlights of the results of our SPA project.

It’s that time of year again! I can still remember making the blog post about last Thanksgiving. Time certainly does go by quickly. With the holidays rolling around again, I just wanted to make a quick post to give thanks for everything we have. Even though we live on less than [...]

On November 1st, Sarah and I had the opportunity to go and see the barriletes gigantes (gigantic kites) of Sumpango, Sacatepequez. The city is located about a third of the way between Chimaltenango and the capital of Guatemala City. The kite festival's roots go back hundreds of years, and it is one of the biggest traditions here in Guatemala. It is part of the overall Dia de Los Muertos celebration that takes place in Latin and South America, where families celebrate and remember dead relatives on the first of November.

I cannot even begin to count the number of interesting things that take place on camionetas. When a U.S. school bus is sent to Latin America, decked out in brilliant colors and decals (outlines of voluptuous naked women, cartoon characters, the face of Jesus), and turned into public transportation, well, all sorts of ridiculous things occur. Every PCV has dozens of strange stories. Mat and I have our fair share: Mat has had his butt soaked by vomit when he was puked on by a car-sick kid, who was then smacked around by another stranger that had received some of the projected fluid in his bag; while trying to store my giant camping backpack filled with food in the rack above the seats, the bus driver came to an abrupt stop, sending my pack onto the heads of two unsuspecting indigenous women and me to the floor – to add to my humiliation someone we know from our town and happen to work with witnessed the whole thing; we have experienced being squished into compromising positions against strangers or being used as pillows by the person sitting next to us; we have seen all sorts of animals – cats, chickens, turkeys, ducks; we have been ripped off by ayudantes trying to make an extra buck from the gringos. The thing is that the camioneta experience is completely normal to us now. I’m hardly ever surprised by what happens anymore.

The weekend before last (October 17-18), Sarah and I had planned to have a meeting out in El Limón to give a health talk and to plan the details of the Small Project Assistance (SPA) grant. We’ve been working in El Limón for the past year, giving health charlas every two weeks with the [...]

Posting this for anyone else that runs into trouble importing images from blogspot/blogger services to Wordpress. I had previously used blogspot for the first part of my Peace Corps service. I later switched over to wordpress and found that all of my images were still on the blogspot servers and, even worse, they were all [...]

Dengue Fever. Perhaps some of you have heard about the recent Dengue Fever scare in Guatemala. In the department of Izabal, there were two confirmed deaths caused by hemorrhagic dengue. Guatemala has a hot and humid climate, with a half-year rainy season, making it the perfect place for mosquitoes and all of [...]

Last weekend we went to visit our friends, Emily and Jaime, in their site. They live in a municipality in the northern part of the department Huehuetenango. To get there from San Andrés, we sat through 11 hours of traveling in the bumpy and ever uncomfortable camionetas or chicken buses. It was a beautiful journey though through the mountains, called the Cuchamatanes.

It is high time we had a work update. Since we are less than a week from being in the US, it is especially pertinent that we write something before we go. Actually we have a couple of posts in the wings so watch out for the triple-post threat! One of the goals of [...]

I'm not sure how to get the dialogue started for this post. The training class that arrived in Guatemala in May 2008 is made up of the Youth Development (YD) and Rural Home Preventative Health (RHPH) programs. There are three married couples, all of whom are in RHPH. This is quite the phenomenon. It is virtually unheard of to have three couples in one training class, let alone all in the same program. That means that the couples live AND work together. Even if you have a site mate, another volunteer who you are not married to but lives in the same town, he/she/they rarely work in your program.

So what is SPA besides three months of stress and anxiety? Well let me explain.

Semuc Champey is host to a 300m natural limestone bridge, under which flows a sumidero, which literally means "water that flows underground" in Q'eqchi' Maya. Fun fact for the morbid: Three tourists have died in the past year by getting too close to the entrance of the underground river, and because of that there are employees standing around to make sure nobody does anything stupid.

Just received word today that the container with all of the computers from Computers for Guatemala is shipping June 28th from the United States. I’m not sure when it will arrive here. How does one ship a container anyways? Edit: While I’m talking about tech, I might as well mention the updates to the site. New: Wordpress 2.8 [...]

We finally entertained some visitors in our new place! Another married couple from our program, Jim and Emily, came to our place for a couple of days to enjoy the hot, dry weather and some delicious home-cooked food.

El Limón is a small community that has about 30 homes. It is an agrarian community where about 2/3 of the men are working in the US (New Jersey to be specific). We have been working in the community since last November. This is where some of the health "charla" (chat) magic happens. We give our charlas a couple of times a month to the people that are interested, a great mix of men, women, and even a couple of adolescent young men. It is mostly prevention work and we talk about poop a lot!

Here is why everyone gets sick during the first month of the rainy season. This water didn’t come near our mouths and as a precaution I chlorinated the water we bathed with while it was like this. Also, for those of you wondering what the big thing holding the water is called, it’s a [...]

May 1st marked 1 year in Guatemala.  Lo logramos (we did it)!  While we were excited for making it, the next 15 months weren’t looking any easier: we miss our families, are regularly frustrated by the work, and there isn’t any take-out to order on those nights you can’t bring yourself to cook!  But 1 [...]

Well, it’s the second birthday in Guatemala.  The big 25.  Thanks for all the birthday wishes!  One more to go. Really missing home… Only a few more months!

After 8 hours of work, site is still looking ugly.  Unfortunately all of the work I’ve done has been on the “backend”, or what goes on behind the scenes. I’ve decided to make sarah’s tattoo in Illustrator, a designing program, and when I finish doing that I’ll take some of the patterns and use them for [...]

So, the site is ugly. I’ve downloaded XAMPP to do some testing locally and get the site to a good point, and I’ve also been cooking up new theme to refine my Illustrator and Photoshop know-how. Stay tuned! It should be awesome. Expect updates towards the end of the week.

First of all, thanks for the package Kathy! The Girl Scout cookies are amazing. We made sure to share them between our friends.  I’m just glad they all made it in one piece, especially after being held up.  Thank god the Peace Corps pays for those pesky fines and fees to get the [...]

Hello everyone!  I spent some time fiddling with new plugins and customizing them to get a good gallery function going.  So here it is!  Bunches more pictures to come!  Click on an individual picture to bring up the shutter effect, and you can scroll around through them or click on the thumbnails. Let me know what [...]

Welcome to the new site. After a few hiccups, I’m now running rigidkitchen.net completely on a wordpress backend. Basically means I have a CMS, and it also means anything I add to the site will follow the same theme, be manageable and what-not. I’ll post more pictures of our smaller-than-expected Semana Santa [...]