Sorry it has been so long since my last post. Thought I would pull out some of the nurses and kids pictures to share with y'all.

In an ongoing effort to take every available opportunity to embarrass and humiliate myself, especially on the web, I am including this video excerpt from our trip. I hope you enjoy watching this as much as we enjoyed making it.

It took us three weeks to nail down the choreography for this. I don't think we ever completely got the lyrics right. We do have a couple of different versions of this taped. We weren't sure the camera was working, so we did it a couple of times. We are, after all, truly, madly, deeply dedicated to our art. We are still waiting for a call from Savage Garden about touring dates.

For those who were unable to catch it, here is the interview Dawn and Nancy did with Leigh Mills on NBC15's 5:00 news on Wednesday. I think they did a fantastic job. Thanks, Leigh, for the chance to tell a little of our story.

Good evening everyone. Just wanted you all to know that once again we are making the news. Leigh Mills at NBC15 here in Madison will be interviewing Nancy and Dawn for the 5:00 news. It will air about 5:10 on Wednesday the 18th. Very exciting. I am including here some of the pics I sent her from our trip. They include:

A photo of the soccer balls we gave to the kids at the Orphanage in Patzun
A couple of photos of us teaching the comedronas how to take blood pressures.

A photo of the doctors and nurses in Chiquimulilla learning newborn resuscitation.

And I had to get a photo of me teaching kids about washing their hands.

I hope you like these, and watch for the interview on channel 15's 5:00 news!

A few more pictures. This set is from a day in Dr. Oscar Paredes' clinic in Sumpango. While Erin, Karen, and I taught the volunteer bomberos (firemen) CPR for infants, children, and adults (a two day process), others were working with students and pregnant women teaching about handwashing (I didn't have to do it!), problems in pregnancy, and other issues, while still others worked in the clinic seeing patients.

We start with Karen and Erin teaching the bomberos:


Dr. Oscar had a pinata for the afternoon's festivities. We filled it with candy and bottles of vitamins, an interesting combination to say the least. We also got to hang the pinata, although I'm not sure that Jenna is holding the pinata in exactly the right way. Turn your head and cough Mr. Pinata:


Well the pinata stayed aloft, and everyone, including the bomberos, gathered on Dr. Oscar's roof to take a whack:

And as you can see we all were quite successful:

Finally, here is Karen with our newest CPR graduates:

I thought some photos of what we did would be good to post too, so here is the group of comedronas (midwives) we taught in Chiquimulilla.

And here are the nurses and doctors in Chiquimulilla who learned newborn resuscitation.

Here are some views of the volcanos that surround Antigua. These were taken from the roof of the Hotel El Carmen. The first photo shows the volcano Fuego, which is the active one I wrote about a fews weeks ago. The last photo is of Agua, the inactive volcano outside of town.

Now for a variety of landscapes from Guatemala:

On our way to Chiquimulilla, a sugar cane field in the foreground.

Outside the clinic in Chiquimulilla.

I promised you all some pictures when I came back, so here is the start:

Here is the clinic in Chiquimulilla we volunteered in.

Here we are in Chiquimulilla, with Jeanette, our friend and translator, and her husband Juan Carlos in the middle; and Dennis and Elvira, our hosts in Chiquimulilla.

I will do the photos in small groups of two or three at a time. Hope you like them.

Good morning everyone. Yes we are all back in Madison, and most of the smart ones of our group are hopefully already in bed. Obviously I am not one of the smart ones. I am a blogger.

A very long day, but I did want to pass on something from the day before I go to sleep. We made it to the airport in Guatemala City without major incident, and were waiting patiently for our flight. The plane arrived, and off came a group of high school students from the California Bay Area. Their faces were full of awe, excitement, anxiety, nervousness. Probably much like our faces three weeks (or was it a lifetime) ago. And here we were, the grizzled veterans, imagining (with some envy) the adventures that are in store for them. Reluctantly we pass the torch of Guatemalan discovery to them and board the plane.

Good night Gentle Readers. Sleep well. I will write more to you later.

