seeds for sale

i sell seeds. you can buy them. i sell them by the meter. yeah, the meter. enough to plant a meter of whatever plant. i measure the seed with soda bottle caps. i put it in little home made envelopes. i seal them with masking tape. then i sell the heck out of them. they cost 25 or 50 cents (guatemalan cents). $1 is about 7.50 of the currency here, so you do the math. they sell like hotcakes (hotcakes are the current topselling good worldwide). today, i sold $8 or so. i don't make a profit, they're sold at cost. I know there was somebody (J.D.O.) out there that was saying "oh, so jake is in the peace corps goudging people, good for him". it's a good time.

walk to work

here's a series of photo taken as i was walking to a community where i work. the first photo is the reference point. the following photos look down upon this point. the 6th photo looks at position 5. i think this works.

reference point


2nd position, looking down at reference point

3rd position, looking down at reference point

4th position, looking down at reference point

5th position, looking down at reference point

6th position, looking at position 5 (hill in center of photo, it's grass on top)

teachin'

so i gave a training on chicken diseases today (it's rediculous how much i know about chickens). it's interesting the kind of possible distractions a person can have in the teaching environment.

1st distraction: started to rain, then to hail a little bit. normally, not a big deal, however, when the door is open to let in light because the house doesn't have electricity and the roof is tin, it makes a lot of noise.

2nd distraction: chickens of all sizes entering and exiting the house at will and people trying to get them out

3rd distraction: the dog, entering and exiting the house at will, and people trying to get it out

but we got through it.

your trash

i was on a bus the other day, and there was a sign in the front of it. it said, "don't throw your garbage on the floor". this does not mean, don't throw your garbage. it actually means, "throw it all out the window".

sounds kinda romantic...

I can say "i live in the western highlands of guatemala", but it's a little misleading. don't get me wrong, it's beautiful and all, but it's generally dirty, dusty or muddy, very poor, and kind of noisy. however, it is home, the western highlands of guatemala.

been a while

so here's the update

-my big sister is engaged. good job josh (not my brother but the fiance). confusing right? anyways, you smell like apricots.

-my parents came, they braved the chicken buses and bathrooms. they did well, no one got sick, many photos taken, not one casuality. good job guys.

-i'm still working. chickens, gardens, worms, the occasional goat, a tree here and there, and some rascally rabbits.

-some awesome minnesotans came (aside from my parents) as a Helps International team to give free surgeries, dental treatment to people in and around my town and to make stoves. i helped translate for a few days with some dentists and ate their delicious american food. some awesome people left me a bunch of snacks. tonight, a snack pack will be eaten. i miss them and their food already. by the way, that pillow is awesome (yeah, i got a new pillow!).

married, tired, or both?

so in spanish, one can easily mess up the two words for married and tired. married is "casado". tired is "cansado". think about the possible screw up's....

person a: are you married?
person b: yeah, i'm sooo tired.

kind of sad huh?

on the other hand...

person a or b: i was walking all day, my feet are so0o married.

pics

They made a box yesterday to start seeds. those pigtails are darling.

Here we're making a fancy compost pile called "bokashi" that is ready for use in 15 days. Most take 3 months. at this moment we were adding the yeast.

Here we have a group of women planting their little pieces of land for one of my projects. I think i'm in there somewhere. This day they planted spinach, carrots, turnip, cilantro, radish, and beet.

Look at those straight lines on that seed bad! If i had gold stars, these ladies would have gotten one, possibly 2.

same stuff

Here i'm giving them instructions on how to plant

sadly, we made the times

article

he'd never seen one

a white person that is. i was really in the country, the motorcycle got a flat, i had to wait while my coworker went and got it fixed. so i sat on the side of the road. some kids were playing nearby, close to their homes. they saw me, as i stand out. they shyly looked at me from afar, avoiding any eye contact. then they got a little bit closer, still no direct looks, but i could tell they were extremely curious. then they dared to stand on the other side of the road and look directly at me. i said hi. they laughed. i asked how they were doing. they laughed. i asked what their names were. they laughed. then one daring 7 or 8 year old boy came right up to me. all he did was look at me, i think he was especially amazed at my blue eyes. all the others he'd seen in his entire life were brown. never had seen a white skinned person, never seen a person without dark hair. just laughed. finally started talking. when i asked them what their names were, they said "nothing". liars.

i told them i work for a local ngo. they told me they didn't believe me. i asked why. "porque su piel es blanco". because your skin is white. ha.

before leaving i asked the kid what he would be doing the rest of the afternoon. "tirar polvo" he said, which is "throw dust".

last sunday

2 eggs: 10 cents
2 packages cream cheese: $3
Graham crackers for the crust: free from a friend
1 lb of strawberries: 75 cents
1 Cup of suger: really cheap
Eating an entire strawberry cheese cake that you made yourself in guatemala: pricelessish

what it looks like

One could almost say my kitchen/dining room is pretty (nothing to do with the guy standing there) at this moment.
Here's me being excited about the cinnamon roll I'm about to eat.

