Endings and Beginnings

My central work project all last year revolved around updating Child Aid's teacher training curriculum.  I observed in our workshops and Guatemalan classrooms to see what we were doing well and what needs teachers still had.  I lead staff professional development sessions to teach new concepts and teaching methods that I wanted to try implementing in workshops.  And I spent a really lot of hours staring at my computer screen trying to figure out how to make all the moving pieces fit together in a logical way.

In October, I finally had it "done", or so I thought, and spent the next 7 weeks modeling and discussing changes with our leadership team.  Their feedback of course lead to another round of revisions and I was finally ready to share the nearly final product with our entire staff in December.  Having them work in small groups to discuss content and map changes between the old and new curriculum was beyond rewarding.  Then, I left for Christmas vacation, trusting my curriculum to the hands of a graphic designer and hoping it would be ready when I got back.

January rolled around, workshops were just around the corner and suddenly we had a crisis- the graphic designer we'd been working with left without telling us, and there were still 30 pages that needed to be finalized.  One of my amazing coworkers took over from there, stopping by the office in person and making sure we got it done on time.  And finally, just in time to get them out to workshops, we got the finished product from the copy shop.  To say I'm delighted would be an understatement. 

Reading for Life, Child Aid's four-year teacher training curriculum,
being used by over 600 teachers in nearly 70 schools. I feel pretty proud of my work :)

So, one project ended, and now we start a new phase- rolling out the curriculum for use by our teacher trainers and the teachers we work with. I'm so excited! 

The Proposal

Cristian had just gotten in the night before and after a long, tiring journey, a late night, and jetlag, watching a movie together seemed like the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon. So we cuddled up on the couch and he started About Time, a movie he said he thought sounded good and he had on his computer.  Fifteen minutes in or so, he turned to me and said, "Wait, this takes place in England?" Bemused, I asked him if he hadn't noticed their accents. It was a charming, sweet love story with a time travel twist and I was soon caught up in the story.  Boy meets girl, they fall in love, and a song I know started playing. 

Not just any song. I looked up at him, "Hey! It's our song!" I smiled, then kissed him, happy in the moment.  I had a tiny little suspicion that maybe he wasn't as clueless about this movie as his "This takes place in England?" remark made him seem.  "Did you know our song was in this movie?" I asked. "What do you think?" he responded.  The obvious answer was, "Yes"

"Now I have a question for you." he said.  And in the second before he continued, my stomach did a million acrobatic flips and my heart started racing.  "This is it. He's really going to ask me to marry him." I thought. "Will you marry me?" he asked, and out of nowhere, he had the ring box open in his hand. And once again, the obvious answer was "YES!". I clung to him, tears hovering at the edges of my eyes, feeling like my heart would burst with so much love and joy. He slipped the ring on my finger as the movie played on in the background, the two of us completely oblivious to it anymore.  He finally asked if I was going to look at the ring, which I'd really overlooked in the significance of the moment.  It was gorgeous.  I watched it sparkle and tried to wrap my mind around the fact that we were actually getting married. 

Eventually we came down from the clouds, got to call and tell my parents, and even eventually finished the movie.  Turned out he'd actually watched it 7 times, figuring out the timing so he'd know when to slip the ring out, unseen by me and be ready to propose.  And it worked. The tenderness of being proposed to with our song playing in the background, the element of surprise, the privacy to be delighted together afterwards-I couldn't have imagined a more perfect moment. 

A Very Different Thanksgiving- Part 2

The sun was close to setting and I was getting tired.  I wanted to sit down, but something about the black sand of the beach made me more wary of that than I usually am. Suddenly, a large line of people emerged from a gate at the edge of the beach.  As they made their way down to the shore, I noticed two women with large tubs and a group quickly gathering around.  The turtles had arrived.  I hurried over and peeked over the heads of the children crowding close and squealed with the “aww” factor of dozens of tiny baby sea turtles, all clamoring to get out and start their journey to the ocean.

