oh the weather outside is weather

Oh the weather outside is weather…

It has been an interesting few weeks here in Guatemala. Lots and lots of mudslides and fatalities and crops getting drowned out and Peace Corps Volunteers being put on Standfast (its like being grounded to your site).

As was expected, the productivity of my school-visits has reached a plateau as we near independence day. My schools are far too busy with dance and music practice for the big day (15^th) to be working on Healthy Schools stuff. After that i've got a solid month before schools let out for the "summer" so we'll see if anyone actually wants to work...I have a feeling it may be a lost cause.

This is a look back at the month of August. Also some pictures of all of the food I have been making, I have been KILLING IT in the kitchen. If I make a cookbook that’s what I’m going to call it, I just decided that right now- Killing it in the Kitchen with Kristin™

Yep, that just happened.

So here’s the food montage.

Some Chilli

and some veggie soup...

...Margarita Pizzas

Yumm Bowl!

Elephant Ear

and a hamburger.

Now that we’ve established I’m a rockstar/fat kid we can move on…


I found and purchased Hellboy I and II in the market in Antigua and I think I’ve watched it an embarrassing amount of times. It may seem a little bit lame…but just know this about me and love me anyway.


About my trip to the dentist…


I didn’t end up getting a root canal but I did cry my face off in the dentist’s office. I went in and they took new X-rays (despite my having brought the one I had taken in my site) and didn’t see any problems; they decided that the reason I was having pain was because my two fillings (one on the bottom tooth and one on the tooth above it) were not ground down enough and my uneven bite had created pressure points. The solution? To grind off the parts of the filling that were uneven. So she put a drill in my mouth and went to work…zero Novocain. IT WAS AWFUL. You know when you go to the dentist and they ask you to just raise your hand if you feel any pain? Not so much at that office. As I’m crying and raising my hand she keeps taking the drill out of my mouth and telling me, “okay, okay, no more of the drilling then” and then she’d switch the drill heads and go back in. At one point in the appointment I was crying so hard, my face was literally dripping with tears so she grabbed the bib that I was wearing and patted my face with it. When it finally came time to tell her if the pain was gone when I bit down, I was in so shaky and sweaty that I couldn’t tell. I left all puffy and sniffling and still can’t chew food on the left side of my mouth, only now I have hot and cold sensitivity as well; joy. I don’t know if my experience was normal for that kind of treatment but I am inclined to think not; pretty sure I haven’t cried at the dentist since I was 6. I don’t want to come off as a whiner, I am trying to look for the humor in the situation. I feel like once it’s funny I’ll be willing to make another appointment with the dentist, but right now I want nothing to do with more dental work. I’d rather just chew on the right side of my mouth for a while and use the extra soft toothbrush and pro-alivio toothpaste. I am just realizing that I forgot to tell the nurses this…I should probably do that… I bet they’re getting tired of me calling them all the time.



Speaking of me calling the nurses all the time…


I got a really cool skin infection on my face. It was really awful. I’ll tell you what, it’s really hard to promote “healthy schools” when people think that they’re going to catch something from you. I didn’t think that it was that bad right? I thought it was maybe just some stress-triggered thing from my near-death rainstorm/landslide/waterfall drive home from the project design and management workshop with my profe (I’ll tell you about it next). So I decided to just wait it out a few days and see if it would resolve itself. I called the gas guy to bring me some more propane and I put on a little bit of makeup and a hat; the first thing the gas guy says, “whoa, what happened to your face? That looks really bad.” THANK YOU. So I said something like…“I don’t know, I’m sick or something, you can put the gas over there, its Q.114 right?” and he left, I washed my face and looked in the mirror and decided it was time to take a picture and send it to the nurses to see if it was something that I should be concerned about. No, I wont show you the picture but imagine me, I’m making the saddest face ever and it looks like I’ve got chicken pox all over my face…got it? Yeah, so I put work on hold because I couldn’t figure out a way to leave my house during the daylight hours without getting a lot of commentary on my hideousness. The nurses decided that it would be a good idea for me to get in to see the dermatologist and get this infection taken care of; so I go back to Guatemala City for the second time that month. So, so poor by the end of the month. I dressed myself up like a celebrity avoiding the paparazzi and hit the road. I saw the doctor, got some drugs and some topical stuff and headed back to site. I was so happy to be back, I can’t even tell you. I think I spent equal amounts of time in my site as I had on the road last month, it was nice to be in my own bed…in my own house where I could let my skin heal and make my own food…and watch Hellboy.



