Since my last post, things have been normal with work. I’m still waiting out the dry season to start my school gardens, but I’ve been plenty busy with our tourism project, worm-composting and family gardens. As for BIG news, it looks like I’m gonna take a job here in Cobán with Partner for Surgery. I will finish Peace Corps in early July, come home for a break at the end of the month before coming back to start in August.

Partner for Surgery is an NGO focused on bringing surgical relief to the most remote regions of Guatemala. About 8 weeks out of the year, doctors from the States and Canada come down to visit rural communities and to identify patients. From there, there is a team of about 15 Guatemalan gerentes from each region in charge of seeing the patients to Antigua for surgery. The charity hospital Hermano Pedro provides the surgeries at little to no cost in Antigua. Almost every week, a foreign team of surgeons comes into Antigua to operate on the patients identified in the rural medical missions. The most common operations are hernias, cleft lips, tumors and burn revisions.

www.partnerforsurgery.org

My technical title will be “Director of Rural Structures,” meaning I’ll be more or less accountable for everything going on outside of Antigua. It’s a lot of responsibility and will be a big change in pace from my Peace Corps assignment. I’ll have a car and be traveling much more often; however, I’ll still be based in Coban. All in all, I couldn’t be more excited with the job. It’s a good spot to be in.

Besides this job news, I had a pretty amazing trip last week out to the western side of the country. I was headed out for meeting and decided to take off an extra day and to hike a volcano with some other PCVs. Getting to the meeting took me a good 8 hours on a chicken bus. From there, it was another 5 to the base of the Volcán Tacaná in the department of San Marcos.

The Western Highlands are a world apart from Cobán. It’s a dry scene of grasslands spotted with peaks and outstanding volcanoes. Furthermore, it’s really cold as the elevation can get up to around 12, 000 feet. After our meeting, we headed out to the tiny town of Sibinal at the base of the volcano. We stocked up on water (all of which had to be hauled up) and got a good rest before taking off the next morning.

I could go on forever describing how sweet this hike was, but I’ll let the pictures do that. Basically, it was a tough 5 hour haul to the top where we camped in the crater (it’s a dormant volcano). The next morning, we got around 4AM to hike to the tip of the volcano and see the sunrise. From there, it was about a 2 hour hike down and then a lovely 13-hour chicken bus ride back to Coban. This hike was awesome. It’s one of those experiences that make me have to pinch myself to believe it was all real. Guatemala is sweet.