Market Day

Actually, there's a market every day in Quiche, but we thought we'd share some pics from today. Today is our second "day off" in a row - like an actual weekend! We had a few visits yesterday, including a run to the Pediatric Ward here at the hospital to check on Juana, the little baby we're working with. The doctors here think she's just malnourished, which is causing all her other problems. They probably see a lot more of that than we do, so we'll see....

We also treated a young man from the Utatlan school last night. Jacob brought him to the house because the wait in the ER was very long. He had been hit by a car in the street outside the school, but luckily for him, traffic doesn't move too fast around here. He just had a pretty good bump to the knee. Both Jacob and the boy speak decent English, so we taught them about RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation). It was pretty funny, because the joke became that the American doctor looked at his knee and told him he needed lots of "Arroz" (rice). What do you expect from a gynecologist, really?

We also managed to find the rat in our storage room in the hospital. We bought the only rat trap we could find in town today - a live trap - and when we got to the hospital with it, they said that the rat must already be dead - they could smell it. So we had the fun task of digging though the storage room until we found it. Sure enough, it had been dead awhile. Luckily, Matt is still a little stuffed up from his cold, though not quite enough.... Add that to the list of things Heidi never thought she'd have to do in a hospital.

Anyway, in the first picture, you can see what the street looks like during market. Lots of tarps strung up everywhere (none of them high enough for an American man to walk under) and stuff for sale everywhere. In this picture, you can see potatoes, flowers, pineapples, onions, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and yes, that's a popcorn popper in the middle.

In the second picture, it's basically more of the same.

In the third picture, you can see CDs and DVDs in the background (very popular here), commercially packaged fried chicken and raw chicken on the same table, including chicken feet, and some bananas.

The fourth picture shows a man walking a few goats next to our grocery store (the Dispensa Familiar). The sign just under the grocery store sign that says "Cajero 5B" means that there's an ATM machine there. Very handy. You can also see some more CDs, DVDs, some clothes, some more bananas, and a bunch of big umbrellas. This is the main street though the market, so it's not very crowded. People still drive down this street, the pedestrians just have to jump out of the way. The other streets have booths on either side of the street and in the middle. Not really for claustrophobic people....

Anyway, that's it for today. Matt spent about an hour and a half washing mud off of the truck from this weekend - the undercarriage alone took almost an hour. And we have more gardening and general housework to do. Dinner tonight will be something in a pressure cooker - it's really the only way to cook the local "steak"....