los guatemaltecos play some fierce futbol

I got my wireless to connect! Weirdly enough, if you enter a $ sign before the password when trying to connect to wireless, it will make it work. Hurrah for Jessie's internet and google! So this morning I woke up at 8:46, which is by far the earliest I've woken up in approximately 39028493 years. It wasn't even that impressive because I'm still on home-time, meaning it was 10:46 in my head, but that's still the earliest I've woken up in a long time. And that was the result of about 12 alarms. Anyways, I met with Hilda at 9, the woman in charge of AMA, which is the organization that organizes women's meetings in nearby towns. Basically, the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted until the mid-1990s, led to huge human rights abuses, especially against women. As a result, the women have little confidence, education, or knowledge about how to participate in their communities. AMA holds daily meetings to help give the women skills in four basic areas - self esteem, civic participation, education, and 'negocios', which is like business knowledge. If the women attend these daily meetings and develop the skills they need to be able to give back to their community, they are eligible to receive a stove, which is where Highland Support Project comes in. HSP coordinates mission teams from the states to come build stoves in the women's homes. Currently, most of them cook on the ground in these tiny, unventilated huts. It wastes a lot of wood and leads to a lot of respiratory illness because the women are breathing in so much smoke. The stoves the mission teams built have chimneys and are enclosed so less wood is wasted. This helps with health problems and also gives the women more time to do things outside of the home. SO Hilda told me that while I'm here, my job will basically be to develop a year-long curriculum for the women's meetings. The year will be broken up into 4 segments to cover the four themes, and I will be coming up with a plan for each meeting. This will involve going around Xela and finding organizations that the women can volunteer with and learn about, coordinating with the schools and the Mayan Arts Program (another part of HSP) to have guest speakers come in and teach them about the programs and also having the women help out, and finding women to lead each meeting. It's going to be a lot of work but I think it will be fun coming up with different activities to cover each category.

So today, to help me get familiar with the stove building projects and AMA's role with them, Hilda took me around to a few different towns to visit the women who will potentially be receiving stoves this summer. The driving process was fun - because of all the rain (we are now apparently in the beginning of the rainy season, hurrah!) there are HUGE potholes in the roads, and most of them are not paved. So we rode in a pickup truck and it kind of reminded me of one of those disney world rides where you are strapped into a moving seat and a movie screen takes you on an adventure through a haunted coal mine. Once we got to the town, Hilda gathered all the women, there were about 9 or 10 or them, in one of their homes which was one big room with two beds and a table. She told them how the stove building process worked, what they would need to do, etc. etc. Then we went around to each of their homes so she could see if the conditions were right to build a stove. They had to have like a specific type of floor and roof for the stove to be able to work. It's so surreal to see how these people live. It's so different from anything I have ever experienced. The homes are typically one room for the whole family, with dirt floors, tin roofs, and stone walls. The cooking areas are separate from the homes, built either completely of tin or will stone walls and tin roofs. There are animals EVERYWHERE. Stray cats and dogs, lots and lots of caged rabbits (for food? decoration?), pigs chained up in front yards, kids walking donkeys down the roads on leashes, and people herding sheep down the road. Also flies. Lots and lots of flies. Or moscas, if you want to complain about them en espanol. So we finished visiting homes in this town and went back to the AMA house to eat lunch and pick up Tony, the filmmaker. It's fun traveling with him because he doesn't speak any spanish so I translate between him and Hilda. It was really hard at first but it's getting a lot easier. And it makes me feel cool. The town we went to in the afternoon was actually just on the outskirts of Xela, and we basically did the same thing we did in the morning except Tony filmed things this time. Then on the way home we stopped at this mall-type place and got some groceries, then came home and attempted to make sandwiches, but then the electricity went out so we ate by candlelight. It was very special. Then some of the AMA people picked us up and took us to a soccer game, which we did not participate in because I cannot play soccer. But we watched and it was neatsies. Then it started raining so we escaped. There are literally no people here who speak english except me, Jessie, and Tony, and it's very strange speaking/hearing spanish almost constantly. I've improved so much just from this morning, because when you are forced to speak it and translate it you really have no choice. Hopefully by the end of this I will be a spanish master! Although sometimes I get words mixed up that sound similar in spanish but translate to mean very, very different things. For example, cabeza = head and caballo = horse. At the soccer game, I accidentally told someone that they had hit the ball with their horse. It made for a lot of confused looks and nervous laughter. That actually kind of defines a lot of my communication thus far, but maybe one day it will get better. It is very cold here, and it rains a lot. I will probably run out of my supply of warm clothes in like 2 seconds but it's ok cause there's a laundromat right around the corner. And now I am in bed and my feet are cold! Ok, that's enough detailed info about my life in Guatemala for now, I am going to more towns with Hilda tomorrow so it should be fun!

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Part of trip: Highland Support Project Internship

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