things you realize when you are away

today, as i was sitting in the pharmacy, helping dole out prescriptions to guatemalan after guatemalan, my mouth started to water. an inexplicable urge to eat a turkey sandwich had overwhelmed me, and currently, it is still haunting my every thought. dont get me wrong, i love avocado. i love salsa. i love tortillas. i love black beans. but i also love eating those things once a week, or once a month. instead, i eat them 3 times a day. i love drinking water and not being terrified. i miss those things from home. i miss berries. apparently eating berries here is one of the number 1 ways to get all sorts of crazy shit - and if any of you may know, i. love. berries. strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, the unidentifiable berry you get in a muffin at your local gas station. i miss them.

i want eegees.

luckily, i have a main squeeze who is planning my return by bringing me the aforementioned eegees to the airport, and i must remind him immediately that berries must be in the fridge and the candy drawer must be stocked. i am impatiently waiting to walk off the plane, into my mans arms - but almost more importantly, into a brown paper bag filled with a fresh turkey sandwich, frenchfries, and a teagee.

some things

1) abortion in guatemala is illegal, and punishable by death.

2) guatemalans love pancakes.

3) pap smears take only 2 minutes to complete in guatemala.

4) every single hot sauce made here is better than the next.

5) when a mother dies in the hospital in guatemala, the grief and suffering of the family is unmistakable, but the guard in the waiting room kicks them out of the hospital, for creating a scene.

roasting marshmallows in lava.

on tuesday we hiked a volcano. it is called pacaya. at the top of pacaya, after 2 hours of straight up hiking, you break through the thick layer of clouds and you see a sight that could only be described as the most breathtaking vista on earth. j.r.tolkein...eat your heart out. so, when you get to the base of the volcano (as high as you can go without your shoes melting) you start to hike out in the black battle field of hardened magma, watching your step and looking forward towards the feral dogs that walk with you in hopes of getting food (how they do it, why they do it, left me astounded). at one point, if you stop to take a breath, a few things happen. one thing is that you look straight, and you see 3 more volcanoes reaching high above the clouds, one right after another, and the vibrant green vegitation that contrasts with the black as night rock you stand on. the other thing that happens is that your shoes start to melt. after you walk for a little while, your feet always moving, you reach a point where you can look through cracks in the rock, and see bright red streams flowing through them, about 2 or 3 feet below. that is lava, there. a group of german tourists, who had brought jet-puff marshmallows, decided that their kids had enough sugar (much to the shagrin of the 13 year old son, who gave me the evilist eye ever when i thanked him) and gave us their half finished bag. our tour guide had brought a stick, and we threw some of the jumbo mallows on it. then, we spent the next few minutes, always quick stepping some our shoes didnt become tar, roasting marshmallows in the ambient heat of the lava. true, i love roasted marshmallows over a campfire. true, i love looking out over an unknown terrain and thinking, wow, this is incredible. but the unbelievable combination of my sticky hands covered with roasted marshmallows that were roasted by lava, looking out over the sunset across jet black craggy rocks to the lush green and volcanos in the distance, was something i will never recreate. and thats the way i like it.

dressing burn victims

on monday we worked in the actual clinic, having had our share of injecting needles into children. on first arrival, we were trained to take heights and weights of the incoming patients. but then, they decided that that wasnt really that important, so we were moved into the one-stop-shop nursing room to take care of all things quick and medical. included in these tasks were taking out sutures of women who had c sections, more vaccinations but this time for people of all ages (did you know that the birth control shot is the number 1 preferred family planning method here?) and, of course, quick fixes for burn victims. an elderly man, who works as a cement mixer down by the city dump, had an accident with the mixture, and suffered severe chemical burns on both of his calves. in strong tradition of my mother, the only thing that really grosses me out in terms of ailments of the human body is a gnary, puss filled, infected, skin hanging off, basal cell layer exposed body part, with exposed nerve endings creating exruciating pain for whomever. so, of course, thats what i got to see at 8 in the morning. pancakes be damned! so, i took a deep breath, put on gloves (incredible!) and went to work with a wooden stick and some antibiotic cream. i struck up a conversation with the burned man, but he couldnt quite talk through the pain. i wasnt nervous, its not hard to swab cream on a leg, but it was an experience - no pain medication, no gauze to cover the wound, just an old man's burned leg, and me sweating and feeling amazed that i was doing it without barfing.

things that made the weekend great.

