Danza Folklorica (Traditional Mayan Folk Dancing)

I was planning on doing another ordinary school visit when I was told that one of my ten schools was hosting a cultural performance day so to speak where students from different schools would recite poems, sing songs, and do traditional dances. This turned out to be amazing. My "workday" consisted of walking 20 minutes to my closest school and from 8-12:30 watching children artistically showcase their Guatemalan and Mayan heritage. In my area almost everyone can speak at least a little K'iche' and for a lot of people it is their first language. I don't think that this event fell on a special day (Guatemalan independence day is September 15), but clearly SO MUCH time and effort was put into this event. One of the more unusual performances was the dance of the monkeys (pictures 5 and 6). The kids who performed wore the most beautiful traditional clothing and the outfits were so ornate. The more I know of it the more I am in awe of the beautiful Mayan culture and I feel so lucky to be living here among it. I am also very grateful that almost everyone in my town and in the schools I work in speaks Spanish!

A mix of traditional and modern clothing 

Traditional huipil (top) and corte (skirt)

Crazy Camionetas

Public transportation buses here are called "chicken buses" or "camionetas" in Spanish. Everything about them is crazy. First of all they are all old american school buses and most of them are all pimped out, some with lights and almost all of them painted with designs and colors. I don't know how they all get down here. I wonder if they all get driven down here through Mexico when we are done with them in the states. The drivers of these buses also practically drag race them down the street. They go so fast! It is common for buses to try and pass each other on the road. I also like to to describe them as "club camioneta" because many of them have TVs in the front and all of them blast loud party music in both English and Spanish.
Guatemalans are speed bump happy. There are SO many speed bumps on every street! It takes about 20-25 minutes on the camioneta to get from Antigua to my old house and there are 26 speed bumps along the way (yes I did count them). I am trying to start a photo series of camionetas, but here are a couple pictures to help you get an idea about what they look like.

Puesto De Salud (Health Center)

This past Sunday I spent the morning (8-1) working at the Puesto de Salud (health center) in my town. There is a woman (probably around my age) who also rents a room in the house that I am living in. She is here Thursday-Sunday working in the health center. She says the health center is pretty well staffed during the week with 9 people working there, but on the weekends she is the only one so last Sunday I went and helped her out. I think this was probably my most productive I have felt since becoming a PCV. The pace of work is just slower here and I am having a hard time adjusting. For example in our first three months in site our main goal is community integration oh and we are supposed to visit our ten schools. But back to the health center. I spent the morning weighing children and babies, passing out vitamins, and recording all of this information. I'm not sure if I am going to help her out every weekend, but maybe I will if it gives me an excuse not to go to an Evangelical service for three hours. My host family is Evangelical and they do this twice a week.

Tortilla Tally, Water Filter, Yanet, and a Cow Detour

So I have mentioned that Guatemalans LOVE bread, but what they love more are tortillas. I don't think that they eat a single meal without accompanying it with AT LEAST 3 tortillas and that is a conservative estimate seeing as that is the number I usually eat. Lets make that number 5. I have tried my best to stay away from tortillas, but they use them to fill up, so if I don't eat at least a couple of tortillas I will most likely leave the meal still hungry. So I eat tortillas. I have started a tortilla tally and am planning on recording the number of tortillas that I eat. I really wish that I had started this from the beginning, because I am sure that by now it would be a ridiculous number. I mean just look at my tally so far - that was only started 2 days ago!!

After a month of only drinking bottled water I finally got my Eco water filter put together and purifying my water! The tap / pila water isn't safe to drink and it comes out of the faucet with little chunks of something in it. My host family only burns their trash so I am glad that I am no longer having to find creative ways to use my empty plastic water bottles. I refuse to burn my plastic trash and am only burning paper. On the bright side all of my organic trash goes to the two pigs in the backyard that my host family owns.

This is one of my billion host siblings. Her name is Yanet (Guatemalans saying Janet). All of the girls in the family like to model and have pretend runway shows. Yanet is in my opinion one of the best. She is three years old and is adorable. Especially when she wears the traditional Mayan traje!

Also today I had to take the long way from my house into "town" because there was a cow grazing on the path that I normally take and my host brother told me that I shouldn't walk there because the cow would kick me or step on me or something. There are normally pigs and sheep grazing in this path, but this is the first time that I had to take a detour because of cattle.

