Continuing the Roller Coaster

The last two weeks have felt like an eternity!  Probably the longest two weeks of my life. 

Catholic tradition following a death here in Guatemala is as follows:
-Having the body in the house for 2 full days, with people coming in and out to mourn and pray and share food
-On the 3rd day, there is a funeral for the burial
-Each evening on the following 10 days is spent doing a rosary prayer service
-On the 11th day, everyone heads to the cemetery to give flowers and last prayers.

It is a long grieving process.  I sway between thinking it's beautiful to be honoring the dead for so many days, and feeling exhausted of being sad.  Every prayer service is full of tears and tight hugs and a heavy sense of loss.  The hardest part for me is free prayer time at the end, where everyone stands up and shouts their prayers to the world.  The sound of all that sadness and hope being cried into the air reverberates in my lungs and makes me feel as if all the woes of the world are inside my chest, ready to explode. Seeing my little buddy Steven's 7 year-old eyes full of tears and anger every day during these services is an image I know will stay with me forever.   I am there every day, for all the tears and cups of coffee and prayers to support my family - but the gigantic achy hole in my heart is just so exhausted of being sad.  

The day that the shooting tragedy happened, my new teachers arrived.  So between the rosaries and flower buying and funeral attending, I also ran a training all week.  I felt like a newscaster.  One minute experiencing an intensely sorrowful, heart wrenching pain . ..  and the next, plastering on a smile to inject passion and inspiration into the new blood of UPAVIM.

My birthday quietly passed during that week as well.  We were invited to an Indigenous Mayan village where we learned a Mayan religious ceremony, ran around with chickens, and tasted incredibly potent homemade wine. The journey there and back took 7 hours. It was actually a lovely day, but I found myself just wanting to be back in La Esperanza - where I could play with kids and chisme with my favorite women and get my fill of birthday hugs.  When we returned at 9 pm - even though it was past our curfew of when it's safe to be outside - I stomped through the community and knocked on doors, asking for birthday hugs.  When I knocked on Dona Dina's house and told her I needed a birthday hug, she yelled into the house and immediately 11 people came filing out of the house to give me hugs.   Probably the silliest, selfish birthday thing I've done - but I just needed it.

What else has happened here in my new 29th year?  School started back up and I got my fill of hugs and kisses and love.  I found that I even missed their shouting and climbing over the tables and throwing their food, which tells me I'm getting used to life here.  Sadly this week, my house mom lost another family member to gang vioence, and the community lost 2 more boys that night. In the span of 2 weeks, Angela lost 2 nephews and a cousin, and the week continued with more wakes and rosaries and funerals - today another 2 men were killed, and I unfortunately saw one of the dead bodies as it was carried away. So many life changing images on the reel of my experience here.

One of the most precious women had her baby!  And she is a beautiful bundle of joy and hope.  One of my teachers was bit by a dog, and has had to get a series of injections to prevent rabies (News caster face - and happy, and sad, and happy and sad).  I got my first round of head lice.  And by round, I mean infestation.  Two rounds of medicine, three sessions of people picking at my head like monkeys, and a week of lice shampoo still hasn't killed it all.  Nothing like a week long fight with head lice to keep you real good and humble. In the last two weeks I have become obsessed - for the first time in my life! - with a televised sport.  El Mundial. . . me encanta!  I have craned my neck to peer through windows to watch games, screamed and hugged random strangers over goals, pretended to be Messi from Argentina as I'm playing in the street, and during one game yesterday when I couldn't find a TV- I even went online to read the minute by minute play-by-play. I did a world flag unit with my kiddos and we made really cool soccer ball art.

Today I visited the cemetery with my family, and it was the first day in two weeks that felt light on the heart. With the sun shining and wind blowing, we put flowers on the graves and sat around laughing and taking deep breaths - the first sound of laughter in 14 days, and it has been the best sound of my life.  Back home, my bestest friend here had her birthday - and I channeled my dad's party planning magic to throw her a themed party around her favorite movie. . . Frozen. Snowflakes, crowns and capes and snowman building contests.  It was a really wonderful day at the end of a really hard 2 weeks, refreshingly full of laughter and WAY too much candy.  Just what el doctor ordered.