Dear Everyone,

I would like to begin, somewhere, but it’s hard to figure out where, so much has happened. I’ve been in Guatemala for two weeks now, but it feels like it’s been at least a month. The two days in D.C. were absolutely packed but we made time to stop in and see the President.

Hah that is not normal for all Peace Corp volunteers, but it just so happened we were there for National Volunteers Week and W was giving a little speech so we were invited for a photo op and to listen to him talk. It was a pretty funny event as basically everyone in our training group dislikes him, but we were excited to check out the white house. So we all boarded the bus that was to take us there. For some unknown reason, our trainers were not on the invited list and could not get in so they didn’t go with us and thus when our driver dropped us off on a street corner in downtown DC we had no clue where we were supposed to go. Luckily someone had a clue where the white house was, and from there we walked in circles questioning security guards until we got to the i.d. checkpoint and they let us in. All of the PC country directors were in DC for a week long conference and they came too, so we met many of them. After sitting in a room being lectured on culture, diversity, safety and our wardrobe for a day and a half it was nice to be standing out in nice weather with people who seemed genuinely excited that we were volunteering. -One strange thing about PC is that there’s so much bureaucracy that they beat a dead horse explaining everything as though you’re a child, and though you’re donating two years of your life to them they don’t seem that happy for you or excited you’ve come, until you happen on just the right people outside of the paper work side of things. The Country Directors were so happy for us that we immediately got excited. One CD mentioned how rare it was that we got to meet the president, but mentioned she had a photo of her training group with JFK from 1962, which is totally sweet, since he IS the president responsible for the organizations existence.

They let us, and the couple hundred other invitees, roam a number of galleries once we got inside, while a uniformed service man played a grand piano. Lots of presidential portraits and chandeliers to look at as well as an inside out view of the South Lawn. Then they began to line us all up for our photo where we, who have all known one another for about 24 hours at this point, were squished boobes to backs on these stairs and made to wait like 15 or 20 minutes while they secured the area. We were all joking around to pass the time, and W just sauntered out. I must say, it was very surreal. I did feel a kind of shocked awe for a few seconds before i realized I really don’t like anything this man has done in office, and that quickly the awe was gone. He does not sound any more intelligent in person than he does in person, let me assure you, since the first thing he said was, “Gee, I sure wish someone would have told me I was meeting with you today. I just met with the President of Guatemala yesterday to talk about narco-trafficking. Are you the first group to go to Guatemala?” To which I, probably more resentful sounding than I should have, responded, “No, actually Peace Corp has been in Guatemala since 1963.” He looked a bit taken aback and said, “Well, no, I guess you’re not the first group then.” He talked a little more, turned, the photo was taken, and he said, “ I thank you for your service, for serving your country in this way,” and I back pedaled some because he’s granted PC their largest budget in history so I said, “Well I hear your responsible for our funding, so thank you for that.” and he’s said, “oh, yeah! Right, I am. Your welcome.”

Fletch about died laughing and told me he couldn’t believe I just corrected the president of the United States of America. I was just so overcome with years of annoyance with the man, I couldn’t help it! I just told Fletch he could let my Dad know he was certainly not the only person who has to put up with my flack. And to top it all off, we watched W speak, and he managed to call us “spirited foot soldiers of compassion”. Ah, doesn’t he have a way with words…

The big jump happened the next day when we actually boarded the plane to Guatemala. Due to all the obstacles we had to get through we were pretty convinced that they would find some reason not to let us go, but they didn’t! So we woke up at 3:30 am to started the journey. Fourteen hours later we arrived at the Peace Corp training center in Santa Lucia Milpas Altas. We then had our mugshots taken–lovely–, sat through a few hours of culture classes, got our first of many rounds of shots and were then walked to our host families home for the evening. This is where everything hit me.

