Monday, 9/18.06-Saturday, 10/14/06
From Antigua, Ross and I were slung along winding mountain roads on a minibus for several hours until we reached Quetzaltenango, aka Xelaju (its original Mayan name)—everyone there just calls it Xela (SHAY-la). It’s the second largest city in Guatemala, after the capital, and has a big language school and volunteer scene, as well as several universities, to keep things interesting.
View of Xela from outside the language school
Our first stop was my language school, ICA, so that we could meet up with our host family (the school sets its students up in homestays with middle-class Guatemalan families). Our host family was a nice older couple, Lydia and Francisco. It quickly became clear that we weren’t their first exchange student guests—Ross and I marveled at what we called the “cabinet of lost gifts” in the dining room, featuring tacky objects that had to be gifts from past students, such as ugly dolls and beer steins with ponies tromping through snow.
Our bedrooms at Lydia and Francisco's place
Ross and I had our bedrooms and a bathroom in a separate part of the house, and while the host families provide 3 meals a day, Lydia and Francisco didn’t actually eat with us, although sometimes Lydia would sit down with a cup of tea to chat. Francisco also gave us a 2-hour history lesson on Guatemala one night, telling us about the war and about his work in sustainable development projects (he’s retired), which was pretty interesting (at least for the first hour).
Lydia and Francisco have four grown children, and one of them, Elenora, lives nearby, so her 4-year-old son, Pepe, would come over to visit almost every day. Pepe was basically live entertainment for us. One night during dinner, Ross and I watched him attempt to ride a small, decorative straw llama he found in the kitchen, sitting on it while scraping its wooden legs across the floor (the llama was clearly a “to be looked at, not played with” type of object). When the front legs inevitably started to bow outward, Pepe attempted to reinforce the front legs with empty paper towel rolls that were much longer than the hind legs, leading Ross and me to snicker as we imitated the llama walking. If you want to try this at home, here is how you imitate Pepe’s llama:
Hold your front arms stiffly at your sides and slightly in front of you. The elbows cannot bend, because paper towel rolls do not have joints.
Point your face toward the ceiling, because your front legs are too long for the rest of your body, preventing you from facing straight ahead.
Alternate stiffly moving your arms up and down (left arm, right arm, left arm, right arm…..)
Pepe would sometimes venture into our rooms and tell us about his school day (he went to a “colegio”—primary school—a couple days a week). One day I asked if he liked colegio, and he said yes. Knowing I was also taking classes in Xela, he then asked if I liked “colegio.” I said yes, and didn’t bother to clarify that I already completed elementary school a few years ago.
Pepe was also a brilliant cultural ambassador-- one night when Elenora was explaining the traditional Guatemalan tamale they had served us, Pepe pointed to the banana next to it on Ross’s plate and helpfully added, “Y este es banano,” (“and this is banana”) clearing up that confusion for us.
Overall, Lydia and Francisco were a good host family, although there were a few weird moments, like when Lydia tried to charge Ross extra money to stay there “because he wasn’t a student,” even though the school said we could pay the same price for both of us….and when Lydia told Kelly she could rent another room in their house, only to change her mind the day before Kelly arrived, deciding that they didn’t want to take in any more boarders and making up a story about how her son who lives in Vancouver was coming in town and they needed the room (not surprisingly, he never materialized).
Overall though, living with the host family was entertaining. When we weren’t busy being inspired by the three Mona Lisa paintings they owned (because you can never have enough of those) and the painting of a windswept lion that hung above my bed, we were admiring their stunning family portraits in the dining room.
Exhibit A: The classic windswept lion
Exhibit B: The revealing family portrait
Since Lydia and Francisco rarely ate with us, Ross and I spent a lot of dinners perfecting our imitations of the family portrait expressions and making faces at each other across the table--the best was when you could catch the other person off guard by staring at them with your impression until they unsuspectingly glanced up from their plate in your direction.
Being left to our own devices at meal time definitely proved to be beneficial—at first the food was great, but at the times when she served rubber pancakes, corn pudding, or bread with liquefied beans, we were happy to have some alone time with the kitchen trash can (I count the location of the kitchen trash, under the sink, among my most important discoveries in Xela). One night Lydia presented us with heavy bread-like pockets filled with liquid refried beans, and the whole thing had been fried in sweet banana juices. When Lydia left the room, Ross gestured to the plate and offered, “Do you want a turd pocket?” Since the Spanish word for bag/sack is “bolsa,” we decided to be culturally sensitive and call them “bolsitas turdisimas” instead. After a couple bites, those heavy lumps of flavor went straight into the trash—“anchors away!” as Ross put it. From then on, when we heard Lydia moving around the kitchen, Ross would say, “Is that Julia Child I hear in there?”
Our ad for bolsitas turdisimas
Bolsitas turdisimas aside, I really am glad we decided to live with a family because we had some interesting conversations with them and got to practice our Spanish some (I learned how to say “I vomited twice” after an episode of food poisoning). Plus, I’m sure they thought we were weird too at times—I had a particularly shining moment one afternoon at the beginning of our stay, when I was alone in the dining room and got up from the table, carried my dishes to the sink, and decided to grab one last tortilla from the table—one for the road. As I was walking away holding a tortilla in my fist, Lydia came into the kitchen, and since I had wanted to go back and ask her where the dish soap was, I quickly stuffed the tortilla in my pocket, Napoleon Dynamite-style, so she wouldn’t wonder why I didn’t just stay at the table to finish my food like a normal person. Then I realized that what was even weirder than running away with a tortilla in my fist was having one stuffed in my front pocket, and I began envisioning scenarios in which the tortilla would spring from my pocket mid-conversation. Luckily I had the dish soap conversation without incident, and afterwards I escaped to my room, pulled the tortilla out of my pocket, and ate it. So, far be it from me to point any fingers about strange behavior.
