It's been raining more frequently the last week or so, but we didn't get a real downpour until this afternoon. I think this is the official start of the rainy season. As a result, the power went out, which is apparently something I'll have to get used to, and I'm now sitting in candlelight, listening to the patter of rain outside while watching the last bit of light fade from the sky through my window.

The sky was bright blue this morning when I woke up, so I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and went for a training run. The Coban half marathon is less than 2 weeks away, so I decided to do a long, 90 minute training run with some hills. I felt really strong and enjoyed getting my blood pumping in the early morning air, greeting people walking into town and trying as always to avoid the dogs, or “chuchos” as they're called here. The run gave me a lot of confidence because I haven't been running as much as I should these last few weeks.

After a delicious breakfast of granola with yogurt, raisins, bananas and honey, I got on my new bike and headed to work at the elementary school in Oxlajuj, the nearest of the 3 communities I work in. My Peace Corps friend Susy gave me her bike last week--a really great mountain bike in good condition-- and it's really changed my life by cutting my commute more than in half. At the school I visited the 4 classrooms and did a short health lesson with each group. The lesson was designed to teach kids how to properly wash their hands, and consisted of going over a poster (made by yours truly) outlining the steps of washing hands, then practicing it in the classroom and then outside with real water. We also learned a song about washing your hands. It wasn't the most exciting lesson but I tried to make it as interactive as I could, and the kids seemed to be into it for the most part, and I seem to be gaining a lot of “confianza”, or rapport, with both the kids and the teachers. Whenever I walk into the classroom all the kids shout “TRAVES!!! TRAVES!!!” It's a nice feeling but sometimes I feel guilty to be a distraction. Last week I had meetings with all my 3 schools to introduce the Healthy Schools project and explain a bit about the goals we'll be trying to work towards as well as the methods we'll be using to achieve those goals. I put together a power point presentation of the program which I was very proud of, and I think all the meetings went very well. Today I was thrilled to see that, after only mentioning the goal of having clean drinking water in the school during my presentation, one of the teachers had already taken the initiative to bring a water dispenser into his class and had water boiled on the school stove for his class to drink!

I moved into a new house last week and so far it's been working out very well. The family is very nice and have 4 young children, 3 girls and 1 boy. I haven't spent a whole lot of time with them yet since they've been very busy building a new store/bookstore in the front of the house. The room I moved into was the old bookstore, and they also had a little general store next door, but they decided to combine their 2 stores into one bigger one, which they're putting the finishing touches on as I write. When I have the window open people sometimes peek in to look at me—makes me feel like a goldfish—or to ask about making photocopies. Apparently the old book store had one of the town's few public copy machines, so I politely explain that it's no longer available (although it's starting to get annoying). The room is nice because it has the benefits of living with a host family, but I also have my privacy. I have my own entrance to the street and my own half bathroom, which has been a very nice luxury. I decorated by hanging pictures of my family and from various trips I've taken, and have spent a lot of time and effort making my new environment more like home.

Nonetheless, what has brought me the most joy this last week has been the ability to finally cook for myself, something I haven't been able to do for almost 4 months. After riding home this afternoon at around 1pm, I cooked a lunch of grilled turkey and cheese sandwich with instant mashed potatoes. In addition to the obvious benefit of getting to eat the foods I like (although I'm probably not eating quite as healthy as I have been), I've also found cooking a great, relaxing way to pass the time and keep myself busy. I've bought and electric stove top, and have my entire “kitchen” concentrated on the table propped up against my back wall. I stocked up at the supermarket on things like spices, turkey meat, yogurt, and of course CHEESE, and can get amazing fruit and produce here in town on Wednesdays which is market day. The other day I made homemade guacamole, which was delicious and very cheap since avocados are about 10 cents each!

Today, however, I attempted a new cooking method that all the other Peace Corps volunteers rave about—the “Peace Corps Oven”. The idea is to use your stove as an oven by taking a big, tightly covered metal pot with an empty tuna can filled with water inside of it, and using the evaporated water vapor to cook food like an oven. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical of the idea at first, but finally acquired all the necessary elements of the oven yesterday, and today I spent almost my entire afternoon making banana bread. I mixed the sugar, margarine, eggs, flour, baking soda, baking powder, and finally the mashed bananas (the girl in the store this morning looked at me kind of funny when I gladly bought the black mushy bananas-- only 1 Quetzal for all 6, or about 2 cents each!) I poured the mixture into the baking pans, and lowered them into the preheated “oven” on top of my stove. Soon the aroma of fresh banana bread wafted out into my room, and 45 minutes later I removed 2 fresh loaves of yummy banana bread! Eating my new creation, I realized I still had 3 bananas left, so decided to spend the rest of my afternoon making a second batch.

