The good, the bad and the ugly

The past eight days (or so) have been absolutly insane, I don´t even know where to start so I´m going to break it down by good and bad and insane.

Good:
We had a GREAT weekend at the beach (not counting the sunburn I brought home on my legs, but it´s not THAT bad).

All of our families (and extended family) from Dueñas rented a 28 person microbus and the four of us from Dueñas as well as Courtney from Pastores and Anna from San Lucas, piled in (I think there were 29 people) with all of our stuff and headed down to Las Lisas, a beach near the El Salvedor border. It was NUTS...we get there and the first thing we see is their pet Racoon on a leash...it´s name is Jackie.


To get to the house (the ¨house¨we stayed at was in a compound owned by Doña Vila´s family, she is the homestay mother of Katherine here in Dueñas...) we drove about 2.5 hours and all of a sudden the road ended...it just ended, and we were clearly in a town, not where we were staying. But, the entire family got out of the microbus (not an easy task), and bags and logs were thrown (literally) off of the roof. I had no idea what was going on, but before I knew it, we were being herded into a small covered boat...all 29 of us

(see the covered boat on the right...exactly like that, the engines were 15 horse power and we had a LOT of stuff).

We finally stop at a beautiful sandbar island with a lagoon-bay in the back and the Pacific Ocean in the front. It was beautiful!

We had amazing food (including a caldo which had surprise animals in it, most of whom still had their eyes) and relaxed under palm trees and drank Cuba Libres. It was perfect.

In addition to that...

I FINALLY GOT MY SITE!

(way to bury the lead right?)

I will be living in Aldea San Vicente Buenabaj, Momostenango, Totonicapan


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It´s an indígena community that speaks mainly Quiche...good luck!...it´s a farming community that produces corn, trigo, potatoes, habas, arvejas, beer and pears.

I will have a site mate who has been there for a year and is in the Youth Development program, I will meet him at the 4th of july party on Saturday (can´t WAIT!).

ok so now to the BAD:

I think that many times people don´t understand what a Peace Corps Volunteer is. We´re not volunteers, not really...we volunteer to work abroad, but once we´re here, we have a job, we get paid (not alot, but enough to eat and live) and we have a lot of real work. So like any job, the Peace Corps has an interview, however, it´s interview is 3 months long and called training.

During training we´re watched, talked about and judged as to whether or not this country and program is right for us. It´s hard.

Recently our good friend Haley was asked to leave. It was sad, because she didn´t break any rules, it was just decided that she wasn´t a good fit for the program and sent home.

We will miss her and I wish her all the best in her future endevours.