This is a patchwork of all the feels from week one. As wavering as unrooted as the feelings were, they came and went like the incumbent GI issues I experienced.

I laid on the cold tile, looking up at the ceiling. A beam runs across the room, cutting me across if it felt.

Now it’s my first Monday (Dec 12). I’ve almost withstood it, but not yet. There’s still dinner.

The problem, I’ve realized, is that I do not have a refrigerator. And without refrigerators, cooking for one is a useless enterprise.

I could buy a mini-refrigerator but the power bill will go through the roof and I am trying to be discretionary with my spending. Power here is not like power at home. If you leave the light on, your family will notice and ask you to apagarlo right away.

I feel faintly sad, mostly concerned with a touch of dread.

Mostly I feel aware of the gravity of one moment, again. When I got my apartment when I was 27, I sat in the wide open tiled basement space and felt the empty air droplets collect dampness and hover around me. Everything was slow, everything was quiet. I wrote an email to my girls from Seattle, telling them how it felt to move out on my own and how I remembered what it was like to move out on my own for the first time in Seattle. I broke my back making the house look good (on a budget..) and how quiet things were in a house alone.

I don’t talk to any of them anymore. And that is sad.

I stood over the pila and handwashed everything. Everything that the volunteers said during training about hard days, tough times, how the job is hard: they all found me in Santa Clara and hovered over my shoulders as the bright sun and mountain wind greeted my wet clothes.

It took about 2 hours. It’s what I did in the morning. Then after I ate some weird assortment of bread, avocado, peanut butter, jelly, papaya and banana, I went to the market to buy food containers (to preserve in the room temperature..?) I bought a cutting board, small knife, three food containers of amoebic shapes and a big water bottle. I’m boiling my water but I’m worried I’m going to run out of gas so I’m not really boiling it.

And then I thought for a moment today, “I hate this.”

But I just kept on puttering around because there’s nothing else to do.

I made my closet this afternoon and listened to a podcast (I hung my things up). My host grandmother knocked on my door to tell me it was going to rain. I grabbed all my laundry and scattered it around the house.

Doña Rosario is cutting aguacate today. I miss her. She hired someone else to help her cut it so she has to go. She also brought her lunch so she didn’t come back. Some family member was here with Abuelita downstairs, making sure she ate lunch.

Yesterday Doña Rosario showed me where she gets her leña, wood, from the top floor of the house. There’s a bunch up there, she puts it up there to dry. I’m not sure if she cuts it herself from the farm. From the top of her house, I could see more of what surrounds the town and the “you are here” star in my head beautifully framed by stacked piles of wood around my feet. With the strong wind and the sunshine, it was a glorious moment, my host mom’s corte clinging just above her ankles.

She officiously laid the leña in a pile over her lasso and carried it down the steps on her back, reminding me ‘despacio.’

My first week in site, I eased in like a sinking boat. Slowly slowly and then all at once, I was officially sunk. This is why they call it inundation?

My first Monday was the first hard day. In general, Mondays are not easy. But I found myself in a new place with a list of responsibilities and no interest in doing them. I washed my clothes instead, which took over 2 hours. They dried slowly, martyrs of the reckless wind.

On my first Thursday, I awoke at 7:17 in enough time to be downstairs by 7:35 (hugging the curve of on-timeness but always in it’s wake), I let my host mom feed me and decided I’d worry about the money later. Since I already bought my stove, I was supposed to be eating upstairs but I didn’t have any ingredients yet or pans or wherewithal and the fire downstairs crackled away, the two ladies orbiting it with task and deliverable, task and deliverable. “Sit sit sit sit. Here is your chair. How did you sleep? You weren’t cold? I worried that you were not sleeping. I worried that you might need a blanket. Here is your  incaparina. Do you like tortillas or French bread for breakfast? The Tonito, he only eats French Bread for breakfast. He only likes the tortillas for lunch. Yep, that’s what he likes. Only the tortillas for lunch.”

We sat and she told me again all the K’iche words for everything. Te’m, c’eboll (I’m not spelling them right) mish, me’s, ach, wach, pish- chair, tortilla, cat, another way of saying cat, tortilla, the words sounding just as global and unpronounceable as the first time I heard them. When she uses them in a sentence, it is truly the definition of foreign, non-sensical gibberish. This reinforced my love of textbooks and pictures. I didn’t imagine that Spanish, El Castillo as Doña Rosario says, would be my safehaven and English a useless tool, a broom without a dustpan.

My spirits were high: I loved my host mom, my host grandmother only got cuter with every mountain of laughter she released from her throat, and my two escapes (Wednesday and Friday) to closeby cities via microbus only delayed the feeling of estrangement.

