22 Weeks and Counting....

Things here have been pretty great lately! I’ve been blessed with 3 little brothers to liven up my house, and it’s turned out better than I ever would have expected! My host mom’s daughter, who is 30, has moved into the house that adjoins ours with her kids, Yobani 8, Agustin 4, and Cesar 2. I thought this would mean many more messes and much more noise, and it certainly does, but it’s been a blessing in disguise. Yobani and Agustin just started school at the colegio where I work, and so they get up, have breakfast, and walk to and from school with me every day. They also come with me to the field and watch me run every night to make sure I don’t get kidnapped, although I think Agustin really just likes looking for bugs with his flashlight. The youngest, Cesar, who is about to turn 2 has a bad habit of biting, hitting people with a belt, and pulling my hair and face VERY hard, but as long as I keep my distance, he’s pretty great, too. He’s taught me important lessons about the functionality, or lack thereof, of cloth diapers, and that kids start drinking coffee here when they are less than a year old. No wonder everyone is so short!! So I’m really excited to have these kids around and a little extra activity has been a nice change. The kisses before bed certainly don’t hurt either. I’m becoming convinced that I might actually want some kids of my own someday!

Well, school has started officially and that’s been quite an adventure. I’ve been observing classes for the past 2 weeks, and today I had a meeting to give the director, my boss, and the head of the board my thoughts. I’m excited to start teaching here and am excited also about my lesson plans, but I have to admit, the school is even crazier than I expected. The ¨rules¨ here are much, much different than in the States. Kids control the classrooms much more, and that is really hard for me to handle, especially in limited Spanish. I am not accustomed first of all to teaching in general, but I’m certainly not used to kids walking out of the room whenever they feel like it, fighting like crazy and even hitting me, and basically declaring time for recess whenever they feel it’s necessary. That plus about 8 trips to the bathroom for each student every day are enough to make me nuts! But I guess these are things I’m gonna have to work with, although hopefully with the help and support of the director and other teachers in the school. And don’t get my wrong, most of the students are great and they are all SO excited about learning English and computers, so I really am looking forward to it….. But please pray that I am not left alone with the first grade class ever again, or else I might take the next flight home!!

On Saturday the 20th, I visited La Selva (the jungle) with my host mom and a contingent from our church. We had to travel in the back of a pick-up for over an hour, climb down a trail, cross a river on a footbridge, and climb up a big hill to get there. So just arriving was an adventure, and for me, those are the best trips! But THEN, I realized we were there to attend the 15th birthday party of a girl in the local church (and my church helped to start their church), which is basically like a wedding! The girl wore a pink wedding-style dress and had an attendant who was like a bridesmaid, got a mountain of presents, 2 rings, and had a huge feast with a few hundred people. It was nuts! Everyone gets party favors too, so it ends up being a really expensive thing for the families and makes me wonder why this tradition continues. The girl cried like crazy and obviously I have missed some of the significance, but I think basically she is considered a woman now, and it was interesting none-the-less. I just hope she will hold off on getting married or having children for a few years, as that is a MAJOR problem here. I wish they would wait and celebrate the 20th birthday this way instead of the 15th, so that maybe people wouldn’t get this idea in their heads that it’s time to have kids when you really still are a kid. BUT obviously my opinion is contradictory to what is happening in the culture, so…. just some food for thought….

I spent the past 5 days with the other YAVS. We went to a finca near Coatepeque and hung out for a few days, catching up on what’s happened in the past 6 weeks, discussing the books we read this month for work, and learning about personality types. It was probably the simplest retreat we’ve had, but I’ve learned to really appreciate just being together and enjoying my quiet time. We watched some movies on my computer, cut each others hair, and took an awesome hike to a waterfall, also, so it was a great weekend. We ended by going to Xela Saturday for lunch at Café Babylon, and you´d be surprised how much one can enjoy hummus, a good salad, and a beer. Oh, the small things in life!

Well, I’m pretty excited about everything coming up in the next 2 months, and pretty excited that I’m really feeling at home here. I’m planning on getting involved in a health committee in my presbytery who travels around holding events to inform people about hygiene and other preventative health measures. I’m pretty excited about it because there are a lot of interesting people on the committee, including some people around my age, and it also means I’ll get to see some of the other churches in the Presbytery. I also can’t wait for my b-day. The other YAVs are all gonna come to my house and we’re gonna make dinner for my host-family. What makes that even more exciting is that Margot finally moved her furniture in yesterday and WE HAVE AN OVEN!! I’m foreseeing many cookies and cakes in the near future!

Alright well this is about as good as an update as I have for now, but I´ll try to write something more thought provoking soon! Hope all is well in the world (haha) or at least in your world! And remember, one thing doesn’t make a man.