“Step back behind the line”, the volunteers instructed us, shepherding us to a line that had been drawn in the sand. They walked the line in trios, one person taking our 10 quetzales (about $1.30) and giving us a ticket, the next person handing us a little plastic bowl and depositing a diminutive turtle from the tub the last person was holding.

I stared at my turtle in delight.  It was so tiny, so full of life, so anxious to go.  It tried to crawl it’s way up the edge of the bowl, so I covered it with my hand, afraid it would flop out and fall to the sand. Once everyone had gotten a turtle, they counted to 3 and we all released our turtles at once as the sun sank below the horizon.  Their little flippers moving madly, they stumbled their way toward the ocean, 3 strokes forward, pause, 3 strokes forward, pause. They were so tiny that footprints left in the sand were obstacles that had to be carefully maneuvered. We cheered them on, urging them to the sea, to survive, to be quick and wary.

As the waves rolled in, little turtles would disappear from the sand, bobbing out to sea.  Others, the stragglers in the group, wandered haphazardly, heading down the beach before veering back towards the ocean.  Finally, as it grew darker and the grey turtles blended in with the sand, the last of the turtles finally made it out to sea. My heart was full- thankful for this amazing and unusual Thanksgiving experience.

Big Spenders

Usually when my alarm is set before 6:00 I’m not so happy about waking up, but last Tuesday was an exception.  I had an exciting task ahead of me- several coworkers and I were going in to the capital to buy $10,000 worth of books.  Every year we receive over a million dollars worth of books in donations from book consolidators in the States, and then we pass on those donations to schools and libraries we work with, but since those donations come from surplus from publishers, there’s no guarantees to what we get. This year, almost all of our books were at the 3-5^th grade reading levels, so we were in search of some quality early grades books. 

As we walked into the store, Fondo Cultural Economico, the manager came down the stairs to meet us, handshakes and kisses on the cheek were exchanged, and then we were ushered through the store area to a separate room.  Tables had been laid out, books carefully displayed, a careful selection they thought might interest us. We flipped through, quickly discarding books that were too advanced. We asked the price of a book and another employee appeared with a laptop, looking up prices and marking them on a sticky note for every book we were interested in.  Another table magically appeared for us when we wanted to put all the books we were tentatively interested in together.

I found a new favorite, about a little boy with a stubborn pet mastodon and giggled over a wordless picture book of some animals who chase after a fox who stole a hen, only to find out that the fox and hen are actually friends. There were the books I set aside too- Beautifully illustrated poetry that was way to abstract for 6 year olds and moralizing value tales that were too boring to read.  But choosing $10,000 dollars worth of books goes surprisingly quickly when you’re buying for 70 schools and would like best if every school received the same set of books. 

While we were waiting for our order to be packed, the manager invited us to coffee at the bookstore’s adjoining restaurant.  We sipped tea and coffee and talked about book publishing in Mayan languages in their upstairs lounge, and then, urged by the manager to accept his offer of lunch, moved down to the restaurant floor below for cheese stuffed cauliflower and rice. We talked about international book fairs and his plans to expand the bookstore into more of a cultural center, and as the book packing continued, he invited us to try dessert, and we were rewarded by some excellent crepes. There’s a saying here in Guatemala- “full belly, happy heart”.  That was absolutely true at that moment.

We browsed the bookstore as they finished packing out order, and then arranged for delivery and headed back home.  I’m thankful for spending sprees, especially book buying ones, and as we were driving away, I couldn’t help but think I could get used to spending $10,000 at a go if the customer service was always so great.

Split Pea Pie

“I’ll make a pumpkin pie and an apple pie”, I said. How hard could it be, really?  I’d just bought something that was smaller, greener, harder shelled, and more ridged than a pumpkin at the market the week before, and it was remarkably pumpkin like inside.

