For those of you following the blog, you may remember that I started a small computer lab project working with Don Livingston from Computers for Guatemala, funded with donations from family and friends. My Health Center director, the program manager of “Healthy Adolescents”, and I went to go pick up the computers almost six months ago only to find that they did not have keyboards or mice. After a few months of scrounging around for supplies and going through my stuff back in the United States, we finally got the lab up and running. Unfortunately it didn’t get much use because we finished getting everything set up right as the school year was ending. The 2010 school year is scheduled to start in our area next Monday, so I plan on spending the majority of these last few months here serving as a lab monitor and instructor for all of the students that come in.

Images of the lab in the next week or so… stay tuned!

We recently had the chance to make it out to El Limón to finish documenting the final results of our USAID Small Project Assistance (SPA) Grant. Without further ado, here are the results.

*I know this post is a bit late, but we’ve been bouncing all over for the holidays, just bear with me

On December 3rd, we celebrated World AIDS Day with our Health Center. As the name implies, World AIDS Day is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS Pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection on December 1st. So why did we hold the event on the 3rd? Because this is Guatemala! We thought we could get a bigger audience on a market day that was a bit farther away from the last day of the town festival (November 30th). To mark this occasion, we held a small presentation and information station by the main bank, Banrural, in our town square.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV as of 2007. These figures make it one of the most devasting epidemics recorded. According to USAID, less than 1 percent of the adult population in Guatemala is estimated to be HIV-positive, making it a concentrated epidemic. Even so, Guatemala – Central America’s largest country – is responsible for almost one-sixth of Central America’s HIV-infected population. For this reason, USAID has been campaigning and educating on HIV/AIDS and all programs within to Peace Corps Guatemala have a component of HIV/AIDS education. All volunteers have taken part in multiple workshops that include our counterpart agencies so that we can better inform our host communities.

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