Just to much to tell

Wow, ya´ll, I am here to say that I have been hopelessly remiss in keeping up on my blogging. It has gotten to the point where if I tell everything that has happened this will turn into the worlds biggest blog post. Therefore, I will just give the highlights, and put up all kinds of pictures to fill in the rest.

The weekend of Halloween was an absolute blast. Things are celebrated a lot differently here. The whole thing is a three day festival starting Friday and going into Sunday. Friday night was the Halloween party at Kasbah, a club here. My two brothers, Carlos and Pablo, dressed up as smirfs. It is really hard to dance with a blue man. There costumes were great and I got to spend a lot of time with Andréa, who I had not seen in quite some time. Saturday is a day with more celebration. People from all the towns in Guatemala gather in large fields in their various cities and fly bariletes, kites. I went in the afternoon with Pablo and Brayan to buy my own kite, a mariposa, and we all went out and flew them. This whole thing made me miss my mom, because she would have loved to see them all out there. This is yet another thing you can do in Guatemala and not in the US. There were probably around 50 kites caught in the power lines by the end of the day, complete with people trying to climb up and pull them off. Dinner that night was a special food here called fiambre. It is made with all different kinds of meat, beans, vegetables, and all kinds of things. It costs a lot to make so they only eat it one day a year here, but it was absolutely fantastic. Sunday there is a religious parade in the street with this huge altar carried through the streets of the city by women. There is also a band (there were baritones!), priests, and incense carriers. It was a very different kind of thing to see.

A few nights later we went to a birthday party for our friend Joel at a hookah bar called, Gaya. It is a very Persian kind of feeling place, pillows, canopies, the whole nine yards.

Every day I am surprised by what I wake up to. I eat refried beans and tortillas for breakfast (amazing). Then I hop in the shower and hope it is going to be a hot water day and then I rush off to four hard hours of Spanish class. Class is so important to me. It gets really hard sometimes as my teacher tries to make the things the things I am learning on paper become part of my every day conversation. I have no idea how she comes up with the patience she has every day. I can get really frustrated but she always figures out how to keep me going. I probably have not talked about her much. Her name is Olga Perez. She is 27 and has been a spanish language teacher for five years. She really loves what she does and it definately shows. At the same time, it is not easy being a language teacher. The work is inconsistent. If you dont have a student during a certain week, you dont get paid. Also, I may have said this before, but CSA has a continuing education program for their teachers that rivals most schools in the US. Thus, at the end of our class, Olga goes to her class. After school I am home for lunch and a quick nap. Most days I then go to Nuestro Ahijados. Brandon and I have made some huge leaps in our last couple of days of work. Today we finally got together all of the department heads at Nuestro Ahijados. We talked with all of them for two and a half hours about how we can make their jobs easier, implement an effective database, and make sure everyone can keep up with it. We finally have some really concrete plans about what to do next. It is so exciting to see exactly how all the work we do will help people. I definately do a lot of on the job training. It is really rewarding work. It is an awesome thing to be a part of.

This past weekend I went on a tour through a bunch of different places in Guatemala. The idea of the tour was to expose the participants to the reality of Guatemalan life as it is today. This includes both the bad and the good. I will be updating you all on the details of that trip in my next post, but just to keep you on the edge of your seat, here are a few of the topics... live chicken sacrifice, strawberries, puppies, and a cozy night. Oh, did I mention live chicken sacrifice.