Sundays are market days, and the streets were overflowing with vendors. I walked down a crowded lane, fruit displays, papaya, pineapple, granadillas, strawberries, and some fruits I couldn’t even identify forming haphazard towers.  I restacked an orange I’d knocked to the ground as I brushed past and headed past vegetables: tomatoes, red peppers, onions, eggplants and broccoli. I wasn’t noticing any pumpkin-like squash. I headed into the covered market, made a detour to one of the stalls in the back that sells candles and then zig-zagged through past kitchen goods, dried peppers, cheap clothes, fresh fish and more vegetables.  Still no sign of pumpkins.

Outside, and close to giving up, I finally spotted something that looked like a cross between a butternut squash and a watermelon. It just might do the trick. “What color is it inside?” I asked the lady selling it. “Black”, she answered off-handedly. “Black?!”  I asked, surprise in my voice, as my mind mentally cataloged every vegetable dish I’ve ever been served at Guatemalan restaurants and failing to bring a single black squash to mind. But, she continued to insist that it was black, and when I told her I was looking for one that was orange inside and asked if she had any, she pulled another odd shaped winter squash from under some lettuce and presented it to me.  It looked pretty much like the other. “It might be black, it might be orange,” she shrugged, then nicked the outside skin, revealing some pale orange flesh underneath.

I took my pumpkin substitute home and tried to hack it open with my kitchen knife.  When it finally split, I looked at it in consternation.  Blackish green goop and dark greyish green flesh were what the inner layer looked like, only the very outside of the squash was orange at all.  But, I had a pie to make, so I cut it into pieces and stuck it on the stove to boil. 

As I scooped the softened flesh from the shell to make puree I almost stopped the experiment then.  The green vastly overwhelmed the orange and this was going to be the strangest “pumpkin” pie ever.  But, I had just spent an hour buying it, hacking it apart, and boilng it til it was soft enough, and it smelled and tasted pumpkiny enough so I threw it into the blender, and continued my recipe anyway.

Several hours later, my no bake, pea-soup “pumpkin” pie was chilled and ready to go.  And green notwithstanding, I’m thankful that a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg go a long way towards transforming a mystery squash into a very tasty and almost convincing “pumpkin” pie.

Kites and Umbrellas

Halloween festivities started off unexpectedly, in the middle of trivia night. “And this week, the physical challenge is to wrap one of your team mates as a zombie using an entire roll of toilet paper”. My face may have lit up like a jack-o-lantern with the surprising silliness of the task. Cheap toilet paper and a damp night worked against us, as we tried every method we could think of to wrap our “mummy”. When speed didn’t seem to work for us, we decided to go for the “best looking” bonus points. Carefully folding torn pieces back into the wrappings, and draping the remaining bits over her head, we stood back in triumph as our mummy was declared the best.


Now I was all geared up for Halloween, with one tiny problem- I had a costume ready to go, but nowhere to wear it to. But turned out Jamie was more or less in the same boat, so Friday night I booked a hostel in Antigua for the next day and went to bed, my inner child happy to finally have a costume party (and some other fun) to look forward to.


