A successful vacation should be one that satisfies your adrenaline rush and your taste buds. So after Ethan and I submitted our heat exchanger design to the manufacturer in Xela, we grabbed our packs and hopped on a chicken bus to meet up with Ethan’s family. They had made the trek down to Guatemala to visit for vacation and very graciously extended an invitation to me. It was an incredible opportunity to take a breath from the previously insane week and explore more of the country, including Antigua, Chichicastenango, and Lake Atitlan. Between the restaurants, the superb Schrag family cooking in the Airbnb, and the chocobananas, it was certainly endorphin inducing.

The first city we visited, Antigua, which literally translates to “ancient,” used to be the capital of Guatemala and is rich with history (and tourists). I do not particularly enjoy shopping, but as my fourth visit to the city, I love entertaining myself by aimlessly wandering the cobblestone streets, browsing for really unique paintings, and eating very tiny, but free samples of chocolate. Fortunately, not bringing work on vacation is almost painful for me, especially as the heat exchanger’s structural support design needed to be finished yet. I was sure to wake up for some occasional early morning engineering fun, calculations, textbook reading, and simulations.

Chichicastenango is the largest indigenous market in Central America. We visited three different museums in Chichi, including the Museum of Masks, the Mayan/Catholic Church, and a museum containing ancient Mayan paintings and pottery. The Church combined both Mayan and Catholic beliefs, traditions, and ceremonies, and I was intrigued by the different prayer stations throughout the church; the concepts of each station were very practical, including successful agriculture and the battle of drug addiction within their community. The museum of the Mayan paintings had an interesting take on the creation story with people made from corn as it is a very important crop to the Mayan people. (Wait, am I still in the Midwest?)

The thunderstorms did not let up much all week. Large areas of both Chichicastenango and Lake Atitlan lost power while we visited, but power outages are actually very common throughout all of Guatemala. The electrical grid in Guatemala is not very robust and is an electrical engineer’s nightmare. Ethan actually overheard a conversation between a man, holding a large role of duct tape and standing beneath some precarious scaffolding, yell up to his coworker fixing the power lines on top of a light post, “Negro es negativo!” The man looked at the hopefully not live wires in his hands and replied, “Ohhhhhh…” Anyway, I thought the candlelight dinner complimented by the natural light show was very aesthetic.

At another restaurant with a large buffet of traditional Mayan food and unlabeled meat including my “too late, it’s already ingested” discovery of cow tongue, I almost pet a parrot until Ethan informed me of their 700 psi bite force. I decided I liked my fingers still attached to my hand.

The world continues to seem smaller the more I travel because the owner of our Airbnb in Chichi taught Spanish in a Waukesha elementary school. She showed me a picture of herself in Cathedral Square Park in Milwaukee, right in front of my university’s library. She was a very sweet woman with four cats, a dog, and an overabundance of cow decorations. We asked for her permission to pet her dog on the balcony to which she happily said yes. When I let him sniff my hand, he wiggled his tail for about two seconds with almost more happiness than his owner and then chomp. I really did not expect my first lovely experience of a dog bite in Guatemala to be from a domestic animal. But you know that survival technique where you need to be just a bit faster than the last person to escape a bear attack? I twisted my hand out of the dog’s mouth, causing only minor bruising, and sprinted off the balcony to the closest room, slamming the door. Unfortunately, Ethan was in second and got a bigger chomp to his back thigh. He thankfully had thick jeans and no major injuries either, but our adrenaline was definitely pumping. But again, I like my fingers attached to my hand, and I was still 10/10 for all my fingers on this trip.

Ethan and I originally intended to join for only the first two legs of the trip as we needed to head to Cobán with our heat exchanger, but the manufacturing ended up taking longer and bumping our departure a day later. We hopped on the opportunity to visit “the most beautiful lake in the world” even if just for 24 hours. On the steep switchbacks of Guatemala to Lake Atitlan, we found ourselves stuck in traffic from a horrific accident of a semi truck that went over the side of the cliff. I have always been horrified by the graphic news portrayed here, especially in the Nuestro Diario — the popular Guatemalan gossip column I was almost interviewed for in March for my work with the cardamom industry here.

