Several weeks ago, my younger daughter turned nine. Or rather, two and a quarter, since she’s a Leap Year Baby.

We made whoopie pies to share with her class (and a taxi driver and the neighbor kids and another volunteer who was celebrating a birthday), and that afternoon we had a piñata, in honor of both the February birthdays. There was a chocolate cake and a few little gifts—a recorder for school, a fake Barbie, a stuffed Pooh Bear, etc.

However, it wasn’t until yesterday that she got her real gift. We weren’t sure it was all going to work out, so we downplayed the whole thing: we said that her uncle was bringing one of her birthday presents when he came, but it wasn’t any big deal. Which was a lie and I think she knew it.

See, a ways back when I wrote this post about her one and only toy, I alluded to her great, persistent and vocal longing for an American Doll. My cousin-in-law read the post and immediately announced, She can have mine. And then she, bless her heart, bent over backwards to travel to her parents’ house, dig it out of their attic, and mail it to my brother.

Yesterday after school, we called everyone together and handed her the box.

When she opened it, there was a loud gasp followed by much hollering.

Hers is the Felicity doll, the girl from Virginia, which is fitting, I think. I read all about her online the night before—how she was the first doll to be added to the collection in 1991 and how she was discontinued in 2002 and how there was such an uproar that they re-introduced her a couple years later.

My daughter, however, doesn’t care about all that. She has an American Doll of her very own and that’s all that matters. She has opted to call her “Lily,” which is probably some type of American Doll sacrilege.

Lily has her own bed under the night table. My daughter goes into her room and shuts the door and I can hear her happily chattering away to her new friend.

Thank you, Kate. You have made one little girl (and her mama) very, very happy.

Good morning!

The sun is shining, the sky is blueblueblue, and there’s a cheerful breeze. This morning, I washed my sheets, dried them on the line, and had them back on the bed by 9:15.

Yesterday, my husband traveled into Guatemala City and this morning he is picking up my brother at the airport, our first international guest, wheee! They will arrive home this evening, hopefully before the kids’ bedtime. Because, see, the children are so excited that there is no way I’ll be able to make them go to sleep if their adored uncle hasn’t shown up yet. (And it may be impossible to get to them to bed even if he has, though the fact that he will be dead on his feet might help speed things up.) I did warn the children that they would not be going through his bags tonight. (I did not add that I will be going through them after they are all asleep. Rumor has it that chocolate is in one of those bags, and where chocolate is involved, I can not be expected to wait!)

I woke up at five this morning. Laying in bed, listening to the wind terrorize the tin roof, I thought about the weather. And then I wrote a post in my head. It was very good and very profound. Too bad for all of us that now, a few hours later, I can’t remember exactly how it went.

Oh well. I’ll do my best. (Clears throat.)

Even though the weather is much more extreme in the states, it’s much more noticeable here because there is no buffer. In the states we have things like AC and central heat and cars with windows that work and insulated houses with rugs and no reason to be outside if we don’t want to. Funny thing is, we fuss about the weather all the time.

Here, whatever it’s doing outside, it’s doing inside, too (though hopefully the roofs are doing their job and keeping the rain out). Most walls are concrete block, or simply slabs of wood nailed to posts with great big cracks between the pieces. The roofs are tin, as are some of the walls. Therefore, if it’s cold outside, it’s cold inside. If it’s hot outside, it’s a furnace inside. If it’s wet outside, it feels (and sometimes is) wet inside. And no one hardly says a peep about the weather!

Life is rawer here. There is not a buffer to cushion us from the scrappiness of being alive. For most people, it’s hand to mouth every day. It’s taken me awhile to catch on, but this is why fruit and vegetables are sold ready to eat this very minute. Because that’s why people buy them—to eat NOW. There’s no storing up 50-pound sacks of oats (oh, how I miss my big sacks of oats!) or bushels of apples. There is no canning or freezing or preserving. There is no need to because fruits and veggies are in season year round, yes, but it’s also because the people don’t have the resources for such investments.

