First week at site!

---

Visiting my site has brought on many emotions and thoughts.. is this really the town I will be living in the next two years? How can I learn the local Mayan language and will my Spanish continue to improve? It is so cold and high up in the mountains, will I survive through the nights with only the clothes I brought and lack of sleeping bag I failed to fit and bring? Will they accept their first gringa in this town, or will they just continue to stare as some are in awe, some in fear, and some out of shear confusion? Will I make friends and get along with my co workers at the health center?

In spite of all this, I managed to feel quite welcome, especially in the local schools. Both the teachers and the students are very friendly and seemed rather excited to have me here. The volunteer living near my town who occasionally comes to work in my town is starting a project to help tackle part of the trash problem here. We are doing a bottle project with the schools and we are making it a competition among the classrooms in hope of more motivation. Each student needs 3 plastic bottles, hopefully ones they find on the ground since there are more than plenty lying around everywhere, then they are asked to fill them with plastic trash and use a stick to shove it in to make sure the bottle is well packed and durable. Then we are going to build 2 latrines out of the bottles along with 10 benches around their main soccer field since there are no places to sit and every Sunday the town has soccer games all day which the majority of the town comes to either play or watch. The classes then are going to paint and decorate the benches with pictures of trees and other environmental symbols. The winning class gets a free pizza party, thus they are pretty stoked about doing this project especially because pizza is a rarity and a special treat for them, and some students have yet to try pizza yet so it will be extra special for those!

I m very excited about starting on this project, and we already went around and talked to all the classes at the beginning of the week so it was a great way to introduce myself to the school and since then when I have been walking around the community I hear yells of "Aeno Alisa". Seno is short for senora and here my name is Alisa or Alicia, depending on what they can remember or pronounce. And I have even had a few kids that will run up and show me their bottle they are filling with trash and give me a hug . It is an amazing feeling to be accepted and well respected by the kids already in the town, and this school happens to be ideally located right next to the health center where I mainly work at, so I will be working in the schools regularly giving charlas, skits, puppet shows and other projects about various health topics throughout the next two years.

As far as cold nights, I have adopted a routine of wearing my wool socks and my mutlucks (knee high knitted slippers), 2 pairs of pants, a long sleeve shirt I used to wear snowboarding along with a fleece zip up topped with a wool poncho I bought here, my bandana and my fleece hat and of course my wool mittens. I was given two blankets by my host family here because they know how cold it is and figured I wouldn’t be able to survive through the nights without them. My room have two unsealed windows and of course no heating so it gets rather cold at night, it feels like winter or late fall/early spring camping! I should really take a photo of myself before I go to bed sometime, then I get into my bug repellent sleeping bag liner while I am still standing up then finally work my way onto the cot they are letting me use! So far these have been working out with my lack of sleeping bag, but we will see how things go when I want to travel more around Guatemala… I may have to give in and buy one finally!

I have been going around with Maria, the health educator, who also works at the health center here in our town. She is awesome and knows both Spanish and Ki´che´ so it has been a blessing to have such a friendly co-worker who is helping me learn about the local town, the people who live here and the local language. Thursday in the morning, she and I walked to several different parts of the Aldea up and down steep, slick muddy roads, and I was impressed that she trekked through these roads in her heels, as are many of the women here since they wear their traditional traje which consists of a long wrap skirt and they wear these year around even when its very cold.

These other parts of my town are called parejas and there are 21 different ones, and all together I think there are about 3,000 people living here, with a total of 4 schools. We walked to another school today to talk about environment health, so to do this more effectively we did a short little skit to show how throwing trash in the rivers and streets is not only bad for the environment but also can make us sick. This is because here there are hundreds of street dogs as well as other animals and kids that play in the trash thus carry the sicknesses into the houses and cause many illnesses. The kids were responsive to this and were very welcoming as well, so I am excited to do more with this school as well throughout my service here.