Good Times in Santo Domingo

The past 10 days for me have pretty much been spent in Juan Calvino, the school where I'll be teaching in a few weeks. The school was started a year ago with help from a church in Wisconsin and my church here, Monte Hebron. It's definitely a work in progress, but last year the school won a lot of awards, and I hope that this year the school will grow and learn even more....I've been getting to know the teachers pretty well. There are 7 full-time teachers and 3 part-time (me for English and computers, another for religion, and another for gym). This pic includes some of them, on a day this week when we were making Quetzal birds as part of teacher-training. It was really fun! They seem like good people and I should know because I've spent about 30 hours talking to them in the past week while we were supposed to be having meetings for planning (I've been really annoyed that the director schedules meetings for 8am and then never shows up until at least 10:30, but he averages 11:30. It's RIDICULOUS!) Then this week we had meetings to learn how to teach math. I'm not sure why I had to be there since I'm not even teaching math, but let me assure you that learning about something you don't need or want to know in a foreign language by a teacher who is not even telling you anything helpful, is about the most boring thing you can possibly be made to do. In the name of not going crazy, and actually doing something that needed to be done, I gracefully bowed out the last 2 days and worked on trying to upload some new programs into the school's computers.

My first day of teaching has been changed to the beginning of February. School officially starts this Monday and I'll just be observing classes for 2 weeks, which I'm really happy about. It will be good to see how the other teachers handle their classes and meet the kids that I don't know already. It also gives me 2 more weeks to practice telling the kids to behave! haha. Migde (the guy on the right, who is my boss' husband) is the one helping me to get all this school stuff straight, as he's played a large role in getting the school started, as well as keeping it going.

So this past week, a group of 10 came down from Wisconsin to work with the school and our church in Santo Domingo. This is the fourth year they've come here, and they have awesome relationships with the people. I've realized more and more lately how important it is for groups to come here and spend time getting to know the people, and not necessarily just completing a project. It really makes a difference when people know each others' names, have visited each others' houses, and have shared meals and experiences- whether they be funny, sad, exciting, or whatever else. This group does both tasks very well! In the past, they built 7 houses for women of the church and their families, so this week, they came back to install electricity. It was great to see how much it meant to the women! The group really maximized their time by doing a 3-day bible school, a workshop for the teachers of 2 schools, and a workshop for pastors and other important members of the churches in our presbytery, Suchitepequez. We had a lot of fun, too, including a night of fun in Mazate for the younger ones of us! Another fun thing that happened this week (although I wasn't actually there) was when one of the male members of the group's pants tore. Alba (a woman from my church), insisted on taking him on a "shortcut"-aka dirt path-to her house, made him take his pants of and lie in a sheet in a hammock in the living room, and sewed his pants up while he waited! I also got to make dinner for the group one night- tuna salad sandwiches. haha. Hopefully I will marry a man that can cook real things! But they seemed to really like it....It was really great to spend the week with the whole group because they each had different things to offer and different ways to share, and it definitely brought more life to the church, school, and all of the people involved.... They also brought down my Christmas packages! Yay!! I was so excited to get stuff from friends and family :-), and I even got 2 Christmas cards in our post office box in Quetzaltenango (although I'm still waiting on my Thanksgiving cards). Funny how the mail works here. But thanks CeCe, Derrick, Mom, Dad, Grant, and Rob for all of the great stuff!

So one of the greatest things that's happened to me lately was driving my host dad's truck. He is in Xela recovering from eye surgery (he is doing well though!) and Dina needed to go to Mazate to buy some things for the group. No one in the family can drive, so she asked me to. I told her I'd like to practice, since I haven't driven a standard in a good 6 years....so she let me back out of the driveway, and then everyone hopped in the truck bed and we were off to Mazate. So much for practicing! I didn't have my licence with me and when I asked if I'd go to jail if I got caught driving, they told me not to worry because money can get you out of anything, and they never see policemen anyway. So I chanced it and AS SOON as we were leaving Santo Domingo, a police truck pulled up behind us. While trying not to panic, I couldn't get the truck to go into 3rd gear, and the policemen wouldn't pass me! They rode behind me for a good 5-10 minutes before I guess they decided I was an ok driver, or maybe they got tired of following someone driving SO SLOWLY in 2nd gear! When we finally got to Mazate (it's about 25 minutes away), I realized the parking break had been on the entire time. GENIUS! Luckily the transmission is still in tact and we made it home fine- and with all the gears functioning this time. Needless to say, I don't plan on driving again for awhile. And yes, I do realize this was a bad idea for many reasons, but let's just let that go since it turned out ok!

