SamanthaAnne

This morning I woke up around 7:30am with enough time to shower and grab breakfast before one of my roommates and I headed out to walk around Panajachel to do last minute souvenir buying. Admittedly until this morning I hadn’t bought any souvenirs, I had bought one small shot glass that had Guatemala written on it, but that’s about it so I wanted to actually buy something. After walking around for a little bit I found a wool blanket that had the quetzal bird (bird of Guatemala) all over it and since was a much better price than a blanket I had looked at a couple days ago I bought it. My roommate and another volunteer that was with us wanted to buy a chess set made from stone so they headed back to the store ... read more

This morning I woke up to lights!! Yay. I’m so happy to see sunlight and have electricity that I don’t even mind the lack of sleep. I head downstairs to have breakfast and soon after we load up the buses and head to our second last clinic day! (tear) It was a super exciting clinic day because the community we were in (Santa Maria El Tablon) was the community that has the highest percentage of people that speak Kakchiquel so for most of the day each group had two interpreters. One of the patients that my group definitely got to me and made me cry; he was 15 years old and came in because of some stomach pains but when we were asking him all the questions to figure out what it could be nothing was ... read more

This morning I woke up before my alarm (again), but wasn’t overly exhausted so I got ready and headed down for breakfast early. My stomach is still feeling off but I ate breakfast anyways; fruit (papaya, watermelon), tortillas, plantains, little bit of beans, and chamomile tea. I could live off of fruit, tortillas, plantains and tea. Slowly everyone made it down to breakfast and then we got onto the bus and headed to our last clinic day in San Jorge La Laguna. Today we didn’t get any super interesting cases but the group I was in saw 13 patients throughout the day which is awesome; we also got the diagnosis completely right on 4 patients!! Is anyone sick? Don’t worry, I’m almost a doctor, I’ve got this ;) At lunch I decided to venture out and ... read more

This morning we got ready and headed over to the main hotel to eat breakfast before we split up into two groups for our tour of Antigua. The tour was really interesting, we learned some pretty interesting facts about Antigua and got to see tons of cool sites including the main cathedral, an ex-nunnery –which is said to be haunted, and even went to a chocolate factory. At the chocolate factory we learned the facts about how they make chocolate and even got to taste test some! All of us bought some chocolate products as souvenirs before heading out again; it was a really hard choice to decide what to buy because they had all sorts of products ‘choclified’. We broke for lunch and Brandy, Megan, and I headed to Mono Loco to grab a quick ... read more

I seriously don’t understand why here I always wake up so early, maybe it’s because I’m so excited to get out there and see more of Guatemala? Who knows; either way I woke up at a lovely 4:30am. At first when I woke up I could’ve sworn I heard noises so I thought that it had to have been the family which would make it around 5am. I was very mistaken when I looked at my phone and it beamed 4:30am. I decided to peek my head outside to see if the family was up; I knew the dad got up and worked early but I never thought they’d be up this early. Peeking my head outside I saw absolutely nothing and no one, not even the T.V. had been left on. It freaked me out ... read more