Well folks, this is probably the last post from Guatemala. We leave tomorrow at about noon, and are planning to be at the airport about 9:00 in order to give ourselves plenty of time for checking in.

Today we took a fascinating tour of Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) that I wrote about yesterday. If you didn´t get a chance to see their sight, take a look. I put the link in yesterday´s post. Our guide from Camino Seguro started us off in the city cemetery, which interestingly enough is a great place to view the city dump. It was very eerie looking at the dump from the cemetery. There are vultures EVERYWHERE! Hundreds of them circling the dump, in the trees, perched on the tombs. Very surreal. And anywhere there are birds, there is bird poop. It got all over the van, and in one student nurses hair (I am not mentioning any names here. Getting vulture droppings in your hair is not necessarily something to write home about, but it is something to blog about if it happens to somebody else). Another kind of spooky thing about the cemetery. Apparently the family actually rents the space. Everyone in the cemetery is burried above ground, and if the family doesn´t pay for 2 years, the grave is emptied of the coffin and it is simply dumped over the side of this very big hill into the dump. We honestly say an empty broken open coffin sitting on the side of the hill overlooking the dump.

We couldn´t stay long in the cemetery. It is also not a safe place to be. Lots of gang activity happens in Guatemala City, and the spot in the cemetery overlooking the dump is also the place where bodies are dumped after a gang hit or other killing. I know this is not a very cheerie blog posting, but I figure I might as well share the bad with the good. Just one more eye opening experience for us here.

After looking over the dump (visitors can´t actually go into the dump itself), we had some better experiences with Camino Seguro. We toured the day care center that Safe Passage started and runs for the children of the people who work in the dump. They have a capacity of 60 children ages about 6 months to 5 years, and currently have 54 kids in the school. It is a beautiful place in the middle of so much poverty. The school, and the neighborhoods that these people live in are built on the landfill of the dump, and there is a constant smell of trash and methane. The neighborhood names are also a bit surreal. Esperanza (Hope), Paz (Peace), Libertad (Liberty), and Regalo (Gift). The school has Guatemalan teachers and volunteers from around the world. The kids get breakfast, a midmorning snack, lunch, and an afternoon snack. For some, this is the only food they get for the day.

We also toured the older kids school and clinic. One of the goals, according to our guide, is to simply provide an opportunity to these kids. For some it is the opportunity at a little education, for others it is the opportunity to get a couple good meals a day. For many, it is the opportunity to survive another day. Their entire operation runs on donations, as so many things like this do here in Guatemala and around the world. As we did in order to make this trip a reality. If I can preach for just a moment, consider giving to a cause. If you do already, thank you. If you don´t, please think about doing something, giving something. We couldn´t have done all that we did in three short weeks without donations and gifts, and we have seen firsthand the effects that donations and gifts can make. From Camino Seguro to As Green As It Gets, and so many in between, there are people in need of help, and every little bit helps.

OK, enough soapbox preaching for the time being. It was a fairly somber group after the dump. We had some lunch, and decided for our last afternoon in Guatemala we needed something different. Laura promised all of us a hug if we would take her to the City Zoo, and we took her up on her offer. Off to the zoo. So many highlights, but two things stand out. The Howler Monkey (Laura´s main reason for wanting to go to the zoo in the first place), and the crowd of elementary school kids that crowded around us asking questions. So many questions. They were so eager to ask us about anything, and so eager to learn. It was very cute to see them all. Much thanks goes to Dawn and her translating abilities, for fielding many of the questions and providing answers.

We had an opportunity to reflect and share about the trip this evening. Lots of emotions, lots of laughs, a few tears. All of us have changed in so many ways over these past, very fast, three weeks. We will return to the U.S. as very different people than when we left. Some changes may be obvious (no I haven´t lost 20 pounds, that wouldn´t be a change, that would be a miracle), some may be more subtle. But we have all been touched by this trip, and I am convinced that we will be forever affected by it. We now have a special connection, and I would be willing to go on another trip like this anywhere with anyone in this group. I only hope next time I can take Mary and Sam with me.