This is what's awesome about every Saturday and Sunday morning (along with the best coffee in the world). And yes, that's right, 4 pieces, I'm in the big leagues down here.

This is what is awesome about every other Friday night. Delicious tasty ribs. If i ate them with my feet, they would be foot licking good (that's the highest classification a food can receive, look it up)

Here's a chicken. I think it looks like it's posing. Doesn't have that blank chicken look to it. It's a Lohman Brown if you're interested in chicken breeds.

This is a photo of Lake Atitlan taken from a boat.

Here's me and my firepit on Christmas Eve. what? Like you didn't start a fire on christmas eve for the fun of it...and take a picture.

treat goats with natural medicine

i can do it. what´s up now? your goat got a little cough? let me know. need to clean those parasites out? give me a call. diarrhea? ok.

non malaria medication provoked dream

had a dream that i had been nominated as the 3rd most eligible bachelor here. however, as i consider this kind of thing essentially silly, i refused and did not accept the title. that was the dream. it makes one ask: why only 3rd place? if one is going to dream, one might as well go all out, right? i just went for third place, in guatemala.

pig ribs

one of the guys at work has some pig projects. they killed some pigs. sold the meat to include the ribs for about $1.50 a pound. got myelf a pound of that. made some barbeque sauce and cooked them in my peace corps oven after a little boiling. i can only describe them in 7 words: i should open a bbq restaurant here. the abbreviation counts as one word.

why i'm such a conservationist

1. the replaced heel of my boot is made out of old tire.

2. when finished with a can of pop, i throw it in the street instead of in the garbage. the kids in town collect them and sell them to be recycled for 50 cents for 32 of them.

yep

The volcano always looks pretty awesome. It's the first thing I see when I walk out my door in the morning. However, some days, it looks extra awesome. This was yesterday afternoon.

picture of home

here's a view of my town. we're pretty much built on a mountain.

the motherload

made some "pineapple chicken". not exactly what it tastes like at your local chinese buffet, but there's pineapple in it, and there's chicken, therefore, it is pineapple chicken
here's what i do when the power goes out. found that sweet returnable coke bottle (it's a 2 liter one) in my back yard when i first moved in.

this is the suit i wear when we travel by motorcycle. i not so fondly refer to my helmet as my captain america helmet. when wearing all this stuff, it's one of the only moments that i can't be identified as a gringo (which would really be nice), but then i got this american flag wrapped around my head.

took this picture from my kitchen window

Here's a newly built stove, they are fantastic, saves a lot of wood and doesn't spread smoke all over your house
Here's how they were cooking before that stove was built. this is inside their house.
I don't know how this ends up here, i didn't do it (like i could spraypaint a heart that well). it is next to a house where the kids always yell goodbye to me though, they may be the culprits
Here's my bridge. built a few months ago because the old bridge was wiped out by stan, nice work dad, ha.
this is a newly built adobe house. just about everyone in the country lives in these. the walls are mud, the roof is tin, the floor is dirt.
here's my poster i made for a training. that thing in the middle is a chicken. the title is "what do chickens give us". and clockwise from top left it says "manure, money, eggs, and meat". notice the stink lines above the manure...that's art.

this blew my mind. went to this lady's house to vaccinate her chickens, and here's this kid with a minnesota gophers shirt on. i was pretty excited, they were confused by my excitement, probably thought i was a little weird.

today´s training

today and tomorrow i´m doing a training on how to raise chickens for a fellow volunteer close to where i live. where she´s at, is a much more indigenous area. What this means, is that they don't so much speak spanish, nor can they read. so this makes giving a traing a bit of a challenge. they can't read what i write if i make posters, and they don't understand what i´m saying. so, what i have to do is have a translator. generally the women don´t speak spanish, but the men do. so there´s a man that translates for me. I do make posters, but they are all pictures more or less. you should see my chicken drawings. my chickens look like potatoes with beaks, but we all get the idea. i think some of my jokes were even translated and still funny for them. in conclusion, i´m hilarious in 3 languages. ha.