Panajachel

Here's some pictures of what the daily heavy rains can do to the streets here.

We finished our last clinic day today, and will head back to Guatemala City tomorrow, before heading back out on Monday.

Cerro de Oro

On the way over to our site for the second day. Yesterday was just a warm-up apparently, today the work really begins.

Kodiak Pictures

Highlights from my trip to Kodiak:

Kodiak Pictures

Guatemala City

I made it to Guatemala City today. Bryan from La Mision met me at the bus station and now I am back at the house. Tito's family has moved to a new house in a nice neighborhood here. Tomorrow the group from Nashville arrives,  and we leave for Panajachel on lake Atitlan on Sunday. Coincidentally, Mike's friend Ben Ross's younger sister Jill from Whitworth is here working with La Mision too.

I changed my ticket to come back 6 days earlier to have a bit more time at home. After the 2 weeks here with La Mision I think I will go to Semuc Champey for a few days then either finish up in at Lake Atitlan or Antigua.

Things are looking kid, will post any updates here.

Nepal Pictures

Here is a link to an online album with the edited, highlight photos from my trip to Nepal:

Nepal 2014 Highlights

Guatemala

I am a bit late in getting this up, but I have arrived in Guatemala safely and am now in Xela at language school. I go to class from 8 am - 1 pm, taking a "pausa" from 10:30-11. I am liking my teacher. So far a lot of things are coming back to me very rapidly, though as I do review things I had learned in Peru I realize there are substantial pieces I have forgotten. Still, things are moving quickly. Apparently they normally cover 1 tense per week here, and go in depth on all the irregular verbs. We are doing the same but with 3 tenses per week as well as additional grammatical points, general and medical vocabulary to mix things up a bit. The hostel where I am staying is working out alright. Im paying less than $30 per week for a large private room with a desk and a decent view over the city, a huge improvement over spending the same amount per night for a shared room in Nepal. I am a bit concerned that there may be some bed bugs however, I am using the REI permetherin treated sleeping bag liner but I still seem to wind up with a few new bug bites each morning... hopefully not a problem, hah. On the topic of bugs, I went to the pharmacy today and picked up a pack of albendazole for parasites. The same prescription I tried to pick up in the US was not covered at all by insurance, and was going to cost me $1,140. Here I got it for 7 quetzales, just under 1 USD. Xela is a nice enough small town, not terribly scenic but the people all seem to be quite friendly. I get smiles and waves from little shop proprietors as well as shotgun or fully-automatic toting guards in front of the banks and richer businesses, hah. Virtually none of the local people speak anything approaching functional English, so its a great place to practice. My Spanish teacher is so far the teacher who knows the least English out of all the ones I have had so far, we communicate basically entirely in Spanish and I simply google  word if we can't figure out the translation. Its going quite well. I ran into a bit of a problem with my computer over the past few days. The microSD memory card I use for running my programs, storing my documents, pictures, and just about everything else (since the tablet's internl hard drive is almost entirely filled just with the Windows operating system) stopped working. Fortunately it will still let my computer read it, but I cant make any changes to anything on it, no new files, no new pictures, no deleting files, no changing my documents, etc. After some extensive trial and error I have basically decided it is shot, and moved my critical files over to the card I had in my camera (half the size but still bigger than anything I can buy here), and Ill try to pick up a cheap card for my camera before doing anything exciting. This weekend I am planning to go on a day trek up the volcano Santa Maria. Apparently we leave at 4:30 am in order to get up to the viewpoint by sunrise...

With regards to my plans while here, I am finishing this week of school and staying for one more here in Xela. Next Friday afternoon or Saturday morning I bus to Guatemala City to meet up with Tito, and join him for 2 weeks of rural medical clinics. Three different volunteer teams will be coming down during that time, and he is hopeful we can visit Tikal during that time. Afterwards I had initially thought to return to Xela, but now I am thinking I may go spend a week at Lake Atitlan for more language school. After that I would like to go to one of the local places I have been told is a must visit, Semuc Champey, which is a bit of a journey so may take a few days.

That's about all for now.