My Peace Corps Experience By The Numbers

I have less than three weeks left in Guatemala, and it’s about time to start wrapping up my service on my blog. This post is not for the faint of heart: I swear and talk about poop, but that’s my service! I hope my math isn’t too off on these…


*Books read: 64 (I think)
*Times bitten by dogs: 3
*Times mased dogs: 2
*Tortillas eaten: shit… over 1,000 for sure
*Visitors: 11
*Haircuts: 2 in country, one at home
*Times called fat per month (more specifically, gordita): at LEAST 10 times a month
*Hours spent on chicken busses: a realistic estimate… at least once a month to the office (5 hours each way) 10 X 23 = 230 hours, plus hours going in and out of Xela… hmm… I’ll say an even 300.
*Hours spent listening to Adele: Minimun of 50 since her new CD came out
*Times squirted by breast milk: 2 – when you weigh babies, women just pull the kid off of their nipple and hand them to you while the milk is still flowing
*Babies that have peed or vomited on me: I can only think of 3 pees and one vomit – not too shabby!
*Number of boobs seen: countless…. But to put a number on it, I have to estimate that I see 4 boobs minimum per womens group, which meants 16 a month from those groups. I’ll have to say I see at least two more boobs a day, which makes the total around…. (23 months X 2 boobs a day= 1380 + women’s group boobs (368) = 1,748 boobs
*Longest stretch of days without showering: 8 (don’t judge, we didn’t have water at my house for like 4 months last year during dry season)
*Longest stretch of days without leaving my house when I wasn’t sick: 3 – sometimes you don’t want to be stared at, you don’t want to speak another language, or you just don’t want to walk out of the house and have to be a happy go lucky PCV
*Times I wished I was invisible so that everyone wouldn’t stare at me while outside of my house: umm 30% of the times I left my house I felt this way
*Number of days I’ve gone without speaking to anyone but myself: before my sitemate got here, I’d say at least once a week. So 36 days
*Times I thought I was going to die of food poisening (read: eating weird body parts of animals, getting a fever, puking, diarrhea): 3. This was only two when I started writing this blog, and I kid you not I knocked on wood at how lucky I’d been. And then I ate a papusa from a lady on the street, and spent this past Sunday puking my guts out. The first time I bought pizza from the street with two friends; I got horribly sick and they did not. The second time, I was eating a pache - a typical food: rice with chicken and sauce in it, wrapped and boiled in a banana leaf – that was gifted to me around Christmas. I was just kind of going at it, not paying attention, when I realized the meat part I was eating was a chicken claw. I definitely woke up puking with a fever that night. I still love paches, I just look at little harder now.
*Times I have diarrhea per month: 4 days of each month are typically diarrhea filled
*Animal body parts I’ve eaten while actually having no idea what they are: probably 10
*Panicked phone calls made to fellow PCVs: ooh probably around the 30 mark
*Panicked phone calls I’ve made to people back home: 4 that I can think of, but my mom might raise that number (sorry Mom, Jordan, Brooke and Casey…!)
*Panicked phone calls made to my PC bosses: 2… good think their jobs are 24/7 too!
*Times I cried for a really good reason or no apparent reason: too many to count, but I’d say it’s an equal number of each
*Number of conversations had about the weather: 500+ … boring, but on the plus side I can now talk about the weather pretty well in Mam!
*Percentage of times I blow my nose and my boogers are be black: 65% - lots of smog from the busses here, as well as visiting houses and inhaling smoke like crazy
*Babies I’ve made cry just by looking at them: I feel like this is thousands, but realistically it’s probably only around 50.
*Items I’ve had fall on me from a bus shelf: 4 that I can think of, including a particularily heavy suitcase and a piece of wet meat
*Times I’ve been asked for money: millions
*Times I’ve been asked for a visa: billions
*Hours I’ve spent waiting for people (la hora Chapina): I would guess I’ve spent at very least 48 hours sitting and waiting… puncuality is something I am VERY excited about when I get back to the US!
*Times I’ve had to hang on for dear life on the outside of a bus: 2 that I can think of
*Times I’ve had fleas: ugh. Once a month (including right now)
*Percentage of PC conversations that revolve around work or poop: 85%
*Number of near death experiences: It depends how you define near death, but for the sake of my parents I’ll say half a dozen (bus rides, dogs, heavy puking, etc)
*Times I´ve been sexually harrassed: twice a day - this meaning people always cat-call me, ask me about my sex life, ask me for advice on their sex life, etc. it’s typically gross old men
*Times I´ve shat/sharted myself: twice – you’re not a real PCV unless you’ve pooped your pants

I only have 2 weeks left in Guatemala, so I’ll probably do one more blog post. I have no idea what I’m going to write or how I’ll wrap up my thoughts on two years here.

I wrote down a couple quotes from books that I’ve read and that I’d been meaning to post a while ago, but here they are now.

“You think we’re victims, because we cover our hair and wear modest clothing. But we think that it’s Western women who are repressed, because they have to show their bodies – even go through surgery to change their bodies – to please men.” A female Saudi doctor interviewed in Half the Sky

“I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl talking about her awful fear of the dawn.” Little Bee

“On the girl’s brown legs there were small white scars. I was thinking, do those scars cover the whole of you? … I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must be in agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty, okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, ‘I survived.’” Little Bee

Books read since my last post:

Silence on the Mountain
The Lace Reader
Go Ask Alice
Never Let Me Go
Night
Consider the Lobster
The Ugly American
On the Road
100 Years of Solitude
The Search
The Sinday Philosophy Club
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The Hunger Games

Hasta luego,
Megan