Well, I think I have written enough for one night. I´ll keep writing if you keep reading. See you all tomorrow (ok, maybe Thursday very early in the morning). Buenas noches.

Good evening everyone. We are approaching our last full day here in Guatemala with mixed emotions. We are all eager to see our loved ones, but we feel there is still so much we would like to do and see here. We want to come back home, but we hate the idea of leaving. Oh well.

We had an interesting day today. We had the opportunity to tour the two large public hospitals in Guatemala City today: Roosevelt Hospital and San Juan de Dios. Both of these hospitals serve the general public, which means that they both serve the people who cannot afford to pay for private hospital care. We met some fascinating people who are very much overworked and underpaid. We toured the neonatal intensive care units in each hospital, the intermediate care unit at Roosevelt, and the pediatric intensive care unit and the pediatric emergency room at San Juan de Dios. It was an eye opening experience for all of us. What they are able to do with limited resources and staff is amazing, and yet we can only imagine what it would be like if these two hospitals did not exist here. Rooms filled with babies on ventilators, and row after row of warmers and babies. Roosevelt only delivers high risk pregnancies, and San Juan de Dios has about 300 births a day. Once again I have to say check back after we return, so you can see the pictures from the hospitals.

Roosevelt Hospital has one, yes one, latation consultant for the entire hospital. She is a truly inspirational woman. Breastfeeding is not a popular thing in the city, most women in the city use formula. She is fighting an uphill battle to try to get more women to breastfeed, and to try to get support from the nursing staff to try to encourage their patients to try breastfeeding. We were lucky enough to eat dinner with her, and she stayed and talked with us about her experiences and the difficuties of her job.

Nancy and Karen are already planting seeds for next years´trip, talking to the neonatologist at Roosevelt about what we can do to help him in his hospital. I hope that next years group has as much fun and gets as much out of their experience as we have over the past three weeks.

This evening we were also lucky enough to learn from Karen´s extensive knowledge of the natural sciences. We read about the difficulties the rains in Wisconsin have caused, including the tragedies faced by Lake Delton. We have had rain and clouds for the past week and a half or so, remnants from a variety of hurricanes and tropical depressions, and Erin asked where all the rain in Wisconsin was coming from. Karen, with a perfectly straight face told us ¨clouds.¨Where would we be without her keen insight.

Tomorrow we are off to the Guatemala City dump and Safe Passage. You can see and read more about this program at http://www.safepassage.org/. After that, a free afternoon. Some are wanting to go to the city zoo. After spending three weeks with this wild bunch of women, I think the zoo might be a little tame for me.

I finish this post with a personal note. We have celebrated a couple of wedding anniversaries on this trip, and we celebrated one more today. I want to wish a very special happy anniversary to my wife, the true love of my life. Thank you, Mary, for 18 of the most wonderful years of my life, and thank you for letting me trot off to Guatemala. Without you, I would not be even half the person I am today. All my loves, my love. Nathan

Good evening everyone. We have landed safe and sound in Guatemala City. We are staying at the Seminario Anabautista Latinamericano (SEMILLA). Basically we are in a kind of dorm area, but it is comfortable, and once again we have been very well fed. Spaghetti, fried chicken, fresh salad, watermelon, and fresh coffee. The ride to Guatemala City was a long one, with a very important stop along the way...for ice cream! Oh, and to stretch our legs...with ice cream! We took a great group photo, with about half of us hanging out the windows of the van, and the other half on the top of the van. The poor man from the ice cream place volunteered to take our photo. I don´t think he realized just how many cameras were going to come out of the van for photos. The people in the ice cream shop were quite entertained by watching us scramble to the top of the van, get our picture taken, and then scramble down.

We still have so many suitcases that we had left the larger ones in Antigua at the CLM and we only took ¨overnight¨ bags with us to Santiago Atitlan. Eric got us to Guatemala City and then turned around and drove back to Antigua with Karen to get the suitcases. Eric has been an incredible companion on this trip, part driver, part guide, part interpreter, and an entirely good friend to all of us. I think he has been entertained by us, and has certainly learned a few things, like CPR and midwife issues. He has been a real asset to our trip and we will certainly miss him when we leave.

