Life in site

Hi everybody!

Sorry I have been a big slacker pants and haven’t updated in a few weeks. As of today I am officially two weeks in site, which is pretty awesome, and the time really has flown by.

A little bit about my family and new home: I live with an indigenous family, I have two little brothers, Selvin and Dany, and one little sister, Melli, she is only three and obscenely adorable. I also have my host parents, who are really awesome, but the dynamic is not very parental since they are only three years older than me. We live in a medium sized town, about 8,000 people, the population is 99% indigenous, and most everyone over the age of ten have K’iche’ as their maternal language. People predominantly speak to each other in K’iche, Spanish is definitely not the go to language here. All of this is super awesome, but it means that I have been very slowly learning how to speak K’iche, which by the way, is obscenely hard and is filled with glottal letters  that my mouth/throat do not understand in any way, shape, or form.

My house is very modest; I have a room to myself (sorta) and share all the other spaces in the house. We do not shower here, well during the winter anyway, instead we use the sauna! Together! Which Is a lot of family bonding, and is something that I was not prepared for, at all. Now, it is starting to seem pretty normal though, and I am starting to learn to relax a little. The best part about my house is sitting on the second floor where the kitchen is, and just looking at the view, it’s pretty ridiculous. The less awesome part of my house is that we only have water half the week. You win some, you lose some. I will say that I had no idea how much I would miss running water just for little things.

I have officially starting working in schools; I have every school in my district, but only grades pre-K-sixth, which means I have about 95 teachers I will work with, and roughly 1500 students, all of whom seem to know my name, and I literally could not be more clueless at to theirs. YAY integration.

What else… Oh, I have already had my first confrontation in Spanish, *scary*. But I made it through and didn’t even die!

Also, I have the best site mate ever, and would pretty much be lost without his guidance and help, though it has also already gotten me in to a few strange situations. Like the time I was going to watch him judge a beauty pageant, but then became a guest judge. Surprise! That was really fun, but also quite awkward.

I currently live about an hour and a half away from Panajachel, which is insanely beautiful and amazing, and one of my awesome cohort mates live only about 15 minutes from that so we have the ability to meet up when Peace Corps allows it. Also, we have renamed Lake Atitlan “Lake Awkward” but I am sure no one could guess why.

Well, I guess that is all for now! If anyone wants to email or exchange letters let me know, I miss knowing what’s happening in the outside world.

Oh, also I have recently started reading this book called Open Veins of Latin America. Holy vaca, amazing, if you like history, or disgustingly poetic writing you should check it out fo’ sho’.