Job Hunting

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 ;)

Changing of the Guard, Pt 1

Big changes here this week. The new volunteers have arrived and made it through their orientation, and this weekend it's time to say goodbye to the folks that I've spent the last six months with. Naturally I'm closer with some more than others, but I know I'll feel everyone's absence in some way. The first order of business was an assembly in the cafeteria. All the kids had an opportunity to say goodbye and thank you. It was pretty rough seeing how upset the kids were, they really get super attached after a whole year together. Obviously the volunteers were taking things pretty rough too, but they kept on their happy faces as much as possible in front of the kids.

Here are nine of the ten old volunteers, waiting for the kids to start

Each of the sections put on a little dance for their volunteers. Here's Especiales doing a traditional dance

Check out their costumes! Here's Lupe (who doesn't like me much), Patti and my buddy Emerson.

Best smile in all of NPH :)

Here's Casa de Bebes doing their dance. They dragged their volunteers out to dance with them. Now I have something to dread for the next six months...

The older girls did a floor show...

And then the Anos de Servicios did a scarf dance. Estella's there with the yellow one

They also pulled their volunteer up. God I hate to dance, ESPECIALLY in front of a group of 400 people.

This year the volunteers had a surprise for the kids too. They'd been practicing their OWN dance all week long in our house. Here's evidence of a secret practice session:

The dance went over really well, the kids loved it. After the assembly we watched a slide show of the volunteers and kids together which was really rough to get through. The volunteers said their final goodbyes then and we headed back down to our houses.

Luckily, going away parties are a great excuse to get smashed together, so that night we all headed out to La Familia for a final night of excess.

Here's Bianca and I

Some of my favorite girls

There was a lot of dancing

At some point during the night, Nathan took a broom as a dance partner. It's also worth noting that the dude in the black shirt is a stranger who kept dancing with all the female volunteers. I got roped into dancing several times in order to protect them.

Over the following few days, the volunteers left one by one to return to their home countries. It's odd to think that I'll never see some of them again, and others I'll only see if I travel to their countries one day. It's also strange to think that in only six months I'll be in their shoes, packing up my bags and cleaning my room for a new person to take my place.

Surgery Time

It's been a while since I've had to go on a med run. My charlas have kept my calendar pretty full and after a while Tia Rosa stopped asking me to take the kids places because I always had something else going on. We run into a little bit of a problem now that Mark's leaving this week. Mark's two big responsibilities are controlling the pharmacy (monitoring the medicine that leaves and ordering more as needed) and accompanying the kids on their med runs. Unfortunately we've been having a really hard time keeping track of all the meds; folks keep taking stuff out of the pharmacy for the kids without writing it down, so the numbers are way off. To help control the problem, Mark and the doctor decided that Mark would be the only person to have keys to the pharmacy from now on. The only way for this to work is for Mark (and subsequently the new clinic assistant) to stay in the clinic all day so people can have access to the meds. That means that the bulk of med runs just fell back onto my plate. I can't complain much because the second half of my year definitely has far less charlas scheduled. I can fit med runs in, it's just going to take a bit of time before I'm used to the hours again.

Anyway, this week has been pretty bad. A lot of little things have been adding to this, there's no one HUGE thing that's bothering me. I had told Alex a while ago that I'd help him go visit culinary schools and he cashed in that favor this week. I took off from work today to bring him to the capital, and while I was happy to bring him, I was also really nervous since I don't really know the capital well and leaving my safety in the hands of an 18 year old who's effectively been confined to NPH for the last ten years is not an ideal situation. I was afraid of taking the bus into the city since it requires lots of switch overs, so I asked Tia Rosa if we could bum a ride with the transport she had for the med run. She told me that it was no problem, but asked if I could stay with a kid in the morning while he was admitted for surgery and then go see the school afterwards. Since it meant having transport, I agreed but explained that I could only stay an hour since I'd have Alex with me and he needed to look at schools.

Yesterday afternoon I was talking to the doctor and she mentioned that the kid I was going to be getting admitted for surgery was going to the hospital here in Chimal, NOT the capital like I had understood. I went to Tia Rosa and explained that the only reason I had agreed is because I needed a ride to the capital; stopping in Chimal for an hour in the morning would mean that I'd miss the transport going to the capital. Luckily I didn't have to stress for long because Alex cancelled on me, to my great relief. I told Tia Rosa it was no big deal and I could stay in Chimal.

