What a difference a month makes. After the introductions and ice-breakers of April, May proved to be filled with much more momentum and an increasing sense of direction on the work front. Don’t get me wrong, it is still only month two in a brand new Peace Corps site, but I feel like we’re making leaps and bounds.
A lot of the work we focused on was in the park. With the rainy season approaching, Marcelino, Saul, and I installed drainage lanes on the sides of our most frequented trails and leveled out a few sharp edges to preempt what would have been guaranteed erosion. We also took measurements of the park for the first time and got a sense of the length of our main trail and how we want to change it. Right now it’s about 2km as I said in the photo below, but we’re thinking about extending so that the exit puts our visitor into the meadow as oppose to coming back the way he or she entered. One of the more exciting accomplishments was taking GPS points of the entire park to have a real visual of what it looks like with altitude change. The main advantage with the GPS points is that now we have the data we need to make a map of the park.
Looking forward there’s still tons to do, and we still need much more focus and direction. One of the main things will be registering it as a protected area at a local level through what’s called an Acuerdo Municipal, or Municipal Act. That will allow us to assure that the next mayor will not be able to come in and sell the trees as firewood at the most fundamental level, and at the highest level will help us register it with CONAP, the Guatemalan national parks agency.
Until next time.
Taking GPS coordinates. Now we know what the park looks like and can make a map. 
Hopped in the back of this pick-up to hitch a ride down from the park and found I was in good company.
One of the first completed sections of trail we finished late May
View of the neighborhood where my new house will be