1) a zoo in a rainforest. around the town of flores and santa elena, there are several sights to see. one of those is a zoo which you have to take a boat to get to. once in the zoo, you will find all the animals of the rainforest. and dont worry, there are no fences to hold the animals in. also, there are waterslides from the canopy to the lake in the zoo.
2) spelunking. after the zoo, our group decided to check out this cave we had sort of heard of a little bit. when we arrived at the cave, we were lucky enough to be shuttled into the entrance along with a group of 45 teenage guatemalan boys on a school field trip. after a slight descent on a lighted pathway, we saw the usual cave fare - stalagtite/mites, bats chirping in the distance, the possibility of a cavein (pun obviously intended). then, what do you know, the tour guide points to what looks incredibly like a rabbit hole, and says in spanish, ladies first, and dont worry, this is only one of the smallest holes we will climb through today. then, for the next 2 hours, we were either on our hands and knees crawling through bat shit, sliding on our stomachs through bat shit to get through the tight parts, or being in total darkness save for a few flashlights with bats flying around our heads, confused and sweating and scared and laughing and swearing and trying to photodocument the experience.
3) mayan ruins with a tourguide that can answer any question on earth. tikal, one of the great pyramid complexes in the new world, was our main stop on saturday. when you walk through a place like that, you sense the magnatism, the weight, the collective memory of an entire civilization. not many words can describe how incredible it was. our tour guide, rolando, made it exponentially better by knowing how to do monkey calls, how to coerce rainforest tarantulas to come out of their underground lairs, and by having a 1 hour discussion with me about 2012, metaphysics, synchronism, and the 5th world.
4) canopy tours. what everyone does in the rainforest. all the obvious joys, including several large insects among the highest highs of the trees.
5) a bar called AAdictos? that happened.

it was one of those weekends that enlightened, tested your physical and spiritual limits, reinvigorated your sense of wonder, made you so tired you dont remember falling asleep, and made you feel completely immersed in the moment.

when buses break down in guatemala.

i needed to save a few hundred dollars, and so did a few other people. so, instead of taking the 45 minute flight to tikal, we decided to take a bus. it was a charter bus after all, and i figured that charter buses are sort of universal...what with the fabric cup holders, the guy behind you that makes you anxious to recline your seat, and the overwhelming knowledge that yes, at one point, you will have to use the unairconditioned lavatory. much to my surprise, then, when after 10 minutes of driving, the piloto, or driver, got out to smoke a cigar. i didnt misspell that word. then, about an hour after that, the bus lurched to a stop, and my friends and i looked at eachother with a mixture of confusion, and amusement. yes, we were bad ass for taking the 8 hours bus ride. no, we didnt know that the driver had an overactive bladder and an unusual hankering for cigars. so, after about 30 minutes of sitting on an emergency pull out on a country highway (see the blog post a few days ago to remind yourself what that is) 3 hours outside of the city, in the middle of burgeoning rainforest, we realize the transmission is shot. to ease my mind, i went for a quick walk into the underbrush, until i ran into (literally) a cow who mooed at me in the most vitriolic way i had ever heard. then, we played some frisbee, being careful not to throw it into the busy highway. after about 2 hours, a new bus came. sure, this one didnt have airconditioning (again...rainforest), but only a short 12 hours later, at 12 47 in the morning the next day, we arrived at the tikal bus stop, feeling achy, tired, and still, bad ass.

me, vaccinating, and where i do it.