As of March 1, the Peace Corps is now 50 years old. We hadn’t really planned to do anything to celebrate, but Emily got an email from a friend of a friend, announcing that the Oregon Historical Society was opening a special exhibit at their museum in Portland, showcasing artifacts and stories from a half [...]
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Greetings all, and happy new year.
I’ve not written since last fall, but I had an interesting discussion last week that made me realize I have a loose end to tie up. While talking to my friend Missy (who has occasionally posted comments on this blog) about our next great adventure, she asked if I was [...]
Hey there. Remember us?
I know I said that we were “done” with our blog, but some back story just came up that is SO AMAZING that I have to post it. As you may know, there is a large American expatriate crowd living in Antigua. Those of you that were with us in the early [...]
Dear All,
It’s hard to believe we’ve been back in the US for a month now; in a lot of ways, it still feels to me like we just got here. We’ve been enjoying copious amounts of time with our friends and families and taking advantage of wonderful inventions like hot showers, flush toilets, and freezers [...]
We have successfully returned to American soil, a two full days ago. Look at all that luggage! Sorry it took me so long to let you know, but as luck would have it, I’ve been really sick and only just now feel up to opening the laptop. We had a really nice dinner with Nick [...]
Early tomorrow morning, we’re getting on the plane. Sorry about the landslide of posts in the last day or two; after more than a week of being extremely busy, we took two days of “vacation” at the lake, and we finally got caught up with the blogging. The idea was to relax a little and [...]
Fletch and I got married promptly, much sooner than we might have otherwise, to be able to serve together, and after a year and a half of waiting for a placement we received one only to have it taken away a week later due to a funny little conflict of interest rule…and Fletch supported and [...]
We took a little side trip to Honduras today, to see something of Central America besides Guatemala. This trip was in some ways similar to visiting Illinois from Indiana: hard to tell the difference, unless you read the patch on the policeman’s shoulder. Same language, same accent, same poverty, same natural beauty. The money is [...]
The Grand Finale
by Emily Richardson Fanjoy
Guest Columnist
I was talking to a Peace Corps friend of mine not too long ago. “I just ran into a boy walking home today. His toes were sticking out of holes in the end of his shoes, and I almost started to cry. Isn’t that strange? I mean, I’ve been [...]
Emily made me promise that before we left Guatemala, we’d see Semuc Champey, the only major attraction we didn’t get to in our two years of service. It’s been a while since we’ve “traveled” in the fun sense of the word, so these few extra days between our Close of Service and return to the [...]
This week is crammed full of despedidas, or “goodbyes”. For Guatemalans, a despedida is a social obligation for anyone who is going away on a long trip, and it has a semi-ritualistic format. The people gather, some sort of meal is shared, and each person present gets up to “dar palabras“, or say something nice [...]
For all you left-brain people, we collected some objective, quantatative data to summarize what was actually a very subjective, qualatative experience. During our time in the Peace Corps, there were…
6,506 pictures taken (Jaime)
4,735 hits on the blog in our busiest month (June 2010)
3,706 pictures taken (Emily)
3,476 dollars of Uncle Sam’s money spent on infrastructure
417 blog [...]
Wow, it’s been about ten days since we’ve posted! I hope no one was worried. We’re still alive, we’ve just been extremely busy. So busy, in fact, that we have a half-dozen or so posts to make to chatch up with everything that just happened. So as not to overload you, we’re going to be [...]
Our last day as Peace Corps volunteers was spent in an elaborate scavenger hunt. Being employees of the US Government, we have a lot of papers to fill out to officially terminate our service, especially if we want to have access to the benefits that we receive for successfully completing our two years. By an [...]
To leave our site, we planned on renting a van just for ourselves, but then we put the word out to our friends that they were welcome to ride along if they thought they wanted to, and we could split the cost. Most of them thought it was a great idea. From our house to [...]
Our last week in site passed so quickly it’s difficult now to sort out the details. It felt like that week was actually almost two weeks of constant activity packed into the space of about two days. Saying good bye started on our way home from the fourth of July party, though I think the [...]
Looking around my house in these last remaining days, my eyes fell upon The Stove. I can say pretty honestly that it has become one of my favorite things in our home, and I will miss it dearly. In the half year before we had it, we were suffering daily from the nonstop 40-degree weather [...]