So this morning I go to Chimal with this kid (who's not really a kid, he's 22. I was there more for moral support). We get into the hospital and have to ask several people where to go before we're directed to a corner of the hospital full of very sick looking patients shuffling around. We sit and wait for a staff member to show up (again, funny how different things are here. I sat next to a med cart that had twenty pre-drawn syringes on top of it and cups of meds. I sat next to it for a full twenty minutes before anyone walked by. Definitely not kosher in back home). When a nurse finally showed up we asked about the surgery and they had no idea who this kid was or what he needed. There was no paperwork at all, they just asked him "what kind of surgery do you need?" and he replied, "I'm not sure but I have a tumor in my knee." They said, "well we can probably do a resection of it. I don't know if we can fit you in though." I just sat there quietly, not shocked anywhere near as much as I should have been at the fact that they were willing to do a surgery with zero information. It was about this time that the NPH doctor called me. I asked her if she knew what kind of operation this guy was supposed to get and here's exactly what she said to me:

"I'm not really sure either, but can you do me a favor? There's a chance that they might try to amputate his leg, can you make sure they don't do that? Thanks!"

...

Say whaaaaaaaaaaat?! Maybe the dude who speaks fifth grade Spanish is NOT the one you want ensuring that a kid's leg doesn't get hacked off. I didn't want to tell the kid any of this because he was already nervous as it was, so I just resolved myself to stay attached to this kid at all times and drill all doctors that came near him. After an hour of waiting, a doctor approaches us and tells us that we're in the wrong department, we need to go through the ER and wait at trauma. Makes no sense to me, but whatever. We do that and naturally the ER tells us that we shouldn't be there and to return to the other place. You can see where this is heading, but before we could transform into human ping pong balls, one of the nurses from the other department walked by and I snagged him so he and the ER nurse could duke it out. Finally the ER nurse conceded and the kid was prepped for surgery. I met with the surgeon and ensured that his leg would NOT be removed, only the tumor (I asked him three times JUST to make sure)

This all took place at 7am. Fast forward to 3p. I'm still standing at the kids gurney in the hallway for surgery prep. I have now started and finished a 450 page book. FINALLY the kids gets pulled in and one hour later, brought into recovery. By that time I'm pacing the halls wanting to get the heck out of there. I made sure he got to recovery okay, then high-tailed it out of there. I hadn't eaten or drinken (is this a word??) anything yet, so I went straight to a restaurant only to hear that the only thing they had left for lunch was liver. Think I'll pass, thanks. I got on the bus, headed back to NPH and passed out.

I decided that I was going to take off tomorrow since I was mentally exhausted after today (and my damn parasites have been partying hard all week). The only thing I had planned for the day was my English class with Juan Carlos, and even though I didn't feel like going, I needed the money bad. Naturally right after I call him to confirm, I get a call from Tia Rosa saying she needs me to do another surgery run tomorrow at the same hospital. I am so not in the mood for this two days in a row, NOT to mention that I had to cancel my class (and paycheck). Needless to say I'm not feeling too happy tonight. Hopefully things will be calmer next week. On the bright side, I get to finish writing my STD charla next week! Who doesn't enjoy scaring kids into safe sex with gruesome photos?!

Mwha ha ha!

Today was one of my favorite days in the clinic: mass injection day! We received a donation of flu vaccines for all the kids from the Department of Health. Flu season in the States is during the end of the winter months, mostly because during the winter more people are hanging out inside together and spreading germs. The same goes here for the rainy season, meaning most kids catch the flu between August and October. Since our seasons are at different times, the US uses what it needs in the winter and then sends it's leftovers here for the upcoming summer. Having so many kids in tight quarters means that the flu would destroy us. While the vaccines won't prevent all cases, at least it'll help us make a dent in it.

I used to love doing injection days at WGA too, and here we have four times as many people. The kids piled into the clinic all day and got their shots, some more willingly than others. It was the new volunteer Jack's first day and we got him started right away. We went over drawing up meds and soon Tia Rosa had him doing shots on some of the older kids. Anyone who does injections knows that sometimes you get good ones where the kids can't feel a thing and other times it hurts a bit more. Jack lucked out on his first few and word spread quickly that he was magically gentle, so soon the kids were lining up at his chair to get injections. It was pretty cute, and I was happy for the confidence boost it probably gave him.

Sadly some kids were stuck with "Rough and Tough" Shawn ;) Nah, I'm gentle too so I did fine by the kids. Look at the smile! In fact, he's the only one who's smiling. You can tell Tia Rosa and I take our jobs seriously.

Still serious

Just have to add this one. Look at that face!!

How do you solve a problem like Marie?

There's a bit of drama going down in Volunteer Land this week. First a little reminder on the back story of Marie, our dog. Marie is a stray who wandered into NPH several years ago. She made her way down to the volunteer houses and made herself out to be the most well-behaved dog to ever grace the streets of Guatemala. She wouldn't beg for food, she was quiet and she kept to herself. She made herself a little bed in front of one of the homes and became a cute new addition to the volunteers' lives. Really it worked out perfectly for her; she found a group of 24 people who were lonely and homesick who also happened to really hate the cafeteria food. Needless to say, Marie has been well loved and well fed ever since.

