11 days...

We've now been here 11 days. Slowly we're working out a routine. I go to the school 3 days each week and stay home (at Berly and Oscar's house in Palencia) the other two. Fortunately I've been able to keep my job as a research assistant so the days I'm home I try to get as much done as possible. Teresa and Halle are home every day, which is comfortable, but at times a bit boring for Teresa. Hopefully she'll get to know some more of the neighbors soon to build more of a social network. But she is a trooper and doesn't complain.

The work with the school is going well. It has been a great opportunity for me to apply the organizational consulting skills I learned in the MBA program. The school is a classic case of an organization suffering from its own success. Berly, the director, has created a school that is much admired for its quality. Under her direction the school has grown from 100 students to 284 and is recognized as one of the best in the area. She is an incredibly gifted educator. But as the school has grown, there are new challenges, especially concerning the best way to manage the organization. Currently Berly runs around focusing entirely on the educational aspects and putting out fires, but never looking at the system as a whole. My job is to examine the system and try to figure out how to make the whole thing run smoother. So far we've made small but important steps in terms of teamwork and the decision making process. It's going to be a great learning experience for me; I'm really enjoying the challenge. Hopefully this eventually translates into better education at lower cost for more students...

It's interesting to be here in Guatemala. It's such a beautiful country with such wonderful people. At the same time there is a strong and dangerous undercurrent of violence and fear. We're constantly bombarded with terrifying stories--the grandfather that didn't pay off the gangs and was kidnapped and then his body sent to his family piece at a time, the kidnap and rape of a young girl, the murder of a father by the police because he turned them in for stealing his car...and the list goes on. And these stories aren't urban legends, they are friends and acquantances of our friends here. This fear taints what would otherwise be an idyllic picture...And yet our experience has been completely the opposite: the love of friends, the kindness of strangers, meals shared by those who can't afford to feed themselves. Strange and sad, but such is life.