Training – Pt. 2 – 2 Natural Disasters in 30 hours

One month down, 26 to go. I’m finding my friend’s words to be more truthful every day: The days are long and can be slow, but the weeks fly. Days fill themselves up quickly with things to do (even though those things may not be numerous but they almost always take longer than you would think), and then next thing you know, it’s Friday again. Aka time for my weekly visit to the only ice cream place in town.

So some of you might have heard about Volcan Pacaya erupting this week. I woke up this morning to four missed calls and three new text messages from my training director, safety and security coordinator, and group members in my town making sure I was okay and to please call if I heard anything more than rain falling on my roof (possibly referring to the rock showers that killed a reporter). Evidently Alotenango and a few other training towns were in the most danger due to proximity to the volcano, but I just thought there was a big thunderstorm out. Speaking of thunderstorms – Tropical Storm Agatha made landfall close to the Mexican border around 7 p.m. on Saturday night. My house is pretty big and stable, so we didn’t have to deal with too much water. The houses along the rivers weren’t so lucky – lots of people have lost everything to the storm. My language professor’s house was filled with 6 feet of mud. He lives in the next town over which was hit pretty hard. The death toll’s over 100 now for the country, and we’ve heard news that Honduras has it worse. Evidently there hasn’t been this much damage from a storm around here in 38 years, so my host dad’s hoping people will start to realize how bad the forestation and it’s consequences really are.

Last time I was talking about how we might get a bit more freedom in our training schedule. Well, no longer even have language classes (even though we sometimes meet with the head of the language department for a few hours or send her emails to proofread our formal letters/invitations) and are pretty much completely free to work with the Health Center however we please. We go to every event we can – ranging from information sessions for young pregnant women to watching the local police use religion to coerce school kids into behaving.

In other news, we received our Field Based Training Assignments. Six others and myself will be heading to Aldea San Vicente Buenabaj for 7 days in the department of Totonicapan (an aldea is a super small town, rural, usually indigenous). It’s about a 3-4 hour drive to the town where they speak Kiche and Spanish. Other than giving health talks, we’ll be hanging out with the volunteer who lives there, doing whatever she does, and I’m sure asking her a million questions. I’m excited to get up into the mountains into a bit colder climate and talk to someone who’s been at this for a year. My program director happens to have been assigned to my group, so it should be a pretty tame week. Then again the World Cup starts while we’re gone, so let’s not fool ourselves.

I’m not sure who I’ve given my cell phone number to, but in case you’re looking for a way to use up your Skype credit, my number is:

5384-3642 (not sure what the country code is)

Would love to hear your voices and know how you’re doing!