The other week, I stepped into a pharmacy in search of bandaids. The guy behind the counter placed a single band aid on the counter. “Twenty-five cents,” he said.

“Oh no!” I said. “I’d like a whole box, please.”

He looked at me like I was addled—who in their right mind needs an entire box of bandaids?—but then he got a calculator and figured out the price of the whole box.

Like band aids, everything is sold individually. One light bulb, one pen, one piece of candy, one banana, one ounce of coffee, etc. You buy what you need this day, right now, period.

Here are some other examples that illustrate this Lack of Buffer.

Things
In the States: it’s expected that things will work when you buy them. If they don’t, we are indignant. And returning them is such a stinking headache!

Here: it’s the norm for things not to work and there is NO return policy, not ever. (Why yes, the use of italics and all-caps do indeed indicate an elevated level of frustration, you astute reader, you!) The post-it notes don’t stick. The tape doesn’t stick. The envelopes don’t stick. (So NOW what, if there is no sticky tape with which to close the envelope?) Clothing falls apart. Extension cords don’t conduct electricity. Earphones don’t work. Therefore, it’s the norm for all electrical products to be tested in front of the customer (much like servers in fancy restaurants pouring a bit of wine into the glass for the patron to sample before making a final decision) to prove that they do indeed work, from hand saws to light bulbs. Also, always test pens before buying them.

Taxis
In the States (where I live, anyway): we all have our own cars, at least one per household and maybe three or four.

Here: not many people have cars and if you want to get around—and opt not to go by foot, bike, or bus—you take a taxi. This is a luxury, but the taxis are not.There are taxis that funnel exhaust directly into the back seat. Go above 25 mph, and many fishtail all over the road because the wheel is bent. (You know what’s worrisome? Sitting in a taxi and having a passerby point to the tire and yell some warning at the driver.) The windshields are cracked. The door handles don’t work (so you have to wait till the taxi driver gets out and opens the door for you—taxi drivers are the most chivalrous people in town!) The taxis have no shocks so they drive across the crazy-high speed bumps at an angle, and even then the cars sometimes get stranded, all four wheels spinning frantically like an upside down bug. (Okay, so I’m exaggerating. But only a little!) (And I’m not exaggerating when I say that we can sometimes feel the speed bumps with our feet as we pass over them!) Once, we rode in a taxi that had to back up and start over to make it up a little hill, and then, on the hill up to our house, it really didn’t make it up, so we all had to get out and walk.

Trash
In the States: trash is removed quickly and quietly disappears to Who Knows Where.

Here: trash is visible everywhere. We pass the dump on our way from Chamelco to Carcha. It’s a  whole side of a mountain, covered in smoking, steaming trash. The workers (and the people who live there) pick through the toilet paper and rotten food and leaky batteries in search of the recyclables, and at the entrance there are often big bales of plastic waiting for pick-up. (Recycling in reverse.)

Trash lines the roads, surrounds the houses, and coats the cornfields like mulch. People throw trash down, not out, even in their own houses. Then, once or twice a day, they sweep their living area, pushing the trash out into the yard or the street.

This post feels garbled, incoherent, repetitive, and clumsy. I am, however, leaving it as is because there are other things to say and I’m sick of polishing the same old thoughts over and over again. (You: That was polished? Me: SHUT UP.) Therefore, I’m making the executive decision that, for right now, anyway, it is better to write things down and get them them Out There than it is to hold on to them. Besides, my hunch is that the more I write, the more clarity there will be. I mean, if I talk about the dump today and then I post pictures of it in July and then you catch a glimpse of a loaded and low-hanging garbage truck (like a baby with a poopy) in a September post, it will hopefully all come together to present something that gives a good representation of Taking Out The Trash In Guatemala According to an MCCer. (Oh bother. Now this paragraph is one convoluted mess. I give up.)

Written on Monday, March 18. My brother arrived and my chocolate basket is overflowing!

