9 Month Checkup, Townhouse & Guate Crisis

Sienna had her 9 month checkup on Thursday and all is still well. She has both of her lower central incisors, but no signs of any more teeth. She weighed in at 20 pounds 8 ounces, a gain of only 8 ounces in the last month, and she is 74 cm (29 inches). The biggest development is she started to crawl!! All of the time in her walker didn't have an affect on her ability to crawl, after all. You just have to take all the paranoia that you read with a grain of salt.




We moved out of our zone 10 apartment into a zone 15 townhouse, just across the street from school and we love it! It's very secure; at the garita (gate), visitors have to exit their vehicle and give their ID to the guards behind what appears to be bullet-proof glass. The guards call the house to let you know your visitor has arrived and asks if they can let them in.

The neighborhood has a little park with a playground that Sienna visits almost every day with Reina and with me after school and on weekends. We also live next door to a CAG teaching couple, Christine and Doug, and their almost two year-old daughter, Saranzaya. Sienna and Zaya are the best of friends - the upcoming year should be great when Sienna starts walking and can be more of a play pal for Zaya.

Things in Guatemala have heated up, as they seem to do in the Spring, but unfortunately I'm not talking about the weather. On April 14, the grandfather and mother of a couple of our students, Khalil and Marjorie Musa, were gunned down leaving their business. I figured it was the usual drug lord trying to extort money, but last Sunday the grandfather's attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was shot while riding his bike on a street that is closed off on Sundays for roller bladers, walkers, bikers and puppy sellers.

Mr. Rosenberg had made a video before he was killed accusing President Alvaro Colom, his wife Sandra de Colom and his secretary Gustavo Alejos of the crime. It's all over the news and the video, in Spanish with English subtitles, is on You Tube.



Most Guatemalans, at least those in the city, seem to have hopped on the anti-Colom bandwagon. I, on the other hand, think this smells fishy. Nothing is ever black and white in this country and the video spelled things out almost too clearly. I'm suspicious that Colom, being the first center-left President since Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (who was ousted by a CIA-backed coup in 1954), is being set up. Not only is the powerful upper class against him, but his government has recently begun opening the files from the 36 year civil war that ended in 1996 and took an estimated 200,000 lives in Guatemala, most of them indigenous Mayans. This doesn't make him very popular and makes him a huge target.

It'll be interesting to see if anything comes from this. Today there were supposed to be demonstrations in zone 1 where the National Palace and many government buildings are located. I live in zone 15, a healthy distance away and will be steering clear of that area for the rest of this school year. The US Embassy said an expected 30-40,000 people may turn out. I hope it's peaceful, but in a country where everybody has a gun and only 2% of cases go to court, there's a chance tempers could flare.