Hey guys!

Remember that time when I had a blog that I was updating often?! Nope, neither do I.

Well never fear! Here I am, still alive and kicking nearly a month after my last post. In the last few weekends we´ve had quite a bit of excitement. What with a tornado knocking the entire city´s power out, the massive amount of rain we had that broke the pipes and left us without any water for an entire day (and then several more evenings that week), the eruption of the Volcan de Fuego (that´s "fire" for you really gringo peeps) over the past weekend (resulting in the evactuation of about 33,000 people) and the arrest of the mayor of Antigua yesterday morning on corruption charges (including stealing multiple million Quetzales from the government), we´ve had our fair share of both natural and unnatural excitement.

This weekend we are also celebrating Guatemala`s independence from España, a celebration the people of Guatemala take far more seriously than we do en los Estados Unidos (if you´re like me, you´re thinking, "Well obviously! Why would people from the US care about Guatemala`s independence?"). Today we participated in a 20 15 14 16(?) km (they kept changing the distance on us) run from a neighboring town that had a couple of double r`s in it (I had to ask the name of the town twelve times and still can´t remember) all the way back to Antigua (while at certain points carrying a torch). Maybe eventually I´ll find a picture of it?

I should also talk a lot about both the retreat the missionaries attended a couple weekends ago and our trip last weekend to Semuc Champey, Lanquin, and Coban, but I´m out of time at the moment... more on that later!

Life as a (really poor) translator!

Dear Y´all,

Good Morning! Kevin here with another update on his experiences in Guatemala! This week has been a bit different than the usual for me, because rather than going to language school the whole week, I´ve been spending some of the days this week going with some doctores de los Estados Unidos a Santa Maria de Jesús, un pueblo cerca de Antigua. Most of the doctors (all from Lubbock, Texas) don´t speak mor´n a lick of Spanish. The organization that is responsible for organizing the even is called Guatemala Sana, and they´re a group that tries to bring doctors from other countries to small towns in Guatemala. From what I can tell, they contacted my language school and asked if they had anyone who could translate for the doctors...  so here I am! The whole week I was almost certainly the least qualified translator, because of the other three translators, one is a girl that works at the school and two are going to be working at the farm with me, but of those two, one is much better in Spanish than I, and the other is a Nurse Practicioner who worked with a hispanic population in DC at some point, so she´s got tons of medical terminology down pat. However, even if I was the last qualified, I did still manage to make some positive contributions, which was quite rewarding. My favorite translations were the ones where the patients only spoken the Mayan language of Kaqchikel. In those situations, we had two people who spoke Kaqchikel and Spanish, so typically the doctor would say, "So... where do you have pain?," I would give a rough estimate of the question in Spanish, the other translator would speak to the patient in Kaqchikel, the patient would respond in Kaqchikel, the translator would tell me in Spanish what she said, and then I would tell the doctor what she said... in theory. There were also some doctors that only spoken Spanish around, but sometimes they could understand other people´s Spanish better than us and would simply say what the other person had in slightly easier terms for us to understand. It reminded me considerably of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Xtbbo_lHqAs. Anyway, that´s been a considerable amount of fun.

In other news, we took a trip to the Volcan de Pacaya about an hour away from Antigua this past weekend, where we climbed up a decent percentage of the way and stopped near the top to take pictures, roast marshmellows (heated by the volcano) and generally explore. I don´t have a camera with me, but whenever I actually manage to get pictures from someone else, I´ll work on puttin´some of ´em up. We all got up at 5 am in order to do this, because we went on a morning trip to avoid all of the massive amounts of rain we normally experience in the afternoons. Sadly, it was ridiculously cloudy that morning anyway... which was sorta unfortunate but also kind of cool to look at.

Anyway, I´d better run cause I only have two minutes left on this computer!

Buenas tardes!

Hola familia y amigos!

Kevin aqui! I´m writing from an internet cafe in Antigua, Guatemala, where I´ve been for just under a week. That´s right, I didn´t die on the trip. I know a lot of you were concerned. So was I. In fact, I did spend the night overnight in a really cold section of the Mexico City airport without a jacket (because I was silly and checked both of mine), and woke up with a cough, but luckily an actual cold never developed and I made it out safely.
Anyway, I´ve successfully been here since last Tuesday, and during the past six days have learned a lot about Guatemala. Since I only have five minutes before I run out of time at the cafe, I´m going to make a list:
1) Guatemala drivers are ridiculous.
2) The entire dealio with the streets is ridiculous... nobody listens to any of the rules of the road... if there even are any?
3) I´m really good at darting across streets rapidly between cars now. I´ll need to remember that´s not how it works in the US.
4) My Spanish needs some work.
5) My Spanish is improving.
6) As far as I can tell, none of the channels down here showed the US Women´s futbol team winning an epic semifinal against Canada. I had to find out from das Internet.
7) Monterrico (The land of rich weeds) is a spectacular black sand beach only two hours away from Antigua, and I very much enjoyed a weekend there.
8) Shoot... I´m running out of time... what else? My host family is awesome! Okay, I´ll add more later. Bye!