This year a new Marie has started to develop. You may recall that at the beginning of my time here, Marie jumped up and bit me for no apparent reason. Unfortunately that was not an isolated incident. She and I have made our peace and now we're great friends; I always come home to an excited dog. Sadly, she's become extremely territorial, specifically against men. When a guy tries to come down the stairs, she starts barking and growling and eventually will run up and bite them. She's gotten the priest twice and has gone after a few of the kids too. Twice in the last two weeks she's also gone after girls. She's definitely getting worse and it's a huge liability. If volunteers are home and we hear her growling, we have to run out and break it up. All of us worry about what's going to happen if we're not home and she goes after a kid or visitor.

The director heard what was going on and decided that the dog needed to be put down. I didn't argue because if this was happening in the states, she would have already been put down a long time ago. I also feel like we've done what we could to help. We've taken her outside the perimeter fence countless times but she always digs her way back in. I knew that we had given her a good few years here, far better than what she would have gotten being a stray, so while I felt sad about the situation I knew that it had to be done to protect the kids (and also NPH).

My feelings changed dramatically when Suzie, the lady in charge of the farm, came down our stairs with a machete to "take care of the dog". Yep, putting Marie down was apparently to be done by viciously hacking her to pieces. Luckily Nate, one of the old volunteers who is now a full time employee here, caught wind of the plan and let us all know. Marie was smart enough to high-tail it into the woods and Suzie was unable to complete her awful task. The volunteers spent the rest of the day freaking out, waiting to hear Marie crying out from a machete blow. Luckily, she made it through the day without running into Suzie.

While all this is going on, we start talking about Marie's possible pregnancy. She went into heat several months ago and we had to deal with a constant stream of beaus here courting her. Once that passed we started speculating as to whether she was knocked up or not (wasn't she slightly fatter? Aren't her teats a little bigger than before?). She ended up disappearing for five days which really got our radars up, but when she came back we never saw a puppy. She still hung out a lot at the houses, but she started sleeping somewhere else at night. A few of us went into the woods a few times to try to find her nest, but we never did. Now that we knew she would be killed any day, finding the puppies took on a new importance. We might not be able to do much to help her, but we certainly didn't want her babies starving to death afterwards. A few of the volunteers took to the woods again and this time Marie led them to her den. Some thorough searching led us to her little puppy! He was immediately kidnapped and brought to our house to live. Marie seemed happy about it. Here they are living on our front porch together.

So now Marie has a puppy, a puppy that's still dependent on her for milk. That certainly complicates things. I hadn't planned on talking to Suzie, but I happened to run into her that afternoon. She immediately became defensive and explained that she had been ordered to kill Marie, it wasn't her choice. She explained that Marie was a huge liability and started listing reasons why she needed to be killed. I told her that I wasn't there to argue for her life, I just wanted a reprieve until the puppy could live on it's own. She agreed to wait one more week, but then she'd have to kill her. I asked if there was a more humane way to put the dog down since none of us wanted her to suffer a brutal death. She explained that she had anesthesia for doing minor surgies on the farm animals. She could give Marie an overdose which would stop her heart, but Marie wouldn't let her get close enough. I told her that Marie would let me do it. So that's how it came to be that I'm putting the dog down. Le sigh. While "murdering my pet" is an experience I could have done without here, if it means giving her a more peaceful passing, I think I need to put my own feelings aside and do that for her.

Mark and a few of the volunteers are trying hard to find a back up plan, something that would get her out of here and allow her to live out the rest of her life while saving the orphanage. It's caused a bit of a rift here as some of the volunteers feel it's less cruel for her to be put down than to throw her on the streets and make her fend for herself for the first time in years. We'll have a better idea of what's going to happen later this week. We all hope the story will have a happy ending. For now though, we can let her enjoy some time with her baby, Osito (Little Bear).

The two bears together

More randomness!

I grabbed some more pictures from our day at Xesuj

Today was pancake day for breakfast! And here's how we eat pancakes in Guatemala. First, put jelly down the middle...

