Friday

I wake up to more rain.  Another overcast day full of chipi chipi (light, drizzly rain) broken up only every so often with real, lamina-beating, puddle-causing rain.  It's been five or six days of this, I've lost count.  I hate when it's like this; days and days without the sun shining--it throws off my whole sleep pattern.  But I guess we still have it a lot better up here in Alta Verapaz than out West where the tropical depression has caused flooding, landslides, and even a few deaths.

I peel myself out of bed anyway, do my morning yoga with my good ole' friend Rodney Yee (or as Dilan likes to call him, "Yakeechahn") and clench my teeth through an especially cold shower (it's 65 degrees inside my house, colder in my outside bathroom) before boiling my water for coffee and oatmeal.  I dilly daddle around, enjoy my hot breakfast, and leave around 9:15 for the 8:30 Radio Q'anpur meeting.  I was formally invited to the meeting on Wednesday when Don René called me over to his market store to hand me an official invite, on which he had me write my own name ("What's the point, I remember thinking, I know my own name..") since spelling it himself was a challenge he, like most others, wasn't willing to take on.  The meeting is about a restructuring of the previously Catholic radio station into a more universal station meant to involve the whole community through a number of short programs, some religious, and some not.  Even though I don't arrive until 9:30, I'm the second person to show, and sit reading my book until we start at 10:15.  The meeting is, par for the course, extremely long and drawn out.  It's held in Q'eqchi', so I focus in on understanding what is being said to give myself something to do.  The best part, though, are their Spanish translations for me.  I am at the point in my Q'eqchi' where I can pick up the pith of the discussion, but not much more than that.  I know enough, however, to know that their translations are, frankly put, totally half-assed: Don Juan Jose speaks nonstop for ten full minutes about the goals and mission of this new radio station, which Don Rene follows up by turning to me and saying "Don Juan says that the radio station's goal is to develop the community and raise the villagers' spirits."  It reminds me of that scene in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray is filming the "Suntory Time" whiskey commercial.  The funny thing is that Guatemalan, particularly Q'eqchi' talk tends to be so pointlessly circular and drawn-out that summing up a ten-minute rant in a sentence or two isn't that outrageous.  I got the gist.  Three hours later and all we manage to do is decide on a new name for the Radio station and come up with the list of programs, and who will be responsible for them.  I leave the meeting with a weekly "Cuerpo de Paz" radio hour, so we'll just have to see how that pans out.  This show definitely presents me with the possibility of a reaching a lot more people than I have in my service so far.

I get home soaking (somehow I forgot both my umbrella and my raincoat) to meet Dilan who's patiently waiting for my return.  I read a book to him about a fútbol-playing penguin named Sergio and then send him home so I can eat lunch and relax for a bit.   My roof has a tendency to leak when there's a constant flow of rain like this, and today it's leaking in four spots, such that if I'm laying in my hammock, one of the drips smack me straight on the head.

I think I'll spend the afternoon reading and napping.  With this rain I just don't have the ganas of doing much else.