Hola from Guatemala!

I guess it’s about time for me to try this out. Well…….. I arrived in Guatemala City on last Wednesday. I spent Wednesday afternoon meeting people in the CDC office and quickly forgetting their names. On Thursday, I got started on my project. I have been trying to translate this questionnaire into Spanish and then program the questionnaire into the computer which has been really frustrating. There isn’t a user’s manual for this CDC software, and it doesn’t make any sense!! Which is why I am taking a break and writing something…

I’m staying in a house with Lindsey. Our roommates are both teachers at this fancy private school. They are pretty nice (both named Michelle- one from Canada and one from Texas), and the house is great (complete with decent wireless internet). Over the weekend, Lindsey and I took a “chicken bus” (a crowded, revamped school bus that puts off so much smoke) to Antigua- about 45 min from the city. Antigua is really pretty. There are cobbled streets and old colonial buildings and ruins. On the bus, we made friends with a guy from Mexico City and a girl from Argentina who was studying abroad in Mexico. It was really neat listening to their different accents. Argentinean Spanish is so smooth! We ended up wandering around the city with them, going to a nice market, and exploring some ruins, including those of an old school. We went to dinner at a place owned by a guy in Carrboro (Stevo met him and told Lindsey about the place). On Sunday, we were supposed to go to Chichicastenango (a small town in the highlands with an incredible market), but Lindsey was sick. She thinks she got food poisoning. We spent the morning wandering around Antigua, looking at churches and ruins, and saw some type of parade (can’t figure out what holiday it was). The churches were really amazing. The chapels have these gorgeous arched ceilings, and the stone walls have sculptures encased in glass and painted scenes on them. The sculptures and the paintings are very graphic and some are kind of terrifying.

People in Antigua were very pushy in a nice way. Walking through the streets and the market, everyone calls you friend and asks if you are looking for something special. Also, people are not upfront about services and costs. Lindsey told me that it was not uncommon for people to give you papers, candies, etc and then come back and collect money.

The city is noisy and polluted but surprisingly has a lot of trees. I haven’t gotten to see too much of the city. The CDC office is across from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. I’m not exactly sure about the extent of the collaboration between CDC and UVG, but the regional CDC office is here. The campus is really pretty. The CDC office is in a nicer zone in the city (city has 22 zones). On Monday, I got to visit one of the clinics run by the Ministry of Health (where I will hopefully be shadowing in the next few weeks). Apparently, the Ministry of Health claims to provide all of its services for free, but they find a way to charg for services in the hospital and services are often limited. Sidenote: there are 3 tiers of health care here: the best is private insurance/ private care, second best is a public system which employers buy into for their employees, and the worst are the free public clinics. The clinic I went to this morning was pretty small and is primarily for sex workers. It is not in a nice part of town.

There is still a lot of ash on the streets from when Pacayo erupted in the end of May. I still haven’t seen the sinkhole. I did go see “Los magnificos” (The A-Team) at the VIP cine where you sit in recliners and there are waiters. It was really fun! Tomorrow we are headed to Lake Atitlan for the weekend. I’ll post pictures soon. I miss you all and want to hear how everyone is doing!