Roll it up and then eat it with your hands :)

This week was chock full of flu shots! Here's me working my magic with one of the Tios

I was doing shifts this week so I had to miss the welcome dinner for the new volunteers. One of the old volunteers Liz made me a special treat because she felt bad! If only all gifts came in the form of homemade macaroni and cheese :D

Since half the volunteers are getting ready to leave, its time to start writing in some books! One of the cool things we do here for the volunteers is keep memory books. They're kind of like yearbooks; when someone is leaving everyone write a few pages in there and puts in photos about all the things they did together. I'm both incredibly sentimental and emotionally needy so I LOVE the thought of bringing home a book full of nice things people wrote about me :)

Check out the artwork the kids did on the stairs

I love these kids. They're a brother and sister that are new to NPH and they're teased mercilessly in their sections. They're super sweet and shy. I've added them to my list of kids to potentially support after I get home :)

There are a ton other projects here in Guatemala to help kids. One of the ones that we work with is called The Memory Project (http://www.memoryproject.org/about.php) Kids from the United States are given photos of NPH kids. They paint portraits from them and then send them back here. All the kids have paintings hanging up next to their beds, it's pretty cool :)

And finally, I want to leave you with something memorable. Here is a tooth, specifically a pig's tooth. Why yes, it was an added bonus to yesterday's lunch! o_0

Xesuj

With the new batch of volunteers chomping at the bit to get started in their jobs, it's almost time to say goodbye to half of our group. It's hard. In the beginning I could feel a much closer bond with the folks I had started with. We all struggled together when we got here while the older volunteers seemed to be so comfortable with their jobs, the language and the kids. As time went on and we started to learn our way around, the line separating new from old became a lot grayer. I consider quite a few of the old volunteers my friends and it's hard to imagine this experience without their presence.

One of the volunteers who'll be leaving next week is Mark. Mark and I are not very close but we're friendly (which is a good thing since not only do we spend all day together in the clinic, we also live in the same house). Mark will be leaving next Saturday to make room for Jack, the new volunteer from Chicago. I've been feeling Jack out and from what I've seen so far I think we're going to be a good team. Mark will be missed in the clinic though, especially by Tia Rosa. They're very close and I know she's not looking forward to having him leave.

Tia Rosa organized a little going away party for the clinic volunteers. As the physical therapist, my friend Hannah is also officially part of the clinic (though we don't usually see each other during the day). All of the clinic staff woke up horribly early for a Saturday (who leaves for a BBQ at 8a?!), packed up picnic stuff and headed out. While we were driving there and chatting about all the delicious foods we had brought, Tia Rosa and I discovered what has so far been my biggest translation flop since being in the clinic. Earlier in the week we had been discussing what we needed to bring and she asked me to bring a "parilla". I had no idea what that was, so I asked for clarification. She said, "You know, the thing you use when you're cooking hamburgers." "Ahh," I said. "You mean this thing..." Not knowing the word for spatula, I acted out flipping a hamburger with a sizzling sound. She confirmed what I was saying and asked if I could bring one. I said no problem and I was quite proud that I remembered to pack our metal spatula the morning of the picnic. Yeah, well it wasn't a spatula she wanted, it was a friggen grill! So with ten of us packed into the car en route to the park, we realized we had no way to cook the ten pounds of raw meat we had. I felt like an idiot, but I also asked her why on earth she would assign the foreign volunteer to bring the grill when I obviously would have no way of obtaining one. Anyway, crisis was averted once we got to the park and discovered that they did, in fact, have grills there for everyone to use. Phew!

The place we went was called Xesuj (pronounced almost the same as the bird from the Lion King- Zazu. Actually I think it was more like Sa-zoo, for those who care). It's a small park located right outside Chimal in a town called San Martin, about half an hour away from NPH. It doesn't look like anything from the road, just a dirt road leading down to a small river. Once you go down a small hill you can see how truly beautiful it really is. It's wonderfully landscaped with peacocks, ducks and guinea hens running around everywhere. They have big cages of monkeys and displays of artwork as you walk around. There's also two big pools that were immaculately kept. Next to the pool is a small waterfall with a cabana next to it. We rented the cabana for the day for $15 and got to enjoy a great breeze that came down from the mountain. Then we spent the rest of the day pigging out on a mixture of American and Guatemalan BBQ food. I made my potato salad and brought hot dogs, but we also ate guacamole, salchichas (sausages), chicken, frijoles and a ton of Mexican beer. It was a really great time :)

Here's Tia Rosa and her husband Ezekial getting food ready while Tio Espana (the dude who usually drives us for all our medical appointments) eats the leftover avocados

Mark helps marinate the shit-ton of meat we brought

Everyone easing into eating mode. The dude in the yellow shirt if Louis Pabo, he's the dentist who overseas the volunteer dentist, Elizabeth (in the blue shirt). The guy in the plaid shirt is Jan, he's the Director of NPH and a former volunteer from Germany. He bought all our beer for the day :)

Hannah and Doctor Nicole chillin on a rock

Roasted tomatoes (which were later crushed and used in a chili sauce. Delicious)

These are the popular chilis in Guatemala. They're called "dientes de perro" or "dog's teeth" hot peppers. They're one of the hottest types of chili peppers available. I have not tried them, nor do I have any desire to do so

Waterfall! That's the cabana we rented next to it. So pretty!

And the view from the cabana. I felt like we were at a resort!