Rechicken?

Life has been kind of crazy lately. The rainy season has started again, though luckily not with as much of a bang as hurricane Agatha last year! Along with the rain comes the time to plant gardens and crops here on the mountain. Corn is about four inches high now here, and all the men are weeding their corn (with a hoe, or course, no roundup!) and planting broccoli seedlings. I've been working with my women's groups and schools to get their gardens planted. A few weeks ago my middle schoolers and I got caught in a rainstorm while working outside, and to keep them under control while we waited out the rain, I tried to teach them the names of the vegetables that we were planting in English. "Como se dice repollo?" (How do you say cabbage?), I asked them. Silence. Then one little boy, scrunching up his face and thinking really hard, finally shouted out "Rechicken!". In Spanish cabbage is repollo, and chicken is pollo. I have no idea what the word chicken is doing in the word cabbage, but I was impressed that the kid was able to come up with that, however wrong it was! Pretty funny.

While keeping busy in site, I've also traveled a bit lately. Two weeks ago I visited Coban and Semuc Champey in the department of Alta Verapaz. I stayed at my friend Kamille's house with Amy and Erin, all girls from my training class. On Sunday we cheered on Erin in the Coban International Half Marathon, and then Amy and I headed to visit Semuc Champey, a beautiful series of natural pools of crystal clear water.


This week I spent time at the Peace Corps office helping teach some workshops for the food security volunteers who have been in site for six months. As I hosted this group in my site during their field based training last October, it was pretty cool to see how much they've grown as volunteers in that time. The first day I worked with Alene to teach a short workshop on communication to volunteers and their counterparts; while we all know how to communicate in theory, cultural differences always make it more difficult here! The second day Alene and I tag teamed to teach about food preservation: she taught the group to make a solar dryer out of cardboard boxes while I taught them how to make and can pickled beets.

Now I'm back in site trying to get caught up and then some, all the while completely distracted by the fact that I'm coming home next week! Yay!