Volcan San Pedro

Yesterday, Darcy and I spent the day on a grueling hike up Volcan San Pedro, one of three gorgeous volcanoes bordering Lake Atitlan. Despite the soreness that’s slowly been creeping in this morning, and my muddy clothes and sneakers that may never be clean again, it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done!

Darcy and I with Capu, our trusty guide

Interviews!!!

Though we still haven’t scheduled any of our official community visits, yesterday morning, as two women from the San Juan la Laguna cooperative came in to the office for a meeting, Darcy and I found ourselves scrambling to gather our materials for interviews that we had definitely not anticipated conducting.

These first interviews were a definite learning experience for both of us. Though the women were open to talking with us about their lives and their products, both expressed concern that they wouldn’t be able to answer the questions correctly, and were shy and quiet with their responses. And while both women did speak Spanish, their command of the language was somewhat limited, making it difficult for Darcy and I to understand some of their answers. Finally, we realized that while many of our questions made sense on paper, they were more difficult to comprehend when asked out loud in an interview setting, and their answers to the questions didn’t always yield the type of information we were expecting. After we thanked the women for their time, Darcy and I spent the rest of the afternoon poring over our questionnaires, asking ourselves which questions we could remove, what questions we were leaving out, and what modifications we could make to the questions to make them easier to understand, less formal, and more conducive to conversation and open answers. 

A quick Life School visit….then back to work!

Andrea’s husband Eddie is currently the Director of the Life School, a K-8 bilingual school in Pana, so yesterday we took a break from our usual work at OB to spend a few hours with the students during their last week before summer vacation. The school is one of the best in Pana, but is really small – each grade has only around 5-10 students - and we were surprised to see how energetic, engaged, and interested all of the students were, and what a great command of English many of them had already, even at the pre-K/Kindergarten level. 

Reunion de equipo

This morning was our second staff meeting -  this time, since I knew a little bit more about what to expect, it was easier to follow everything that was going on. Most of the meeting involved each of the facilitators giving their informes, brief summaries of what they’d been up to over the past week, and Darcy and I gave a short presentation on where we stand with our upcoming projects. We still haven’t been able to set up our first community visits so we’re at a little bit of a standstill, but while we wait to get those started we have a few smaller projects to keep us busy – updating OB’s outreach lists in Xela and Antigua, learning how to use Access so we can eventually assist in building new databases for monitoring and evaluation, reading and summarizing journal articles relevant to OB’s work to serve as a resource for future volunteers, and blogging, both here and on OB’s website. 

Flexibility and patience...

One of the first pieces of advice I received when I arrived in Pana was that working with any NGO – like Oxlajuj B’atz – would require patience and flexibility, as things rarely go exactly as planned.  My first thoughts when I sat down to review my work plan for the summer as a Fellow for Nest/OB were that though it was an ambitious plan for just two months, with careful planning, hard work, and ample preparation, I would be on track to complete everything before heading back to the U.S. at the end of July. What I’ve come to realize, however, is that true to the initial warning I received, no matter how prepared and on-track I may be, there are so many other things that can – and will – come up along the way.

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