A Very Guatemalan Evening

I haven't blogged yet about my site and my work, but it's not because I haven't wanted to or even because I accidentally downgraded my internet...  again.  My problem is simple: I just don't know where to start. 

Everything about my life has been totally changed over the past three months.  I have made incredible, new friends.  I live with a new family in a new country.  I eat new food.  I have a new job.  I speak a new language.  How do I begin to transmit this amazing, rich experience with a few sentences and some pictures?  Welp, I have no idea.

So, I have decided to cut myself a little slack and start sharing  anecdotes as they happen.  I am going to start with thie of my Thursday night, which very accurately captures the spirit of improvisation and new experiences, that sums up my first few months here in Guatemala.

It all started Wednesday night at about 9:00pm.  I was in bed reading and not too many minutes away from falling asleep when my phone rang and the person on the other end of the line was Seño Gloria, my host mom.  She asked me to come downstairs to talk.  I really thought I was in trouble.  Luckily, she was just inviting me to her daughter, Ruby's, birthday dinner.  Ruby was turning 15 and even though it wasn't a formal quinceañera, 15th birthdays are still a really big deal here for girls.

So, the next afternoon, I got her a bracelet as a gift and got ready for the birthday dinner.  I still had no idea what to expect.  Slowly, family started to arrive and pretty soon there was a group of about 30 at the house. 

All of the sudden, Gloria says "Let's go!" and we all start to walk out of the gate that surrounds the house.  Lo and behold, the bus that my host dad drives was parked outside of the gate.  So, all of us loaded onto this bus and set out for the birthday dinner.  I'm sure everyone else knew what was happening, but I hadn't been filled in on the details and was totally confused about why I was on, what essentially amounted to, a Guatemalan party bus.

After about a thirty minute ride, we arrived at Pollo Campero, a Guatemalan fast food chain that exclusively sells fried chicken.  Guatemalans LOVE Pollo Campero!  After taking a few turns around the block because we couldn't find anywhere to park a huge bus, we unloaded and headed in. 

The huge group sat along a long table and waited for the meal to begin.  However, there was one problem - Pollo Campero does not serve tortillas and Guatemalans do not eat without tortillas, EVER.  Luckily, this was a prepared group and they had brought their own tortillas.  I am not kidding.  They each pulled tortillas out of the purse and were ready to go.

After a prayer and a few words about the birthday girl, we ate our meal, tortillas included.  Then, we headed back out to the bus.  However, the bus would not start.  After about thirty minutes of unsuccessfully turning the key in the ignition, the two mechanics on board decided they could help and fixed the bus in about twelve seconds.  So, we headed home where we opened presents and said our goodbyes!

While there is not a birthday party every night, there does seem to be some adventure every day.  Everything is new and usually takes me six times as long as I expected and always includes a surprise.  I am yet to go to bed thinking, "Well, that was a normal day."

I hope that by sharing some of these stories with you I can stitch together a virtual quilt of my life here and transmit it via blog.  If you want the 3-D experience, you can always visit! 

Also, if there is something that you would like to know about please shoot me an email at kelley.scholl@gmail.com with any questions that you have!  I would love some guidance about what to write about and would be elated to share more of my experiences with anyone who is interested.

Also, Happy Mother's Day!  I don't want to put any ideas in your head, but Mother's Day is celebrated on Friday here in Guatemala and mother's don't have to work...

Our Goodbye Party

During our last weekend in our training sites, Peace Corps gave us a little money to throw our host families a goodbye party!  The three people in my training town and six of the people in the town next to us decided to pool our money to throw a big pizza party for our families!  It was... interesting...

We made a few faux pas, but hey, it was our first time throwing a party in Guatemala!  First, one of the families arrived about ninety minutes late, which isn't unusual for Guatemala.  The problem is that everybody else refused to start the party until they got there.  So we sat and awkwardly looked at each other for a significant amount of time.  I can't believe in a country where it is totally normal to be an hour late, that people wait for each other, but they apparently do.