I was nearly incoherent at this point from lack of sleep and probably would have had trouble speaking english, but i had to socialize in Spanish with Dona Consuela and her 5 and 9 year old sons. They were so kind and welcoming, and thankfully there were 4 volunteers staying together: myself, Fletch, and two other girls, which took the pressure off somewhat. Their home was cinderblock and corrugated tin roof, and all of the plumbing was concentrated in a sort of outdoor hall way. Before I went to bed I wanted to shower, so I went to the bathroom, but here they don’t really have a functioning sewage system so you can’t do things as you do in the US. There is a trash can where all toilet paper goes. Being completely exhausted, I was running on habit and threw the tp in the toilet, and didn’t notice my mistake until I couldn’t get the toilet to flush, but I was so embarrassed by it that my face began to burn and I reached in, grabbed the tp and threw it in the trash can. I was mortified. I still had no idea how to make the toilet flush, so I moved on to the shower, which was conveniently right next to the toilet with no separation whatsoever. It was freezing, and all i wanted was to be clean and sleep. I couldn’t breathe normally the whole time I was in the shower, and I kept staring at the huge bug on the wall thinking there was no point flicking it off because then it would just be at my feet. I felt so miserable it was great to pass out that night, and though the water was cold I was clean. However, I woke up in total darkness to multiple explosions that sounded like gunshots. My heart was racing; I honestly thought the civil war was starting again. But it all calmed down suddenly and no one else in the house seemed to be affected, so I went back to sleep. Hah, it turns out that firecrackers are traditionally set off at dawn outside the home of anyone celebrating a birthday. Surprise!

Living with Dona Consuela and her family was by far the best part of our 3 days in Santa Lucia. Their 5 year old son, Harol–who is about the size of an average american 3 year old– adored Fletch from the time we walked in. He made us draw him pictures and climbed all over Fletch like he was his own personal jungle gym. Poor Fletch could hardly understand what he was saying, so one of us translated for him all the time. We had a great time fixing dinners with them. She gave us tortilla making lessons and we got to know her and the family. She is a 30 year old women who went to school up to the sixth grade and met her husband working in a factory in the capital. She used to run a day care for 15 children out of her home without any helpers, but she prefers supplementing her family income with what she makes hosting Peace Corp volunteers and renting a part of their house to a 3rd year PC volunteer. I have no idea how they fit 15 children in their every day, as the 4 of us seemed to cramp the house severely. Her husband works in the capital city an hour away by bus, so he leaves at 5 am and gets back at 8. While Harol mostly ran the gringo show in his home his older brother Roy practiced his English with us, and started trying to teach us the indigenous language, Cachiquel, that he’s learning in school. He also made all of the girls beaded jewelry our last night in their home. Roca, their father, was quiet but chistoso (full of jokes) when he did speak. Spending time with them helped alleviate the stresses of all day training.

The classes at the center made me more paranoid than I think I’ve ever felt– like every man I passed was a potential attacker, every dog a rabies carrier waiting to bite me, every bus ride a potential armed robbery, and everywhere there are microscopic bacteria and worms just waiting to make me sick. I’m not kidding at all. Yet they talked about our attire like IT was of utmost importance. Business casual, closed toe shoes, they said over and over as though we could suddenly do something about what we’d packed.. I feel like I did a terrible job packing. On top of that I was vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, tetnus, and given my first rabies pre-exposure shot. I’ve now had two of those, as well as been given a choice to take malaria preventative medicine. The choice was take the malaria medication or go home. I’ve come to feel that as soon as my arm stops hurting from shots, that’s when I get to have another one. At least the nurses are nice and really well informed.

Saturday May 3, we moved from Santa Lucia into our host families. There are about 8 different host communities for 33 of us. First we were divided into our programs, health or youth development, and then into smaller language groups. I’m living with a family of 5 in a town just outside of Antigua along with 4 other volunteers. Quite randomly our trainee group has 3 married couples in it–pretty crazy since training groups usually have one couple if any. One of the other wives lives in my town and our husbands live 2 kilometers away, which isn’t too bad. Even crazier is that this couple was also deemed legally ineligible for intelligence and volunteer conflict of interest b/c the guys sister is a navy cryptologist. They too thought they’d never make on the plane to Guatemala. Yay for us! We’re here. : ) Because we don’t get to live together it’s like we have two host families because everyone wants to know the spouses. I told Fletch it seems somehow that we’ve switched families in some alternate universe.I have this small calm family, and he lives with TONS of people who are crazy and loud all of the time. 🙂 haha, no offense family of mine, I do love you.