I can´t say that I have very many pithy things to say this evening. Too full from dinner and to tired from the trip. I will say that some of my sisters layed out some of their purchases from the market this evening, and it honestly looked like we could have had our own little market right here. ¨¿Que estas buscando?¨ ¨¿Una bolsa?¨ Lots of beautiful things are coming back to the states with us. Make sure you get your orders in early for the Quetzal bird key chains. They´re going fast. (sometimes I have to add things in that may not make a lot of sense to you, my gentle readers, but for the folks on the trip they are hillarious, at least I hope so). BTW, I am using a keyboard that has some ¨mystery keys¨on it. I don´t always know where everything is. I only just discovered the upsidedown question mark (the equals, plus sign key, I have no idea where those signs are on the keyboard, I hope I don´t need them) and the ñ and Ñ (which is the colon and semicolon key, but I did accidentally find both of those symbols, shift comma and shift period) Everything is a learning experience in Guatemala.

There is a big spoons game going on in the courtyard down below. I promise we will try to keep it down to a dull roar so we don´t wake any of you up tonight. If we do disturb your sleep lo siento mucho.

Hasta mañana.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The sun is (kind of) out, the air is brisk and refreshing, and we are off to Guatemala City. It will be hard to leave the Posada Santiago. It is a beautiful place, and they have taken great care of us here. The food is great, the views unbeleavable, and the rest and relaxation very necessary. I think we all have been refreshed and ready for the next adventure, which is...

Guatemala City. Yes, we are off to the capital for a couple of days. The big city. It will be a big change for us, we are getting used to a more layed back lifestyle, especially after this past weekend.
One quick note to all the boyfriends and husbands out there. Dawn's husband sent her flowers here to the Posada today. He has set the bar pretty high on the romance scale.

Gotta go eat breakfast. I hope to be able to get on in Guatemala City, but if I can't, see you all soon, and check back when we return because I will be adding photos.

Good evening everyone. We are here at the lake still, enjoying a little R&R. Today we went to visit some of Karen's friends who run a foster home/adoption service here in Guatemala. They are originally from Green Bay, and have been working and living in Guatemala for a number of years. Currently the government in Guatemala is revising the adoption laws and there is a moratorium on adoptions, so they are only fostering kids. They have had as many as 34 kids at one time in their house to care for, many are orphans or come from abusive homes through the court system. They do not charge anything for placing kids in adoptive homes, a rarity here where adoption had been a money making program and the system was corrupt and abused by some, hence the changes being made in the laws. They have a beautiful home and the surrounding countryside is amazing.

It seems I have been saying (or at least thinking) that the countryside is amazing here. All of Guatemala is amazing. They say that Guatemala is the land of permanent spring. I have no reason to doubt it. The countryside is amazing, and the people we have met have been very friendly.

Most of us spent the afternoon at the market. I know this comes as a shock, but it is the last chance for a market for us, so we had to take advantage of it. A little shopping, a little bartering, a lot of looking, and back for a little afternoon siesta. Don't tell Nancy, but my sisters have worked up a little dance routine. Very professional looking. It's a good thing we are studying to be nurses, though.

Gotta go. Dinner awaits. Off to Guatemala City tomorrow, and home in just a few days.

Quick update. Very exciting ride through the clouds and the mountains to our new resting spot at Lake Atitlan. All I can say is WOW! What an amazing spot this is. Even in the dark and cloudy night this place is beautiful. I can't wait to see it in the daytime. Anyway, we are all her safe and sound, and the hot tub is reserved for 9:00. Sleep well my friends. Hopefully I will get on and write more tomorrow.

Hello everyone. I am amazed at the attention this blog is getting. Thanks to all of you who are visiting.

We are all having a great time. We have been furiously studying Spanish at the Cntro Linguistico Maya. It is a wonderful school, and I highly recommend this place if you want to learn Spanish and have some free time to visit Guatemala. Our Spanish is improving in leaps and bounds.

