Oh man so well let’s see it has been quite a while since I have written in my blog… people keep reminding me of this… so here is a little recap of what I have been up to lately. And I shall then later add some things that I wrote in my journal before when Ash was here to give better descriptions.. I have been a slacker at writing in both my journal and my blog lately…. I really need to work on this! But yeah so here is what I have been up to….
Well let’s see I don’t know where I have left off… but Ashley (my sister) was here with me for two months this summer… and I miss her very much. We had such a wonderful time together… we braved the tropical storm with Jimmy and Holly, worked quite a bit on the clinic. I must say that the volunteer construction teams we have had since Jimmy Ashley and Holly have had it soooo much easier. We now have an ayudante who works when we have teams… so Francisco and the ayudante do more of the sifting sand and mixing of cement. With Jim, Ash, and Yoli (Holly) we had to mix and sift all of our own concrete… and it was a lot!!! Since we were stuccoing Styrofoam walls. And Francisco and I were kind of fighting at the time so well yeah he was not going to help at all with the sifting and such. By the end of the week we couldn’t even mix anymore, we just would start laughing whenever we tried. Plus… we had to carry all of the cement across the field… 100 pound bags of cement!
But yeah so after this week, we traveled up to Semuc Champey and Coban and saw lots of cool sights up there… then Holly and Jimmy left and it was Ashley and me. We worked a lot on doing the community health needs assessment, which I am still currently working on… now I am trying to go around and figure out how I am going to start interviewing individual families in the community. We also had an ALAS family planning clinic which we organized. We helped out here and there with a bit of reforestation and such. And got ready for the next team in July… this team was from University Park UMC in Dallas, Texas. We worked at the clinic to finish up concreting the tops of walls which I will add a description of later… it was quite interesting, and got the rafters ready to put up the ceiling. The ceiling is ¼” plywood and little 1X2 boards along the seams and across the middle to make 4×4 foot squares. I kind of wish we had used thicker plywood, but well it is working allright. The best part is that we had to paint the ceiling white, since it is plywood. Now for some reason, Francisco thinks that it is necessary to cut ANY kind of paint with either water or paint thinner… and no not just a little bit of water to make it more manageable, we are talking half water half paint. I kept telling him no, the volunteers are not happy painting with water… but he wouldn’t listen to me… and everytime I came back with another bucket of paint from the store… before I could even turn around… he had mixed in the water! Finally the last bucket I convinced him to not add a single drop of water and he finally listened. We ended up putting like 4 coats of paint on the ceiling. But yeah… we finished the ceiling and it made it sooooo much cooler in the clinic… before it was like an oven. We also got some more of the Styrofoam walls stuccoed… they require 3 different coats of stucco with different mixtures of sand and cement.
Ashley worked with the medical part of the University Park team… I was so very proud of her. She translated for Linda a nurse who was seeing patients like a doctor. We both just really loved Linda, she is an amazing nurse and really just reminds me so much of our Mommy. But Ashley was so unsure of herself, but she did such an amazing job at translating. The group had said that they had more Spanish speaking medical providers than they in fact did… so Ashley stepped up and worked as a translator and was phenomenal! For every doctor, pharmacy, intake, dentist, etc… we have to have two translators… one from English to Spanish and another from Spanish to Tzu’tujil. It is a lot to coordinate! But yeah we had medical clinics for two days in San Juan, two days in San Pablo, and one day in Santa Clara. The group stayed in Pana and had to take a boat every morning which was a little crazy… and Ashley and I stayed at JoAn’s and prepared all the lunches for the teams which was a lot of work… lots of people to feed including all the translators and everything.
But yeah after the team, Ash and I had a crazy trip to Mexico to renew my visa… maybe I’ll talk about this more later… but yeah it was crazy and the boarder guys are all pretty corrupt. Then we came back and got to relax and hang out a couple days before she left me. She had a little birthday party for me. We had our typical dinner… which we ate pretty much every night while she was here… prepared on the little hotplate. But it was delicious and we had all the extras… such as rice, refried beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots, guacamole, limes, homemade tortillas (homemade by us), and lots of hot sauce… mmmm the best. And for desert we made well tried to make a pudding cake. We made chocolate pudding from scratch….Mommy had sent us ingredients in the mail such as cornstarch. And then we tried to make somesort of a graham cracker crust and cook it on the stove… the peace corps oven. But yeah Ash did all the finishing touches and it was just the cutest little pudding pie I had ever seen!
Then Axli (which is how someone spelled her name here and I absolutely love) left… and I was alone again. But I have made other friends since then who come and go so it has been pretty fun. For my birthday, Ana and Francisco made me a beautiful lunch of caldo de marsicos (fish soup… but so much more than just fish soup… it is quite an experience) and it was a really special day… maybe I’ll explain this more later. Next time I write I will describe August and September… but my wrists are tired from typing now… and it looks like it wants to rain… and it is a big muddy river outside of the internet… so I shall write more another day!
