I didn’t run any more after the last post and I really hope that I can get back into training mode when I get back to the states. I’ll definitely have a lot of motivation to run more but I might need an extra push every now and then from friends and family (hint, hint!). My fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Association is going to have to get a push start as well. This year, I’m on the Run to Remember team for the New York Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and I am going to try to raise $3000 before November 7th. Three years ago I raised $4700 but since a lot of my friends are broke med students and I can’t send a mass e-mail out to the entire East Side High School faculty, I probably won’t be able to reach that amount this year. Who knows, maybe I will, but I’d be happy to raise $3000. I have my donation website set up and anyone reading this blog that wants to donate can do so at the following website: http://2010teamr2r.kintera.org/andrea I’m going to try to do a few social fundraisers too. I’m open for ideas and help from anyone :-)
Guatemala is still fantastic. I am excited to get out of Antigua and into a more rural area. I’m probably going to go dark for a while with this blog because I don’t know how close I will be to internet access while in Chicaman. Antigua is nice but I am definitely speaking much more English than I want to be and the city seems to be flooded with foreigners. There are quite a few American school groups and other tourists as well. I probably tend to notice the Americans more but I’ve been surprised to see so many Germans here as well. I know that I cannot totally blend in down here but I hope I don’t look too much like the other American tourists I’ve seen. They really rub me the wrong way sometimes. Not for any particular reason but I’m glad to be traveling by myself and not with a big group. I even ran into a group of med students from St. Louis University. I didn’t talk to them much but I keep seeing them around town and they are always with the same people. It would be nice to do some clinical work while I’m down here but it was more important for me to have an individual experience of traveling alone and learn a lot of Spanish. I might try to see if Juan’s family knows anyone that does clinical work up around Chicaman but if it doesn’t work out, I’m very content just learning as much Spanish as I possibly can.
I think I have a pretty good base now after taking two weeks of classes. My teacher, Amanda, was amazing and helped me learn so much in a very short amount of time. I am really lucky to have had her as a teacher. I really can’t believe how fast the past two weeks have gone. Now, the challenge comes in actually speaking to people when no one around me speaks English. The first few days will be a little difficult but once I’m up in Chicaman, I’m planning on really studying for the first day or so and then trying to speak more each day. I’m not sure how long I will be up there, but I hope that if I end up staying awhile, that I won’t wear out my welcome. I guess we’ll see…
Here’s a little synopsis of what I’ve been up to the past few days:
Tuesday 7/6 – Class in the morning, my computer broke in the afternoon but I couldn’t do much about that right away so I went on the school activity, which was visiting a macadamia nut farm. As always, in my limited understanding of Spanish, I think the guide told us that the farm has hundreds of macadamia nut trees and harvests the nuts all year round. She told us all about how the nuts are collected, dried, sorted and stored for processing. We even broke open a few nuts that were ready and ate them straight away. It was heaven. The farm also grows sapling trees to distribute to indigenous populations around Guatemala so that they can start their own farms and in 12 years when the trees start producing nuts, they can have another source of income. The nuts are used mainly for foods and cosmetics. We got to sample the lotion that the farm makes and sells at its small store. I even saw a bag of bee pollen for sale at their store. Supposedly, the bee pollen stops you from absorbing too much fat…I’m gonna have to look into that one.
We took local transportation to the farm and I even found a chicken bus that obviously belongs to me :-)
Wednesday 7/7 – I caught up on life and posted my last blog after my computer started working again. Not much to say about that.
Thursday 7/8 – Class in the morning and then the afternoon activity was visiting a coffee, corn and bean farm in the small town of Vieja outside of Antigua. It was quite amazing to walk around the farm, which is in the foothills of the Volcan de Agua, and see the area as well as the destruction caused by Agatha.
It was also a bit of an eye opener when it comes to how different the life of a Guatemalan farmer is from that of a Nebraskan farmer. All of the crops at this farm are harvested by hand, which, of course, requires a lot of manual labor. The farmer that took our group on a tour has 11 children and there were also two grandchildren running around the house while we were there. From what I understood, the children go to school until about 6th grade, and then begin helping with the farming. However a few of this farmer’s children have gone on to university and are studying business and other subjects. I’m assuming that once they are done they will come back to help with the farming business but I can’t say that for sure because I got lost in the middle of his explanation and didn’t catch everything he said about his family.
This was our afternoon snack after walking around the farm land.
