The Final Weeks

The last few weeks in Central America passed in a blur, especially after Caleb showed up on the 20th to travel with me for the last three weeks.

We spent the first few days in Xela, where I showed him my favorite coffee shops, restaurants, and sights around town. We also climbed Santa Maria---going up during the day in the dry season makes for a much easier summit.



After Xela we took a chicken bus over to the Lago de Atitlan, where we spent four days strolling around the city looking in vain for Christmas tamales and paches.



After the lake we had planned on heading up to Livingston, Semuc Champey, and Tikal, all of which are on most people's "must see" list of Guatemala. However a couple days before we were due to head up to Semuc Champey the president of Guatemala declared a military state in Coban. Since we didn't much feel like heading into an area where the military was having shootouts with Mexican gangs, we decided to scrap that part of the trip and instead headed into El Salvador and spent a few days surfing.

We went to El Tunco, where we stayed at a pleasant hotel called Casa Mirador. We spent a lot of time reading (Caleb, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, me, The Little Prince in Spanish) and lazing around, heading down to the beach a few times to swim, bodyboard, and surf.

I hadn't ever been surfing before El Tunco. It is a difficult activity, to say the least. The waves were quite unforgiving---big, powerful, and breaking quickly in great crashes. That said, my board seemed to function better as a bludgeon for my head than something to stand on, but I almost stood up once, and that was delightful and thrilling. Otherwise I mostly spent my time epically crashing---surfboard flying, legs akimbo, and thoroughly washing out my sinuses with salt water.



We spent New Years Eve in El Tunco lighting off Roman candles, swimming in the ocean around midnight, and watching people send heart-shaped sky lanterns floating off into the atmosphere. It was also Caleb's and my two-year anniversary that night. Delightful.

After the beach we headed into the highlands of El Salvador, and spent a couple days in a little town called Juayua, which happens to have an excellent food festival every weekend. Then we chicken bused it back to Xela to pick up the rest of my luggage and headed over to Antigua. Besides going on a coffee finca tour, we spent our time doing what most people do in Antigua: strolling around the city and buying souvenirs.

Caleb left for the States on Wednesday afternoon, and I on Thursday morning. Since getting home I have been battling a pretty hefty sinus cold, which has prevented me from going down the list of Things Becky Is Looking Forward to Doing/Eating/Drinking in the United States, since I'm darned tired all the time and the nasal congestion has nearly completely destroyed my sense of taste. Once I recover I'll share what is on the aforementioned list with y'all, as well as Things Becky Will Miss About Guatemala.

Week 20: El Primer Fin

I finished my last Spanish class on Friday! In total, I spent 4 1/2 months taking classes. And sometime in that period I learned a new language and became pretty proficient at using it. How amazing is that?! That said, I'm definitely not fluent. That word means different things for a lot of people, so this is how I'm defining it: speaking a language quickly, with very little difficulty, and with few grammatical errors. I associate this level with, say, being certified as a medical translator. For me to get to that point would take another six months of Spanish immersion, I would guess. But honestly I am happy with where I am at right now: depending on the speaker I understand 75-100% of what they are saying, and I can speak well enough that conversing with patients in a medical setting goes pretty well.

I will still be in the clinic on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and also will be working on finishing up the medical program orientation manual that I and a couple other folk are making, but without my afternoons taken up by Spanish class I have a feeling this week will be a welcome respite from the business of the previous months. I plan on spending my free time watching movies in Spanish, baking, wandering around the city, chatting with the other Guatemalans in my apartment building, and planning the two weeks of travel I'll be doing with Caleb between the 20th and the 6th. All in all, a pretty tranquilo week :)

Week 19: México y no mucho más

Being a passport-carrying gringo from the United States automatically gives me a 90-day visa in Guatemala. However the last time I left Guatemala was when I visited Caleb in Canada, which was surprisingly almost 90 days ago. Since trying to leave Guatemala with an expired visa is bad news bears, I went to Mexico last week. The objective: to renew my visa, set to expire on the 26th of December. The mission: visa run to Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, four hours away from Quetzaltenango.

Technically, renewing your visa means leaving the country for at least 72 hours, and upon reentering the country you get a new 90-day visa. Fortunately, the 72-hour rule is mostly disregarded, allowing you to do your visa run in a day if you'd like, thus not having to pay for two nights in a hostel/hotel. Unfortunately, most of the countries surrounding Guatemala (El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras) are in this CA-4 pact, where a visa acquired in one of countries is valid in all of the others. It is a nice idea, but it also means you can't renew your visa by crossing any of their borders. So that left me with the options of traveling to Mexico (cheap), Belize (expensive), or something really far away (really expensive). Since I have very little money, the choice was an easy one.