One of the hardest things for me to acclimate to here is the cold. I do not like being cold. My fingers turn blue and my toes go numb and my nose won’t stop running. My shoulders hunch up and my back hurts and I get The Spine Shivers. I get snippy.

I should clarify: I don’t mind the cold as long as I can get away from it. As long as there is a warm place to go to, I rather enjoy the cold and the things that go with it, like wool socks, candles, and hot drinks. But put me in a drafty, cement block house with a tin roof and no hot water (except for in the shower—thank goodness we have hot showers!) and no heat source, and then make it rain for days on end and make the temperature plummet so low that it frosts, and you have one very chilled and unhappy mama.

I heat up water on the stove and then soak my fingers in it until I can feel them again. I layer up. I steal my husband’s coat. I wrap myself up in a comforter like a human burrito and then slouch down in front of the computer and do not move. I do jumping jacks. I try to pretend I’m not actually cold and wash my hair in the kitchen sink and nearly pass out from an iced skull. I turn on the oven and stick my feet in it. I dream of an oven big enough that I could climb in completely. Or I fantasize that I’m a sick baby bunny with kind owners who take pity and put it, in its hay-lined nesting box, into the turned-low oven to warm up.

Of course I’m being a wimp. All these thousands of people have been living without heat for centuries and they’re doing just fine. It’s doable. I should just relax into the perpetual cold and go with it.

But how is it physically possible to relax when you’re cold? I can’t figure it out.

A friend commented that she doesn’t believe we have bad weather here because the sun is always shining in the photos I post. That’s because I don’t take my camera out when it’s raining! I don’t want to get it wet and the lighting is bad in the gray dark. But this latest rainy spell, I made it my goal to take some pictures. I couldn’t really catch the bleak, cold wetness, probably because we’re living in a tropical wonderland, but I tried.

There’s a pattern to the weather, I’m learning. We’ll have a spell of warm weather that gets progressively hotter as the days go by. Then there’s an in-between day in which the wind blows and clouds clutter the sky. That night it invariably pours rain, great solid sheets of rain. The heavy rains only last several minutes before dialing back to a soaking rain that holds steady while waiting for the clouds to muster their resolve and once again hold forth. It’s like riding waves, but upside down: RUSH, pour-pour-pour, RUSH, pour-pour-pour.

After about 12 hours of this, the clouds are dragging close to the ground, ragged and worn out, and the temperature drops. For the next two days, maybe three, the clouds remain low and shredded. There is a steady, misty drizzle (called chipi-chipi) that hardly wets your hair interspersed with soft rains.

And then, finally, comes a day of almost no rain. As the cloud cover and humidity lessen, the temperature drops even further. It will be bittingly cold the next morning but that’s a sure sign that the sun will come out, whoo-hoo! In a couple days it will be hot enough to go swimming and wear shorts to bed and drink iced coffee, and the sky will be so blue that the grey clouds seem like nothing but a made-up memory.

Right now we’re on the last day of the rainy cycle, I think. It’s misting lightly and there’s supposed to be sun tomorrow.

But yesterday morning, in the middle of the cold and wet, I decided I could take it no longer.

While the kids were at school, I hopped on a bus and took off for Cobán and its fancy (Walmart) grocery store where I picked out four single bed comforters. By bundling up in jackets and socks, the kids had been staying warm at night, but just barely. It was time they each had their own insulating comforter.

When they came home after school and spied their newly made-up beds, the shouts of joy and screeches of glee were so intense that I actually felt bad. Were they that cold all this time? What kind of a mother would let her children shiver through their dreams? Also, could the cold night temps be the reason the youngest was have trouble with bladder control? Oh dear.

Last night when we gathered for bedtime reading, the kids trouped out to the drafty living area, their colorful, puffy, warm comforter wrapped tight about their shoulders. What bliss!

I go to bed each night hoping that the next day will bring warmer weather. I’m not asking for much—just a few hours of sun in which to thaw out would be plenty!

Written yesterday, on Friday, March 15.  This morning, it is weirdly raining while there is blue sky and the sun is shining, yes!