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A very common sight in Guatemala is a pick-up packed with people standing in the back.

As you can see, this pick-up is designed for that very purpose with its grillwork.

Surrounding Xela are the mountainous areas where many of the indigenous Maya families live and work.  They bring their produce down to market in these pick-up trucks.

Another common experience is waiting in lines – sometimes VERY long lines.  These people are waiting to get into Western Union for their remittances from family back in the States.

This shot was taken in Antigua, a city near the capital, from a hangar mate of mine from California when he recently visited Guatemala.

We recently had a torrential downpour one evening and in the morning we saw the result.

The rainy season starts about in May and goes through the summer. Because our streets flood, every doorway has little metal drop-down doors that help block out the water, but it still makes a mess in homes and little tiendas (stores).

We’re on the second floor so we’re not directly affected, but it sure makes for a mess for a lot of people, and because we walk everywhere, it’s messy – and dusty after it dries out!

Little gates.

Lots of mud and when flowing fast is dangerous.

Surveying the aftermath of the flooding.

Oh joy – cleaning up.

Peace Corps paperwork – a daunting task!

In Guatemala, there’s a requirement that ex-pats (foreigners) must leave the country every 3 months – for at least 3 days. This is commonly referred as a “border run” among us.  In the past we’ve flown to Mexico City, the US or just crossed the border into Mexico to a town called Tapachula.

Last month we were due for another border run, plus we needed to get our PC medical/dental work done so we flew back to California.  We were blessed to be able to be squeezed into the very busy schedules of our doctors and dentist on such short notice!

In our PC applications, we had to fill out detailed medical history information and this formed the basis for the extensive medical/dental paperwork we needed to have filled out by our dentist, doctors and medical staff.  In all this, we needed to hunt down medical records from various doctors going back over 10 years – what a chore!

Finally, after all the paperwork was filled out, signed and collected, Leslie and I had to scan everything and upload it to our PC portal.  Whew!!

After almost 3 years of preparing and pursuing service in the Peace Corps, we were formally invited to service in Guatemala.

Leslie will serve in a position called “Healthy Schools” and I’ll serve in “Youth in Development”.

Service in the Peace Corps is a process.  We’re not “locked in” the PC yet!  However, being invited is a major hurdle that we’ve just accomplished.  Then starts the medical/dental exams, background checks, etc.  If all those things pass muster, we’ll begin “Pre-Service Training” in Guatemala for 3 months starting in September.

Only after successfully meeting all the required tasks and passing an intermediate level of Spanish fluency, do we take the oath of service at the end of Pre-Service Training and are officially “sworn in”.

On Christmas morning I checked my email but got an error message – strange, but maybe not unusual since we’re high in the western highlands of Guatemala.  Tried a couple of hours later but the same error.  Hmmm…so I checked to see if our blog was OK and was shocked to see we’d been hacked with this ransomware message:

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This started a week into a world I didn’t know or understand, but I wasn’t going to pay a ransom! Christmas Day was a Sunday so I had to wait until Tuesday to reach my host provider.  They said our domain was hacked/ambushed but it appeared our data on the host server was still OK.  This is how the “whois” database looked like:

After working with the domain registrar, proving who I was and resetting DNS settings, slowly things came back to normal.

So if the Russians can control our US elections, Yahoo lost a billion accounts to hackers, and Trump says “any computer can be hacked”, what hope is there for our little blog?!

Happy New Year to all our friends and family!