....I've been thinking alot lately about the problems Guatemala has had to face that have kept it as a developing country. Some of that thinking is due to some really great books we've been reading about the influences of other countries (cough, cough- The US!), religion, and other factors... but also just knowing the people here and understanding a small part of their culture has made me see so much (and of course, I still have SO MUCH more to learn!). For example, the way people go about getting things done here can sometimes make me crazy. Suppose there's a meeting at 10AM. NO WAY is that thing gonna start at 10, because NO ONE will actually get there on time. It will MAYBE start by 11 if you're lucky, and then each person will want to stand up and give a mini-speech about how thankful they are to be there and how they got there "with the blessing of God." I'm not saying being thankful is a bad thing, but all this formality and being late in the first place, is WASTED TIME! I have also rarely left a meeting here that actually accomplished an objective. Usually, another meeting is just planed to talk at a further date. It makes it really hard for anything to get done!....
Another thing that's really been bothering me lately is this: When you walk down a street, you are likely to see at least 1 (and usually more) bread store, cell phone store, and used clothing or shoe store ON EVERY STREET!! I understand why competition is important, but this much competition means that no one is really making money. EVERYONE here seems to be selling stuff, and I wish that someone could just make enough money to buy all the bread stores in 1 area for instance, and make it a chain. How can there even be customer loyalty when you are selling the exact same products that are sold in 100 other stores in a city? It just makes no sense to me! I'm going to continue to contemplate how to fix the economic situation here because I'm pretty sure my idea of buying bread stores or having more productive meetings isn't gonna do it, so I'll let you know how that goes! :-)

Well, I'm now back in Xela for a little relaxation time and also to take advantage of the free Internet in our office. I didn't think I was ever going to get here because on the bus ride up the mountain, the driver kept turning around and asking me questions like, "Will you take me to Louisiana with you when you go home?" I told him of course, if he would just keep his eyes on the road!! Buses are nuts. There were all kinds of things going on- the driver was not only talking, but eating too, and there was a DVD player with only about a 6 inch screen mounted in the front of the bus for everyone to watch. If you weren't in the first 2 rows, you would have needed binoculars to make out anything, but let me assure you that EVERYONE on the bus could hear it. I think they had sub-woofers attached to that thing! Ok now I've gone off on a very random tangent so it's time to switch to a new activity!

I miss you all! Prayers for no worries,

Julia

"I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." John 16:33

Happy 2007!!

Well, New Years has come and gone, and I've made it to 2007 in Guatemala! New Years was more eventful than Christmas- we had a church service, at which I was asked to give the opening prayer and read a whole chapter of Psalms in Spanish (not thrilled), and then we ate tamales and I went to bed becuase I was in a bad mood. But whatever, New Years is all hype anyway.... We did go to the beach on the 1st though, which was pretty nice. We had a little cabana thing and my family brought 2 hammocks, so I slept in a hammock and ate shrimp all day- not a bad way to start the New Year. Oh, and I even had a BEER with my host family, which is really taboo here, but they said it was ok since no one would see us at the beach. It was funny considering I got ratted out by someone at my church last week when I snuck off to have a beer in Mazate (almost 30 minutes away from my freakin city! People need to mind their own business!). Apparently I'm not as sneaky as I thought....

So my host family had all these presents under our Christmas tree that I later discovered were just empty boxes for decoration. I gave them each presents for Christmas, and they stuck them under the tree and they are just sitting there still wrapped with the empty boxes. It's great. Dina even opened hers, re-wrapped it, and put it back under there. It's really weird. I wonder when they're gonna take the tree down and if they'll ever un-wrap my presents and use them.... That reminds me, Sarah's family gave her a pen holder (with no pen) and a coffee pot that had been sitting in their kitchen for Christmas. HAHAHAHA. Gift giving here is GREAT!

The exciting news is that I started "training" for my job at the school finally. The first day included meeting for 4 1/2 hours and talking about work for only about 30 minutes of that, but at least I got to meet the other teachers. At the end of the meeting, they spent at least 5 minutes reading back the minutes of the meeting, which was REALLY annoying considering I didn't feel we'd accomplished anything worth noting in a book... and then we had to sign it, too. Crazy! I still have no idea about the curriculum and have no supplies, and school starts on the 15th of this month. But hey, if they're being this relaxed about it, then I guess I will, too. Hopefully things will just fall into place!! And if not, it's certainly not my fault. I guess a lack of preparation is just the Guatemalan way....

One last cultural thought.... I made a friend in Mazate this week- some guy that works at a bread store and wanted me to help him study for an English exam to be a translator.... but we were spotted by the nosey people in Santo Domingo talking together 2 or 3 days in a row, which apparently means we're dating and soon to be married or something, so I had to cut off my budding friendship. haha. It's funny, but it's also pretty frustrating to me that I live in a community where it's not ok for me to have male friends. So now I'm back to my friendless self and sitting in Santo Domingo reading my 50th book since I've gotten here. I'll be glad when school starts and the group from Minnesota gets here this week!

Hope everyone had a great New Years and didn't do anything too crazy! Send me some emails or mail me something for my birthday (which is only a month away so I probably wouldn't get the mail until about 2 months after anyway, but hey, you could try!!) ....oh, and I have pics up on the web now, so if you want to see them, send me an email and I'll send you the link (I can't figure out how to get it on here!)

PS. Dad, here is that pic of my bed with the crazy bug nets that you have been waiting on! At night I sleep with the green one down too, but during the day it makes it too hot. I kinda like being a princess- or permanantly camping.

Miss everyone! Peace.