I essentially did this trip in a day. I got up at 4:30 to walk over to the Minerva bus terminal where all the camionetas line up. There I found a direct bus to Tecún Umán, the town on the Guatemalan side of the border. I paid $3 for the trip, and four hours sitting four-to-a-school-bus-seat later, I was en la frontera. For $1.25 a guy on a tricycle-rikshaw thingie pedaled me from the bus terminal to the border proper, where I got an exit stamp from a friendly female customs officer for $1.25. Then I walked across the bridge into Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, spent a couple hours frittering away my time in an internet cafe ($1), got bored, ate a couple empanadas ($0.50) walked back across the bridge, got an entry stamp from the same customs officer ($1.25), traveled via rickshaw ($1.25) and bus ($3) in reverse order back to Xela, getting back to the Minerva bus terminal at about 7:00pm. Sweaty, exhausted, and with a stress+dehyrdation headache (it is /not/ a good idea to be hydrated during camioneta bus trips, since they never stop for pee breaks), I collapsed in bed at 8pm, waking up sometime around 9:30am the next day.

My time in Mexico was short lived (about two hours), but I did learn some things, namely:
-Mexican men, surprisingly, are much more prone to cat calling than Guatemalan men.
-It is hot and miserable in Ciudad Hidalgo, but that means they make really awesome ice cold fruit punches.
-The randomly selected empanadas that I ate for lunch in Mexico were by far better than any empanada I've eaten in Guatemala, lending more credence to the theory that Guatemalan food is sadly fairly bland.

So now I have a renewed visa, good until well after I leave Guatemala to head back to the states! And heading back to the states is approaching very quickly - Caleb is going to be in Xela in less than two weeks. Wow.

Week 18: Acción de Gracias

Thanksgiving in Guatemala! I was half assuming I'd be eating the usual beans, eggs, and tortillas, but my classmates who cooked the dinner really pulled out all the stops. We had green beans, cranberry sauce, cranberry can, mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey, squash pie, pumpkin pie, /and/ mojitos.

The most interesting aspect of our Guatemalan Thanksgiving was that we killed our own turkey. We originally were going to buy one from the mercado, but as folks were leaving to do so, Doña Lety, the cleaning lady, overheard us and said that she had a turkey at her house that she could sell, so we bought it.

I was working in the clinic on Wednesday morning when the cooks got back with the turkey, and they called me upstairs so I could take pictures for them. Those present included Paty, one of the teachers at Pop Wuj and a battle-hardened turkey-slayer, who was holding a large butcher's knife that she had just sharped on some cement steps. Also present were the two cooks for the evening, who were to hold down the turkey while Paty killed it. And there in the middle of the patio, feet bound but resting seemingly tranquilly on its belly, was our turkey.

After I had gotten the pile of cameras in working order*, everyone got ready. The cooks held the turkey down, Paty placed its neck over a drain, and with two knife strokes cut off the head. It was as bloody as I was expecting, but it still was shocking to witness. Then, right around the time we were waiting for the nerves in the turkey's body to settle down, Doña Lety's little daughter came in and informed us that the turkey's name was Hector, and it had been her pet. Ack! Some kids learn life's cruel lessons earlier than others, I guess.

This had an interesting effect on the way I felt about eating Thanksgiving dinner: even after Hector was defeathered, gutted, boiled, filled with stuffing, and baked until crispy golden brown, in the end looking very much like a typical Thanksgiving turkey, I couldn't help but remember the living bird. With Hector's life in mind, instead of being in a hyper wow-look-at-all-this-awesome-food state, I was much more aware of how I was connected, in a very circle-of-life-tree-hugging sense, to every dish we had prepared for that night. It actually made me feel so thankful for the food in front of me that I found it impossible to overeat. I hope I can repeat that feeling in subsequent Thanksgivings, because it felt more in accordance with the essence of Thanksgiving that what I had experienced previously.

Other than Thanksgiving I spent last week working in the clinic, studying, running, working on my research proposal, and cooking. Lately I've gotten to do a lot of talking in clinic because I'm one of the better Spanish-speakers at the moment. This in itself is amazing to me, given that in July I couldn't say more than ten words of Spanish. I still have /so/ much room for improvement, but I'm happy with how far I've come after 4.5 months of school, and spending a few hours interviewing and examining patients is a great way to keep my Spanish on the up-and-up. I've been asked where it (my Spanish) is at these days, and it is hard to quantify, but perhaps a couple examples will explain:

I'm starting to understand conversations/movies/radio chatter going on in the background without trying. It means that snippets of conversation will intrude on my thoughts while I'm, say, walking down a street, but this has had the pleasant effect of making me feel more connected to Xela and the people living in it.

