I FOUND A SCORPION

Okay, I could also name this "My trip to Monterrico" or "Weekend Beach Getaway", but since seeing a scorpion was the climax of the trip for me, I'll just start with that. This was hanging out in the bathroom. I didn't kill it (nor did I try to relocate it), and naturally after it ran away everyone was paranoid that it was sitting under a toilet waiting to attack. Very quick bathroom breaks for the remainder of our trip.

So Monterrico is a touristy beach town on the south coast of Guatemala, about two and a half hours from Parramos. NPH is up in the mountains and because of this, we have a relatively mild, arid climate. It's warm in the day but borderline chilly at nights. Very nice, in my book. Once you start heading away from Parramos, you get out of the mountains and the climate changes drastically; Monterrico is hot to the point where you wouldn't dream of sleeping in pajamas (despite the mosquitos) and so humid that you're constantly covered in a mist of sweat, regardless of your inactivity. It's not a climate that I enjoy, but the excitement of new scenery and three days of hammock-laying was more than enough to keep me happy. Here are some photos I took on the way

You can see Volcan Agua in the background of this one

Coming into Monterrico, the surrounding villages are made up of tiny farms, and while Monterrico makes most of its money from tourism, you can see that many folks there also keep small family farms. The style of the houses are also different than the mountain homes. Here most things are built to be very open and airy, and the roofs are thatched from banana leaves. There's a constant backdrop of Reggae music in the streets, so it's pretty easy to feel like you're on some island somewhere

But there are still reminders of Guatemala! You can't walk down the street without tripping over a chicken or pig :)

And we still had Guatemalan prices! $5 a night for the room and $1.25 beers at the bar. Good life :D

Like any beach town, they had a bunch of souvenir shops. I always think of my sister Jamie when I see stuff like this. Look at this awesome starfish!

I LOVED these!! They're little seashell armadillos! (For those who don't know, I collect armadillos). I exercised very good self control though. Hooray for staying on budget

They have great locally caught seafood here. It's a shame I don't like seafood much. This is what Holger had for dinner, I stuck to the locally caught fried chicken :)

The hotel that we stayed at was rated as the worst hotel in Monterrico, but being saavy volunteers we knew that that meant low prices! And it actually wasn't that bad! Though I did get a visitor. It reminded me of NY

At first I loved the idea of this open ceiling in our room, but then when I tried to go to bed at 10p and the bar was full of drunk people singing and dancing until 1a, I realized it's flaw. They might as well have been dancing in my room for all the sleep I got.

Speaking of, here's the view from the bar attached to our hotel. I spent most of my time reading in those hammocks to the left.

Okay, so the beach. The beach was absolutely gorgeous: black sand, crashing waves and surprisingly very few people.

This is the most crowded I ever saw it.

But I soon figured out why! The beach is beautiful, but the crappy thing about black sand is that it gets really fucking hot. Like, to the point where you can get serious second degree burns on your feet from walking from the hotel to the water. A lot of people avoid the sand altogether during the day and only come out in the late afternoon and night. I stuck to hiding out under my shaded cabana and taking pictures (though I did eventually brave the heat and hung out in the water)

And it did get a little cloudy which helped a lot

Jack, Vroni and Kim hanging out

One slightly crappy thing about Monterrico is that the ocean is ROUGH. The waves are huge here so swimming is very dangerous; three people drowned the week before we got there. It didn't stop us from going in, but after getting the shit kicked out of us by the waves and having the undertow drag us out to sea a few times we were quick to struggle back to the beach.

And I discovered that stray dogs are a lot cuter when they're playing in the ocean

Steph wasted no time inviting herself to play volleyball with some local kids

Charlotte was my reading buddy for the trip

On the way out, I saw this. This sign isn't anything special, but it made me think of my Aunt Gerry who worked for years at a hotel called the Hawaiian.

All in all I loved the vacation. I spent almost the entire thing laying in a hammock reading a book about icebergs, drinking strawberry smoothies until I was nauseous. Couldn't have asked for more :)

A special shout out to my sister Kayla who sponsored this trip :D

My baby!!

Look what those awful children did to my sweet Julian!!

This kid gets picked on horribly in his section, it makes me so upset. After asking around though, it seems that the boy who punched him is actually a good kid and must have had something really upsetting him because behavior like this is really out of character. It still makes me angry, but I know that shit like this is going to happen when you have 30 twelve year old kids living in the same room. Today I was really wishing that NPH allowed adoptions though...

