Site envy

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 doesn’t even have electricity. Basically, a day of forced rest.

I often brag about the view from our window, and I have posted a lot of pictures of how beautiful our village is. But if there’s a Peace Corps house in Guatemala with a prettier view than ours, it would be this one. After 26 months of Peace Corps*, Emily and I finally experienced our fist twinges of “site envy”. I suppose it’s a good sign that it took so long; like I said, we love our site. And I realize that if we actually LIVED in Nick and Katal’s site, the honeymoon might be short lived (What? We have to leave at 5am or not at all?”).

But it has so much to recommend it. Their cute little houses are nestled on a mountainside, with no neighbors in sight (though they are just over the hill, about 3 minutes away). Majestic mountain peaks rise up on all sides, and when the clouds roll in, they fill the valley below. Their road is 40 minutes of 4×4 trail, so they only hear a car or two per day. No electricity would seem like a bad thing, until you realize that the neighbors can’t play loud music and many modern distractions are unavailable. Even better, though, is the nighttime view of a valley completely devoid of electrical lighting as far as you can see. A view completely unavilable anywhere in the US, except for perhaps the deepest reachest of Denali national park in Alaska.

What they lack in services, they make up for with ingenuity. Their kitchen sink/ laundry station is a board on stilts at the edge of their yard/cliff. Nick set up a 55-gallon drum and gutter system to collect rainwater for drinking and domestic use. They also have some technology; besides their solar panel that runs their rarely-used lightbulb (they use candles like the neighbors, to not isolate themselves culturally), they have a handcrank shortwave radio for entertainment. I occupied myself with it for an hour, tuning in stations from as far away as Russia and somewhere in Asia. Then, we played euchre. Simplicity.

After they’d visited us so many time, it was nice to give them the opportunity to show is their style of hospitality. The food was great, the quietude was restful, and it was fun to see other volunteers living the same sort of life we do: working with very poor, very rural Q’anjob’al Mayans in a personal, one-on-one setting.

*Just one month from today, we leave our site for good. Ohmygod, how did that happen so fast?