Blogs from Western Highlands, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 7

ahhhh I am SO sorry I have been a horrible blog updater!! With finishing up our time at TRAMA and then having visitors for 2 weeks, this is one of the first chances I've had to just sit around and not do anything! I have a feeling it will take a few blog posts to catch up with the end of January and most of February -- again, I APOLOGIZE! The last week of January was a bit of a busy one for us - we traveled around to a few different places with a great girl we met volunteering at TRAMA. Her name is Chiara and she's Italian. She's back in Italy now (actually, Scotland visiting her sister) but we're still in touch and I think we will be for quite some time :) Chiara, ... read more

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

It's been awhile since I wrote last - sorry! To be honest though, not too much really happened before Christmas. We just did the norm -- wake up, coffee (Roger is in LOVE with our espresso maker!), volunteer, dinner, sleep with a few hours of bass and books thrown in. Christmas wasn't really anything too different either. We decided not to exchange gifts since we're sharing all money and everything we own down here anyways. It was a bit of a bummer - I didn't think I'd be bothered by it too much but I really took it hard. It was so different (and not that awesome) to have Christmas without family, without snow, without yummy smells from the kitchen all day. And then looking at everyone's awesome times on Facebook made me even more sad! ... read more