Randomness

Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend! Time for another random photo dump :)

Here's Jack. This boy has a serious addiction to hot sauce (and wicked shirts).

It was Jose Louis' birthday this week. I haven't talked much about Jose, but he lives with me in the house and is roughly my age (he just turned 32). He's a super awesome guy. He works as a kindergarten teacher and volunteered with kids in Lithuania and Poland before coming here. I love having him in the house, even though it's almost impossible to understand him (people from Spain speak MUCH faster than people from Guatemala, plus they pronounce their words with a lisp. It takes a lot of focusing to figure out what they're saying). Anyway, we had a surprise party for him at La Familia. He was really happy.

And then I made eggplant parm for everyone for his birthday dinner. If nothing else, I'll know that my eggplant parm made an everlasting impact on Guatemala. Several people have asked for the recipe :)

HUGE thank you to the anonymous donor who sent me a little money to get through the month! Here's what $40 worth of groceries look like!

I had a med run with Audy this week. She's so adorable! She sat in the waiting room while I was talking to the doctor, and she was able to nab this free piece of corn from one of the other patients, just by being cute. Little scam artist.

This is a picture of a picture, so sorry for the quality. I have no idea who this little girl is (she's an externo, so she only comes here for school and then goes home to her family at the end of the day) but every time I see her she reminds me of my Nana Barbara. Maybe it's the haircut?

The doctor and Liseth (one of my favorite nurses) spending some time with a sick kid

And here's the youngest member of NPH Gautemala. He's 15 months or so. I love babies <3

Oh. My. God. This is called estofado (stew) and it's another traditional Guatemalan dish. It's basically pulled chicken that's braised in some kind of tomato base. Holy shit. Definitely the best food I've had since I've gotten here. Ruben made this in the restaurant as a lunch special and gave me some after I helped him out a little. I loved it so much he packed me a bag of it to take home. I ate it for every meal for two days and still wanted more. I refuse to return to the States without this recipe.

I haven't talked much about rain lately, but we're still deep in rainy season. I don't know if it's always like this here, but rainy season has leveled out to basically be normal New England weather. Sometimes it rains here, sometime it doesn't. When it does though, it's usually INTENSE. Check out this mini-flood while we were driving through the capital.

And in this week's edition of "Things I Wish I Was Home For", my dearest baby sister Lauren moved out of the house and into her own space for the first time! Yes, it's a college dorm, and I couldn't be happier :) Here she is showing me her new room

And look what she brought with her! It's the little owl I gave her from Guatemala. This photo made me cry!

My dad sent me this photo along with the ones of Lauren. He wanted to let me know that he was enjoying the start of Autumn and baking apple pies. I will assume that this photo is not a taunt, but rather a promise to bake me as many apple pies as I like once I return.

And finally, I saw this quote online and thought it was wonderful. This is exactly how I want to approach life

Eruption!

After an exhausting day of torch-running and kid-tossing, we finally got back to NPH. As soon as I walked in the door I was accosted by a groups of little ones. "Did you hear we're in a Code Red?!" I had no idea what that meant (and at first worried that it had something to do with a war or uprising or something), but they quickly filled me in on all the action I missed while I was gone. Fuego, the volcano that overlooks NPH, erupted during the morning! Fuego is one of the most active volcanos in Guatemala and almost daily has a bit of smoke coming out of it, but this was a full-blown explosion. Luckily Nate was able to grab this photo while it was happening. This is the view from the front of the clinic.

By the time I got home, all you could see was a ton of clouds surrounding it and a lightening storm starting (I wonder if that's somehow caused by the volcano?). We're far away enough that lava isn't a concern, but they had to evacuate 30,000 people from surrounding villages. The one thing we do have to watch for is smoke and ash, but luckily the wind tends to blow in the other direction. Hopefully we won't have to worry about 400 displaced children anytime soon.

I went down to my house, ready to call it an early night. As I was laying in my hammock, we got word that the director was going to drive over to the other side of the volcano to see if there was less cloud cover there. Jose and I were the only people home, so we jumped up, threw on clothes and ran up the stairs just in time to jump into the back of the truck and head off.

The ride was gorgeous. It's starting to turn to fall here so it's brisk at night, especially with the wind whipping around. There was hardly anyone out though, so it was quiet and dark, we got to lay in the back and watch the stars while drinking beer (totally not illegal here). It reminded me a lot of being in high school and driving around aimlessly with my friends at night just to pass the time. It's almost a weightless feeling, it's really easy to just focus on the moment and forget about your stress.

