On Friday I woke up to the world, and my brain, in the same state I left them.

Everything you know about “that Friday feeling” is not applicable in Peace Corps. You can’t go out because you can’t leave site after 6pm aka Saturday. So you sit in your apartment, alone, or you sit downstairs and watch Combate with the family with your adult coloring book, and you wait for the weekend because Friday might as well be any other day of the week. But on the bright side, it’s calm and it’s simple and even if you are imagining your friends back home at a movie, or dinner, or NOT ALONE, you have the call of the roosters and pigs to guide you. I have my host family but we are different, and speaking in Spanish is sometimes a reminder how isolated you are in your own thoughts. Everything that you think and feel in it’s original format has to go through the processing plant of your brain and into accessible, imperfect form on the other side.

I went downstairs to get my water for coffee and Clara said: “Someone came looking for you and asked for your number, but I didn’t give it to her!” In another 30 minutes a face came through the door and I was still in pajamas. I had never seen this person before. She had a notebook and I knew it was for English. It’s not the first time someone has knocked on the door and asked for help. I invited her up and she had to fill out a crossword puzzle with English numbers. I felt like I was partially showing her how to exercise common sense (I’m sure she could have looked up numbers in English online) but the instructions were in English, too, so we went, step by step, through three pages of English that was far more advanced than what she knows. It didn’t seem to have a purpose, me doing her homework for her, but trying to show her google translate for future use…. At the end she tried to pay me and I told her I could not accept. Peace Corps doesn’t allow us to be paid outside of the per diem we are given. She said thank you and that she would return (I was secretly relieved that I am nearing the end of my time, is that bad?)

Then I had a phone call with Nic about data visualization. He and I are both on the training committee and compiling feedback from Early In-Service Training. Nic lives in Huehue, myself in Sololá, and we launched a “Training Committee” back in April. I take credit for seeing the need, and he should have all the credit for coming up with the solution. Feedback compilation consisted of me reading a bunch of feedback forms and tallying their responses. It took me three full work days to complete this task. It has been important to work on these committees during the vacation months or I would have had nothing to do. Visme is the program we use, and every time he uses it, he swears it is the last.

Lunch was probably potatoes and onions. Abuelita was home all day but my host mom and sister were working in the fields. I went to school for a few hours to observe Profe Miguel’s session on the effects of drug use. I am not supposed to intervene, but I knew the kids were just going to copy the material word for word, so I suggested that the students also draw the physical effects of drugs on their posters. This is how it went:

When we finished the session, I started the walk home and decided to distract myself with PACA clothes. Friday is the busiest PACA day, they have loud music and used clothes piles you can dig through at a cheap price. I found a gently used leather jacket that was genuine leather and talked him into giving it to me for Q10. As I turned to go home, I ran into Rachel, another volunteer who lives in Santa Clara, and we caught up a little bit. We chatted about my service almost ending, my relationship status, Abby’s visit. She invited me over so I wouldn’t have to be alone, and I told her I might take her up on it. When I got home I called my Dad from the same pit of sadness I’d been trying to ward off all day, but I opened the can with Rachel and there were more worms. I sat on my hammock with my tears and tissues and watched the ticker on the useless traffic light they installed outside my window. I just watch it go from green to yellow to red, trying to come up with a metaphor for how it relates to my life. But it doesn’t. It’s just a useless stoplight.

I knew when I went downstairs the ladies would be in the tuj. Tuj in K’iche’ is temezcal in Spanish, and sauna in English. It’s a 6×8 brick hut with a teeny, tiny entrance you have to squat to get into, with an alcove to burn firewood with stones above it and two wooden boards that serve as benches. It’s a little bathing house. Friday night is vapor night (steam in Spanish) for my host mom and host sister. Of course they bathe more than once a week, but on Friday nights they set-up the sauna. I never wanted to go in there because I couldn’t understand how you could sit, naked, on the same damp wooden board after someone else, but I swallowed my fear and germ neuroses and asked “Can I go in the tuj?”

I changed into my bathrobe and brought my towel and supplies from my shower upstairs, and my flip flops. I ducked as low as I could and entered the brick hut. There were two thin candles lighting the dark space, and I sat down on the board across from the entrance. There wasn’t any steam left because the stones weren’t hot anymore, but it was warm behind the heavy blanket they hang up to trap the heat. Clara showed me how to do it: “Take a plastic bucket and fill it with this hot water (which they had heated up on the stove beforehand) and mix it with the cold water, pour them together in this third bucket until it’s reached the temperature you like. Be careful, don’t burn yourself” and she left. It was just me in the almost dark with two thin candles and the plastic buckets. The darkness was soothing.

After two years, I wanted to try the tuj. Maybe being sad makes you try new things you wouldn’t otherwise try. Maybe nearing the end makes you adventurous for new experiences so you don’t miss out. I began to mix the hot with the cold and pour water over my legs, taking my time, limb my limb. Bathing while sitting requires patience. There was a drain just below me where all the water went. You don’t wash your hair in the sauna, the women in my family heat up water from the stove and wash it over the large cement sink (the pila). Just your body gets washed in the tuj. And maybe a little bit of your soul.

Clara and Doña Rosario stay inside for at least an hour. They take their time because they enjoy the steam. I tried to take my time, too. Several times during my tuj experience, they came over to check on me. “Estás bien?” they would say through the blanket. It’s lovely being cared for, even if it’s unnecessary. I know they care for me. And I don’t know what I will do when they aren’t checking on me anymore.

By the time I exited, I was too warm and pajamed to think of walking to Rachel and Rafi’s in the cold. I think I rolled up under my blankets and turned on Dr. Pimple Popper on youtube. It sounds gross, because it absolutely is, and it’s also distracting and somehow stress-relieving.

And that was Friday in Santa Clara: English, Class, PACA, Tuj and Bedtime.