Ethan, his sister Julia, and I needed to make the most of our single day so we swam in the gorgeous lake despite the forceful downpour. The streets turned into flashflood rivers, but Ethan convinced me that my idea of a slip n’ slide would be a bad one. Overall, the entire week was paradise, and I spent a lot of enjoyable time reading, relaxing, and hearing hilarious childhood stories about Ethan.

The evening we returned from Atitlan, I woke up at three in the morning with extremely intense stomach cramps and diarrhea, but we were supposed to leave in exactly 24 hours for Cobán. That morning I received the disheartening text that the heat exchanger was still not finished, but that frustrating delay ended up being a miracle. I took my prescription traveler’s medication, and I had until early Thursday morning to recover.

The heat exchanger was still not ready Wednesday night, but Ethan and I headed out to work on the rest of the system. Our boss was already in Cobán, but we only had 1.5 days with him before he returned to Xela for some meetings. We got a quick run down of the components already manufactured and what our project tasks were, including setting up the gas line, building the firebox and structural supports, wiring the entire system, programming the temperature controller, setting up the temperature/pressure/velocity sensors, programming the data logger, collecting data, and building and testing MSOE’s retrofit design to improve the heat exchanger. 1.5 days later, Ethan and I were basically alone, living in a cockroach invested hotel eight hours from the office for three weeks straight, but the independence and trust on such a challenging, but rewarding project was incredible.

With that independence, I realized I still had not recovered from being sick and had to visit a medical clinic by myself in Cobán. The cramps were only severe for the first two days of being sick, but I still was experiencing a lot of discomfort after six days of my body failing to absorb water and nutrients. If I thought engineering Spanish was challenging, I was even less knowledgeable on basic medical Spanish. I did not completely understand my prognosis from the doctor, but they prescribed anti-parasitic medicine. After eleven days of being sick and a copious amount of nasty, grape electrolyte juice, things finally started improving.

Because of our tight timeline and high workload, Ethan and I worked six days a week for usually nine, sometimes ten hours a day. Despite being sick, I never really stopped working, except on Sunday. We were at a private workshop in a small rural community with some trees I became well acquainted with as my bathroom.

When building a prototype, the construction process always seems to be fixing one problem until you find the next one prohibiting your system from functioning. Ethan and I actually applied and used a lot of the lab experience and theoretical knowledge we had gained during our junior year, but we also relied on operation manuals, emails to the technical support teams of our purchased equipment, some intuition, and a lot of, “I hope this works out…”

After our 1200 lb heat exchanger left Xela on Monday morning, the large flatbed trailer arrived in Cobán after driving straight through the night. Guatemala is not particularly known for their construction safety, and I do not think our process to lift the heat exchanger 4.5′ with a single rope wrapped around the massive teeter-tottering heat exchanger and a lift that was 6″ too short and needed two people to stand on the base so it did not tip was exactly OSHA certified. But hey, I am still 10/10 with fingers.

In our contract with EWB-USA, Ethan and I agreed to not operate any vehicles in Guatemala — not that I would ever want to drive on the rough, narrow roads with the apparently optional traffic laws that may or may not even exist. Therefore, whenever we needed to quite frequently run to a store for parts, we relied on foot or public transportation. One of our biggest issues included finding the coupling to connect our pressure regulator to the propane tank. After at least twelve miles of walking to visit seventeen different stores in Cobán, I finally found our left threaded coupling and only managed to run into one crazy man who almost tried to steal our expensive pressure regulator.

Once we sealed the entire gas line with Teflon tape and checked for leaks, Ethan and I drilled a larger orifice hole in the burner and checked for the correct gas pressure with our homemade manometer. I successfully completed all the programming of the temperature controller as well as all the electrical work for our circuit breakers, propane burner, magnetic motor starter, electric motor, thermocouples, and temperature controller. After working on this dryer design all summer and two weeks of intense hands on building and trouble shooting, I think I better understood a pyromaniac’s obsessive desire to set things on fire. Seeing the burner light up and the entire cardamom dryer successfully function was a huge win.

