What's happenin?

Just thought I would give you all an update on my work and life here in Guatemala. I am continuing in giving my health talks to my four different groups in my two communities and trying to figure out how to best educated these groups of individuals, most of who are illiterate. I have been working on a schedule of two health talks a month but now I am taking a step back and realizing that that is a lot of information to cover in a period of a month and expect these women to remember it at a level that they can share it with other community members and give health talks on the topics in a similar manner as I do. I have decided that it would be worth slowing down and arriving at our goal a little latter and have the women better prepared then to stick with the current plan and be left with health promoters that are not ready to work in their communities. I have decided to cover one topic a month and use the second meeting time of the month for a review and potentially a cooking or craft activity. Also, during the review time I will pick out two group members to help give the review of the topic covered in order to build up skills and get them ready to work in their communities.

On another note, when I was heading to one of my groups, I was approached by another women that wasn't apart of my group. After talking with her, I learned that she was a part of a group of women that exist in one of my communities and that they want to work to help get a better drainage system in place in their community. She didn't ask me for money (a huge relief as this seems to happen a lot!) but for the guidance to help secure funds for these projects they wanted to take on. I was excited to be approached and excited to take this on. She also asked about me starting charlas with the group she was a part of. It was a great feeling to have people understand my job and seek me out instead of me trying to find participants. We didn't get many details of how we are going to work together but she was supposed to call this past Friday but didn't. I hope we can get something going with her and her group. Another reason that I really hope this works out is that the community she is from doesn't have a woman's committee as part of the leadership in the community and apparently according to the municipality, every community has a right to have one of these. A woman's committee will help out when it comes time for me to do projects because they will be more aware of the needs of the women in the community and forming a committee is a step to becoming official and will allow them to ask for funding from the municipality.

Living Intentionally

Trying to figure out what I want to gain by being here in the Peace Corps. I guess I have the typical vies of what a PCV expereince should be like (gained from a book from PC the includes short stories about past PCVs called "A Life Inspired") but is that what I want and can I be satisfied if that's not what I get out of all of this? I feel like coming into this experience as a Chrisitian I am already set up to have a different experience. I feel like I am still adjusting to everything here, it's a slow go like everything else here. :) I still don't feel like I have it all together and I am not sure that I will ever truly get to that point here. After watching presentations from others in my department over what we have all done with our first 6 months in site, I feel like I can't help but compare my accomplishments to theirs. Why do I feel like I need to? Can't I be happy with what I am accomplishing? That I have women who to come to my twice a month meetings and participate and thank me for teaching them? Why should the volume of what I accomplish be the factor by which I measure my time here?

I have decided to live more intentionally here. I think this will help me in my challenge of comparing myself with others and will help me to be more content in my work here. I feel like I am so ready for the next step that maybe I am missing what the here and now has to offer. Now I have not totally figured out what an intentional life looks like for me but I would dearly like to get there. I think a good start would be setting some reasonable goals here and now that I can work towards.
Just thought I would leave you with a picture of the sun setting as seen from my health center. Enjoy!