As we walked around the farm, I pretty much got eaten alive by bugs. However, I’ve been surprised by how little I’ve actually been bitten since arriving. I do have one strange bite on my right calf that has been bothering me a lot. I think it must have been from a spider or some other insect because it did not look much like a mosquito or other flying bug bite. It seems to be getting better now but for a few days I was starting to worry that there might be something more seriously wrong with it. I might have gotten an idea in my head after finishing the Atul Gawande book, Complications. At the end of his book he tells a story of a young woman who presented to the ER with what seemed to be a simple case of cellulitis but ended up being necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating bacteria). So, armed with that story in my head, I started to imagine my calf being eaten by small bacteria and having to be flown home so that I could have the proper surgery to save my leg from being amputated. Obviously, since it’s gotten better, I don’t have necrotizing fasciitis but I sure did create an elaborate drama in my head before it got better.
Friday 7/9 – I had my last class in the morning and got a quick lesson on another one of the past tense forms in Spanish. This solidified my limited Spanish base and made me feel much more comfortable about striking off on my own into the Guatemalan countryside. After classes were over and I said my good-byes to my teacher and a few students, I booked a shuttle bus to take me to a transfer point near Chichicastenango called Los Encuentros. After I get dropped off, I will transfer to a public bus (one of the chicken buses) and ride north to Quiche. In Quiche, I will transfer again to another public bus that will take me to Chicaman. It seems pretty straight forward and I’m excited for the experience. I just hope my bag fits in the luggage rack on the bus so that I don’t have to strap it to the roof of the bus. I wouldn’t really mind doing that but I wouldn’t want it to get wet and it would most likely get rained on at some point. Maybe I’ll bring a garbage bag to wrap around it in case it does have to go on top of the bus…I’ll have to put that on my to do list.
Friday night, I finally went out on the town for an extended period of time. I met up with some other students from my school at a place called Café Sky. We had a few strong margaritas and then the bar had to close at 10pm because of a local law saying that establishments that serve more food than liquor must close at 10pm. Well, we just moved on to a different bar called Café No Se and no one seemed to like this place so we again moved to a different bar. However, before leaving, my housemate and I took a few funny pictures. Café No Se has this funny door that is the front of a refrigerator and it leads to a different room in the bar. One of the other students living in my house described his first experience seeing people walk into that door and he was dumbfounded by the fact that people kept walking into a refrigerator. Eventually he realized that it lead to a different room but I can only imagine what he was thinking before this clarity set in.
The night ended at La Esquina (appropriately named because it is on the corner of two streets) where we all had one more drink before heading home around midnight. My housemate had to get up really early to be picked up by a shuttle that was taking her to Honduras and all of us were pretty tired from the day. It was a good night out in Antigua.
Saturday 7/10 – I ran a whole bunch of errands today and am knocking another one off of my to do list by writing this blog update! I met up with a couple other women from school and we booked a bus to go to Monterrico beach tomorrow, just for the day. The weather doesn’t look fantastic because of all the storms in the Atlantic but we thought why the heck not. We are taking a direct shuttle and only had to pay about $20 round trip. It is probably cheaper on public busses but the shuttles are much more comfortable and probably a shorter trip. We’ll get down to the beach by about 10 or 11am and then get to hang out for a while before finding a good place to eat and watch the final game of the World Cup. I watched the Germany vs. Uruguay game with my host family today and that was very entertaining because both of the daughters and the dad got really excited after any of the goals. Although, they wanted Uruguay to win so their excitement was much more pronounced after those goals. I didn’t understand much of what the announcers, or my host family, for that matter, was saying but I also wasn’t paying really close attention. Most of my other errands are pretty boring so I won’t subject anyone to reading about them.
Now, I’m off to go to church at La Merced with another student from school and her teacher. I’m excited to go to church and interested to see how much I understand during the mass. Maybe God will give me brownie points for going to mass in a different country. I need all the extra credit I can get…I never did go to mass while I was in Germany because Leipzig turned out to be completely Lutheran and I also didn’t work very hard to find a church to go to in Australia last summer. However, on the weekend trip that I took to Ireland, Erika and I found a mass to go to.
Again, I will be out of Internet contact for a while probably but I will update my blog as soon as I can. If anyone needs to get a hold of me for some reason, my parents have the phone numbers for where I will be staying in Chicaman.
Peace out!
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