I no longer have to pre-translate in my head to say something simple like, "I bought two loaves of bread because they were on sale." Pretty cool considering that in the first week of school I couldn't for the life of me correctly say, "I'm Becky. What's your name?" That said, I still have a lot of trouble with hypothetical statements, reflexive verbs in general, and and, of course, using the subjunctive, but it is nice to at least to be able to say a few things in Spanish without struggling too hard :)

*I have some interesting photos of Hector, but I decided not to post them because they are quite graphic. I may put them on my blog later for intrepid folks to view, but at the moment I'd rather be sleeping :)

Week 17: Luz al final del túnel

A couple things happened this week worth sharing, although I can't say they're too exciting.

Numero uno, I tried some new fruits! (see? Very exciting week.) One was a custard apple (anona in Spanish). I think it looks like a dragon egg. Inside, as the name suggests, are a couple dozen fat shiny black seeds surrounded by creamy, custardy sections of fruit. You eat an anona by picking out a seed encased in fruit, sucking off the pulp and spitting out the seed. They're really delicious.



The other fruit was called loquat (níspero in Spanish). The best I could describe one is "a fig that tastes like a half-dried apricot whose hollow center is filled with fat brown seeds". I don't have a picture of them, but these are also tasty. Having the opportunity to try both of them is another one of the small pleasures of having my own place again; I buy a lot more produce these days, and I get it all from the mercado.

Numero dos, I bought my plane ticket home. The date is January 6th, 2011. Unfortunately, this is about two months earlier than I originally intended, but money and research constraints have forced me to change plans. The money aspect is simple: I just don't have enough of it to stay in Guatemala. But even if I stumbled across a pile of gold tomorrow morning, I'd still have to go back to the States early to work on my research for medical school. I had originally planned on getting IRB (institutional review board) approval for said research while I was in Guatemala, then coming back in March with it ready to be churned out. However, I've discovered that getting a proposal accepted while the primary investigator is out of the country is next to impossible. So I have to head back early to make sure the proposal gets approved in time for me to complete my research before 4th year starts back up at the end of April.

On a related note, Caleb is coming to visit on December 20th to spend a couple weeks traveling around Guatemala with me. After that we both head back to the States together. So this means I have roughly one more month of class and clinic. Suddenly it feels like I have very little time left here, but with a ton of things left to do.

Weeks 14 & 15, and oh heck why not 16 too

To give you a summary of these last few weeks, which positively flew by, first we had a Timmy Brigade at Pop Wuj, which I mentioned in the previous post. We spent all week in clinic with them, and helped a lot of people. Then two Saturdays ago four of us climbed a volcano to watch the sunrise from the top. Then I went on a week of vacation with friends up to Todos Santos and Lago de Atitlan, and saw a ton of Guatemala and got in some much-needed down time. I returned home this Monday and started classes and clinic again, and then, just to keep things interesting, moved into an apartment on Wednesday. Now for the details:

Not much more happened with the (Tim-Tim)Timmy Foundation besides what I wrote about in the last post. We had three mobile clinics and two "supersized" clinics at Pop Wuj in total. Each day we saw between 40 and 70 patients in a six hour shift (that's with 3-4 patient rooms). During the mobile clinics we had just about zero lab tests available to us, except for a glucometer, urine dipsticks, and a microscope. But the good (?) thing was, most people presented with the same three complaints, regardless of age: belly pain, headache, and muscle aches, all of which we had some medications for. So most adults got some kind of anti-inflammatory pill and counseling on the importance of staying hydrated, most children got an anti-helminth medication called albendazole and counseling on the importance of staying hydrated, and almost everyone got some kind of pill for gastritis, be it Tums, omeprazole, or ranitidine. And because vitamin deficiency (specifically iron, zinc, vitamin A and magnesium) is extremely common in rural Guatemala, every last patient got vitamins, in prenatal, infant, child, or adult form. We talked a lot about drinking liquids because many patients didn't drink more than a glass or two a day, which very likely was giving them headaches from dehyrdation.