I found a great book during our COS conference. I’d been looking for it for over a year, ever since I heard about it from Karen, our linguist friend from the University of Illinois. Way back in 1932, an American enthnographer named Oliver LaFarge made a trip to Santa Eulalia, and studied the Q’anjob’al Mayans [...]
Aaaah, site visit. How well I remember our first week in Santa Eulalia, two years ago… the cold, clammy hotel with the brown, grease-streaked bed… the bathroom overflowing with sewage… the days spent wandering around the streets with nothing to do as people stared at us… the bland, not-so-sanitary food eaten in dingy comedores that [...]
I started writing this prior to the 4th of July excursion. It will all make sense by the end of post, I hope.
Construction is finished, entirely absolutely 100% finished. You could say I’ve got a lot of sueño. Sueño means tired, but it also means dreams, and I think I’m so tired that sometimes the [...]
I know I promised an update about the mayan school a LONG time ago, but things have been weird. I last posted about the construction way back in Week 8, and here we are, suddenly in Week 20! How did that happen?
Some time in Week 9, we started to have some of the problems typical [...]
This weekend was the annual all-volunteer conference and fourth of July party. In many regards, it was much like last year, except that we knew only a handful of people this time. The majority of our group left country a few weeks early, getting ready to start grad school and other things like that. Where [...]
Here I sit at the Peace Corps HQ, finishing up the SPA paperwork. We did the last of the construction Tuesday, and had to leave at 6am the next morning for our last administrative trip to HQ during our service. Besides all the other stuff going on (which will probably appear in the next post), [...]
Somehow, in the midst of all our SPA construction, I managed to find yet more for us to do–I planned health fairs at the school. Soon after we arrived in our village, almost two years ago, the teachers asked if I would help them with sex education. They said they’d had a hard time getting [...]
Despite the frantic pace of our lives as we try to get things sealed up here, I had to take a trip this weekend to go visit Dan. He’s the last of my friends that I’d promised to visit, and we’re about out of time.
Traveling by myself in Guatemala is kindof strange, since Emily and [...]
In addition to how physically and emotionally tiring the construction project has been, there’s been an another exhaustion factor. I’ve felt, the whole time we’ve lived here, that there are always eyes everywhere, watching and judging our every move. In the two months we’ve spent almost every day, six days a week, getting up and [...]
When we last spoke of stoves, we were building the bottom half. This was a timesaver idea we had to help us get 15 stoves done in four days of work. The issue is that the stoves have a concrete “table” that we pour on the ground, to save on the time and expense of [...]
Besides all the insane SPA construction going on, we still have a lot of other administrative tasks to do to prepare for our departure and the coming volunteer’s arrival. A few days ago, Emily went with Aurelio (our counterpart) to visit a few nearby villages where the new Santa Eulalia volunteers will be living. Peace [...]
The majority of the projects we’re building for our SPA grant are stoves. They’re an important key to improving health; the World Health Organization says that more than half of human beings cook over a fire, and the majority of them live in smoke-filled environments with a poor or nonexistant chimney. Medical studies sponsored by [...]
One of the nice things about all this SPA construciton is that it’s a great chance for the comunity to pull together and work as a team. However, as is the case in human endeavors, not everyone wants to play ball. Mayans have a strong sense of community, a willingness to look out for the [...]
Today I am at home, sick, feeling like a chucho. Chucho is Guatemalan slang-Spanish for “street dog”. Not your ordinary dog that has a home and an owner… that’s a perro. A chucho is a mongrel, usually with mange, underfed, covered with flies. You wouldn’t want to pet or even touch one, and heaven forbid [...]
We’re getting close to done with the tanks. This morning we did the base of the next-to-last one, and as I was gluing all the PCV drainage plumbing together, I kept thinking “one more time… one more time…” I think I like the tanks (pilas) the best of all the projects we’re doing, but MAN, [...]
You’ve all read the post about our trip to Aguacatan with our friends Pedro, Lucia, and their family to celebrate a first communion and baptisms. Our friend Reyna, mother of the famous Delmi, has also been trying to have her children baptized for months and months. Her first problem is that the church here in [...]
Even though we’re buried to our ears in work, we decided to take a Saturday off to visit some good friends of ours, the other volunteers in our municipality. Or maybe it was because of the work. You see, Nick and Katal work in a village even more remote than ours, one that [...]
