In reply to Jim.

Thanks for the reply. I will definitely take you up on lunch. I never got tired of tortillas and beans. Enjoy all the tortillas you can, because in over 25 years of being back in Gringolandia I have yet to have a real tortilla i.e. made with stoneground mixtomal and cooked on a clay griddle on an open fire. In my three years of service I spent many joyful hours hunkered down in some family's cocina, with a little kid sitting on my lap, marveling at how privileged I was to be able to share in the experience of sharing the daily bread.
I don't know how PC handles indigenous language training now, but in my day, if a volunteer qualified with a Foreign Language Rating of 2.5(?), lived in an 80% or better Indigenous site, and especially if you were considered an excellent candidate for future extension of service i.e. you really loved your PC experience, then PC would spring for two months of Indigenous language training with a local tutor ( usually Evangelical trained ), one on one, for 4 hours a day. It was grueling, and not many of us opted to go through it. But for those of us that who did, a whole new world was opened up to us.
As a Cakchiquel speaker I found that I could communicate with similar language groups, such as Quiche and Tzutuil, by listening carefully and figuring out minor differences in verb and noun usage. Just the fact that we were trying to communicate with people in a different Indigenous language than there own, so impressed people that they would patiently converse with us for hours.
Once again, enjoy your experience. Yes, I know you will have some sad times and even some real bad times, but when you look back on your total PC experience, I believe you will find the heart warming memories that most of us "oldtimers" have. You will be a member of a special cadre of Americans, and we RPCVs will welcome you as one of us.