On Friday night after the Timmy Brigade week I climbed Santa Maria with Alex, Deb, and my teacher Ulises. We met at 11:30pm on Friday night in front of the school, then took a 30 minute taxi to the base of the volcano. We started climbing at 12:30. There was a spider web of paths low on the volcano, so we spent the first hour or so weaving through hilly corn fields, high grass, and patches of forest. Ulises, our guide for the trip, did an amazing job navigating this area; I've heard that formally guided tours often get lost a couple times trying to find the one path that leads to the top. But we had no troubles, and soon found ourselves on a steep switchback that led into a forest, then into a cloud forest, and then into just clouds. Three hours later we were nearing the top, and it was spitting rain and getting windier with each step. Soon after we started seeing flashes of dark blue, starry sky appear above us, only to disappear a few seconds behind some clouds that were /really/ whipping by.



We made it to the top at 4:30am, which was just a bit too early to start watching the sun rise immediately. This was unfortunate, because we all started freezing the moment we got up there. It was soo cold and windy. Luckily there was a leeward side to the summit with a little half circle depression protected by some large rocks. It was clearly also the place where everyone else took shelter up there, judging by the fire pit and the scattered trash. So there we huddled, under Ulises' grandma's blanket, shivering and passing around a brick of dark chocolate (thanks Caleb) and a bottle of Old Friend, a terrible, terrible whiskey that you can buy here. At times Alex and Deb, who were on the ends of the tiny blanket, got too cold, so they would hop up and do this hilarious running-man/penguin-dance to get feeling back in their extremities. As for myself, between the blanket, the whiskey, the chocolate, and the belly laughs from watching those two dance around, I was okay for the 45 minutes or so that we had to wait for the sun to rise. But as soon as the sky began turning colors we all felt obligated to leave the protection of our rocky cubby hole and start snapping photos, and that's when we all /really/ froze. I think my fingers froze, thawed, and refroze at least three times, which didn't tickle. But I got some decent shots, I think:





As soon as the sun got above the horizon the temperature became tolerable, so we stayed up there for another hour enjoying the view. This is a picture of Santiaguito, an active volcano which frequently spews ash and vapor:





When I first saw this shape on my camera screen I thought I had somehow broken my camera. But then I realized that it was the shadow of the mountain, a near-perfect triangle. How cool is that?

We headed back down the mountain without issue, and were able to collapse in our beds around 10:30. It was definitely worth the effort.

On Sunday Alex, Megan, Kristin and I headed up to Todos Santos Cuchumatán. What a strange few days we spent there! But first, the trip there: epic. Why? 1. road signs don't really exist in Guatemala; 2. to get there, we drove a 1979 VW bus with old brakes and an even older engine, which would spell trouble if we encountered steep hills; 3. to get to Todos Santos, there were only steep hills. So because of 1-3, these things happened:
-We got lost several times trying to get through a city because there weren't any road signs, only a maze of windy cobblestone roads, more often than not blocked by a Sunday market.
-A few of us had to hop out and walk so the bus could make it up a really steep road,
-Several times the brakes started going out while descending a long, steep hill, so we had to pull over and let the brakes cool for an hour or so.



Regardless, we arrived in Todos Santos without too many problems on Sunday, and wandered the city's two main streets, marveling at how everyone, men and women, were wearing traditional dress.



We slept in the van in a "parking lot" that was really someone's farmyard. The next day was All Saint's Day, i.e., Todos Santos. From what I've gathered about Todos Santos in Todos Santos, many of the men in the village spend most of the year on the coast working in coffee, sugar cane, and cotton fincas, but return for the festival, where they spend the money they've earned over the year by renting horses, buying a new "traje", and buying booze. Then they spend the next several days drinking heavily in preparation for the "Skach Koyl", the drunken horse race on All Saint's Day. The race starts at 8am in the morning, with the riders charging up and down a 100-meter track in waves, and taking shots of Quetzalteca in between. The race usually goes until 4pm, and the last man still able to ride wins the respect of the town, which is a fairly big deal for the riders.



We watched the race in the morning, and the riders were already nearly falling-down drunk. But amazingly, they still galloped hands-free, singing songs and whooping; I would have been hanging on to the horse's mane for dear life. This video does a decent job of showing the race and the mass of spectators that watch it all day.

The next day the town went to the cemetery placing candles, food, water in front of the graves, putting a new coat of paint on the tombs, decorating the crosses with plastic stringers, and praying and singing with their family. Seeing the celebrations at the cemetery gave some meaning to the drunkenness we had seen the previous two days: primarily, the festival honors the dead celebrates everyone who has made it another year, which is an accomplishment while living such a hard life. Regardless, all too often we encountered this:



and wandering around in a town where all of the men were falling-over drunk had us all on edge, so we left a day early to head to Lago de Atitlan, where we knew it would be much more tranquilo.

