It's official. My new COS (Close of Service) date is June 1st, rather than March 27th. I need the extra 2 months to get my projects done, and because I love it here and I'm not ready to leave yet! I don't know how to do life in the States.

It's amazing how much life has changed and how much I have gone through in the past year to get to the point that I am at today. I was realizing this at Agua Caliente today after giving some talks about trash. I was sitting in the pool staring at the forest (my favorite reflective time) and realized that a year ago today was when my Guatemalan life was turned upside down. I was miserable for so long, but now I am so completely happy with life. It's amazing.

Thanks to all of you who have donated to the bottle classroom project! We currently have Q4000 which is enough to get started building the supports. I expect more donations to roll in but probably not enough to cover the total cost (about Q21,000) so we are soliciting the rest from a national governmental institution called ProRural. So the project is moving along! When we start building I will start uploading photos. And more donations are always welcome as we will also need to buy desks, chalkboard, etc.

Last weekend I climbed Volcan Tacana with a group of Peace Corps friends. It's the second highest volcano in Guatemala (4095 meters or something like that). It was breath-takingly beautiful as well as quite an adventurous trip! I don't know if I can do it justice in describing it, so I will just leve you with a photo of me on top (at the Guatemalan-Mexican border) and a photo of the truck that we rode out in (in the back).







On the way back, I had a very hilarious encounter. On the bus up from Xela to my town and old man sat next to me an introduced himself. He asked me if I work in the Municipal Forestry Office. When I replied yes, he asked if I remembered him and writing him a letter of recommendation for getting a visa into the States. Obviously not, since I have never written one before. I asked him when someone wrote him that. While looking up searching for the answer, he slowly replied (in Spanish, obviously), "In the year 1985." Inside I was cracking up, but I managed to calmly explain to him that if a señorita wrote him that 25 years ago then she would be a señora now, which I clearly am not. Or maybe I do look like I'm 50 and not 23? Oh yeah, then I got a whiff of alcohol on his breath (it was 1pm).

Okay, well I'm sure there's tons more to write about like my dog, my basketball team, my running, etc, but this is enough for now! Cuidense mucho!