We could really use your prayer these last few weeks in Guatemala as well as some praise for the continued blessings:

• Prayers for God’s protection from the Dengue fever outbreak which is particularly severe in my hometown, Queztaltenango, and continued prayers for protection from malaria
• Praise for the mostly safe travels for the Cobán trip thus far (especially with the heat exchanger), and praise for no injuries after our coworker endured a head-on collision in the company vehicle on his trip home
• Prayers for financial support of the lean, but very efficient EWB-USA/Guatemala office after the significant loss of the company vehicle
• Prayers for the continued testing of the entire dryer system and for the potential sponsors for Heifer International
• Prayers for the Guatemalan presidential run-off elections Sunday, August 11
• Praise for Sabbath and time to breathe, rest and recharge

At 4:30 on Monday morning, Ethan and I walked to the Engineers without Borders office for the first site visit of our internship. Our team of eight interviewed communities in Pachut and Chuatzité and performed a basic technical study for potential water projects.

Ethan and his team had a 15 minute walk to visit Chuatzité where they collected water samples from several homes and a school. At 6’3″, Ethan looms a foot or two over most Guatemalans, and he came to Guatemala without a lot (or really any) Spanish experience. That morning, one of the community members said, “Cuidado con tu cabeza,” or “Careful with your head,” as Ethan ducked through their low door frames. With his newly learned Spanish from our week of classes, he confidently replied, “En Guatemala, siempre tengo cuidado con mi cerveza,” which actually means, “In Guatemala, I always have caution with my beer.” He received some strange looks from that Guatemalan family…

I have definitely had my fair share of embarrassing language hurdles as well, but I recently experienced the fascinating perspective of language on my trip to Pachut. Of the twenty-one indigenous languages in Guatemala, I have worked with a lot of people in the past three years who speak the Mayan languages Kʼicheʼ, Q’eqchi, and Kaqchikel. I learned the Kʼicheʼ phrase for, “How are you?” literally translates to, “What is the state of your heart?” which is amazingly and uncomfortably deep to me.

Speaking of the state of my organs, I had started feeling ill that morning which was only escalated by the winding roads through the mountains, and I ended up leaning out the truck window to empty my breakfast down the side of the door. As a lover of roller coasters and someone not typically susceptible to motion sickness, I ended up being sick for the rest of the week. Sickness could not detract from the views I had during my site visit, though. The Volcán de Fuego is one of three active volcanoes in Guatemala, and despite neighboring Pachut, the community was on the opposite side of Fuego’s devastating eruption last summer and thankfully not destroyed.

Ethan’s team and my team were supposed to reconvene for lunch and our meeting at 12:30 with the Guatemalan Christian organization, Agua Viva, meaning Living Water. But my “hour-long walk” to gather water samples ended up being a little more intense than I expected, especially while feeling subpar. My coworker Moises and I followed three Guatemalan men who used machetes to cut a new path in thick rain forest down an extremely steep mountain for almost two hours. We safely arrived to the bottom after I slipped and fell at least four times, destroying the palm of my left hand.

I had a strange God moment that morning. As I laced up my steel toes at 4:15 am, I found a leather glove crammed into the toe from packing, but it was only the one glove. I was about to leave it behind when I decided I might as well pack it. At the bottom of the mountain, I remembered I had that glove in my bag. I thought to myself, “Hey God, wouldn’t it be crazy if the hand I cut up was the same as my single glove I brought?” Yep. A left glove. Life, especially in Guatemala, is continually demonstrating it’s craziness.

The team walked (or maybe waded, crawled, and bouldered would best describe our movement) up the river for a half mile where Moises and I collected water samples and recorded the river’s flow rate. To do this, we built a small dam and timed a leaf floating the length of our “standard” vine and timed how long it took to fill a bucket under a small waterfall. We also tried to mark certain locations on Google maps, but there was no service in the middle of nowhere. We walked back down the river, and before we began the ascent, the Guatemalans offered me a coke. I accidentally left my water bottle in the truck at the top of the mountain so I gratefully accepted. They pulled out plastic bags, straws, and a two liter bottle of 7-Up. After finally stopping for this short break, I realized my muscles were shaking and fatigued from just the descent. And oh boy, if I thought the descent was difficult…

Despite the much thinner air than my accustomed 2,000′ elevation of Xela, I was still able to hike back up in just over three hours. It took a lot of team work to hoist each other up certain areas of the terrain, but the community members were encouraging and hilarious. Unfortunately, my coworker and I split up about halfway through the ascent because he needed to ride a horse the rest of the way up due to exhaustion. We did not end up returning to the rest of the group until about 4:30 pm. Ethan and I put the key into our front door around 8:30 pm, and feeling exhausted and ill, I went straight to bed.

