EST. 2011

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QRLJ5O0.htm

Renato Beto

In the western highlands of Guatemala, everything seems to come to a halt around 10am. That's because it's snack time. The little boy seated to the right of Don Milo is his son. Everyday he brings his father snack and lunch(1pm). In this photo, he's drinking a home made rice milk out of an old plastic bottle.

During construction, we saved an estimated 800 quetzales(100$) by not having to buy expensive elbow connectors. Instead, we used man's oldest magic and bent the pipe using fire. In this video, you can see how we were able to bend the pipe up to about a ninety-degree angle with only using some fire and water. Two men would hold the pipe on either end while Don Milo would move the tubing over the fire. After about a minute of softening the tube, the two men, on other side of the six meter tube, would pull the tubing in opposite directions. This would cause the tube to become weak and malleable. Enough so, that Don Milo could slowly bend the tube ever so slightly. This process would be repeated until the tube was at a desired shape and angle. The Tube in the video has about 17 small bends in it. Before beginning the process, I was the most skeptical of all. Each one of these tubes cost 230q and even the smallest mistake in the melting/bending process would be, to say the least, a cos...

This man decided to dig his part of the trench barefoot. His boots got so heavy with the mixture of pine needles and mud that he decided to take them off. Pine needles and mud are the two ingredients for making adobe blocks, which are still used, more often than not, in the construction of Guatemalan homes in the campo . My house is made of adobe .

Everyone who has a child in either the pre-school or grade school in Piache was summoned to dig for a day. Many widows, like this woman, had to come and put in their days work. She was accompanied by her 6 yr. old son(on the left-side of the photo) and upon arrival many men left their own work and helped her out. It was nice to see chivalry in a culture dominated by the antiquated notion of machismo . Other widows simply paid a worker 50q(6 US$) to do their share. Fifty quetzales is a small amount of money for a days work under the Guatemalan sun, although something is better than nothing.

On the left are the old latrines. There are nine in total, although only 2 are not completely full. Due to their current state, many of the children refuse to use them. On the right is the InterVida constructed bathroom facility that since its inauguration(2007) has been left locked and unused.

It was 6:30 AM yesterday morning when my phone started to ring. It only rang once and then said I had missed a call. In the world of buying saldo , the amount of electronic credit one has on his TIGO Peace Corps issued cell phone to make calls, send texts, etc, it was clear to me that the caller was out of money, as my phone rang once and only once. This is TIGO’s way of letting the person without saldo contact another person to alert them of their insufficient funds and lack of ability to make an actual call. In essence, it’s like being paged in the year 2011. After looking into my missed calls log, I realized that it was my albañil , Don Milo. Albañil is Spanish for mason. Although, foreman better suits the role that Don Milo plays in my USAID funded SPA project. Regressing a little, I returned the call to Don Milo and it was only then that he began to share his unease about the weather. We talked for about three minutes after which it was clear to me that we would have to postpone...

Miguelito(little Michael), son of my host brother Miguel and older brother of Angelou, shows off his newly acquired skills. Miguelito is 8 years old and loves FC Barcelona. I've spent countless hours kicking the ball around with him in the family's patio area. In this short video clip he's quoted saying - " It's hard being a good soccer player like me!"

In the entry iSad, I talked about how great it is to watch a child play in the rain just for the feel of it all. For the past week we've been experiencing a tropical depression and so it has been raining almost 20 hours of the day. This inclement weather has given me the opportunity to catch some of this innocent curiosity on camera. This is a video of Beto, son of my host brother Juan Fernando, playing in the puddles on my patio.

It’s been a week since the passing of Steve Jobs, so I thought I’d put together another entry. All this talk of technology has lead to me wonder how our world will look in 2050? As we advance in technology, our ability to turn once thought impossible inventions becomes more and more a reality. A good example of this is the new concept for the iPhone 5. It has a holographic element that evokes a George Lucas’esk Star Wars way of leaving messages. It makes me wonder if one day we’ll leave holographic 3D messages instead of the old annoying boring voice mail. The link below is to the youtube video that shows the new and ridiculous features of the concept iPhone 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsBwnv_dAg I’ve compiled a list of things that I believe could possibly be extinct or completely out of use by the year 2050. While some of the items below are already on their way out, others are slowly starting to vanish due to advances in technology and people’s access to high speed Internet....

