The past three weeks have been a whirlwind and I haven’t gotten enough time to write in my gournal (I hope someone gets that reference). Anyways, let’s play catch-up. I've broken up all of what I had written over the past couple of weeks up into five different entries. That way it’s not just one long, scatterbrained, rambling passage (although they will probably all read that way).
October 14th we were assigned our sites and we spent the next week visiting them. I knew I wanted a rural, indigenous site in the mountains, and that’s exactly what I got. For the next two years I will be living in Salquil Grande, an aldea in the Nebaj region of the department of Quiché, (“key-chay”). There’s an accent on the “e” so no it’s not pronounced like the French cuisine. Don’t bother trying to find Salquil Grande on Google Maps, it’s not there. Instead look up Nebaj, a close town of about 13,000. Salquil is about an hour and a half northwest of Nebaj along a windy, bumpy road high up in the Sierra de los Cuchumantanes, the highest non-volcanic mountain range in Central America. Salquil rests on a mountainside and my house sits at about 7,500 ft. From my window I have an incredible view of the surrounding 10,000+ ft peaks. The scenery of the area is epic; steep slopes drop into vast valleys. There is much to explore in these distant mountains with gushing rivers and cascading waterfalls. Not surprisingly Nebaj is a hiking destination though not well known or exploited due to its remoteness. I plan on doing a good amount of exploring during my time there.
The site visit went well. Peace Corps Guatemala pairs its volunteers up with organizations (this is not the case in Togo) and I’ve been paired with Save the Children which I think is a pretty well known U.S. organization. The other new volunteers in my area are also working with Save the Children: Stephen, Nicole, and Cara. They’re all a good distance away from me but we’ve got a good group up here and I’m pleased they’re (relatively) close to me. On our way to our sites we had a meeting in Santa Cruz de Quiché, the department capital. Save the Children put us up in a nice hotel and we spent the night full of fresh emotion, bonding over beers and watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
It was nice to finally see where I’ll be working. I’m replacing a volunteer named John who left me all his stuff which includes a huge Kansas Jayhawks flag, which shall be replaced as soon as possible. John was great in showing me around and introducing me to people. There is a decent sized group of gringos in Nebaj made up of volunteers from different organizations. They threw a welcome dinner for me which was nice. I’m looking forward to seeing them whenever I’m in Nebaj. Saturday we all returned from our post visit drained, eager to return to our sites and facing one more week of training.
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