I need a vacation

     While I don't want to write a blog without anything to say, I also want to get one out before I head off to my first (hopefully of many) trips.  Because I don't have a visa, I can only stay in Guatemala for 90 days at a time before I become an illegal, so I've decided to make my trip out of the country coincide with Thanksgiving.  On Satuurday I will be taking a bus to El Rancho (little more than a few food stands on the side of the road), where I will apparently wait for up to an hour and a half to catch another bus to Cobán where I will meet up with the other two BVC volunteers who are staying there.  We plan to hang around Cobán for a few days and then head to Belize to spend Thanksgiving on a beach!  Needless to say, I'm looking forward to it.
   
     That being said, I don't really have anything interesting to report from Esquipulas.  Things are chugging along, I'm staying busy, and having a little fun in between.  However, November has been a tough month for me so far.  First, I'm finally beginning settling into my stay here at the Abadía Jesucristo Cricuficado which means that the excitement of the first month in which everything is new, and the learning of the second month in which I'm finally comfortable enough to begin noticing the cool things about the country, have faded away, and I'm now just living in Guatemala.  Without much to do.  Please don't hear me wrong, it is amazing that I've been given the opportunity to live in Guatemala for a year, for free, learning Spanish, experiencing a really cool culture, and meeting some awesome people.  Also, I'm not the only BVC member going through this.  The more I talk to my friends the more I realize that almost every BVC group is experiencing the feelings of not really being needed.  A few of my friends have summed up this sentiment very precisely.  A friend from Chile writes that living abroad is "much like how I think living in Antarctica would be, or spending a year sailing the ocean.  There’s a lot of mediocrity in between the excitement."  Another friend in the BVC in the Phillipines uses a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle to sum up his thoughts: “I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely” suffice it to say, I'm pretty tired.
     The second reason for my November difficulties is that I've been unwillingly providing room and board for thousands of amoebas that have taken up residence in my GI tract.  This has given me a constant stomach ache as well as making me feel tired and weak all the time.  This Tuesday I went to the stomach doctor to get a check up and was introduced to the Guatemalan health care system.  While I've said before that there is no hospital in Esquipulas, that should not be taken to mean that there is no medical care for the people of Esquipulas.  In my search for an "internalista,"  I found that there are probably a hundred independent doctors in Esquipulas who all have clinics interspersed throughout the city.  Beyond that, you can walk into any of the dozens of pharmacies, describe your problem, and the pharmacist will "prescribe" you medicine.  While it doesn't have all the nice bells and whistles of the American system (and comes with the risk of two different pharmacists prescribing drugs that shouldn't be combined) it seems to work pretty well for the Esquipultecos, and is much, much cheaper.  That being said, my particular doctor is a friend I met here at the monastery, and because of that decided to give me a free consultation!  He set me up with some drugs, and sent me on my way.  The treatment for amoebas here is the medical equivalent of using a napalm strike to start your Coleman grill.  He basically gave me pills to kill everything in my stomach in one fell swoop, then a weeks worth of antibiotics and other pills to help me build back up the good stuff.  A little more than a week after my initial problems, I'm finally feeling good again, and gastrointestinally ready for my Belizean adventures. 
   
     Aside from these small setbacks, things have been moving along here.  I still teach English 3 times a week, and students still come, so that in itself is a success story.  The word about my class is really spreading too, I even had a stray dog wander into class the other day.  The stomach bugs have put a halt to my soccer playing... for now.  Actually, that's how I knew I was sick.  The last time I played, I didn't score any goals (hyuck hyuck).  That could have been due to my stomach problems, or due to the fact that I was facing a truly formidable goalie in the form of a herd of cows that wandered onto the field temporarily shutting down the game.  Instead of making photocopies all day at the library, our focus has shifted to painting the library.  While I generally enjoy painting, the way they do things here is just too different for my tastes.  Instead of using masking tape to cover the areas they don't want to paint, if they get paint where they didn't want it, they just paint over that slip up going back and forth with the colors until it looks good.  I also walked in one day to find them stirring giant 5 gallon paint buckets, not with sticks, but with their arms, in the paint almost to their shoulders.  That being said, the library has moved along nicely, and we are just about finishing up.  It should be all done by the time I get back from my trip.  When Mike and Sister Stefanie were here I began working on building a vegetable garden at the Ciudad de Felicidad.  It moved along nicely until my stomach problems started, and then promptly fell apart.  I had hoped to get it done before I left, but that didn't happen, and now it gets to wait until I return.
     That's all I have for now.  Happy Thanksgiving!