"Kenan, we're not in Kansas anymore" "Good... Kansas is boring"

I sit in my grandma’s house staring at her 10 liter cooler, my friend’s words echoing in my head.  VD is a friend of mine now in med school, doing something productive with his life.  Off to save the world by getting straight A’s in med school and becoming the world’s best neurosurgeon while I sit in Northern Minnesota listening to Rick James and staring at a 10 liter cooler.  Yesterday VD had to call me on the way home from his ungodly-early class.  They had discussed Typhoid Fever, a disease that is not nearly as wiped out in rural Guatemala as it is in Minnesota, and one phrase, read directly from his textbook, caught my attention: “Diarrhea up to 10 liters.”  3 weeks ago I couldn’t spell diarrhea with much certainty, and now I have 4 pill bottles devoted to that nasty little word.  Somehow during this discussion I forgot to mention to VD (and also to my mom) that I began taking my typhoid vaccine a week later than is recommended.  Speaking of phrases that keep popping into my head, there’s another one that I can’t seem to shake.  While talking to the volunteer there the year before me about the commodities at the monastery I’ll be staying at, he told me that there is a computer lab, but that I should leave before 10:30 pm because “that’s when the dogs come out.”  I joked that my dog used to like to go out around that time to, and he shot me a serious look and told me that these are not house dogs, nor are they guard dogs, but attack dogs, and if they see me, that I wouldn’t be fast enough to run away.  Feeling completely unprepared for what lays ahead, I pack my parents Jetta and leave my grandma's house for the first part of the journey.

3+ hours by car, 5.5 hours by plane, and 7+ hours of idle airport sitting later, we landed in Guatemala.  Outside the airport we were picked up by a few of the monks from the monastery.  The next 6-7 hours were a tour of guatemala city of sorts as our "guides" had different errands to run all over the city.  Tired as we were from hours of traveling and minimal sleep, this errand running quickly became "try to nap" time.  My initial impressions of Guatemala were less than spectacular.  From the men armed with combat shotguns outside nearly every store (see left) to the guard towers with machine gun toting guards, the almost complete lack of pavement on some streets to the very, very sick dogs unleashing foul streams of feces upon unsuspecting automobiles, Guatemala seemed like more than I had bargained for.  

After our makeshift tour, we began what was supposed to be our four hour drive home.  Because of the incredible amount of rain that Guatemala has received in the las months, landslides had covered the normal route to Esquipulas, and we had to take a longer route.  Aside from the odd herd of cows processing down the street in front of us, and the landslides which covered the roads we were on mere hours after we passed, we got on our way.  Not far outside of Guatemala City the landscape changed and Guatemala became more and more agreeable.  Over the next 5 hours we traveled from around 200m elevation to around 900m.  The weather became cooler and the views became more amazing.  After what seemed like years of traveling, the van stopped for our first view of our new home.