Viajo.

So I'm still in Antigua, still learning Spanish. I've recently acquired a new linguistic goal that is a little above the level of a 10 year old. I need to be able to talk to a doctor. There is a clinic in the children's home that I will be able to work at, except the doctor only speaks Spanish. One of the other interns also works there, but she speaks the language just a tad better. The doctor lets her help with minor surgeries and delivering babies. I'd love to do that, but I'm afraid the doctor would like...hand me a newborn and tell me rock it gently and I think she'd be saying to dunk it in a tub of water. So there's yet work to do.

Today we took a trip to a volcano called Pacaya. It was incredible. There is a dried up lava field that still has little streams of lava running down the side. We could walk up next to it and poke it if we so desired. I wanted to poke it and fully intended to, but as I was walking up to it our tour guide started yelling that it was time to go. I turned around and went back, but I regret doing so. Now I can't stop thinking about what the consistency of magma would be like.

I have met a lot of interesting people walking around Antigua and traveling and such. Its been incredibly interesting and has kind of made me think. I've met a lot of young, inspired college kids like myself that are traipsing around Guatemala eager to either live life to the fullest or change the world. I met a Canadian studying to be a physical therapist, a quad-lingual Swedish girl teaching school in a small Guatemalan town, a couple of Notre Dame students, one minoring in poverty studies, and missionary after missionary working in different clinics, children's homes, and social work organizations around the country. A lot of these people remind me alot of myself in their thought process, and the way they live life, their desires and goals, even their rhetoric. We also recently toured a macadamia nut farm. The tour itself was like 10 minutes long and the lamest thing I've ever seen, but the man that owns the farm happened to be there and talk to us about all things not-macadamia. He's an old man with a pride issue, but he runs a very successful farm and has a lot of green farming projects going on to help save the world. He was incredibly interesting and kind of a jerk all at the same time. The speal he gave us was about changing the world and doing things that matter and he gave all sorts of examples of how he was doing that. The best way I could describe the feel of it was humanistic and selfish. The problem was, it also sounded a lot like me. I want to change the world and make people's live better, like he was talking about, but there has to, I thought, but a difference between me and him. There is a Difference - and it has to be capitalized. To solve a disease, like the world's problems, you don't just treat the symptoms, you treat the source. Everyone agrees about that. What people disagree on is the source. To the old man people were the answer, not the problem. We were the ones that had to fix things, we were fighting against this cold, hateful universe. We were the beautiful product of elegant evolutionary processes. That carries a lot of responsibilities. I, however, tend to not think that highly of people. Looking inside myself I seem to be fundamentally flawed. The deepest part of me isn't right. Any problem I have directly comes from stuff inside of me or inside of someone else. So it seems the stuff in people is what we are fighting against. Change the people, change the problems. Thats the Difference. So this incredibly long paragraph is really about wasting life. Its easy to be inspired and try to battle the evils of the world. Many college students, like the ones above, are like this. The difference comes from what you are battling. I don't want to battle the wrong thing.

If you've read this far you are obviously a faithful reader and are also obviously wondering how my relationship with the parrot is. Well, he's still waking me up, but he's been nicer about it. He likes to yell the spanish word for parrot, "loro". Its really kind of cute. Things are looking up.

Some pictures are on my facebook.