Then in the afternoon Thursday, we met up with a local women´s group who she has been meeting with over the past few months that she met through the health center. She told me to bring my knitting and crochet supplies because they were going be weaving, as most of the Indigineous women do. I was surprised to find out that I ended up teaching these women how to knit and crochet, and they picked up very quickly, even with the language barrier. They were so excited to have a new craft, and since it is very cold here they can make scarves and hats to keep warm and even start their own small business and sell the goods they make. Maybe I can even help them set up a small co-op in order to create equal shares among all of them who knit, crochet and weave!

They also expressed interest in having regular knitting groups, possibly every week a few of them mentioned. In addition, many wanted to learn more about cooking as well, so I am very excited to start up cooking classes, too with this group of women. I helped make ovens out of wire and aluminum with another group of women in the past during training, so I think that would also be very successful here and then we can also have baking classes such as breads, cookies and pizzas. They said they also wanted to learn English, and in return would help me with learning their local language of Ki´che´. I think this would be a lovely interchange of languages!

My initial thoughts of being worried about being accepted quickly grew to emotions of happiness and encouragement for this group of women and kids at the schools have really helped me to feel welcomed and only in the first few days. This town is very tranquil and is full of very friendly people that express a great interest in learning new things as well as bettering their community and their health.

There is also a local non-profit funded by a group in Germany called Pies de Occidente and the volunteer in the site next to me who has been living here for a year now works with them regularly. Every month there is a meeting with the local midwives and it happened to fall on the Wednesday that I was here, so I got to meet the nonprofit workers and all the local midwives and exchange information with them so I can continue working with them in the future on various topics. I learned that typically the midwives use old, dull razors to cut the umbilical cord and do not have any tools or proper materials for delivering babies. After the midwives attended these workshop meetings that this non-profit was giving about various pre and post-natal health topics, they were given kits with very nice materials and utensils that they will greatly help them when delivering babies, such as real sissors and cleaning solution.

After visiting for the week we came back to our training communities to spend our last week with our host families. I didn't realize how much I had missed them, it was such a different experience to live with a new family that I didn't know, who speaks very very fast spanish thus is harder to communicate and their 4 year old son is very afraid of me since I am the first American he has experienced. My training host family welcomed me back with open arms and smiles, we talked for ages all night about our weeks and all the differences and new things in my site. I will greatly miss them when I move permenantly this weekend!

The next day was the final World Cup game, so my sisters, my host mom and I spent all morning making Pepion! It is a very famous delectable spiced soup here in Guatemala made with two types of chiles, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, along with vegetable cooked rice and meat. We then sat down on mats with our world cup mugs full of fresh papaya juice and watched Spain's victory! We were all in our pijamas all day lounging and enjoying this perfect sunday! It was a great end to a long, busy week, especially after travelling all day saturday from my site for I have to take 4 different buses, it takes a good 5-7 hours total.

The rest of this last week is spent at our training office finishing up the last bit of logistics as well as Mayan Language training. Friday is our final swearing in ceremony with the ambassador and all our families are invited and we will all be dressed up nicely.. my mom is dressing me in their traditional Indigenous traje which I'm very excited to wear! Then we stay the night in Antigua and get to go dancing and then leave for our sites to move in permenantly for the next two years...

lots of emotions, thats all I have to say.

Welp, I guess that is all for now.. Oh and one last thing, I am very happy at the current moment because I am enjoying a cup of black coffee (which is rare believe it or not unless you find a cafe, in the homes they drink a different type of coffee) and a piece of freshly baked banana bread from the local bakery next to our training office, this has been my typical routine at the office every tuesday morning since we have to catch a 6am bus, its an early start so this makes the morning that much brighter 😊

Until next time!! Peace, love and hugs, Alyssa

---

Photos

Imrpoved wood burning stoves
These will be the stoves we will be making

Watching the game
Eating pepion while watching spain win!

Guatemalan Fruit!
Its called a leech (not sure how to spell it) but its delicious

group of volutneers
4th of july party!

Comments

[Mom]

Congratulations!
You seem very prepared and ready for what you have been waiting to do. You will be wonderful with all the skills you have, and will continue to learn, while working with people. You are soon to be an official PCV, moving up from PVT ! Love the pics you added! And love you much! M and D