Salsa and Soccer Saturday

This past Saturday was a fabulous day. At 8am I arranged for my host dad to drive me in his pickup truck to the city of Totonicapan to pick up a dresser and table that I bought from a Peace Corps Volunteer who is leaving in a month. I paid my host dad 150 Quetzales (~$20) for the two hour drive round trip and helping me move everything (I live on the second floor). My 16 year old host sister and 9 year old host brother were also going to Totonicapan so they rode in the back part of the pick up truck for the whole hour ride down the Pan American highway. This seemed highly dangerous to me, but they made it. Finally after three months of being in Guatemala (we arrived February 13) I am finally not living out of a suitcase!! Although I did have a file cabinet in my room when I lived with my first host family that worked pretty well as a makeshift dresser.

That afternoon I took a two hour salsa lesson in Xela (pronounced Shea-la) the big city with some other PCVs and locals. This was a lot of fun and only cost 20Q (around $2.50)!! Needless to say I plan on doing this every weekend. Later that night we went to a Xelaju soccer game and then spent the night in Xela because buses do not run at night and it wouldn't be safe to take one even if they did. We stayed at the Gato Negro hostel right in the center of town for 60Q each ($7.75) with a large free breakfast in the morning! I highly recommend all of the above experiences. Also I apologize if you are tired about reading about how much things cost here, but I am constantly amazed at how cheap things are here so I am probably going to keep writing about it.

All in all it was a great weekend and I am so happy to finally be able to unpack! (Pictures of the soccer game will be added soon!)

Feliz Día Del Madre (Happy Mother's Day)

Mother's Day in Guatemala is always on the 10th of May so this year it fell on a Friday. I spent the morning at one of the schools that I am working with. It seems like most schools here have a special event for mother's day where all of the student's moms are invited and they have a celebration where the kids put on performances, dancing, singing, and reading poems all dedicated to mothers. And of course a Guatenalan gathering of any kind wouldn't be complete without dynamicas (basically interactive ice breakers) and refaccion (snack). In my opinion there were way too many dynamicas and not enough performances by the kids, but all in all it was a really nice event. There was one amusing dynamica where they asked for four volunteers from the audience, two men and two women. It was a race between the two pairs where first the women had to put this cloth on the men to look like a diaper (this was highly embarrassing due to the placement of diapers) then the men sat on the woman's lap while she fed him a bottle (filled with juice).

The man - baby activity

My Second Guatemalan Wedding

This past weekend I went to my second wedding here in my site. This time there was no bachelorette party where I got called out for being "the girl in the room who we haven't seen before," but I did get introduced to everyone over the microphone at this wedding (I take it a new Peace Corps volunteer every two years is about the extent to which this town gets new people - gringos especially). This wedding was very similar in terms of general events, but also very different in a lot of ways (there was sadly no furniture carrying this time). There was also no breakfast, but we arrived at 9:30am and when the civil ceremony ended (they were also married by a lawyer) we were served lunch. This wedding was in a special events hall and the bride wore a long white dress. In fact there were a bunch of girls in the wedding party (family) who were wearing white dresses. This couple are jovenes (young)! The bride was 16 and the groom was 19. I have a feeling this is a pretty normal age to get married here in Guatemala.

The venue 

They looked happy 

Lunch

I'm not sure what this was about, but it was adorable!

Monday Market Day

In my town Mondays are market days. The three main (and basically only) streets in town get blocked off and filled with vendors. They sell all kinds of things including: fruit, vegetables, cloth, clothing, dishes / household items, some meat / fish and shrimp, packages of pasta, hot sauce -- Picamas - there is no Frank's here :( --, oil, grains, etc. I have a feeling that most people in my town do most of their shopping for the week there, because there is no grocery store. It turns my quiet town into a busy and bustling place from early in the morning until 1pm when most vendors pack up and leave. Shopping in these markets is definitely the most economical way to shop (and yes bargaining is a MUST). I work in the schools I follow their schedule which is 8am-12:30-1pm at the latest. This is a chill schedule and I am in no way complaining, but it makes it hard to shop at the market. It is hard to describe so see for yourself!!

Tons of typical fabric

Yummilish. Everything is so cheap here! I got a pound of strawberries for 6Q
(less than $1)! I then bleached them (we are supposed to do this to anything
we don't boil or thoroughly cook) to get rid of all of the germs etc. 

Weighing potatoes (all vendors use this system)