We finally convinced the families there to eat some chips, but we had them serve themselves, which my host mother told me soon after was very shameful.  It's important to always serve your guests.  Oops.

When the last family arrived, we learned that they wouldn't eat until we had done the pinata.  Thank goodness we had a pinata, two actually.  So, we were finally able to start the party.  It was about two hours later than expected, but we each said something nice to our host families and they said something nice to us.  Then we did the pinata, finally ate the very cold pizza, and relaxed.

Our reason for wanting to have a pizza party was to do something nice, simple, and informal.  It didn't exactly turn out that way because Guatemalans don't like those type of parties.  Lesson learned.   I think that our families at least know we were grateful for their hospitality and that was the whole point, anyway.  Plus we have some good stories.

Here is a picture of all the guests at our party!

WE DID IT!!

So the big day finally happened, we were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers!  Impressively, all 29 of us that started training together were sworn-in.  That doesn't usually happen, but we're a pretty awesome group.

The first step of the Swearing In ceremony was cleaning ourselves up.  We'd become a little dirty in our time here, but we had to look real nice in order to meet the ambassador!  We were told that we had to rise when the ambassador entered the room, could not eat before he ate, and were lectured in the appropriate way to address him.  You think with all of this warning, I would be ready to meet this VIP, but, alas, I found a way to embarass myself...

After saying taking the oath, we were each called up to get our certificate, and go have our picture taken with the ambassador.  I got my certificate, shook my Program Manager's hand, and headed over to the ambassador... where I proceeded to put my hand around his waist as if he was my best friend or my boyfriend.  Immediately, everyone started laughing and my face turned bright red upon realizing the error I had just committed.  Plus, I forgot to hold my certificate up because I was so distrated by the fact that I had just made an advance on the ambassador.  I haven't seen that picture yet, but I'm sure it's a doozy.

Anyway, all is well that ends well.  I appologized to the ambasador afterwards, and he was really cool about it, telling me, that everyone experiences "awkward advances" in Guatemala.  All in all, it was a great day!  We took lots of pictures of our cleaned up selves and had a lot of fun celebrating our accomplishment!

Oopsie Dasies

So much has happened over the past few days that I have been dying to blog about.  The only problem is that I accidentally downgraded my internet.  (Why is it an option to downgrade your internet??  I do not have the answer to this very important question.)  Anyway, I am going to try to post a few blogs right now, while I am in the office.  I just wanted to let you know that I understand that posting three blogs at once isn't exactly ideal blogging technique.

Drum roll, please...

I am going to ***!!  We got our site assignments on Thursday and I am going to the place where I had field based training.  I am so excited about this for so many reasons!  Here's a quick list:

• There are already two great volunteers there!  They are working on different projects, but they'll be able to show me the ropes around town.  They also happen to be very good cooks.
• The site is surrounded by mountains and absolutely beautiful!
• It's about an hour outside of Xela, Guatemala's second biggest city.  So I'll be able to enjoy the modern comforts in the city.  Still, it's a very peaceful Mam village.
• I'm going to be working on Monitoring & Evaluation and Peer Education, two things I find super interesting!
• There are already established kids and women's groups that I'll be able to work with.

After this great news, we finished up training on Friday!  (SO WEIRD!!)  We ended training by having a cookout at the hot spring nearby.  The water was very, very warm and it was a great afternoon.

Plus, we did not have class this weekend, so we all got to hang out in Antigua!  We took a salsa class, ate some really good food, played a lot of Spades (my new favorite card game), and hiked up Cerra de la Cruz.  Here's a pic of myself and the three other girls from New England at Cerra de la Cruz!

We swear in on Friday... does anybody know where the past two months have gone??

