Hora Chapin

(<---- My House)

Here there is a custom, for everything that starts at a particular time, in reality means come an hour late, "hora chapin". Right now I am in the hora chapin for my next basketball game, it was supposed to start at 7:30, but the lights in the building aren´t even on yet.

This last weekend I was super lonely, it just hits you doesn´t it. I found some other volunteers here from Spain but their spanish is even harder to understand than guatemalans! so although they are awesome, it´s still been pretty difficult. But since then I have found my neighbors to be very inviting and am really going to work on improving my relationship with them. I also found a very exotic looking black spider with spikes and bright yellow dots on its back, something out of national geographic for sure. I couldn´t kill the thing for its beauty, although I would bet it´s poisoness or something. I named it Amarillo.

I spent the last two days at a womens conference at a very beautiful hotel in Zacapa representing my women´s office because for some reason they didn´t want to go and know that I say yes to everything. Since I split my time between the womens office(OMM) and the planning office(OMP) aparently my boss in the OMP was upset that I didn´t pass this by him before hand, but honestly I wasn´t doing anything anyway, but it´s all about power and politics. Anyway, the conference was very nice and I got to meet some pretty amazing women in offices from all over this region of Guatemala, and yes even the conference was hora chapin and the tortillas were amazing.

I now have a gas stove top, but need to buy the gas tank for it. Possibly that will happen tomorrow, along with picking up my clothes which thank god get washed by this lady down the street who has three washers and does laundry during the night for about a $1 a load. Tomorrow it will hang in my garden with Amarillo to dry.

I´m really looking forward to the art supplies my family sent, I´ve been doing art recently from dried plants, which I think has been beautiful but maybe its really just dead plants...