Pudding

During training the Peace Corps Medical Officer led a session on the “Emotional Cycle of a PCV.” We were instructed that Peace Corps can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster with its high times and its low times. The majority of the dips and peaks are dependent on a volunteer’s individual experience, but some of them come at predictable intervals. Right now a lot of the members of my training group are suffering from a mid-service low, but it seems as if my amusement park ride has been downward plunging for some time now.

The whole situation surrounding Mynor’s death and the subsequent “loss” of my project have been the major forces driving me into this valley, but there have been a lot of little things too—“little” things that have not all affected me personally, but are very disheartening nonetheless…


My chairs were stolen from my front porch one evening while I was home sleeping. (The property surrounding my house isn’t Fort Knox, but there is a 9-foot wall on one side and fences on the other three, adjacent to other fenced and walled yards. Traversing through lawns and jumping fences under the cover of darkness without being detected was certainly a planned and not very easy act.)

There have been five murders in Tactic during the past week—10 in the past month—not including a man who was shot but not killed just down the street from my house.

Someone doused the building next to my house with gasoline and set it on fire.

During a visit to the market, a young boy was throwing rotten pieces of fruit at my head from the second floor. (This I might have found slightly amusing at another time, but now it just served as another agitating factor.)


I do love this community in which I live, and I have some great friends here, but it is hard not to get angry at and discouraged by everything occurring around me. I know the United States is far from perfect, but it has been looking rather saintly to me right now in comparison.

The other day I made my weekly shopping trip to Paiz in Cobán. Squeezed into a customarily overcrowded micro, I spent the 45-minute ride thinking negative thoughts about Guatemala. I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t, and they continued to occupy my mind as I walked the aisles of Paiz. Then I happened upon some pudding. And the pudding gave me hope.

Yes, pudding. Glorious boxes of powered non-instant vanilla pudding. Pudding has temporarily restored my opinion of Guatemala.

Powered non-instant vanilla pudding is a key ingredient in my mom’s apple crisp recipe that up until the point of my exciting discovery, I could only find over 120 miles away in the capital. For over a year, since arriving in Tactic, I have written “pudín de vainilla” on the list of suggested products in the check out line of Paiz with no real hope of actually ever seeing it there. (I have also been writing “Diet Sunkist en lata,” but the odds of that product making its way into the Guatemalan market are about as good as Notre Dame winning a national championship in football.)

I love baking, as any of my former roommates, work colleagues, neighbors, and college friends can attest to. With its exact measurements and instructions, baking is a perfect outlet for my anal retentiveness. I enjoy baking (probably my singular domestic talent) in and of itself, but it also serves as a great stress reliever. In the states, whenever I was frustrated or upset about something I would bake—carrot cake, banana bread, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, German chocolate cake (named as such for the brand of chocolate not the nationality), lemon bread, almond bark cookies, apple crisp, sugar cookies, chocolate/oatmeal/caramel bars—for someone else. Doing something enjoyable for someone else prevented me from dwelling on my own problems.

So now stocked up with boxes of pudding (even though the recipe calls for one box, I bought five, because given Paiz’s horrendous stock replenishing management, a sold-out product can take weeks or months before being on the shelf again), I am going to bake myself out of this emotional valley. I am going to bake until I like Guatemala again. And until then, thanks to the pudding, there will be apple crisp for all.