My life flashed before my eyes…made me miss theme parties.


My near-death experience…Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic but at the time I was pretty sure I was going to die. On the way back from PDM Workshop with Profe Lisandro we took Mari and her counterpart back to her site which is like 2 ish hours from mine. Well we went up into the mountains to drop them off and while we were there it started raining…like REALLY raining. There was some concern as to whether or not we were going to be able to make it out because often when it rains up there the roads to get back to the highway become blocked. Well Profe Lisandro and I decided that we really would rather go home than stay and try and wait out the rainstorm, since it had just started we thought we had a pretty good chance of getting out. So wrong. We are driving down this, well, mountain and we are taking our time to try and be as safe as possible when we come to one area of the road that looks like a waterfall is running down from the straight-up mountain to our left and then flowing over the road in front of us where it waterfalls again over the cliff on our right. The first thing profe lisandro says, “oh no, I don’t like this, this is really dangerous.“ Naturally I stayed completely cool under pressure. Yeah right. So Profe gets out of the car and starts talking with these two guys who are walking up the hill to see if they think that we can get across; right away I’m thinking this is a bad idea, I am just seeing our little pickup being washed over the right side of the cliff. The men that profe spoke to thought it was not possible, so we sat and waited for the rain to let up a little. There was a brief softening of the rain and profe got out (in his business clothes…in the pouring rain) and started to move boulders and tree branches and other misc. stuff that washed down the mountain and into the road with the other two men. So, long story short, we made it across the river in the road but only after we got stuck in the mud in the middle of it, I was terrified. Then, not 200 feet further down we run into a landslide that has covered the entire road. At this point I am thinking that we’re pretty much screwed. There’s a river behind us, washing out the road, and there’s a landslide in front of us, blocking the road. We’re not going anywhere. Then I start to think about the likelihood that another landslide happens right where the car is…that would pretty effectively ruin my plans to get home/live. So I called the peace corps office to see if they had any sort of “Disaster Preparedness” lecture they could give me, you know, maybe some tips about, “in the event of a mudslide happening on a narrow road in the middle of a rainstorm on the edge of a cliff, you should____” ? well, I ended up talking to one of the Nurses who happens to know the area really well because she used to live near there, and she asks me, “are you more worried about the mountain falling on you to your left or the road washing out under you to your right?” Shit. hadn’t even thought of the road washing out on me to my right, a whole new set of death scenarios came to mind. In the end a crew of locals helped to make a passage in the landslide wide enough for one car to pass through. We were the first people through and 10 minutes later we were down at the highway. Thank god. We stopped at a little café on the side of the road so that we could wash up and try and dry off a little bit. We drank some coffee and got back on the road. 8 and half hours after we left the hotel where the workshop was held we arrived back home. It was 10:30PM and I was hungry and needed to bathe. So I put some water in a pot to boil it for a bucket-bath only to find that all of the propane was gone; that my roommate had left me with none. This was a terrible turn of events for me, since I also didn’t have any food except for and apple and some dried pasta in the house because I’d spent the majority of the month traveling. I gave up, I washed my face, changed my clothes, ate an apple, went to bed. Awoke the next morning to a brand new day and skin problems. It was one of my top 10 worst peace corps days. But it’s over now and I’m glad.



Other things I am very glad about: I received packages! I love love love my friends and family. I am so lucky to have you all! This week’s all-stars are Meredith and Elizabeth Joy.


Mere- love the scarf, headband and yumm sauce! I have been trying to eat it slowly but it’s just. So. Good. Just thinking about it now has me craving another yumm bowl. Putting it on the docket for tomorrow.


Lizzy- Currently on disk 11 of 37 in NCIS… it brought me back after my life-issues last month, can’t thank you enough for sending those to me. I think I actually ate cheeze-its as a meal one afternoon. Mmmm…so much goodness.


I'm all tuckered out, uploading those photos took FOREVER. blah.


LOVE LOVE LOVE!

xoxo,

Kristin