Keeping On

 Things are finally starting to feel kind of normal around here.  To most of the villagers, I feel like I seem more like just another person in the village as opposed to the strange white guy that’s working at the school.  I’m used to village life and have a routine that’s pretty set.  I’ve become adjusted to the slow pace of life in the village, and actually enjoy it much more than the stress that comes with rushing around in town checking email, making sure that I’ve bought everything for the next week, contacting everyone back in the States.  That sort of thing.  When you only have about 6 hours to get yourself situated for the next week, it gets pretty stressful, especially now that work is starting to pick up at site.  I feel like it gives me much more to do when I come into town. 

The main project that I’m focusing on is still the latrine project.  I’ve finished up with all the classes, and they were a huge success!  The CHW and I averaged over 30 people at each of the meetings, a huge number considering there are only 65 families in the village.  Almost half of the families had someone in attendance, so I was stoked about that!  The first three meetings were pretty awkward.  I would stand up and talk about poop in broken Q’eqchi that would then have to be translated by the CHW in order for the people to understand.  The last meeting, however, was completely different.  We spoke about diarrheal disease prevention with an emphasis on proper hand washing.

At one point, I was demonstrating how to wash hands.  I poured a little water and started to rub with soap for 20 seconds.  The usual.  Everything had gone pretty smoothly until I went to wash the soap off.  I finished pouring my water bottle when I realized I still had soap on my hands.  The audience thought it was hilarious.  Especially when I told them not to use a dirty towel or pants when all I wanted to do was wipe off the remaining soap.  Just at that point, an older man walked in late and came up to me, asked how I was doing and shook my dripping hand.  A look of disgust and confusion flashed across his face, and though for just a second, the participants didn’t miss it.  They died and began telling me to wash my hands again.  If only I had more water…

Now that the classes are over, I’ve started doing house visits to ask the participants questions about the classes – how to prevent and manage diarrhea, when to go to the hospital, even why do they need a latrine.  The biggest challenge now is finding out how to get enough money to bring in sand for the cement before the dry season ends.  I think I have a plan, though, that will be cutting it close, but hopefully will lead to latrines being built by around August. 

I’ve also started giving lessons at the school on the prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCD), such as diabetes.  The plan is to have a health fair in the beginning of June where the students can come out and do skits and draw posters to teach the villagers about how to prevent NCDs.  On top of that, there will be various booths set up that teach about healthy eating and cooking where some of the villagers will use locally grown foods and sell them to people in the village.  The hope is that the people will enjoy the food and be encouraged to start a garden, or at least eat the healthier foods.  I’d also like to have maternal and child health booths for the mothers in the village.   Though my CHW and I are just in the beginning stages of planning, I’m already excited about the health fair and think that it has potential to be very successful!

A lot of the ideas that I have for the health fair are coming from another fair that I attended that one of the volunteers set up in her village.  Her health fair was awesome, but I was even more excited to get to see her and a few other volunteers in their villages.  They live in beautiful villages and it was fun to kind of experience and day in their lives.  I got to walk around and talk with people in the village and see how differently they live from the villagers in San Vicente.  The two villages I visited are only a few miles apart and even they are very different.  It’s something that I find very interesting.  What factors led to the villagers living so differently even though they are so close together?

Well, other than those two projects, the Student Leader Program is still going pretty strong at the school despite the fact that I’ve had to switch my focus more toward the community based projects.  They sell bananas with the help of some of the teachers and have even raised enough money to start buying toilet paper for the classrooms, something that students had to bring before.  If you thought you might have to go in class, you brought toilet paper.  Now they won’t have to worry about that.  The Student Leaders have also said they would be interested in buying buckets of water with a tap at the end as a way to continue to emphasize proper hand washing.  To top it all off, the world map is slowly coming along.  The students and I will begin to draw the countries sometime over Easter break, so I’m stoked about that!!

Really that’s about it.  I’m reading Don Quixote right now which is an incredibly long book, but I’m finally nearing the end.  Anyway, I read something that really stuck out to me: “Let us live while we can, speak while we may, and at present pursue our journey.”  I really liked that!  It stuck out as a reminder to me to just keep living.  Celebrate the highs and push through the lows.

And here, just because I haven't posted pictures in a while: