Easter

It's a tradition in Salacuim to spend Easter Sunday at the river. We went with one of our favorite families in town, the Prados, and spent the day swimming, eating and socializing with the entire community. It was a cultural event and something different than we had experienced in our time here.


The river scene in Ixloc


The Prado family on Easter Sunday


Kari, Paola and Kennedy in Ixloc

Passing the Torch

Last week we had a chance to spend time with the volunteers that will be coming to replace us in our respective programs. We spent about 4 days with my replacement Andy, the new environmental education volunteer, in Salacuim and we had a chance to meet Ted, Corby's replacement in Ecotourism. There will be many changes coming up with the new cycle of volunteers. After realizing some of the challenges we dealt with while working in our programs, we recommended some changes to be made for the new generation. They will no longer be partnered with our NGO counterpart and rather Andy will work directly with the 4 schools in Salacuim teaching environmental education and training the teachers how to implement the curriculum into their classrooms. Ted will be living in a new Peace Corps site, Santa Lucia, which is near the entrance to the National Park Laguna Lachuá. He will be better situated to work with the park from that location as well as all the budding tourism sites in that area.


Welcoming Andy to Salacuim

It was nice to meet the people that will be taking over and continuing on with some of our work and starting new projects of their own. I really think that Andy will be a great addition to the list of Salacuim volunteers and the kids and schools are already so excited to have him start. In terms of passing the torch, I don't think we could have asked for a better person to receive it. He's also talking about starting a blog so we can stay caught up on the happenings around town. We'll post that info as soon as we find out for those of you that have become attached to Salacuim as well.

Last Trip

We just took what may be our last trip around Guatemala a couple weeks ago. We were lucky enough to have Corby's brother, Jeremy visit us for 3 weeks. He just returned from a year long tour in Afghanistan and made time to come see us, which was great.



We spent some time traveling to new parts of Guatemala that we had not seen before, including Huehuetenango and Xela and up to Mexico for a couple days. We also managed to climb the 3rd highest volcano in Guatemala, Santa Maria.







Things are quickly coming to a close here and the time seems to be slipping away. We've finally made our trip plans home and after a small trip to Mexico City, we will be returning to Minneapolis on April 7th. Everything has slowly been falling into place and the most exciting news from last week was my acceptance to graduate school at the U of M. Starting in the fall, I will be working on my masters in social work. I'm really looking forward to a new challenge and it'll be great to get home.

The mix of emotions has already begun to set in about leaving Guatemala and we're looking forward to spending the next 3 weeks with our Salacuim family.