Another luxury I have recently acquired has been internet in my house, courtesy of a USB modem which connects through the cell phone network. It's a relatively slow connection and I have a very limited amount of bandwith (only 1 GB of information transfer per month), but it's really great to be able to read the news every day in my own home, and WONDERFUL to download podcasts from BBC and NPR to listen to while cooking or cleaning.

Speaking of which, I spend a lot of time cleaning these days—between washing dishes, washing my clothes, and just keeping my things in order, I'm becoming a regular domestic. Not that I really can say that I mind. Washing dishes while listening to my music in my room is actually rather enjoyable, and I'm getting used to a slower pace of life.

As my second batch of banana bread was just finishing up, my new Q'uiche teacher, Juana, arrived at my door. I've been studying the Q'uiche mayan language for several weeks now, and am actually starting to make some headway. The first few classes were pretty tedious—just learning how to pronounce the sounds, several of which are completely foreign and very difficult for a non-native speaker to make. The hardest letter is the “ q' ”, which is pronounced by pushing just a touch of air from the very back of the throat. I'm also starting to build a small vocabulary, but the most fascinating thing for me has been learning about the grammar. It's really interesting to me to learn how the words connect and relate to each other to form ideas and communication, how vastly different languages find different, but also very parallel, solutions to similar problems of how to transmit information. For example, today I learned the formula for conjugating verbs in Q'uiche. The conjugation consists of a fairly straightforward formula of adding a different pre-fix depending on which person the verb is referring to. To change a verb between the past, present, and future, there are different prefixes, but mercifully they are all fairly similar to each other. The basic idea of modifying the verb root depending on the person and time being referred to is similar to Spanish, but the entire system is infinitely simpler. In Spanish there are multiple pasts, presents, and futures, all with totally different conjugations. After learning all the various rules and formulas, one must learn all the arbitrary exceptions and irregular verbs, stem changes and a seemingly endless plethora of other rules—it normally takes 2 years to have a good working understanding of conjugating Spanish verbs in all their various tenses, and even now I find new verbs with strange conjugations. In contrast, I learned the entire system in Q'uiche in about 10 minutes, and it all fit into 1 page of notebook paper. I'm sure I'll discover more subtleties, and have no doubt there will be difficult grammatical points which I can't even foresee, but I was amazed to see the simple yet effective way of conjugating verbs in Q'uiche. OK, I better stop writing about this before I look like too much of a geek, if that's still possible.

Overall, my life still has a lot of day to day ups and downs. As much as I'm striving to stay busy, there are still plenty of down times, which are inevitably harder. Those are the times when things start to rattle around in my head, when I start to think about the fact that I'll be here for 2 whole years, 2 WHOLE YEARS! I've already been here over a month, which in hindsight seems to have passed pretty quickly, but that still seems insignificant in comparison to the big picture. The 2 worst feelings to have are boredom and loneliness. People here are very friendly and curious for the most part, but being “friendly” with someone is different from having friends. I feel like I've had the same conversation 100 times about where I'm from, what I'm doing here, yes I'll really be here for 2 years, and I'm neither catholic nor evangelical (pretty much the only 2 religions that exist in Guatemala, plus the occasional Mormon or Mennonite missionaries here and there). I've started becoming friends with some of the teachers at my schools, but the problem is that most of them commute here from Quiche or other larger population centers, so they go home after work which prevents me from hanging out with them out of school. One exception has been Roberto, a teacher at Oxlajuj who lives in town. He invited me to play soccer with him once, and we went running together the other morning. He's a really nice guy and is also very smart and hardworking—like many teachers, in addition to working full time he studies in the university on weekends, which also means he's very busy and doesn't have a whole lot of free time. Nonetheless, I can definitely see myself becoming good friends with him as well as a few of the other teachers at my schools. It's kind of a paradox how traveling and doing things like Peace Corps makes me feel so lonely but also so closely connected to others at the same time.

Another strategy I've found helpful in helping me keep my sanity is having things to look forward to. I'm really looking forward to running the Coban half marathon in 2 weeks. I've also taken 2 weekend trips to meet up with other volunteers in Xela, a beautiful, bustling colonial city 3 or 4 hours from here. I also went to visit my friend Erin at her site on beautiful lake Atitlan, which was a lot of fun. I've also met up a handful of times for a drink or lunch with Susy and Tony, my 2 Peace Corps “neighbors” in the area.

The electricity has returned, and it's almost 9PM, which has almost become my de facto bedtime these days, so I guess I'll sign off for now.