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

Well, today's the day. I'm shipping out on a 6:30 pm flight, and it is currently 7:23 am (as of finishing this, 8 am). At the moment I've pulled a usual Kevin's method of preparing for leaving by not actually packing pretty much anything last night and having a giant list of things to do today. Luckily this time I have about ten hours in which to complete all of these tasks, rather than the three hours I'd usually have to do everything at ND.
I actually set my alarm for 8 am, so I suppose nervous excitement (or the fact that I'd been consistently waking up at 6:45 for my job) has taken over.

Since I need to make a list of things to do today anyway, I figured I might as well make it here:
(1) Laundry
(2) Call USAA and ask them not to (necessarily) flip out if someone tries to use an ATM card in Guatemala or Honduras.
(3) Talk to a few people to whom I still need to say "Bye!" (I have no clue whether that was a grammatically correct wording. I spent about five minutes just now reading Grammar Girl instructions on when to use "who" vs. "whom" and that was my best guess, but honestly I sort of gave up. After a while it seemed a silly thing to be spending my time on)
(4) Pick up a few last-minute supplies for the trip: battery-powered alarm clock, sunglasses (maybe?), daily planner, at least one other thing that's slipping my mind right now..
(5) Mail a few more fundraising letters to some people I should've mailed things to months ago.
(6) Figure out exactly which clothes I'm bringing with me and separate them into vacuum-packable and non-vacuum-packable (cause I'll be in Guatemala for two months before I get to my long-term location).
(7) Actually pack everything into my suitcase(s) and backpack. (I'm a votin' for it all goin' into one suitcase, but there are a few things that ain't gonna easily fit well (Please Excuse My Dear Accented Speakin'))
(8) Listen to Chicken Fried, The Wind, Stereo Hearts, (cough, maybe Call Me Maybe and one or two songs by One Direction, endcough), In The Mood, Sing Sing Sing, and a few others at least once today.

Hmm... I'm definitely forgetting something.
Oh well!

Hey guys!

Long time no post. My apologies on that front. In the last month, I've graduated from ND and headed back home to San Antonio, where I'm working with a program called PREP, that gives middle and high school students the opportunity to take higher level classes than they would otherwise be able to take at that age. I'm working at Texas A&M University - San Antonio, a really new campus. It's fun but challenging, and giving me a glimpse of what it'll be like working with kids all the time in the near future.

I've also been trying to balance this summer job with other avenues of fundraising (we're up to $5,625, so thanks to all who have contributed!) and with brushing up on my Spanish.. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten about Spanish.

There really isn't that much else in the way of exciting news at the moment. I suppose I booked my flight (which leaves on July 30th) about a week ago... I saved ~ $200 by booking a flight with a 13 hour layover in Mexico City! I also got my passport a couple days ago and made an appointment for immunizations... but none of that is really terrible exciting.

I hope all are doing well, and I'll try to come up with something more interesting to talk about in the near future!

First Post!

Hey guys, Kevin here!
I'm mostly just testing out the main features of this blog at the moment. I haven't exactly decided what ratio of Finca-related stuff to everything else I'm going to post for the time being. I'd imagine once I get down there, I'll hardly have enough time to post about Finca, much less about everything else, so it'll probably become more focused over time.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this blog! I'm really excited about what I'm going to be doing for the next few years, and I'm delighted that you were interested enough in it to share that experience with me.
My apologies for having very little of substance to say right now. I'm currently in the middle of study days for the last finals week of my college career. That's a very terrifying prospect in some respects. In others, I suppose ND has done a halfway decent job of making me realize that this was all temporary in the first place, and that my real place in life is out in the world, trying to have a positive impact on others in society.
There's also a weird dynamic going on with respect to the old and the new, here. I'm having to balance my time between studying for my finals (oh, Philosophical Issues in Physics, why do you torment me?) and fundraising for the Finca. Unfortunately the former is very much winning right now. That's not a spectacularly positive thing for my fundraising efforts. I only have a limited amount of time left on the ND campus. I should be using most of it wisely. I'll just have to make that happen on Wednesday of finals week, when I'm done with all but one of my finals.

Anyway, for now, I'd better head out. I've got a lovely bunch of philosophical issues within quantum mechanics to make sure I understand.

- Kevin