Thursday, September 18, 2008

Quince de septiembre and other fun stuff

LAGO ATITLAN





------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our First Batch of Homemade Brownies In-Country



----------------------------------------------------
Quince de septiembre (15th of September)
El Día de Independencia










My favorite...




Hey Everyone!

Yes we’re still here… it’s been a slow-busy month. It’s funny – it doesn’t feel like we’re doing a whole lot but there’s barely enough time for everything in the day. I think it feels like that because we’re still accustomed to the ‘go to work/do lots of work/accomplish goals/go home’ mode of working. We make ourselves little to-do lists like “go to the tienda to buy laundry detergent” or “call this person”. There’s no way to forgot to do the things but it feels good to cross stuff off.

We went to a COMUDE meeting today. COMUDE is Consejo Municipal Desarrollo or something like that. Basically means a committee to organize all of the development in the municipality. It was the first COMUDE meeting in our muni’s history! I think we are officially members now, but I’m not really sure. We hung up our invitation on our bedroom wall because we’re nerds like that but it’s cool to have this big formal invitation in Spanish with our names on it. Not sure if we’re supposed to go to the next meeting – my plan is to show up and act like we’re supposed to be there. It’s really exciting because if the projects pan out we’ll have been able to be there from the beginning. Although it’s really boring too… today they argued in a governmental way (we don’t have a majority, who hear wants to suggest a different time and why) about what time to have the next meeting for at least thirty minutes. C-SPAN in PERSON! Sign me up.

School is rumored to end early this year, at the beginning of October. If so, that means 50% of our work is cut out. It will be a great time to learn Spanish and visit some communities close to our site to get to know the people. On that subject, Sarah has a new best friend in one of the outlying communities. The family has a few men up in the states working and usually the people are somewhat interested in talking to us when they have family up north. We went over to visit and the family was all women! I’ve been finding that a lot here. It was a little weird at first but I’m used to it at this point. I talked to another guy volunteer and he’s been working with women’s groups for a while as well. We have special ‘work with women’s groups’ privileges as gringos here, I think. Anyways, here are the pictures, the real reason for this blog. I’ve been recording some sounds of our town… can’t wait to upload them for everyone to hear. I think that one big part of Guatemala is the noise and it’s hard to capture it any other way. My favorite recording is of the band playing in the basketball court next to our house. It’s like 20 kids with ADHD got together and found instruments… I kind of miss it now that it’s gone :) How could one not like four hours of that every day?

Until next time…

2 comments:

Mamacita Jo said...

LOL! I've heard so much about the band. I look forward to actually hearing the band. And the bombas are back!

Lago Atitlan - beautiful!

Love you two!
XOXOX

Unknown said...

Hey S&M

Just wanted to drop a line. The Lake Atitlan pictures are gorgeous! And I was there!

Good to have you guys as friends in this PC experience.

--Thea