There are few times in the world where a person that you've never met, seen, or even had a conversation with can have such a direct influence as to how you see and interact with the world. Thanks to my father, I grew up a "Mac kid" and fell in love with Macintosh long before it was the "cool thing to do" or before the ipod came out in 2001. Even before it was main stream or socially acceptable, I was hooked. I remember being one of the only kids freshmen year at college who had a white storm trooper like laptop. Most of the other students rocked an HP, Dell, Samsung, Sony, or any other brand of PC that wasn't Apple. It wasn't until sophomore year when Apple decided to make the laptop sleeker, sexier, better running, and with a web-cam that I began to see that I wasn't the only kid on campus with an iBook or PowerBook. As I write you now, from the hills of Central America, I'm typing away on my iBook G4(2004) which, for better or worse, is on i...

This is a normal view from my patio area and one that often greets me as I leave my house . The guy with the pot is my host father Don Willy. In this photo, he's preparing to de-feather the chickens that have been previously sacrificed for the day's lunch. In Guatemala, the day's largest meal is lunch time and it's not rare for my family to eat criollo chicken three times a week. Criollo literally means born in spanish America, however in our current context of the chicken it simple translates into home-grown. Home-grown chicken, like this, doesn't taste the same as the poultry that we eat in the States. It's a more natural meat with less added preservatives, steroids, etc. When my father came to visit, my family prepared us a local chicken dish using this type of home-grown poultry. Needless to say, it was delicious.

This a panoramic view of the aldea Quiaquizuyal. This frontier like photo was taken a couple months ago, although could easily have been taken a hundred years ago as not much has changed in the rural areas of Guatemala. Houses are still constructed with adobe or mud blocks, there is no running water, no electricity, and a majority of the homes still have dirt floors. This is a photo of Don Luis. Don Luis is an employee of the Municipality and acts as a right hand man to the Mayor. Here he is standing in the back of a pick-up truck looking over the hills of Huehuetenango. The mountain range in the background is the Cuchumatanes. He accompanied us out to Xepon, one of the farthest out villages, and joined us for the free ride back to the centro of Malacas. As you can see by this photo, many of the roads in Huehuetenango are of dirt. I'd say that 10% or less of roads in this part of the country are properly paved. This is a photo I took last year in September of 2010. I was returni...

This is a picture of Renato and Angelou. Angelou is Miguel's son and wearing the brown hoodie. Renato is Andy's son and wearing the red jumper. Miguel and Andy are two of my four host brothers. Only in the past couple of days have the children of my host-siblings realized that they only have to knock on my door to get my attention. Needless to say, I feel like it's Halloween these days as the kids just can't resist knocking on the door of the Gringo . As a health educator, it will be quite the conflict of interest, but I plan on rewarding the kids for their knocks with candy come October 31st. I took this photo of Renato and Angelou through the window portal of my metal door about three days ago.

T his photo was taken while we were on standfast. Standfast is PC's way of saying be alert. Damian, the rather tall guy in the back, was relocated to Malacas during the recent country wide election season of five days because his site was deemed a possible dangerous place to be by PC administration. Frank is on the right and in the front is my host brother Miguel. Miguel is 30 years old. He, his wife, and two children all have visas to the United States. They've gone to the states once as a family and he'll be going to Miami and New York to visit extended family this October by himself. His wife's name is Alejandra and his two little kids are Miguelito and Angelou. I spend most of my afternoons with his two kids. They live next door and so are always coming over to their grandparents' house. Angelou is three years old and Miguelito is eight. Miguelito loves Barcelona FC and hopes to one day be a goal keeper. Angelou is much younger and looks more like his father, M...

This is a picture of the Malacas PCV's. Megan works with me in the Healthy Schools program. Frank works in the Mayor's office in a Municipal Development program. Due to the size of our town (2,500) we can see a lot of each other or can choose to be more independent. On an average week, we meet up for lunch at least four times. It's there where we share the stories of the day, talk about work related topics, projects that we're currently trying to fund, and whatever else happens along the way. This picture is of us in our rain jackets on the side of the road after our pick-up decided to die only 30 minutes into our 2 hour trip to a community. Luckily, after some fine tuning, we were able to get the pick-up running again and were only 15 minutes late to give a workshop. Being 15 minutes late in Guatemala for a workshop is like being 5 minutes early in the states; right on time.