After incubating the water samples for several days, it was devastating to see a lot of red dots and shades of green, showing the strong presence of E. coli and bacteria in the water from all of the houses and schools and from the river at the bottom of the mountain where they wanted to bring water up. If Ethan and I drank that water, I am certain we would get deathly ill, but these communities have developed some sort of tolerance but at the cost of severe impact to their physiological and even psychological development.

Tuesday morning, Ethan and I returned to the office with an already tight, two-week deadline for the heat exchanger design cut in half. With an already shorter work week from the Monday site visit, Ethan and I strategized our short timeline to still finish with a quality design by Friday.

For two years now, I have been spearheading the first mechanical engineering project for MSOE-EWB to find improvements for the cardamom drying industry in Guatemala. Guatemala is the world’s largest producer and exporter of cardamom, the third most expensive spice by weight. Most current state-of-the-art Guatemalan cardamom drying machines consist of a wood burning heat source, a natural convection tube heat exchanger, and a diesel-powered fan to move clean air through the heat exchanger to a drying plenum. This basic and inefficient dryer design has been in use since the 1940’s with little to no optimization. Deforestation is a growing concern in Guatemala, and wood is becoming more expensive. This is decreasing the net profit for Guatemalan farmers by increasing the price to run a cardamom spice drying operation.

Through our partnership with Heifer International-Guatemala, the MSOE-EWB team has been seeking to improve efficiency of the cardamom spice dryer to save time and fuel through short-term, cost-effective retrofit solutions of the dryer. Heifer International has been bench-marking the seed drying process while simultaneously developing and testing other technologies and prototypes for potential long-term redesigns.

This summer, Ethan and I were responsible for designing the heat exchanger for Heifer’s most recent prototype which deviates greatly from the traditional dryers. Through the magical Excel solver function and thermodynamic analysis involving a hefty amount of Dittus-Boelter and Churchhill-Bernstein correlation manipulation into the Bernoulli equation, an optimal design was identified. I created an AutoCAD model of the system and set-up flow simulations to observe pressure losses, velocities, and flow trajectories. If you have a strong desire to hear more about the nitty gritty, just message me for our technical report.

Our boss had me explain our design to the manufacturer in Xela, and I must say technical Spanish is much more difficult than conversational. Now that the three meter long heat exchanger was under construction, Ethan and I were asked to design a fire box and structural supports for the heat exchanger. We have been running into some difficulties with the structural supports, especially with two groups building and designing sections of the dryer on different sides of the country and limited communication. I am nervous and strangely excited to travel to Cobán with this three meter long, 1250 lb box we designed hanging out the back of our boss’s truck for an 8 hour trip through the Guatemalan mountains.

Our boss also brought his puppy into work on Friday, and we had a potluck celebration at the office with turkey and cardamom wine. Ethan loved the wine saying it tasted like Chartreuse, but I was not a fan and poured the rest in his glass.

As always, thanks for checking in, and happy Monday! It is a beautiful, rainy day in this world, and I am so grateful for your thoughts and prayers:

• Praise for Ethan’s new glasses, the frequent, mesmerizing thunderstorms, chocobananas, and the ability to video call
• Prayers for the design of the structural supports of the heat exchanger
• Continued prayers for the manufacturing, delivery, and implementation of the heat exchanger
• Prayers for the partnership with Heifer International and their new potential sponsor as they visit the new cardamom prototype we helped design
• Prayers for the financial and technical support of Guatemalan projects to meet basic human needs, especially water projects
• Prayers for the communities still recovering from the adverse eruption of Volcán de Fuego last summer

So I managed to learn a few tricks of what not to do in Guatemala in the past two weeks.

Sunday morning, sweaty and dirty, I found myself walking 20 minutes late into a church I did not originally plan on attending… I actually had left my house an hour and a half earlier to visit the church right across from the Engineers Without Borders office, but one of the four locks on the front door of my house got stuck. I had already missed a quarter of the service when I got the final lock but thought “better late than never” and started the 15 minute walk. Unfortunately, with it being election day, a bunch of roads were caution-taped off. I saw a dirt road surrounded by two cornfields that would cut my detour in half and decided to take the new shortcut. I was maybe fifty paces or so in when I heard this nasty, aggressive growl from the corn next to me. Suddenly, a pack of seven dogs had strategically surrounded me, growling and barking. With my heart pounding loudly in my ears, I put my bag and Nalgene bottle between the teeth of the closest dog and my body. The dog lunged, and I swung that thick plastic water bottle at its nose like I was in the MLB. Simultaneously, this Guatemalan miraculously stepped out of his back door yelling, causing the dogs (and myself) to sprint off. So I found myself even more late as I finally approached my office and the nearby church when I realized… There was no church. It was just a billboard advertising a church above a random building.