I hung my mosquitero on Thursday and continued to arrange my stuff. The sing-song voice of Doña Rosario saying Poco-a-poco-poco-a-poco-poco-a-poco, pitch increasing with each “poco” until she needed breath. Her speech is a song, higher pitched than Rosa Maria’s and a smile to follow. When she laughs, she laughs, when she means it, she means it. She’s earnest, hard-working, welcoming, giving and kind. She says she cried for her Patoja when she moved to the city 11 years ago (which I later learned was 16). She told me her husband left her for another woman, so that’s why her mother lived with her. Abuelita sat by the stove, and Do-Ro and I sat at the table with what appeared to me a tablecloth made of paper. I’d seen the design in other corner stores.

We got up and endeavored to get my tambo de gas, costing a cool 540 with the cord included. The young guy set it up for me, Do Ro talking to him in K’iche, rapid pace, with Castillo sprinkling out of every paragraph that invited me to glimpses of meaning. But only glimpses. The language is beautiful and different and I can’t reach it if I try with all my limbs. I just rest in the presence of it’s differentness. Or maybe it’s me being the different one, and they’re simply allowing me to be their for their familiarity. Either way, they know I don’t speak it. But I can tell as Do Ro points around the room and leans forward as she prints out the words with her mouth, it will mean so much to my host family if I try. She is proud, but only in the best sense of the word. She loves her language, it is her language. She continually repeats the phrase, after I repeat the latest word, “Ese es el hablado de nosoooooohtros. Ahuh. Ahuh.” Shaking her head with confirmation “ Ese es la hablada de nosoooooohtros” and points at another thing, a tour of her surroundings in her native tongue with echoes of Abuelita’s laugh dancing off the light-orange walls as we finish our breakfast.

A house of three ladies. This is my new home.

A warm and firm welcome is delivered in coats of paint. Doña Rosario repeats the same thing to emphasize her reality: Tuesday before dinner as we color-coded my key collection: She narrates “We are solita here, no one will bother you here. It is quiet, everything is calm in this house. No one will molesta. You have your own pila, your own bathroom. It’s just me and my mom, just me and my mom. No one else, maybe sometimes my nephews and my brother come but no one else. Just me and my mom here.” At dinner, a second coat: “Everything here is calm, no one will bother you here….” At breakfast the next morning, with a third coat: “It’s like I told you, this house is quiet, no one will moleeeehsta.” And the same pattern with asking for the next bit of business. Anything you need, you tell me. Con cualquier cosa, con confiaaaahnza. Mhmmm. Aha. Mhmmm. With a shake of the head as she folds more food into her mouth, via tortilla. She talks with her mouth full to the point I can hardly understand. She has to get the words out because she has to emphasize their meaning.

Imagine a worker bee with smarts, straightforward communication, laughter at the helm with smiles only as an afterthought. She puts her head to one-side in a girlish way when she is being humble or tells a story with a “can you believe that?” ending. She puts right cheek to right shoulder, looking back coyly to see if I get it. And she launches in again.

I want to be more like both of my host moms.

They are in different socio-economic classes and different cultures. One wears full traje every day, the other wears slacks without fail. The one asks “How much did it cost?” the other leaves that to gracious mystery. The one explains things to me in K’iche, the other asks me how to pronounce the same words in English. One cannot write, the other co-owned a sewing business with her husband. And they both ask:  “Do you want more tortillas? There are more if you want more.” One has a house with wifi, the other has a flip phone that she recharges with “saldo” so she can call her daughter.

These two women have written vastly rich and different stories of Guatemala to me and blown over the ink to promise no chance of smudging.

One is not more “Guatemalan” than the other. They are both Guatemalan. They are both my host moms and they’ve both shown me a picture of what it means to be strong.

When Clara arrived, almost a week after I did, she was the younger version of my host mom. The coats of paint all over again: cualquier cosa, cualquier cosa, con confianza con confianza, also quench’s necessity, me pida. Cualquier cosa, cualquier cosa Natalia.

“O Come Let Us Adore Him” is on forever repeat in tunesy tones outside of my bedroom, which is basically the same as inside my bedroom.

The doors in my room (there are four to the great outdoors) each provide a generous inch and a half opening to the noise, bugs, dirt and debri from the stovepipe that wafts in arbors across my front bedroom entrance.

“The other people, they see you out there and they charge you. They see you, they think you have plata, holding up index and pointer like a credit card is inside (but I think her gesture denotes ‘wad of cash’ over plastic). They see you, I know the people, they see you they charge you, le cobran, le cobran.”

Each day I have to be mindful of clean water: a primordial clanging. I wonder what that’s like for a parent, to be gnawed by the constant thought of finding clean water. I appreciate the experience because I am here to experience life in a developing country. This is why I am here: perception, empathy, and also work. But I’m not there yet. That hasn’t started yet.

I’ve been boiling water and it’s confirmed that I can boil it for 10 minutes and it’s potable. It tastes like aluminum. I prefer this method over bleach except that boiling the water takes time and time takes gas and gas takes lots of q. I know there is more gas in the tambo than it feels, but I’m low-key dreading that it will run out tomorrow and will cost an arm and a leg throughout service. I’ve been wondering all week if I shouldn’t have bought the grill at all.

“Poco a poco” my host mom says. “Poco a poco.”