Continuing the conversation about the “1 st ” and “3 rd ” world , I had a teacher once define the difference between these worlds as ones’ ability to get any fruit from around the world at any time of the year. She said that those in the “1 st ” world have access to any kind of fruit or vegetable throughout the entire year. So, next time you’re in your local supermarket, stop and think about where all the produce comes from. Ask yourself whether the people who have labored to grow and export whatever fruit or vegetable are able to buy said product at the same price that you’re paying for it. A good example of this can be seen in the sale and exportation of Latin American coffee. Guatemalan coffee is delicious. However, I’ve never been offered Guatemalan coffee since arriving here in January 2010. Most of the country’s coffee production occurs in the western highlands. Ironically, the people living in this region of the country are, more often than not, too poor to afford their own lo...

This is a picture looking out my kitchen window on any given Friday. I mentioned in an earlier entry, when I was talking about the bizarre noises that pass by my windows, that my neighbor runs a carniceria all day Saturdays. Accordingly, at the end of every work week a local cattle herder arrives to drop off his weekly delivery. So, like clock work, every Friday around 430-5pm my view from my kitchen window is blocked by a cattle truck and my nostrils are reminded that I am living in the rural areas of Guatemala. It gives the cattle and I a whole new meaning to TGIF. The netting over my window is an essential part of my kitchen set up. It allows me to cook with the windows open while not letting too many mosquitoes in.

Since getting to Guatemala, it has become evident how much a laptop and the Internet has changed the average Peace Corps volunteer’s life and ability to keep in touch with those stateside and everywhere else in the world. It was during Christmas vacation in the states that I realized how dependent we are on technology. I remember seeing people out at a bar or in a restaurant sitting together but not talking. They were all so preoccupied with their iphones and Blackberry’s to be hassled with man’s most basic mode of communication. It was so shocking to see and even more evident to me as I didn’t have a phone, or means of mobile communication, for the 12 days that I was in the US over Christmas break. When my father was a PCV in Bolivia during the early 70’s, he would record himself on cassettes and then mail them all the way up to Belmont, Massachusetts so my grandmother could hear about his travels. I still haven’t heard the cassettes, as he’s currently in the process of converting t...

Here are two rather old links to articles about Guatemala in the New York Times and the New Yorker. The New Yorker article is a little long but worth reading. Enjoy. The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/opinion/04schlesinger.html?_r=2 The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

This photo was taken at Patuitichaj which is a small two room schoolhouse located in the village of Xepon. The picture was taken after snack and so the children have gathered around the pila to brush their teeth. Healthy Schools' three biggest taught and emphasized habits are washing hands after using the bathroom, before eating, and brushing teeth after eating the daily snack. In Guatemala, 80% of the most common gastrointestinal illnesses can be prevented with the washing of ones' hands after going to the bathroom and before eating, yet in many of my schools water is a scarce commodity or in some circumstances doesn't exist at all. I'm currently waiting on word from a local NGO about two water projects that would provide far out communities with water in their local grade schools. These two projected projects would drastically change the lives of the students who attend these schools. The projects are very simple in "nature". The idea is to take advantage of...

This is a photo of my kitchen from a low vantage point to show off my recently mopped concrete floor. It’s taken from the interior wall looking out towards my large bay window. I decided to share this photo with you to give you a little look into what’s important in a volunteer’s life. At first, I didn’t think much of the photo. It’s nothing special and will never make a calendar. Although after a closer look, I began to see how many objects from my daily activities seem to be present in the snapshot. Computer with iTunes I am always surprised how much I rely on my computer as a Peace Corps volunteer. However, it is the year 2011 and so PC related emails are part of the job. In the photo, you can see that my iTunes are open. I’m always listening to music. Music is an important ingredient to my cooking style. Needless to say, I listen to music every night while I make dinner. Buckets for Leaks in the Roof During the rainy season, I have to strategically set-up 4 or 5 cut up...

This is a great article about the western highlands and the obstacles people have to face in their daily struggle to provide for their children. It also has a "shout-out" to the Peace Corps and mentions the upcoming Presidential election that is sure to have a great effect on the country. I hope you get a chance to read it. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/latin_america/july-dec11/guat_08-29.html