Best week so far. We went on out second and last field-based training up North in Coban. We spent the week running around with two volunteers who are on their way out and are going to be replaced by two of us. Both are good volunteers, but more importantly, they´re actually sane. Both have learned to speak both Spanish and Kekchí­ and have had a lot of success with their communities. It was encouraging to spend the week with them.

Basically, we ran around with them all week and had some training activities. This included giving presentations to local groups in order to practice. I gave mine to a bunch of fourth-graders on how to use worms for composting. I had planned on giving it to adults, so I scraped my plans at the last minute just walked around and let them play with the worms. I think they liked it.

We also met with a family of Mennonite missionaries who are running a school in Coban. They run a large organic farm outside the school where we spent they day. They were hilarious. They´ve been their for four years and the whole family is tri-lingual, including the kids. What´s best is that they look like the Children of the Corn and live in totally indigenous community. On Thursday, we ended up going out to a nature preserve with them. There were a bunch of waterfalls and caves. We cooked-out and soaked it up. It was great to go swimming.

We also had meetings with the jefe to discuss our sites. After seeing the two Coban volunteers, I decided I´d really like to learn another language and requested a Mayan-language site. We find out this coming Thursday. At the moment, we know all the sites, but they have yet to be assigned. All we have to go on is hearsay and hunches, so we´re all pretty nervous to find out. Based on my requests, my guess is that I´ll either end up in Coban or way out West. I´m suspecting I´ll get the one out West. It sounds pretty rugged, but I´m up for that. However, in the past, people have gotten sites totally contrary to their requests, so I could end up somewhere else. We´ll see. Till then, we´re placing our bets.

Not a whole lot going on this week. Right now, we are in between our two field-based training trips. Basically, that means two weeks of training in the center until we leave a week from tomorrow for Coban. We still do not have much information about our sites. We should be getting our assignments the week after going to Coban.

We did spend some time this week working to rebuild from some of the damage of the hurricane. A couple of the villages around Antigua took some serious flooding that left a lot of houses and property buried. Our work was to help dig out what we could. In this area, help abounds as many tourists from Antigua have lent a hand. From what I have read, many of the communities in the western part of the country have it worse. As such, some of the sites our director had picked out may have to be changed.

While working, we met a bunch of other PC volunteers who had been stranded in Antigua and could not get back to their sites. Having met about six ag. Volunteers, I would characterize them on a scale from seemingly normal to utterly crazy. One year working out in the field seems to have a strange effect on some people--some far more than others. The three that stand out more than others are Sara, the 50 year old ex-hippie, Justin the misanthrope and Billy, the far too happy cowboy from Nebraska. I don´t have enough time to elaborate on their complexities, but let´s just say it offers an interesting insight into how we might be in a year.

So here it is, I started a blog.

I am a little over a month into training at the moment and I must say that Guatemala has been a great time. Although I spent most of last week stuck out west in Xela due to the Hurricane, everything has been an experience.


While most of Guatemala got nailed pretty hard by the storm, we managed to have a good time in the hotel. The rains caused landslides blocking the roads out of Xela, killed the power and broke all the water lines. We got by with rainwater and gas stoves. The storm made the trip a wash, but the nights of cards, politics and drinking made it a worthwhile time to really get to know the other trainees.

Beyond last week, training has been a good time. I landed a great host family that is the envy of everyone else. A couple weeks ago, I went along with them to their family finca down by the El Salvador border. The place was incredible. They grew about 25 different crops on a huge piece of land up in the mountains. It was a family plot with 3 houses, about 30 family members and four generations. There are no roads in and we had to walk a mile to arrive. It´s seriously a scene out of 100 Years of Solitude.

Beyond the travels, I have been fairly busy with training. I opted out of Spanish classes to focus more on technical training. So far, we´ve terraced some land, planted a bunch of vegetables and built a chicken coop. We finished the coop last week and bought about 115 chickens to raise and produce eggs. At the moment, we´ve got about 100 somewhat happy chicks, hens and roosters under one roof.

Unfortunately, of the 15 full grown birds we bought, some have gotten sick and we´ve had to cull them from the flock. When this whole ordeal began and the hens started getting sick, it was my job to kill them (I had mentioned my hunting experience before, so I got the job). My instructor told me to take the hen down past the avocado trees, do the deed and to then bury her. Instead, everyone else came to watch. I thought I could get by with the old ¨wounded duck¨move and just snap the neck without making much of a fuss. So I grabbed the hen by the feet and the head and pulled. Nothing happened, it just sat there and blinked at me. On a second and more concerted try, I gave the bird a harder pull and managed to tear the head right off. As there are three Dan´s in the ag program and we need to distinguish ourselves, I now sometimes find myself responding to Dan the Butcher. However, the other Dans find their names prefaced by Diarrhea and Delicate Peaches, so it could be worse.

So that´s the first month in a nutshell. I´ve got more training in the center for the next couple weeks before we go on another training trip to Coban. Hopefully, I learn some more about where my site will be.