My family is awesome. I have two sisters, 16 and 7, and a brother, 9, plus the Mom and Dad, a refreshingly egalitarian family, for Guatemala anyway. I was so excited when I came down for breakfast the first day and HE was mopping the floor, and told me since the cleaning lady didn’t come on Sundays it was his turn to clean. The mom runs a typing school for about 5 hours a day 6 days a week, in one hour class increments. The classroom/school is above the main house, and I sort of got this suite deal (big bedroom and my own bathroom) upstairs behind the typing school. I had no idea what was going on when I got here the first day and there were like 20 pre-teens upstairs typing away. I was super exhausted so laid down to a nap while tick tick tick tick tick DING tick tick DING tick tick tick DING tick tick tick tick DING tick tick tick moved in out of my dreams. It was very bizarre and funny. I also have a hot shower, oh yeah! I was almost used to the cold shower deal, but was so excited not to have to do it every day for the next 3 months. My host dad is a college graduate and works for the ministry of education both as a supervisor for area schools during the day and as a teacher of night classes for teens who work during the day. My group is living in the wealthiest host community. I’m not sure why they gave my group this luxury as we are by far the most advanced language wise, and it seems it would be nice to give those with low level language skills a little more comfort. But apparently PC doesn’t care about that. My parents are legally married, which is not always the case since Guatemalans have to get married once in front of the mayor and once in front of a priest and have two parties as cultural custom dictates; weddings are often cost prohibitive, which is why I don’t think our first family was even married because they had no pictures and wore no rings. The kids are awesome as well, all spoiled, but really good kids. Jose and Angelita, the two youngest, go on walks with me and go to the park when we volunteers play soccer with all the local boys. It’s pretty fun. It was a plan first devised because we were all dying for exercise after sitting all day every day, and now the boys give us all high fives when they run into us in the street. I also have extended family throughout town that I keep meeting 3 and 4 at time.

Fletch’s family is also awesome. All of them are, really. Everyone is so kind and welcoming. Fletch lives in a little compound area with a 3 generation family. His parents have two adult daughters, one who just got married in a civil service last Friday (the church wedding is next month) and she and her husband have one little boy while the other sister has been married for 12 years and has 3 children. so he’s got a family of 10 basically. I told him it’s a good thing he’s spent the last few years getting used to a big family; he agreed. The family is always joking around happy which means they love to tease him mercilessly about anything and everything, the kids adore him, and he and his host dad get along fantastically. Fletch has started teaching his father English pronunciation so he can better communicate with foreign clients that come into his tailor shop in Antigua and want a suit. He’s apparently a pretty famous guy as he’s a Deacon in the area, was a Sergeant Major for a year during their horrendous Civil War in the 70’s and nearly killed by the army when he got out b/c he didn’t agree with what was going on, and he’s a founding member of Alcoholics Anonymous in Guatemala, not to mention the suits he tailors are also really well known. The guy is amazingly humble. It’s kind of fun to have two families to hang out with. Friday night we had a wedding party with his family, where I felt like he and I were, in fact, the biggest spectacle of the evening, and a quincenera (15th birthday parties are a girls coming out party) celebration on Saturday night with my family.

It’s pretty strange to be at least a foot taller than just about every other person I encounter and so glaringly white I can find nowhere to hide but in my home, or gringolandia as Guatemalans refer to the tourist havens of Antigua and Panajachel. The only problem with hiding amongst tourists is I feel like an outcast there as well since I haven’t seen anything in Guatemala as a tourist, nor any tourist destinations. We have been herded by PC here and there, as though we’re in a bubble. The realization that I’m in another country has been slow coming since we bounce back and forth from this protected center up in the mountains full of Americans and our host homes. Additionally the organization of this system makes us feel like little kids again, living in homes with moms who fix our dinner and wash our clothes. On Mondays they pack our lunches and put them in our backpacks before we go to the bus stop and get on out of date American School buses–the crux of Guatemalan public transport–and go to class. Plus there is this very high school-heirarchy about new trainees versus volunteers in the field and how many years each volunteer has been here. It’s all very disorienting. Fletch and I joked about this arrangement being like dating again, but we had no idea how formal dating was in Guatemala. We don’t spend much time together and we spend much less time alone and together. The first week was really weird as we basically had two completely separate lives with no communication whatsoever and every day felt like it was a week long. It’s better now that we each know both families and are figuring out how to deal with everything.

Our programs is brand new to our group. It’s been about 10 years in the making, designed by the PC’s Guatemalan trainers. They started out focusing on environmental issues in the 70’s (yup that was during the Civil War, PC never left during the 36 year conflict) and began to see that it wasn’t very practical for country development to focus on trees when the infant mortality rate is nearly 50%, so they’re diversifying the different projects going on, and we are an offshoot of a program currently at work called Appropriate Technology. AT spent about 90% of their time building latrines, water filtration systems, efficient stoves, and concrete floors. They’ve worked like crazy, and yet analysis shows that all the infrastructure has made almost no appreciable difference in the quality of life in Guatemala because no one has educated the people on how and why they should use and maintain this infrastructure. Our program is, ideally, going to spend about 90% of our time giving talks and educational seminars on home preventive health and 10% of our time building. Ideally, that is, because this hasn’t been tried before and because PC has a lot of Ideal thoughts and the practicalities don’t always match up, but we’ll try.

