After almost two weeks out of site, I returned on a Sunday with Diana exhausted and short a pair of shoes (fell of the top of a micro, someone has some new keens). Diana wanted to explore Pachalum as soon as we arrived, so we dropped off our stuff at my house and hit the street. We walked only a few feet when my neighbor called me over to his house. Now this neighbor has some cute dogs and they just had puppies. I had visited the house before going on my travels to coo at the cuteness, so I thought he was inviting me over to see the puppies again…
But there were no longer three puppies, there was only one, the one I thought was the cutest. On Sunday November 14th, I became a first time dog-owner/mother to the brown puppy in the bunch. I immediately named my flea ridden baby Cappuccino Markowitz and he almost immediately peed on my shirt.
I saw the fleas, I washed the dog, he was not happy
I must admit, I was pretty freaked out about becoming a dog-owner. True, I have wanted a dog since I was a kid (that was the birthday gift I wanted every year), but I am selfish, I do not know if I have time for that type of commitment…plus I know nothing about dogs. My fears were realized the first night when I was awoken every couple of hours to my dog’s crying.
Monday, exhausted, I left my puppy at home to go to work. For the past month or so I have been planning a World Map project. In the 1980s, a Peace Corps Volunteer decided to paint a map of the world in her community since people did not know where countries were. It was a great experience with people coming together and working together and a manual was created, so I wanted to duplicate that experience here in Pachalum and take advantage of kids being on vacation. Of course, things are always more complicated in reality than they seem in a manual.
First, we needed to paint the wall of the school. There was no paint. So I had to leave for vacation and leave a coworker in charge. The wall was painted, but it was not completed, so on the first day of work, we just measured around the edges and discovered that along with being incomplete, the wall was not painted evenly (each side was a different length).
On Tuesday, Diana went back home, and I went back to the wall to finish painting the background. We completed painting, I went home for lunch to play with my puppy, and then went back to start drawing the grid.
But when we went back to the wall, it was wet…and not from the paint. Turns out, we painted the wall of the school right below where the bathrooms are on the second floor, and the bathroom was leaking. We found the repairman, asked him to turn off the waterflow, and headed home.
On Wednesday, the wall was finally dry (though there was some weird growth around the America’s section where the wall had been wet), and with the Architectural Student from the University who is doing his internship at the muni, we started drawing the grid with right angles and proper mesaurements.
Thanks to the really long stick we got from a carpenter that we used as a ruler, we made the 1800 6cm^2 squares in around 3 hours and then we were able to start drawing. In my manual there were 28 pages to enlarge on the grid and within five hours we drew the whole world with five to seven people helping. What I should have realized is that such quick drawing might need an overview before painting. But I had people who wanted to work and I did not want them to leave, so when we finished drawing, I much too hastily took out the paints.
After painting for a few hours, we ran out and I went to the store to buy more. While at the store I took a look at the acrilyc paints that I was buying and saw that they were water based…but this map was on an outside wall, and the background paint was oil based. I went to three hardware stores and called my Peace Corps Supervisor and realized that the only way to fix my mistake was to buy oil based paints, and paint over what we had started.
Along with having paint problems, as we started getting into Europe and Asia, we realized that the map from the manual was circa 1980s, pre-Communist fall. So Yugoslavia was on the map, Armenia, Eritrea, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and a host of other –stans were nowhere to be found. I got stressed. We bought a Q1 world map at the local store and started drawing in lines where we thought countries went. At the end of the week, with few kids coming to paint (it was HOOOOT and hard), we put the brushes down for the weekend and took at break.
On Saturday I took Cappuccino out to visit a few friends’ houses. We went to La Vega de Godinez, the township across the river from Pachalum that was badly hit by Agatha and were surprised by what we saw.
Despite beautiful vistas of the river, la Vega de Godinez has recently been declared and uninhabitable area due to landslides. Fifty-odd houses have had to be evacuated since the land under them is on a fault line and after the storm damage, the earth is slowly falling away. There have been periodic closures of the road to the capital due to erosion, and when we went to the Vega, I saw a house that was under construction completely destroyed due to erosion. It is really quite sad since a lot of these people have nowhere else to go, and their houses are all on dangerous territory. Almost a half a year after Agatha, there are still terrible repercussions for the people of Guatemala and the next winter will only bring more bad news with more rains accelerating erosion.
