Hola,

Its been one week since I have slept in my own bed, and so far I think I’m doing ok on my own. As I’ve said, my apartment is really nice and it is on the “main street” of Pana. Working with HoH for the past week has been a really good, eye-opening experience. I didn’t really realize how much of a lack of proper and affordable health care there was out here until this week, nor did I realize just how little the people here are isolated from one village to the next, and as a result they do not have very many oportunities at all. This week we saw approximately 650 people in four and a half days and a majority of them spoke a local dialect called Kachiquel and very little Spanish. This made it really intersting to work because most of the time it required us to relay messages between the dentist, to the English-Spanish speaker, to the Spanish-Kachiquel speaker, to the patient and back, seeing as there was only one guy who knew both Kachiquel and English. For the most part, Rafael and I depended on a really nice local woman named Letty. She works for an organization called Mayan Families which emphasizes improving the living conditions of the indegenious people. Some of their missions include running a preschool, giving small loans to small businesses to help them grow, and installing gas stoves that can replace the dangerous wood-burning stoves that are common in many houses here. After talking for a while with the woman who started the organization, Sharon, I might end up doing some work translating and helping out with the installation of the stoves next week with a group from Stanford University(a little Ivy is coming to Guatemala.)

On a sadder note, we did see and take teeth out of a girl who was 6, was the size of a 3 year old, weighed 24 pounds, and couldn't talk. It was sad to hear here scream for the better part of an hour as Dr. Ken and Dr. Scott took out 5 or 7 of her teeth. At the same time, it was really inspiring to see the mother do her best to take care of a child that would have still had little help in the U.S.

Anyway, as you can tell, the past week has been awesome, although now I’m a little lonely without all the cool people from HoH. On the upside, I figured out where the wifi signal is coming from, and worked out a deal with the guy who runs it so I can use it. The only downside is that because of all the walls in between the wifi and my apartment, I can only get signal outside of my apartment and across the street at a restaurant type place. As for the photos I promised, I am moving that until tomorrow because a few girls I met from Mayan Families and I are going back to Santiago to check out the Festival de Corpus Cristi (the festival of the body of christ) which is kind of like Halloween in June for them) and I think I will get some really cool stuff there. As I heard its all about everyone has evil spirits inside of them and to scare them away they put on scarry woodcarved masks and set of the worlds loudest firecrackers(literally called bombs because everyone within a mile of it can hear it go off.)

Anyway, I’ll post more tomorrow and to replace all the photos I promised, heres a picture of a water bottle in the restaurant im in.=]

Cultural Observation of the Week. Breasts, Babies, and Cellphones.

Everyone has them, and they're not afraid to show them off when they need to use them. All the women here have a bazillion kids that they are not afraid of feeding anywhere and everywhere(seriously about the bazillion kids, I had women tell me that they had "only" 6 kids, and the most so far is 15, thats 95 months spent pregnant for those of you who cant do math).eye contact eye contact eye contact. And cellphones, everyone has them like in the US, and they can talk on them while doing pretty much anything, riding motorcycles, driving cars, riding bikes, feeding babies...they're everywhere.