I'm not really poor. I keep reminding myself this when I walk through town and see folks with no food, or the kids here at NPH who only own one pair of ratty shoes. When my year here is done I'll be back to my normal life. I'll (hopefully) get another good paying job and within a few months I'll once again be paying $7 for a beer and $60 a year for online video games. Right now though it's hard. I FEEL poor. This is the first time in a long time that I've had to go without. I want to go to the movies but I can't afford it. I want to make a welcome dinner for the new volunteers but I don't have money for groceries. The thought of going away for the weekend with Stephanie and Charlotte is a complete fantasy. I know I should suck it up and stop living like an American, but it's really friggen hard to do that. Part of me feels like I should be living as frugally as possible, but another part of me says that this is the only time I'll ever be in Guatemala, I should take advantage of all the country has to offer while I can. That being said, I decided to do what my family does best: get a second job.
Getting a second job is a bit complicated, I can't just walk into a hospital here and start working. Nurses here also get paid garbage (around $8,000 a year). I'm also pretty sure that it's illegal for me to work here with my travelers visa. That pretty much means that doing nursing work is out of the question. Lucky for me, being American makes me a target for folks looking to learn English. I've been teaching Juan Carlos for a while now and though that income helps out, it's not much ($6 a week for an hour and a half of classes). Add that to the $15 a week I get paid from NPH and you can understand why things are a bit tight. One of the preschool teachers here and two of the Doctor's kids are also interested in lessons, but scheduling is proving to be tough. Hopefully we can work something out soon.
The other night I went out with some of the volunteers to a little restaurant in Parramos. The owner is really nice and I try to direct as much business as I can to him. Since they've only been open for a few months and he and his wife are expecting their first baby, money has been very tight for him as well. He had been paying for English classes at a local college, but had to give them up. He approached me and asked if I could give him lessons once a week instead. Since he can't afford to pay me it doesn't really help my money situation, though it DOES get me a free dinner once a week, so it does indirectly help. ALSO, one of his customers pays him in leather belts (bartering is really common here) so he told me he would give me one as a thank you gift. That works out perfectly since a leather belt was one of the few things I wanted to get myself before I left Guatemala.
The classes have also been nice because it gives me the chance to get to know someone else who's my age here and struggling to get himself stable while starting a family. We've been having some pretty interesting conversations together, mostly about God and family. He was really funny the first night we were talking. His wife also works in the restaurant and while we've made lots of small talk in the past, we've never really gotten to know one another up to that point. He told me that he had gone to NPH to deliver lunch to someone and had asked for me. The employee told him that I was in the clinic. Rubin was curious why I was in the clinic and asked if I worked there. I told him that I was a nurse. He was totally surprised and excused himself to go to the back of the restaurant. I hear him yell to his wife, "Hey, guess what! Shawn's a nurse!" He came back to the table and told me that they had been talking about me working in the clinic and had decided that I was probably a janitor there. Nice. Glad to see what kind of first impression I'm putting out there for people.
Anyway, not much else to say on this front other than I might be hitting some friends up for mini loans soon if I don't get enough classes going here. With a little luck, all of Parramos will be speaking English by the time I leave here ;)
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