After about 45 minutes of driving around, we got to the other side and saw this

(photo credit to Elena, because an iphone just doesn't cut it when it comes to volcano pics)

It was absolutely amazing. We laid in the back of the truck and watched the lava spew out of the top and creep down. It was like watching National Geographic, lava would spit up towards the sky every few seconds and we'd cry out. It was incredible. We watched it for about an hour, driving around to different spots to get better views and I eventually fell asleep while watching it.

It's still erupting and no one knows how long it'll go for or when people will be able to go back home. We have plans to climb Acatenango (the slightly taller volcano that's attached to Fuego and offers views down into Fuego's cone) in a few weeks, so hopefully we'll have some awesome photos from that trip too :) It was a great experience and today in general was great for getting me re-enthused for the rest of my time here.

Torch Run

This Saturday is Independence Day for Guatemala and like most holidays here, the celebrations last the whole week leading up to the big day. There were no classes Wed-Friday, but the kids were kept really busy. After the big band competition yesterday, today was the infamous Torch Run. Every year during this week, groups run for several miles carrying torches with cars following them trying to make as much noise as possible. People have whistles, horns honk, kids scream, all to try to draw as much attention as possible to the runners (as if hundreds of people running in the streets with torches could somehow be overlooked). All of this is paying to tribute to the night they received their Independence from Spain almost 200 years ago. That night, a villager heard the news at the statehouse, grabbed a torch and ran through the countryside spreading the news. Everyone really gets into the runs, the streets were lined with people watching.

Naturally the kids wanted to participate too, so after spending ALL day swimming and playing and generally exhausting themselves, we loaded up into the buses and drove to San Martin, a town about ten minutes outside of Chimaltenango. The kids were going to run back to NPH from here! That's about 25 minutes in the car, at LEAST 15 miles. Absolutely nuts in my book, but they were excited for it.

The first thing we had to do when we got to San Martin was meet with the mayor of the town. This was part of the ritual and I'm sure there's some kind of traditional conversation that goes on to reenact the announcement of independence, but I couldn't hear a thing between the chattering kids and crowds of townspeople. Here's the mayor lighting the torches

And then we were off! We did a few laps around the town first and pretty much just ran the cars off the road.

One of my favorite parts of the run: not only do people cheer you on, they try to soak you as you go by. Kids lined up with water balloons and buckets and tried to drench as many people as possible. The buses weren't safe either; the kids would aim for the open windows. More than once, people in the bus got nailed in the face with water balloons. It was always a race to close the windows when we saw kids aiming.

I ran for about a mile and a half (go me!) before I died and had to be driven in the bus with the young and lazies. I had planned on catching my breath and then going out again, but then the kids started dropping like flies and I had to take care of them. No surprise that they were passing out, we had been exercising all day and they aren't used to running like that. The bus crawled behind the runners and we'd jump out whenever a kid fainted and drag them on board. By the time we got back to NPH we had a total of four fainted kids. They don't mess around with their celebrating here, you run those kids till they pass out.

The bus would have the pass the kids every now and then because it needed more speed to get up the hills. I was always a little worried that someone would drop on the hill and I'd have to try to run up it with a body over my shoulder. Luckily, it didn't happen.

Here we are waiting for the kids to pass us by.

The torch bearer!

Charlotte and Katie run by.

We finally got back to NPH after over three hours of running. I'm thinking that tonight will be a very quiet night for the Tios on sleep-duty

Water Park Bonanza

Today when I got to work Tai Rosa asked if i could be the nurse for the class trip that was heading out. I love class trips, so I gladly accepted (little did I know that this would mean lots of running with my first aid kit in hand, but more on that story in another posting). We took about 75 kids up to San Martin, a little town outside of Chimaltenango. They had this awesome water park there which we overran the whole day :)

Check this place out! Very cool!

He's so cute. When we got there I saw him lurking around the pool. I told him to go get changed and I'd take him swimming. He told me that he didn't bring his swimsuit because he didn't know we were going to a water park, he thought it was just a place to hang out for the day. Lucky my bathing suit had a drawstring... I love it! This had me cracking up all day

I love these kids! Julian with his sister Aileen

Martin having a good time

A little water slide action

We taught the kids how to chicken fight. Such good role-models :)

After hours and hours of swimming, we left the waterpark and started the Torch Run! It's no wonder that so many kids bit the dust :P