The Beginning

Hello from Santiago! This is the first chance I´ve had to sit down and write a post since I´ve been here... it´s only been two days but I´ve seen and done so much already. I have so much I can tell, I don´t know where to start! I`m living with a host family and they´re really great. There´s the mom and dad, a sister about my age and a brother who´s four years old. He`s adorable and a lot of fun to be around. I`m getting by with my Spanish talking to the family, although I´m still not great at saying everything I want to so a lot of times I´m just nodding with a slightly confused look on my face. The sister, Emily, laughs a lot and a lot of times I think she´s laughing at my Spanish, but in a nice way. I talked to her for a long time last night about Spanish and English words (she really wants to learn English), school (she´s starting at the university in January), computers (she apparently has a Facebook!) and a lot more. Living with the host family is great. I have my own room (where I´m woken up by chickens and roosters in the morning), I can eat as many meals as I want with them, and I have a key so I can come and go when I want. I`m learning my way around Santiago a bit... as in I recognize a lot of places but never quite know where I´m going. Usually Lisa, a Penn grad student who´s been living here and set me up with everything, has been with me, but right now, for example, I left the library I was helping out at and found an internet cafe on my own! Next I´m going to take a tuk tuk (these tiny red taxis that can take you anywhere in Santiago for 3 quetzales, about 40 cents, and drive crazily and will hit you if you´re in their way) to the construction site of the new hospital where Lisa is working. Which brings me to the things I´ve done so far... this morning I was helping out at an event for children and their moms for mother´s day, before that I went to a preschool with Lisa where she read books to two of the classes. Yesterday I went to a different school, where my host brother Aklaxito goes. I´ve been meeting some of the other American volunteers and just learning a lot about the town. It´s around a lake and in between 3 volcanoes, and in 2005 there was a mudslide that killed a lot of people and damaged much of the town, including the hospital, which why they´re building a new one. About 40,000 people live in Santiago, and many are extremely poor. It´s great that there are so many people who want to help out.

This post is incredibly rambling... I don´t know how to organize my thoughts but I wanted to update you all! I´ll try to post every few days, with more of an idea of what exactly I want to say... but for now, I hope everyone´s doing well in the US and I´ll write more soon!