A little beaten down but too stubborn to give up finding a church, I just started walking around La Esperanza by myself for another hour when I heard some peculiar singing a block away. I followed the sound to a sign for another church. I walked in and saw twelve plastic lawn chairs occupied by only four people and a sound system that reflected a rock concert. They all turned around and looked at me shocked. I sat down in the empty back row, and a man leaned over and attempted to “whisper” in English if I was okay and if I needed something. I kept apologizing in Spanish for being late and that I was fine and that I just wanted to go to church. Meanwhile, preacher lady, without missing a beat, was very passionately and quite literally yelling into a microphone hooked up to this insane sound system that may have popped my ear drums. The man finally sat down, and I listened to this woman’s sermon for 40 minutes that was not even in Spanish but in one of the local indigenous languages.

So if I learned anything from church that day, it was to not take unpaved shortcuts because dogs tend to be more aggressive. (Also, yay for online sermons!)

That Sunday evening, Ethan and I headed to Celas Maya, our language immersion school for the week. I loved the school, my host family, and all of the activities the school organized. It was enjoyable but quite exhausting having five hours of 1-on-1 conversation everyday about Guatemalan politics, getting surrounded by dogs, cinnamon ice cream, my life story, grammar lessons, and the technical engineering and political sides of cardamom drying. But I definitely fell in love with the chocolate covered fruit the school sold, especially their chocopiñas.

I was eager to visit the cemetery in Xela as I have always been intrigued by Guatemala’s colorful hills of tombs on my past trips. Some of the structures were what I would consider reasonably unsafe. So here is a picture of Ethan leaning up against a strong pillar with exposed rebar and a few additional metal wires for superb stability.

I attended the cooking class where we made tamalitos de chipilin. I honestly think chipilin smells and tastes like grass, but I guess it is popular here and tastes better with lots of salsa. My host mother, Thelma, invited me to her church one evening which was a much better experience, but the process of getting there was again interesting as it involved getting in a “taxi” which was basically a van with eleven seats and 22 other people crammed in and a few people dangling out the missing or broken doors. Thelma also invited me to her weekly Zumba class, and I asked her if it involved a lot of “caderas” or hips to which she said no. (To which I would now strongly disagree with my host mom.) Our instructor, Robert Carlos, turned on some crazy disco lights and could certainly move his hips in ways most human beings cannot. But I was flattered when he told me I danced like a Guatemalteca and not as thrilled when he pushed me to the front of the small class to lead a dance on the spot for the last song. As seen in the Zumba picture on the left, I always feel tall in Guatemala.

There were certainly a lot of fascinating people attending the school with us that week, and they all had a lot of great stories. A group of students from University of Virginia actually invited Ethan and I to join them on a trip to Champerico that weekend. Unfortunately, they rented a private van for 15 people and had 14 spots already filled. So Ethan and I shrugged our shoulders and decided to go on the adventure anyway, navigating the public transportation to Champerico. We discovered those very packed van-taxis could take us to a terminal where we could find a chicken bus (named for the people that carry chickens with them on the bus) to take us to Retalhuleu, where we could hop on another chicken bus to Champerico. It sounded like a breeze until we realized the hard part was finding a way the last 40 km around the mountain to the middle of nowhere with no taxis to the house they rented. We learned of a possible “shortcut” by renting kayaks and kayaking 20 km along the coast of Guatemala. Apparently, I did not learn my lesson on taking shortcuts in Guatemala the first time, and it took Ethan way too long to convince me that kayaks were a bad idea, especially for 4+ hours at 5 kph in unknown water, parallel to the strong ocean riptides, waves, and winds while balancing our packs in the dark evening during rainy season when there are thunderstorms almost every evening…

