Peace Corps Volunteer for a Day

Back when we took our weekend trip to San Marcos, I met a Peace Corps volunteer named Jacob on our shuttle from Antigua to Panajachel. At the time, I offered Jacob our place to stay if he were ever in the city and needed somewhere to sleep. As it turned out, he needed to be in the city yesterday to pick up some books at the national library down on the main square.

Jacob assists the city government of Tacaná, a small town along the Mexican border. Its library has had no new books added to the collection in more than three years, so he requested some donations from the national library and they had plenty to spare. After Hurricane Stan, Spain sent about a hundred boxes full of books as donations, and these were still sitting unpacked in the library. Jacob could pick out 13 boxes at random (and they had two full with some of his requests) to bring back to his town.

So, he came into town Sunday and came over to our place around 7 p.m. We enjoyed treating him to some good leftovers prepared by our new maid/cook (another blog post to explain this coming shortly...), hearing about his job, and catching him up on the latest episodes of The Office, Flight of the Conchords, and Radiohead's new album.

Monday morning I offered to drive him down to Zone 1 to the library to pick up the books, although I was a bit fearful of A) finding my way back and B) finding secure parking for our car (the area is not as safe as our zones). After negotiating the confusing directions and one-way streets, I finally dropped him off on a corner near the library. He called back a little later after speaking with a woman in charge of the books to direct me to a parking spot near the library in a construction zone. He had to clear it with the foreman that it was OK for me to temporarily park my car there.

Being in Guatemala, of course picking up the books wasn't a simple procedure. And it was a good thing I volunteered to help as we were lead to a room full of boxes of books and told we could have our pick, but we had to unpack each box, count all the books and record the number, as well as remove any security bars pasted into the backs of them. This would have taken Jacob quite a while by himself. It ended up being as laborious as it sounds, but we hustled and worked our way through the 13. Afterwards, we had to carry each box downstairs near the front entrance; this was a workout as each box weighed at least 35-45 lbs.

Then we waited in an office, sweating, for a woman to record all of the happenings in a log book (basically who we were, when we came, how many boxes and books we took, on this day/time/year, etc.) and finally for another woman to sign and authorize. This was Guatemala's ridiculous formality at its best. They wouldn't even let us load the car with the boxes while they did this because they had to have official papers to show the front guard before we could take the boxes outside! It was frustrating. Finally we got the papers all in order and got to packing up the car.

It took four or five trips each to get the boxes down to the car, and with each trip I had to set my box down, unlock the car, open it up, load it, then close and lock it all again so no one would steal the boxes while we were inside. Once loaded we tried to navigate our way out of the congested downtown and follow what turned out to be awful directions over to the Peace Corps office (which ended up being near the hotel we stayed at our first month here). Eventually we figured it out all on our own, but by then it was lunch time traffic and everything was crawling. Worst of all, the car was nearly on empty--and it was raining--and I was fearing the car would run out of gas amongst all the traffic. Luckily we made it and it didn't take too long to unload everything at the office (the boxes would slowly be brought by other volunteers to his town any time they would come out to the area).

Once we were finished it was about 2:15 and we were both hungry. There was a Wendy's nearby and Jacob was really excited for some of their food so we headed over. He treated me to lunch and we both gobbled down our lunches too quickly. We parted ways after lunch as he had to run across the street to the bank and then cab it over to the bus station in time for his ride. Jacob had hoped to leave Guate by 1 p.m., but everything took longer than expected, so he wasn't able to leave town until the 3:30 bus. Tacaná is 8-11 hours away and he wasn't going to be able to make it home by the end of the day, so he was planning to stay over in another town called San Pedro.

All in all, it was an adventure for me to be running around in Zone 1, see the library and funny bureaucratic Guatemalan processes, as well as hang out and enjoy Jacob's company. I also got to lend a little help to the Peace Corps, so I felt pretty good after all of it, despite it being tiring and stressful at times.