We left the Antigua region on October 1 and spent the next few days traveling to Xela and visiting everyone´s work sites and families. We first went to visit Willem´s site... he´s working on a coffee finca, at a school, and at the church his family attends. We spent a lot of the afternoon at the finca (after eating an amazing lunch with his family), which was really interesting. It´s owned by 3 siblings, one of whom is married to an American/French ex-pat, so he could explain more of the goings-on to us in English. We got to see the general idea of how teh coffee is picked, sorted, and weighed. This finca pays higher normally than the other surrounding fincas, but I think their main goal is to try and provide fairer working conditions for workers. The fincas, especially the coffee fincas, have been places of horrible working and living conditions in the past, and still many do not pay well or provide good working conditions for the Guatemalans who work there. Now, most of the coffee pickers are women, which was interesting to me.
On Friday October 2 we visited my organization and my home. I was really surprised when we visited my home, because Marcia had told us in March at the placement event that she thought everyone would have indoor plumbing since none of us are working in very rural sites. The office of my organization is based in Xela, but my home is not, and I had a hard time at first adjusting to thinking about using a latrine for 10 months, but I really loved my mom when I first met her... she seemed really excited about having me, but I´ll write more about my family later.
On Saturday we visited Whitney´s site...her work is similar to mine... both of us work with women´s ministries in church-affiliated organizations. She is a little bit further away, so that is kinda a bummer, but well get to all see each other at retreats every 5 weeks or so.
Bettina´s homestay is really different than mine... her home is very much like a home in the US, but her family was very welcoming, and I think she´s adjusting to have 6 brothers now! She is working with an organization called CEIPA, which works with kids who are behind in school because they´ve been working, so it´s a really important and necessary organization, because there are so many kids here who work and never really get an education.
On Sunday we went to the Episcopal church in Xela, where Dana will work. It was nice to go to a church service that was kinda familiar in format, and it was women´s month there so they had a sermon/lesson about the equality of men and women within the Church... I was actually a little jealous that Dana gets to go there every week, because my family is Presbyterian, but here anything that´s not Catholic (or Episcopalian) is Evangelical.
I should say that I liked the Episcopal church once we got there, because getting there was anohter matter. We had all our stuff with us, because we´d all been staying together for the weekend before we went for our last week of language school near Xela with new families. So we had to fit all our luggage plus 8 people into 2 taxis... I ended up sitting on Whitney´s lap in the front seat in some sort of pretzel formation with my left leg across my body and sticking out the window, because there just wasn´t room for it in the car. But we´ve learned that the number of seatbelts in a car is in no way an indicator of how many people can fit in one car... such is the way in Guatemala.
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