But 15 minutes into our first chicken bus ride, we learned one of the people got sick and decided to stay back. Suddenly, there were two open spots for Ethan and I on the private shuttle. At least the kayaking shortcut was now certainly out of the question, but we still had two hours on our chicken bus. It was not too awful, but I am always amazed at how many people they can cram into vehicles— imagine at least eight people in every single row on a regular size school bus. Also, I have never seen a bus drive on the wrong side of a single-lane highway for so long to pass people while going down a mountain in a blind, no-pass area and alert the other oncoming vehicles by just holding down the horn the entire time. But that still was not that craziest thing to happen that chicken bus trip. Ethan and I were alarmed by a man who started talking to us in perfect English and started explaining his theory of how China and Russia were the Antichrist. Not going to lie, he was a captivating guy who moved to the US when he was 19, lived in the US for 40 years, and just returned home 6 months ago.

We finally got off in Retalhuleu, alive and thriving, and met up with the rest of the group. We drove the last two hours through the craziest torrential storm I have seen in Guatemala yet. When we finally arrived to this house, we were met by ten Guatemalan guards with guns and machetes. I had a strange mixture of comfort and mostly fear by their protection. We got into the house and saw we had an open kitchen and living room area which may have been great in concept but was not the greatest idea considering this extremity of this storm. It actually looked like we had our own water fountain with the way the nonstop rain poured down the concrete steps, and I only saw one guy completely eat it on the tile floor. Fortunately, he did not break anything or lose any teeth. From the shore with my phone, I captured some stunning shots of the lightning hitting the Pacific. I also made sure to be awake to catch the incredible sunrise and sunset.

Overall, the weekend was gorgeous and extremely relaxing. There was a peculiar dynamic that made me uncomfortable as I realized this was the most “touristy” thing I have done in my four trips to Guatemala. I went swimming in our pool and the ocean, set up my hammock, and read almost the entire time. Ethan got punched in the back of the head by a wave and lost his glasses to the depths of the Pacific. I am still laughing a little bit now, and Ethan has been wearing my glasses this past week that have way too strong of a prescription for him.

As always, life is a grand adventure, and I am loving Guatemala. I am taking pictures of every single rooftop doggo I see, and I plan to make a grand collage of all the rooftop doggos at the end of this summer. But I do certainly miss my family, friends, and dog. Thanks for staying in touch by reading these blogs, and thank you for continually praying for me. Here are some other ways to support me in prayer:

• Praise for not getting sick from my plum and praise for starting to feel better after being sick all week from who knows what
• Praise for the invention of sunscreen because my goal is to return looking as if I was not in Central America for three months
• Prayers for Ethan to figure out his prescription to get new glasses here
• Prayers for effective malaria medicine
• Prayers for the manufacturing, delivery, and implementation of the heat exchanger Ethan and I designed (EWB project updates to come)
• Prayers for Guatemala in their final elections in August between Sandra Torres and Alejandro Giammattei and for safety during the political protests in Guatemala City, Xela, and throughout the country

I have learned from my past three trips to Guatemala to be prepared for anything.

I have spent a lot of nights on concrete floors, taped a Guatemalan’s finger back on, eaten lots of tortillas, watched effigies of Judas be burned with a hundred firecrackers and a half gallon of gasoline on Easter, been nearly interviewed for a local gossip journal, learned to shower with a bucket, never really learned how to actually wash my clothes by hand, jumped out of a truck in the Guatemalan mountains as the engine overheated and exploded, used a porcelain toilet precariously plopped on the side of a cliff with an orange pipe sticking out and black tarp walls I could see over, shaken some scary bugs out of my shoes, and so on and so forth…

All this to say, I have already been very blessed this trip.

Through some connections with Engineers without Borders and the Guatemalan Rotary, I was picked up from the airport and stayed the night with the generous, kind-hearted Grazioso family. As a welcoming gift, the father gave me this bracelet that has proceeds supporting communities devastated by the volcanic eruption in Guatemala last summer. Since I arrived so late in the evening, not many restaurants were open, but with five minutes to spare, we slipped into this fancy restaurant that also sells tailored suits and only served us to-go crepes and salads.

The Grazioso family showed my friend Ethan, who is also interning with EWB this summer, and I around Guatemala City in the morning. We visited one of the underground supermarkets and walked through Paseo Cayala where I saw the statue “El Gigante.” We visited this restaurant for brunch on the top of a tall building with a gorgeous view of the city and mountains. During brunch, I gave Ethan his birthday present, and he was ecstatic and amazed I did not shatter it in my bag. (I mean, so was I.)

