Happy (very belated) New Year!

Unfortunately the internet isn't letting me upload pictures today, so I'll update next week.

So I’m not going to complain too much about the cold weather, because I know it’s much colder in NY, but it’s cold here! I stayed in my site for New Years as well as Christmas, and had a good time. I didn’t quite make it till midnight (lame, I know), but I did wake up to all the firecrackers. It’s funny, but New Year’s in some ways seems kind of like a repeat of Christmas to me. Although they’re two very different holidays, they ‘re both celebrated with firecrackers, tamales, and fruit punch. On New Year’s Day my soccer team had a game in a neighboring town. The field was all dirt and so uneven that about half my team ended up with bloody knees. (For those of you who have played soccer with me, you’ll be surprised to know that I was actually not one of them!) We lost that game, as well as the three other games we’ve played since them. But the last game we only lost 6-4, which boosted the team’s morale a little bit.

Last week I harvested coffee again, this time with a different family. In an eight hour day, I cut a grand total of 43lbs. People who are good at it can cut up to 150 or more pounds per day. Generally people pay Q35/100lb to people who harvest coffee, which would have come out to Q16 for me. That’s $2.00. Let’s just say that I’m not planning to earn a living harvesting coffee. But for people who are good at it, it’s good money by Guatemalan standards, I guess.

On Monday of this week I went to the next town over, where I’m hoping to start a women’s group to work with. A while ago I met the president of Mi Familia Progresa, which is a government program that gives financial aid to families with three or more children under the age of 15 enrolled in school. It seems like a good idea- they only get the money if the kids regularly attend school and their parents take them to the doctors’ office regularly as well- but I guess who knows if the parents actually spend the money to feed their kids better or not. So anyways, the president said that it sounded like what I’m here to teach people really goes along with the goals of her group, and invited me to their monthly meeting. So I got there at 2pm, only to find out that the meeting had been changed to 3pm, and it actually got rolling around 3:30pm. (Guatemala is really making me a more patient person). By this time there were at least 150 women, and probably 75 kids under the age of 3. So basically there was a lot of background noise. The president stood on a chair to lead the meeting, and after about 45 minutes turned the chair over to me to introduce myself. Unfortunately, people were kind of done with standing there and listening, so they mostly just didn’t anymore. I know I’m soft spoken, but I really did my best to make myself heard. However, the president also happens to be an evangelical preacher, so her voice carried a heck of a lot better than mine. Haha. Oh well, I somehow told everybody what my deal is, and got a meeting set up for everyone interested next week. We’ll see how many of the 150 show up!

Another exciting development in my life as a food security volunteer- I have worms! And no, I don’t mean parasites, I mean worms to make fertilizer out of my kitchen scraps and cow manure. Definitely not something I was ever into before, but it’s something we learned about in training, and I’m kind of excited about it. I visited a fellow volunteer who works at a coffee cooperative that uses worms to compost the coffee husks, and then uses the compost to fertilize the coffee plants. The president of the coop is my friend’s counterpart, and he was nice enough to give me a couple of handfuls of worms! The poor things hung out in a plastic bag in my room for a couple of days until I could get a big plastic tub to make a home for them, but now they’re happily making the cow manure from my pasture into some super fertilizer for my garden (which has yet to exist…but that’ll have to wait for the rain!).

This weekend I traveled to Esquipulas with two volunteers who live near me, and we met up with some other volunteers that live in that direction. Friday is THE day to go to Esquipulas, which has a gorgeous church built in the 1500s- apparently it’s considered the prettiest church in Central America. It’s also famous for a statue of Jesus on the cross carved out of some kind of black wood. So every year on the 15th of January people travel from all over to visit, because it’s the day of El Señor de Esquipulas. And man were there ever a lot of people there- we waited in line over two hours to see the statue, and that was on Saturday!

When I got home on Sunday, I found out that my neighbor had her baby. My other neighbor had a baby on Thanksgiving, so the neighborhood is growing! But something really interesting I learned, thanks to my host mom, is about the typical diet of women after they give birth. It’s very common in this area, but I don’t know about Guatemala on the whole. So anyways, for the first 40 days, the mother is supposed to eat chicken soup, toasted white bread, cheese, and hot chocolate…and I think that’s it. Apparently that’s supposed to help the woman start to make milk. No vegetables for the first three months, because vegetables “inflate” the stomach, so if you want to get back to the shape you had before being pregnant, you’re not supposed to eat veggies. Also no eggs, though I’m not sure why. Interesting though…

I’m trying to get myself organized for the week today- I’m making pancakes with my women’s group here on Tuesday, Wednesday running errands (and using the internet, which is why this won’t be posted till then), meeting (hopefully) with women in Miramundo on Thursday, making a eucalyptus salve (for coughs and congestion) in Pino Dulce on Friday, and attending a community meeting here in Soledad Grande on Saturday. Busy week! But that’s how I like it- now that my calendar is starting to fill up, I’m feeling better!

Side note- it’s 1:30 on Monday as I’m writing this, and I’ve already felt two tremors today! That makes four or five since I’ve gotten to Guatemala (one on Thanksgiving)!