The poverty here is pretty astounding. Water coming out of any faucet anywhere in the country is not really safe to drink as there are no water treatment plants. Some of the water is “filtered” but that does not mean it was treated, in fact, I’m still not sure what it means except that it’s not assured to be bug free so it should be boiled before consumption anyway. There are also no sanitary landfills in the entire country, and indigenous culture holds the belief that if trash is thrown in the river, it goes away. That belief was true until about 20 years ago when their trash was no longer organic, but rather became plastic bags, bottles, wrappers, styrofoam, car tires and parts, etc. The river running through this town would be picturesque, except for the islands of trash, smell of sewage and water running black and thick between two lush green banks. The bugs that breed in it during the rainy season spread lots of amazingly disgusting diseases. The half of the population living on the border of malnutrition, or even well in it, can’t really hope to fight those diseases very valiantly. Hopefully all the shots and pills I’m getting will help me keep some of them at bay, and the fact that I’ve been healthy my whole life. About 60% of country’s population still cooks over a wood fire, occasionally the smoke is filtered out of the kitchen, but often times not. Those who have propane stoves are going back to wood since the price of propane has doubled in the last 6 months. It always smells like a campfire in my house, and I live in a middle class home. My snot is mostly black, and most of my family has a constant mild cough. Though I get to use a toilet, most Guatemalans have access to latrines, but those who do don’t usually see the point in using them since they work in the woods and in their fields, so they go wherever they are, with their animals or without, and did I mention many of them don’t wear shoes? There are chickens, cows, horses, dogs, and birds in and around all the houses I’ve seen, and most people are not aware that it is, in fact, a good idea to wash their hands frequently. Hell, lots of them don’t have running water in their home, and since they’re tending to their animals and children and kitchen fires they don’t, by their own inclination, go searching for water and soap with which to wash their hands. I could go on and on and on, but these are almost all things I knew about Guatemala before I came, yet living here, seeing it all with my own eyes makes the statistic something to despair over. At the end of the day sometimes I just cry because the list of things to do just goes on and on and on, and I haven’t really started to do any thing yet. I guess I’m gathering information, but it doesn’t feel like much.

A few days ago, switching buses in a terminal in Antigua, I saw an elderly woman with no legs pulling herself and the load on her back through the filthy street. Every old woman makes me think of my grandmothers. I wanted to pick her up and carry her somewhere, but where would she need to go? I wondered if she lost her legs being tortured, to a disease, or if she was born without them. There’s no way to know. My spanish/Guatemalan culture teacher spent an hour last week telling us the details of his illegal forced recruitment into the Guatemalan Army in the late 80’s when they were running out of soldiers. He was kidnapped from a park in Antigua with his 3 best friends and spent 4 days at an army base being hazed and forced to watch tortures. He narrowly escaped after 4 days, since a family friend had seen him being taken from the park and alerted his family. His father was a former mayor and he had a few cousins in the army who all pulled any strings they could to get him out. He spent a few years afraid to leave his house, and 10 years in therapy to be able to tell us his story without breaking down. I was relieved to wear my sunglasses home, walking through this town everyone tells me is still safe, gracias a Dios, and that was even left largely alone all through the war. While there were no major incidents in the town itself there were about 20 bodies a day that were left on the side of the highway in front of the town municipal building. All this leaves me to wonder, what do I possibly think I can do here? I’m starting pretty simple. Next week I will start giving health charlas, or talks on the importance of washing hands.

After that we will talk about boiling water, and why people should use their latrines. There is so much to do here.

I know it’s not been that long, but it feels like it has been and I find myself missing everyone a lot sooner than I missed anyone in Spain. It makes me feel a lot better knowing you’re all at home doing your things. Thank you, all of you, for your support because I feel like this is where I need to be right now even though it’s really hard some times. And can I just add, I can not believe I married some one who would put up with marrying me on the condition that he do this as well, hah. I think he’s mostly having fun, but I know he wouldn’t have come with out me. I’m pretty damn lucky.

Send me new, I don’t care if you think it’s mundane. I promise you, I’ll think it’s great.

Love and Peace,

Emily