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After our adventures in Guatemala City, Ethan and I headed to Esperanza, Queztaltenago, also known at Xela. Unfortuantely, Ethan was feeling very sick, thinking it was strep. We went to the pharmacy for medicine, and he asked for penicillin. The worker pulled out a glass jar of white powder, but Ethan did not want to buy needles to inject it himself so he asked if they had amoxicillin instead. He was thankfully able to buy a weeks worth of pills for about $5 with no prescription.

I still continue to be humored by all the dogs in Guatemala wandering the streets, chilling on rooftops, and following Ethan and his ice cream. I was extremely surprised and excited to realize our host family for the summer actually owned a pet dog, Albieto, which is not very common⁠— so excited that I had him sleep with me on my bed the first night. I realized in the morning he puked all over my bed, but I wasn’t even mad because HEY I GET AN ACTUAL BED AND A DOG! We also have showers with warm water occasionally, a refrigerator, and a washing machine; I am not sure I have met a Guatemalan with a washing machine before. I was definitely not anticipating any of this, and I am grateful I do not need to master my laundry washing by-hand technique. Ethan and I are very blessed.

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Despite the comfortable living thus far, after my incredible experiences in some of the more impoverished areas of Guatemala with such kind, hopeful people, I am still uncomfortably shocked and disturbed by the economic disparity.

EWB is doing some inspiring work, though, and this is a dream to be working with them full-time. Ethan and I had our first few days of work, and we have been enjoying getting to know our diverse, friendly coworkers more while working on some incredible projects together.

When you travel to Guatemala, you eventually accept that there are always weird sounds at any time of day. While we were at the office, we kept hearing blaring music every half hour or so, and at first I thought I just had some crazy co-workers that liked to listen to a minute of a song at periodic times throughout the entire day. In reality, I realized the Guatemalan presidential elections are this upcoming Sunday, and trucks with large banners obnoxiously drive throughout Guatemala sporting one of the 20+ presidential parties.

Ethan and I walk to the office everyday, and we quickly learned that during rainy season, it basically starts down pouring at 2pm for the rest on the day in La Esperanza. Below you can see the cloudy, but gorgeous view from my desk of the mountains and also the interesting, not as gorgeous rooftop view where we either have meetings or our lunch break. Almost every building in Guatemala has rebar (steel reinforcing rods) sticking up “in case they add a second story”, which hardly happens in reality.

I want to end by saying thank you for praying for me, EWB, and Guatemala! My luggage and I arrived safely, and I have been able to navigate extremely well through my conversations. Here are some more prayer requests:

• Praise for all the answered prayers!
• For Ethan to feel better and get his energy back
• For me not to get sick from eating a really delicious plum from my backyard today
• For language school next week to go smoothly and that I continue to pick up on the language
• To have courage to attend and to feel welcomed at my first Guatemalan church service this Sunday
• For the Guatemalan people to have wisdom in their election tomorrow and for the new President to have a heart to do what’s best for their people

Thanks for joining me!

I will be flying to Guatemala early next week for an internship with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) while also attempting to keep a blog with minimal internet access along the way.

The central EWB-Guatemala office is located in La Esperanza, Quetzaltenango, which is one reason I decided to title my blog “Tenemos Esperanza,” which is Spanish for “We have hope.” It is also named after the song I heard at Urbana 2018, a global student missions conference.

EWB is a non-profit humanitarian organization that partners with developing communities worldwide to improve their quality of life through engineering solutions. I have been very involved with EWB at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), helping to design and build two bridges, a schoolhouse, and a retrofit of a cardamom spice dryer. It has been quite the adventure with some great stories to prove it. I have fallen in love with the organization and with Guatemala.

I have slowly been saying goodbye to friends and family and trying not to pack last minute. This process has been slightly daunting, but overall I AM EXTREMELY EXCITED!

Thank you for your support, encouragement, and prayers in my journey and life thus far, and keep checking in with me through these blogs. If you would like to continue supporting me, here are some prayer requests:

• For a safe flight and travels through the country to my homestay
• For my luggage to arrive with me (and good spirits if it doesn’t)
• For confidence in my Spanish speaking ability
• Para la esperanza en los corazones de los guatemaltecos y en la misión de EWB (for hope in the hearts of Guatemalans and in the mission of EWB)