Saturday night, I slipped into my skirt, pulled on stockings, carefully pulled my hair back in a bun…each step in my transformation tugging me closer and closer to song. By the time I picked up my carpet bag and had a trial run with my unfurled umbrella, I couldn’t help it anymore. “It’s a jolly holiday with Mary, Mary makes your heart grow bright! . . .” We headed out into the streets, the skeleton and Mary Poppins, headed off to find dinner. Zombie brides, Mario and Luigi, assorted Minnie Mouses and a giant baby bobbed past in a thick stream of people. Everyone in Antigua seemed to be out, and ¾ of them were in costume. Scratch that. Everyone in all of Guatemala seemed to be out in Antigua. I’d never seen the streets so crowded here. We stood in line to get into a club as I came to terms with an undercurrent of disappointment- there were no Reese’s Peanut butter cups, or snickers bars for that matter, anywhere in my near future. Seriously, who wants beer on Halloween? They should have a bowl of candy out at the bar. But, since adults trick-or-treating seems to be frowned upon, I people watched from the balcony of the crowded club instead. Two girls came up to me. “Excuse me, can we take a picture with you? Your costume is great!” Ok, even if they didn’t give me candy, my evening was made. I felt like a minor celebrity. As we moved back outside where the people watching was better, my feeling of celebrity status continued “Mommy, mommy, is that Mary Poppins?” a little girl asked insistently. I couldn’t help but sing snatches of Mary Poppin’s songs when I heard people mention Mary Poppins as I passed. After a few more rounds of photos in the park (we’d joined up with some friends of Jamie’s, one of whom, Aladdin himself, on his flying carpet, had big-time celebrity status) I headed back to the hostel, singing as I went “Oh a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down!”


The next day we headed to Sumpango, a small town known for its giant kite festival. Every year on November 1st, people in Guatemala fly kites in memory of loved ones who have died and to frighten evil spirits away. In Sumpango, we were bombarded with color. Each kite takes hundreds of hours to create. Their intricate designs are made out of a mosaic of tissue paper, with some of the finer details painted by hand.

Kites, 2 or 3 times as tall as I am, pulled against the stands that held them upright, filling whenever there was a gust of wind. The message on one of the kites caught my eye- "there is no valid reason to take a child's childhood away". Contrasted with the harsh reality portrayed in the design- a shoe shine boy, a boy with a heavy pack on his back, a girl grinding corn with a mortar and pestle- it brought tears to my eyes.

We stopped to watch as one team glued their kite to its frame and another got ready to use pulleys to lever their's into position. We were coated in a fine layer of dust as we walked through the field, the sun glaring down from a perfect blue sky. Ice cream vendors strolled through the rows of kites (exactly what I needed on such a warm, sunny day), and stalls selling grilled meat with sides of tortillas and guacamole surrounded the field (exactly what I didn't need on a slightly upset stomach). Families were picnicking on the lawn, sprawled in the shade under the bleachers, clustered on plastic chairs under food tent pavilions. And over it all, smaller kites dotted the sky.



Eventually we headed back home, where I happily collapsed into my own bed and felt extremely happy that the next day was a holiday and I didn't have to leave the house.



I’m thankful for silliness
I’m thankful for weekend plans
I’m thankful for excuses to wear costumes and sing in the street
I’m thankful for living in a country that has rich, unique traditions
I’m thankful for rest

The Heaven's Declare the Glory of God

Today I’m grateful for the sunrise.

The gate swung shut behind me and I fumbled with the padlock in the dark.  It was 5:11 am and I had 4 minutes until the van picking me up should be swinging by the fried chicken place just up the street from me.  I shivered as I walked into the almost empty street; even the orange juice stand (where a woman squeezes oranges and then pours the juice into a bag and gives you a straw to drink it with) wasn’t set up yet.  The only people I could see were farther up the block, lining up to get on an early morning bus to Xela.  Two white vans drove by, one clearly labeled “Turismo”.  The other stopped.  It was too dark to tell if it was the one I needed.  Suddenly, the window popped open and I heard Carlos’ voice “over here, Annie”.  On the way out of town we stopped to pick up two more coworkers, than settled in to the long ride to Antigua where we were giving a workshop starting at 8.  I was in my “I woke up before 5 am” haze, trying to tune out the world when I heard someone mention the sunrise.  I looked out the windows as a sort of reflex, and then stopped to stare.  The sky was painted bright orange and the mountains cut a jagged black silhouette at the bottom.  Above, the sky was still blue-black and a perfect full moon floated on top of it all. Such beauty made my early morning worth it.

(Unfortunately I couldn't get a decent picture of this morning's sunrise through the foggy windows, so I'm substituting a sunset picture)