A belated picture and me rambling a lot...

So I've been meaning to take my camera along with me for months now when I go my school that is south of me - about 45 minutes and 15 degrees hotter south. Literally, the weather there is so different that they grow entirely different crops than they do in my town - coffee, avocados, little Guatemalan fruits called jocote - and the trees are distinctly more jungle-like. It's one of the prettiest drives I have been on in Guatemala, and I do it about once a week. This school (and the trip there) also happens to be one of my few "real Peace Corps" things that I deal with, meaning that it is slightly difficult to get to and the school is pretty small and rural. Let me diverge a little bit here (and let me also say that it is approaching 9:30pm, aka past my bedtime, so sorry if this entry is a little scattered): according to pretty much every stereotype that most people have about the Peace Corps, I am not really in the Peace Corps. I live on the second floor of a huge house, with tiled floors, running water and electricity (neither of which ever go out, except for when I accidentally knock my bathroom sink off the wall and have to frantically search for my host mom to get her to turn the water off because my bathroom is flooding, while wearing a towel and sporting still-soapy hair, mind you, but that's another story), I have access to pretty much whatever foods I want (I can't even think of things that I would want to receive in a care package, unless anyone can find a way to ship an endless supply of Ocean Spray cranberry juice), all of my work counterparts are respectful and supportive of me and my work and the majority of them are enthusiastic about doing their part to participate in the Youth Development program (not that they have a choice, their boss says they have to, but that doesn't always keep people from dragging their feet) and what's more, most of them are more than competent enough to do what I am asking them to do. If you put all these things into a list and asked your average Peace Corps volunteer to check off what they had, most people, even in Guatemala, probably couldn't check half. Oh, and also I have an always-functioning always-super-hot shower, not that I use it all that often... I am a Peace Corps volunteer after all! A hot shower may sound like a silly luxury if you are in America, but in the Peace Corps it's a pretty hot commodity. OH also, I have a host family that I love love love. I don't always spend a ton of time with them, but when I do they are great to hang out with, and they never fail to show their support for me, be it for my summer English classes ("why don't you put a big sign out front?") my need to buy appliances for my house (my host mom accompanied me and bargained prices way down lower than I would have ever had the guts to do), sit with me for hours to tell me about the various fruits and vegetables in the market that I had never seen before, sell me me a tortilla press when I was complaining about how the town tortilla lady is never there and so I couldn't get my tortilla fix, stopping whatever they're doing to clear out the pila each and every time that I go down to do dishes, even though I tell them it's ok, I can do it myself... and if I do happen to want to spend a lot of time alone, or I just happen to be out of the house a lot and so don't see them for a few days, that's fine too. I don't feel at all obligated to spend time with them, but I always know that they are there if I need to or want them for anything. Wow I'm diverging a lot. I think I'm just on some crazy high point in my service right now and I gotta get it out! Newsflash, everyone: Life is good!

Anyway, so this school. It's down the hill from me, there is one class for each of the three grades, and one teacher for each grade. They don't wear uniforms because the "administration" (teachers) decided that it was an unnecessary economic burden for the students, many of whom are (slightly) poorer than your average Guatemalan. Most of the girls wear skirts, because as one girl told me, "my mom doesn't like when women wear pants". (Pretty much all the girls in my more-"progressive" town wear pants, although most of their mothers still wear "traje" - traditional clothing). Also, the transportation to this school is a little iffy. I did make friends with the one bus driver that makes several daily trips from this town to San Marcos, but sometimes he doesn't happen to be going where I want to go when I want to go, so in those cases I just set off on foot and wait for the first thing (bus, pick-up truck full of people standing in the back holding onto an improvised metal frame, etc.) that goes by and I flag it down. 

I took this picture (the one below, which I meant to start writing about a half hour ago but apparently got distracted) on my way back home today, obviously from the back of a pick-up truck, which may or may not have been driven by one of my 8th grade students. Along the mountain that you see in the background (which is farther away than it looks) is the continuation of my route home - you can sort of kind of tell where the road is if you look at the right side of the mountain, where the bell-curve-shaped dirt section is flat on the bottom (flat part = road). The point of this picture is to show the landslides on this mountain, aka all of the dirt-colored sections. The bell-curve-shaped landslide was there when I got to site, although I think it progressively worsened throughout the rainy season, and busses wouldn't run on that road if it was raining for fear of being squished by a falling boulder (a very real possibility). The narrow, vertical landslide to the left occurred while I was in site - that part of the mountain was entirely intact and green as of a few months ago. You can't see the full extent of the landslide from this picture, but it runs down the entire length of the mountain and ends in the river below the mountain. Unfortunately, this landslide had impeccable aim, and happened to land square on top of one of the few tourist attractions in this area (mostly local tourists, not too many gringos would venture down this far) - a collection of natural hot springs, which had been spruced up by the addition of cement pools and was, apparently, pretty nice (by Peace Corps/Guatemalan standards, at least). I wouldn't know, because I wasn't able to visit there before it got land-slid on top of. Supposedly they are going to rebuild the pools/hot springs on the other side of the river, so maybe before the end of my service I will be able to see what they were all about. Anyway, just wanted to show some of the effects that this year's crazy rainy season had here, since the rains were actually important enough to make it onto American news a few times (although actually, I'm pretty sure the BBC probably reported the most on them... go BBC!) But, at least for now, the rains are over so I just gotta concentrate on soaking up this sunnnnn :)