Here are some pictures of when we swore in as volunteers at the Ambassador's house. These were taken back in July.

Sidney's and my host family and the Ambassador to Guatemala.

Officially a volunteer!

Someday I will rule the world.

Youth Development and Rural Home Preventive Health volunteers.

This is my house. My bedroom is on the bottom level.

The view of the back yard before all of the corn was cut down.

My host brother, Esdras. He is standing next to his cousin Juan (on the motorcycle.) Juan is also my student. He always behaves well even though he is friends with the trouble makers. He is afraid I will tell his mother!

Chickens

Eli had 9 chickens that she fed almost everyday. Occasionally, she would exclaim that she had forgotten about them for the past day or two. Because of this they were growing at a slow rate and still were not producing eggs. However, this past month she had been feeding them religiously as she was fattening them up for Christmas dinner. She was going to cook 3 or 4 of them depending on if her son and his family could make it out here. She said the chickens would start giving eggs within the next week or so. Since we eat eggs everyday for dinner this would greatly help the food bill if the chickens were laying.
They had the kind of chickens that have no neck feathers, just bare naked skin. These kind are quite ugly, but apparently tasty. They also had a lovely fat orange chicken who was completely covered in feathers. She loved to peck in Eli's flower bed. I always could forgive for it her because she was just so pretty.
As I opened my bedroom door yesterday morning, barely awake enough to say good morning in Spanish, Benjamin ran up to me and shouted, "Someone stole all the chickens!!! Come see!" We trekked out to the shed and sure enough someone had torn apart the bamboo door (which was really unnecessary, they could have unfastened it and opened it) and taken every single chicken. My first thought was OH Nooooo! CHRISTMAS DINNER! When I asked Benjamin how it made him feel when people stole from him he just shrugged his shoulders and laughed. Eli did the same thing. There is nowhere to go and no one to talk to when you are robbed. There is nothing to do here, but shrug your shoulders and say, "oh well." Eli said now she will have to buy chickens for Christmas dinner. This just about broke my heart. After all that hard work she lost everything. The 9 chickens were worth about 450 Quetzales, which is a substantial sum of money here.
This isn't the first time all of her chickens had been stolen, but it might be the last. She said that she has no desire to raise chickens again since they will only get stolen.

Bunnies

When I came to my site I first met my family and soon after the bunnies. There were 4 rabbits. One, a skinny tan and white lady with a pretty pink nose used to hop into the house and eat lunch with us. Everyday at lunch time she knew to sneak into the house. We would forget about her until we heard her munching on cabbage and carrots and potatoes peels. She always kept a watchful eye on us, as though she was ready to run at any minute. My host mom Eli, would leave food scraps in a bowl so that throughout the day the tan bunny could come and go as she pleased. They even made her bedding in the kitchen so on cold nights she could sleep inside. While the tan rabbit lived the bunny life, the spotted brown, black and white one was nursing her 5 little conejitos (bunnies.) New born bunnies are hideous. My family describes them best, says they are puro raton (pure rats.) However, after a week they grow soft bunny hair and their little bunny eyes open and their tiny bunny ears stick up and they are just about the cutest things under the sun.
The other dark gray and white rabbit was forced to live in a small cage with Benjamin’s bunny. His bunny was the fattest of them all, an enormous rabbit. Eli would send Benjamin to feed the bunnies with food scraps and he would feed his bunny and his bunny only. Therefore it grew plump and large and delicious. One day, we realized that the skinny tan and white bunny wasn’t so skinny any more and that she was going to have her own bunch of little ratones. So Benjamin’s bunny had the luck of moving to the shed where Eli makes tortillas. It now had space to jump and hide and eat and burrow. Although all the tan rabbit's bunnies died for some mysterious reason one after another, Benjamin's rabbit was allowed to stay in the shed. For 2 months it lived happily in the shed, eating bits of maiz (tortilla dough) and growing ever fatter. I came home from school one afternoon and was surprised not to find Benjamin waiting for me with another tail of cars and crashes and killing animals and fights. When I asked where he was Eli told me that he was sulking for the neighbors had eaten his bunny! The bunny had been hopping about outside, contently eating away when the neighbors saw it and decided it would be a good dinner. They claim they thought it was a wild rabbit, but I’m not to sure about that. For days Benjamin cried and cried. On the fourth day of his rabbit's death Eli went to tortillar as normal. As she was forming her perfectly round tortillas out of the corner of her eye she saw a little baby bunny crawling amongst the firewood. Benjamin's rabbit had left behind 5 little babies under the brick oven. Their eyes still hadn't opened, but they were so hungry that they left their nest in search of food. Eli and family nursed them back to health with maiz sugar water. Once again we have little conejitos. I rather love little bunnies. Once they grow large they aren't so entertaining, but luckily rabbits seem to constantly procreate and we always have bunnies.