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.