A couple more pictures. 14-17 are also from Todos Santos. This site also has good pictures of the typical dress and the horse races.

We drove to Lago de Atitlan afterward, stopping to let the brakes cool a few times, and once we arrived we spent several days reading, kayaking the lake, enjoying the spectacular view, eating good food, and generally taking it easy.



My favorite place by far of all the places we stayed was Casa del Mundo, the house in this picture:



The views from this place were stunning.



The lake is several meters above normal, so the lowest two patios were underwater, It made for pleasant feet-in-water reading, but at other parts of the lake, many houses, beaches, restaurants, and farmland had been submerged.



I came home on Monday afternoon, and was happy to start up classes and clinic again. I have about six more weeks to go before Caleb arrives; lots of time to keep working on subjunctive and become more comfortable talking with patients.

As for the apartment, the reasons were many, but the primary was, again, bed bugs. I got new bites the day after my host mom changed my sheets, which makes me think they were riding along in those (bed bugs can survive a wash in the laundry; it is the heat of the dryer that kills them. Most laundry here is line-dried.). Other reasons for moving included: missing cooking, missing vegetables, wanting to have a more flexible meal schedule, and wanting to stretch my little wings o' independence again. Sharing three months with various Quetzaltenango families seems like enough, and after two nights in my little apartment, it feels like the right decision.

Week 13: Medicina!

I did my first mobile clinic last week, and it was /great/. Essentially, mobile clinic = packing our school's doctors, dentist, nurse, students, and medical supplies into a minivan and driving between 30 and 90 minutes to a rural village and seeing a bunch of patients. Interestingly, last week we went to the same village - the same community leader's house, in fact - that hosted the elote festival from over a month ago.

The clinic was bare bones but great. We had two rooms, both with dirt floors, one for the dentist and one for the doctors. Giving the dentist his own room made sense, since all he was doing was pulling teeth that morning. The docs' room had a plastic roof, a plastic table and two stools on one end, and an old barber's chair at the other. Deb, a pediatrician, and I sat at the table and saw niños, while Dr. Christian, a Guatemalteco, saw the adultos. We saw somewhere around 15 kids in the half day, and almost all of them had 1. stomach pain and 2. a headache (from dehydration). So almost all of the kids 1. got albendazole, an antihelmintic (read: dewormer) and 2. education on the importance of drinking at least /1/ glass of liquid per day. All the kiddos also got 3. children's vitamins, since almost all of them are small for their age, probably due to malnutrition. And, unfortunately, after they visited the doctors, most of them visited the dentist too to lose a couple of teeth.



The Pop Wuj medical program continues to be incredibly crazy - sometimes it feels like being on IM again - but I'm learning, darn it: I'm starting to remember the right questions and commands for interviewing and examining patients, and I'm understanding more of what the patients are saying, which is only of slight importance, no? I'm still taking classes in the afternoon after clinic. Right now I'm working on learning the tenses of subjunctive (very, very roughly equivalent to "If I were you"). Oy. I may get my first concussion from subjunctive, and it will be because I had been banging my head on my desk.

I'm still enjoying Guatemala. I baked brownies for the Thursday dinner. They were tasty, largely because of the US peanut butter and Ghirardelli chocolate chips that Mr. Matt Percy brought down for me. Surprisingly, Guatemalan PB is no good; it is expensive and/or loaded with palm oil. Not good for eating, and even less so for baking.

I haven't gotten new bed bug bites in a while, but I remain suspicious. The problem with this attitude is the hyper-vigilance; you discover a lot of false positives. For example, just a few mornings ago I nearly flipped a lid when I discovered a line of three red dots on my butt. Luckily, on closer inspection they turned out to be just zits. Attractive, right? (sorry Caleb) But way better than bed bug bites. But if it's not pimples, there's the dry skin, the mosquito bites, the razor burn, the random flea attacks, etc. Needless to say, I'm itchy almost all of the time, and "not being itchy" is one of the things I'm definitely looking forward to when I get back to the States.

This week has been crazy; folks from the Timmy Foundation are here on a "Timmy brigade", so we've been doing mobile clinic almost every day. It has been exhausting, so next week I'm taking the week off to go to Todos Santos Cuchumatán for the Day of the Dead and All Saint's Day celebrations, and afterward heading over to Lago de Atitlan for some by-the-waterside studying. And in two nights a group of us are going to attempt a night summit of Santa Maria, a beautiful cone volcano near Xela (12,375 feet). I'll be sure to take pictures and tell the stories :)