Note to Self

Tomorrow I will be finding out my site - the place I will be working and living for the next two years!  This is exciting and scary and a million other things!  Because there is about to be a big change in my life, I've been thinking a lot about the future and about my expectations for my service.  So, I took time tonight to write a letter to my future self.  I will be a few days shy of my 24th birthday when I COS (Close of Service); this letter is for the Kelley of 2015.

Dear COS-ing Self,

I hope you have enjoyed the past two years and taken advantage of as many opportunities as possible.  I hope you have created big adventures you’ll talk about for years and small memories that you will think of fondly in the quieter moments of life.  I’ve started to think a lot about the person I want to be two years from now and have decided to record some thoughts.  If it changes, that’s okay; it’s life.  Still, I think it is important to remember how I feel in this moment.

First of all, I hope you’re a softer person.  I am always concerned with justice and fairness, but sometimes I forget to look at the person next to me, smile, and strike up a conversation.  Everybody needs kindness, and while it would be nice to influence that on a policy scale, it’s just as important to provide it to the people you see everyday.  (Well, actually, it’s probably more important.)

I hope you picked up some sort of a local skill – whether it be dancing, or weaving, or something in between.  I am both a learner and a teacher here and learning a new skill would be a constant reminder of that.

Speaking of learning, I hope you have used these past two years to become truly bilingual.  There’s something so beautiful about speaking to a person in their own language.  It seems like the greatest way to say that your ideas and needs are so worthwhile to me, that I learned your language to better understand them.

I hope I’m still blogging.  I really believe that my decision to join the Peace Corps was not one that I made solo and that is motivation enough to keep sharing.  My parents were cool enough to smile and say “I think it’s great that you want to spend two year in a country plagued by natural disasters, drug cartels, and political unrest.”  My friends were great enough to assure me that they’d put up with my whining about latrines and would still be around when I returned.  The amount of support I have received amazes me and one of the ways I can thank all of these wonderful people is to share my experiences with them.

I hope you’ve read a lot of books in your free time.

I hope you’ve made friends that are going to be your friends for a long time, whether they are other Peace Corps Volunteers or Guatemalans.

Lastly, I hope you’ve thought about what you want to do next.  And I hope that it’s something that you really want to do, not something that someone told you you’d be good at or something that you think is the right thing.  I hope that two years of roughing it in Guatemala has given you the courage to examine your talents and figure out how best to contribute to the world in a way that makes you very, very happy.

Love,

The Kelley of April 10, 2013

An Overdue Easter Post

Semana Santa (Holy Week) and Lent in general are difficult to put into words here in Antigua.  So, I've made a video to share with you all of the crazy and wonderful things that I've seen over the past few weeks.  (The video is on Facebook.  I'm having trouble uploading it here, but I'll keep trying!)

The most impressive and famous part of Lent in Antigua are the alfombras and the processions.  Each Sunday during Lent as well as each day of Holy Week, processions occur (often more than one at a time).    We even went to a procession at 3am on Good Friday!

Before the processions, families make huge alfombras on the procession route.  The alfombras (or blankets) are made out of flowers, fruits and vegetables, colored sawdust.  Basically anything goes.  After the alfombras are all ready, people walk around for a bit and "oooh and awww".  Then the procession begins.  Nobody is allowed to walk over the alfombras until the Jesus float passes over it.  It is a very big honor to carry the Jesus float or any other that float.  Immediately after the procession passes the alfombra is swept up and the family starts talking about what they're going to make next year.

With all this lead-up during Lent, I was expecting a great Easter Sunday!  But... nothing happened.  There was no acknowledgment that it was Easter.  Even the more religious families didn't go to church.  When I asked what we were doing for easter, they replied that they were going to rest.  It was all a bit strange.

Luckily, we didn't completely miss out on the Easter fun because my sitemates and I had purchased supplies to teach our host families how to dye Easter eggs!  This was a great opportunity to show our families a bit of American culture and to do something nice for them, since they've been taking great care of us.  

I hope you all had a great Easter!  Talk to you soon!