Fletch has been posting avidly about the design and construction of our infrastructure project. His posts come out looking very neat and organized. The projects look polished and done. This doesn’t really portray the reality of what has been a rather frantic and taxing mental and physical effort. These posts don’t ever let on to [...]
You all remember Galindo, right? Nas Palas’s grandson that tried to commit suicide a few months after we got here? Well, I’ve not spoken of him in a while, but he’s been around, doing various things as young men his age do. Sometimes he goes to cut firewood, sometimes he cleans trash out the stream, [...]
We’re still working on the pilas. We’re well into the rainy season, but we’ve been lucky so far and the sun’s been out almost every day. We only need the luck to hold out a little longer, and then we’ll be building the stoves… indoors. The materials for the stoves arrived yesterday, so after we [...]
One of my favorite things in life is “making”, the process of creating something out of nothing. Creation is mankind’s highest calling. I’ve done it all my life, and I’m attracted to people of the same cloth: blacksmiths, knitters, homebuilders, woodworkers, painters, writers, cooks. Making is not something that is much valued in most of [...]
This week we started the second part of the construction for our SPA grant: water tanks. Technically, they are pilas, which is a particularly Guatemalan phenomenon. A pila is an open-top water tank with two wash basins attached to it. Like the stove, it’s one of the centerpieces of the Guatemalan household. The women gather [...]
When we got back from our big trip, Reyna came over to talk to us. “You need to dig up your potatos, or they will all rot in place now that the rains have come.” Knowing the locals to be knowledgeable about such things, we did so and were pleasantly surprised to find that the [...]
Trying to Understand
by Emily Richardson Fanjoy
Guest Columnist
I’m just under three months from finishing my Peace Corps service in Guatemala, and while my husband and I have had many good experiences here, we’ve also had our challenges. The fact that lots of the ladies think my husband needs to take a second wife because I don’t [...]
Go Organic!?
by Emily Richardson Fanjoy
Guest Columnist
Last month I talked about why it’s important to be invested in international development all the time, not just in moments of crisis. That article might hint that all we can do is support large scale government decisions on international policies, but today I want to talk about personal decisions [...]
Oh.my.goodness.
Things have been busy, as you might have noticed from Fletch’s post. It feels like we were living on the road in Guatemala these past few weeks. Let’s recap and look at our calendar:
Sunday (May 16): baptism and first communion in Aguacatan
Mon/Tue: latrine buildng in San Sebastian, bus to Antigua
Wed/Thur/Fri: COS conference, COS meds began, [...]
Nothing happened! The sun shined all day, and now the stars are out. We spent most of the day at a double baptism and a half hour after we got home and were running around crazy–starting bread, digging up potatos, getting ready for some heavy yoga–we were spontaneously invited to dinner. Magdalena had killed one [...]
Things are getting exciting! The storm is getting worse, though for us that just means buckets of rain. We’re still trapped (administratively) in site, but some PCVs on the pacific coast of Guatemala have actually been evacuated. Hmm. I don’t figure that will happen to us, because we’re actually safer here than trying to go [...]
We are back from our long trip, and just in time. A few minutes ago we got a text message from the security chief that Peace Corps Guatemala is on “standfast”, and we aren’t allowed to travel anywhere for the next 48 hours. Some sort of tropical storm is on its way, and [...]
Our travels continue, including several days of medical testing. Uncle Sam tries to return us the way he found us, so that means checking us out for all the things that could (and probably would) go wrong while living in the jungle for two years. A few more of my compatriots were diagnosed with tuberculosis, [...]
Here I am, spending the night in a treehouse in the mountains overlooking Antigua. My friend Belkar saw that we’ve been having a rough week, so he suggested we treat ourselves to something nice and he’d send us a few dollars via Paypal. My friends are the best.
We just finished our COS Conference (Close Of [...]
We just spent two days visiting our friend Charlotte. We like to visit her, but this time it was for business. You see, Charlotte’s program is Municipal Development, which means she’s really good at things like creating women’s groups, organizing people for political action, and working to enhance services provided by local governments. She’s not [...]
I’ve had some observations recently that I wanted to share with everyone about SPA and the celebration we attended with our friends on Sunday and building latrines with our friend Charlotte at the beginning of the week, but I’ve had no time to write about them all. Then I had something happen that stopped the [...]
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