Moving and Working

The rain has started. It rains lightly for a couple hours after lunch and then hard after dinner and into the night. One of my favorite things is to fall asleep to rain, and sleeping under a tin roof makes the sound incredible. We can't really talk or watch TV or anything that requires listening once the rain at night starts. It should stay this way or get even wetter throughout the rest of my time here (which I realized is less than7 more weeks!).

I moved out of my house on Sunday. The mother of my host father passed away the Friday before, and the whole weekend was taken up by funerals, services, lunches, processions, etc. I hardly saw them because they were gone nearly the whole time. Sunday afternoon there was a big lunch at my house with lots and lots of family and friends. The already emotional atmosphere made my moving out feel even stranger. Saying goodbye was more difficult than I expected it to be. Even though there were things I was always unhappy about, they had been my home and family for the past three months, and I was sad to go.

I moved in with a family I had heard good things about from other students at the school. The house is very close to my old one, and convenient to the places I know and frequent. My hostparents are Lionel and Marisol and they have two daughters: Anna, who is 10, and Rimque, who is 18 months. A student from Holland stayed with them awhile back named Rimque, and they liked its sound and guaranteed rarity in Guatemala. So far, I am really enjoying them. They eat with me, something my old family only rarely did, and speak much more with me. It's still new, but I think I will feel more comfortable with them. I don't have pictures of them yet, but I do of the house and my room.


My room. It is much smaller than the one in my old house, but it is comfortable and more than enough for what I need.

This room is just outside my room (the first door on the right). You can see the moisture from the rain on the walls. I eat here with the family and Anna watches TV nearly all day when she gets home from school around 1. She watches almost exclusively shows from the States on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network, all dubbed in Spanish. The shows are all ridiculous, but it's good listening practice, and Anna editorializes and helps explain when I get lost. The house is much bigger with wings where other family members live, but I spend nearly all my time in this room or in mine. There is another room for a student, but I've been the only one this week. Maybe tomorrow I'll get a roommate.

This is the view coming into the house. The ground slopes down pretty steeply once inside the gate. My 'area' is behind the floral curtain on the left. The sky is too cloudy in this picture, but normally you can see the mountains in the distance.

I spent the last two weeks after coming back from my Semana Santa travels looking for a place to volunteer. I called and visited several places, and realized to my disappointment, that nearly all the clinics here only accept volunteers with actual training and more patient skills than I have. I wanted to work in a medical setting, so that was discouraging. The lack of work and place was wearing on me, though, and making me pretty homesick. I was feeling purposeless, directionless, and anxious to get back into a routine. So, I went to the original clinic (the one with lots of other volunteers), Primeros Pasos (www.primerospasos.org), on Monday morning and spent the mornings of last week there. After seeing more closely what they do and speaking with the other volunteers, some of my initial worries were allayed. Yes, they speak more English than I would like, but there is also a lot of Spanish, and once I start teaching health education classes, that will be really good sustained speaking practice. As with the other clinics I visited, I won't be able to do any patient care, but the health education volunteers are pretty much the reception/front office staff, greeting and checking in patients, processing files, etc. As a rule, only Spanish is spoken in the front office so as not to intimidate or disorient the patients as they enter the clinic.

What is health education, you ask? One of the clinic's primary functions is seeing students from the surrounding 10 communities' schools. Four days a week, the clinic gets a class full of students who come for a general healthy child check-up, a dental check, and some kind of health education. The topics vary by age, of course, from basic nutrition and hygiene to the environment, puberty/sex education, and drugs and alcohol. Health education volunteers also travel to the schools for longer, more in-depth discussions within the classroom. The hope is that the clinic will see every child from the community at least once a year. I'm hoping that giving these classes and being involved in the larger life of the clinic will be good practice speaking and listening, and I'm encouraged by what I have seen this past week. I thought about finding a second placement for the afternoon, but by the time I get back from the clinic and have lunch, most programs have already started. There are also often errands to run for the clinic, and other things to be done in the afternoon. I'm still thinking about other ways to practice speaking apart from an official position.

My time is winding down now. I can't believe how fast it has gone. I will be at the clinic for another five weeks, and then I'm planning a quick-and-dirty, week-and-a-half loop around the country to see the things too far away for a weekend trip. I haven't found a traveling companion, yet, so if any of you has time and money at the beginning of June, let me know.