We have been split between the Hermano Pedro Hospital here in Antigua and Dr. Oscar´s clinic in Sumpango. The past two days I hae been working with Karen and Erin teaching the local firemen CPR. Others have been teaching about problems in pregnancy and, of course, handwashing. I can´t say that I have missed the handwashing part that much. I prefer to share the weath and have others experience the joys of teaching people to wash their hands.

Today is the last day in Antigua. We will miss the city, but I think we are all looking forward to some R&R at Lake Atitlan. Apparently there is a hot tub at the hotel we are staying at. I hope it is a big hot tub, because there are a number of nursing students (and instructors) who are planning to spend the weekend in it. I wonder if I can blog from the hot tub. Maybe the next post will be a wet one.

I have to go aprender un poco mas de Español. I will fill you in as I can. Dios te bendiga.

Good afternoon everyone. Sorry about the delay in posting, but for some reason I couldn´t get onto the site yesterday. I will try to gived you all a quick update of the last couple of days.

We have been attending the Centro Linguistico Maya for our Spanish lessons. Eacxh of us has one on one tutoring in Spanish for four hours in the morning. We have just passed the half way point in the lessons for us. I think all of us have learned more in just the past three days than we ever could in one or two semesters back home. But four hours of intense Spanish work, coupled with four or five hours in the clinic in Sumpango or the Hermano Pedro Hospital makes for some very tired nursing students and instructors. We are all moving a bit slower and looking a bit more tired today. All of us are looking forward to the visit to Lake Atitlan at the end of the week. I think we all could use the break.

An interesting sidelight, a couple of days ago the group that was at Hermano Pedro was walking back to their homes and came across a stranded car in the middle of an intersection. Traffic and pedestrians were moiving past, but no one was offering to help the poor woman move her car, so they jumped in and pushed the car out of the way. Another good deed done in Guatemala. I only wish I had been there to take pictures.

I was at Hermano Pedro yesterday. Karen, Katie and I worked in the infant nutrition center, mostly holding crying babies and giving them bottles. There were probably 15 to 20 infants in the unit, all in metal cribs, most of them with cleft lips and pallets awaiting surgery. The only surgeons they have at Hermano Pedro are those that come down as volunteers, so the wait can be quite long. I think they said the next time they would have surgeons coming for these kids was in another couple of weeks, so they are kind of stuck there, and it´s not clear how many of them will be able to have their surgery at that time. Some may have to wait for another group to come down, since there are more kids needing surgery that there is time for the surgeons to operate. It is sad, but it is better than having no hope.

Got to sign off now. I want to wish a belated happy anniversary to Karen and Rick.
See you all soon.

Hello everyone. Sorry about the delay in posting again, but we are no longer at the Hotel El Carmen, and I did not have a place to get on or the time to get on the last couple of days. We are now starting the Spanish language classes, and the director of the school is letting us use his computers, so maybe I will be able to jump on every so often this next week.

There is so much to share but I will only hit the highlights. Last Saturday we were back in Sumpango with Dr. Oscar, doing a clinic open house. We took blood pressures and checked glucose levels on over 50 people. I did not do any handwashing, although we tried to find a spot that we could set it up. Just too much sunshine that day. I´ll get over it.

The highlight of the clinic had to be the session Laura and Erin led on exercise and nutrition with diabetes. I only wish I could put the video up that I took. It will have to wait until I get back. They led the whole group in walking in place, touching their toes, and lots of other fun activities. It is especially fun to watch it in fast forward. But then again what isn´t fun to watch that way.

We have started our home stays this week. We are split up in ones and twos. I am in a house that has three other Spanish language students, all from the Netherlands. It is an interesting time at the dinner table. One of the others came to Antigua last Tuesday, the other two on Thursday. I know more Spanish than they do so far, so I was translating for them at dinner my first night. Spanish classes are from 8-12, and I already have to write a composition in Spanish tonight. That will be interesting. I have a hard enough time writting an essay in English, now I have to do it in Spanish. Late night for me I guess.

I have to let others on, so until next time I remain your humble scribe, Nathan.