This is the hostel Kelly stayed in while we were having our "Lydia and Francisco" adventures
"Keep your tape alive"...words of wisdom that will never go out of style
But I think I actually learned a lot more about Guatemalan culture from my language school teachers than from my host family, because for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, I was getting one-on-one instruction and practicing my conversation skills with Spanish teachers, finding out more about their backgrounds, families, friends, university studies, hobbies and service projects, etc.
My language school, ICA
More of my school
The school assigns students a different teacher every week, so I had three teachers in Xela (since I took classes for three weeks and spent the fourth week volunteering). My first teacher, Ingrid, is studying accounting at a university in Xela. Besides just being fun to talk to, chatting about her family and her university friends, she told me a lot about the education system in Guatemala. It was interesting to hear about some of the problems in rural areas, where teachers face a lot of challenges because they have limited resources to work with, and kids have trouble paying attention because they come to school hungry and under-nourished. Since a lot of the kids in these areas miss school several days a week because their parents need them to work, teachers often have to repeat lessons, which is inefficient, or the kids may have to repeat grades one or more times. While primary school is technically mandatory in Guatemala, this is not enforced the way it is in the US, and especially in rural parts of Guatemala, there can be obstacles to getting a good education. So, Ingrid was really cool and a good conversation partner.
For my second week of classes, Edwin, an architecture student, was my teacher. He was a lot of fun too—sometimes we took a break from our lessons to play ping-pong—and he also had a really admirable commitment to service projects he worked on outside of ICA and his university studies. He told me that originally, his church had a youth group for at-risk boys in Xela (street kids, kids with family problems, etc), but eventually they had so many kids involved (over 100) that Edwin and another guy had to start running the group as a separate organization. He always had activities going on for that—they do field trips and other recreational things, and also have counselors who work with some of the kids who need help. Edwin was also really involved in his church and seemed to genuinely care that it wasn’t meeting the needs of the kids in the community, and would talk about ways he thought his church could be more “with it” to be relevant to teenagers there and the reality of issues they’re dealing with. I really admired the way he was so optimistic and upbeat about his work, so he was fun to talk to as well.
Also, Edwin wrote in huge block letters when writing my homework assignments in my notebook, and in one part he started off the first word of the section with a huge letter that was double the size of the others, like this:
Edwin's writing...
Ross's version
Ross and Kelly were sitting in a café with me while I was doing this homework, and Ross and I decided it was like when story books print “Once upon a time” with a huge, ornately decorated “O”, so we drew a flower on the “A” in “Anoche.” Then, while I completed my homework, Ross made his own “Anoche” on a separate piece of paper, and it turned into an elaborate work of art with cartoon characters skiing, a clothesline, a sun, a moon, a cow jumping over the moon, a rocket ship, a flying squirrel…..basically, everything an “A” should have on or around it.
My third teacher, Miguel, is a law student, and during one of our lessons he took me on a walk to his university, which was really cool. It seemed smaller than a lot of universities in the US, but was similar in that students were kind of milling around in the common areas in between classes, chatting with friends…..a big difference, though, was the gruesome murals painted on all the walls depicting atrocities committed in recent decades and memorializing each of the students who had been killed during the conflicts, by the government or other parties, because they were perceived as a threat. Yeah…that part was a little intense.
But Miguel was also laid-back and very easy to talk to, and I got the feeling from all three teachers that family was very important to them and central to their lives—Miguel and Edwin, who are from Xela, live at home with their families, which is typical in Guatemala, and their weekend plans always included family activities and parties.
ICA also offered cool cultural activities, like going to a local soccer game (Kelly and Ross came along with the ICA group, as you may have already read in Ross’s blog entry on the game): http://themiddlefoamfinger.blogspot.com/2006/09/wide-wide-world-of-ftbol.html.
ICA also has several ongoing service projects, one of which is supporting a local Mayan Women’s co-op and helping them promote their woven crafts, jewelry, etc. Every Wednesday the women come to the school to sell their products, and I thought maybe I should buy a few of their things since they were so colorful…..you know, to relieve them of some weight so that wouldn’t have to carry so much of it back home…..haha. Let’s be honest, there is no justifying the amount of stuff I bought from them, but it made me feel better knowing the money was going directly to their families. Buying from them was also cool because since Spanish is a second language to all of them, they kept speaking to each other in Quiche, a Mayan dialect, and trying to help each other out by supplying Spanish words to communicate, for example, that something was supposed to be used as a belt (one of the women finally just put it around her waist and sashayed around to model it for me).
In general, I’ve found almost all of the people in Guatemala to be friendly, helpful and polite. About half of the population in Guatemala are indigenous Mayan people, and Xela certainly has a lot of Mayan women walking around in traditional colorful clothing, often selling things or carrying tubs of their wares on top of their heads.
Winding streets of Xela
In addition to the colorfully clothed people dotting the streets, the shops and restaurants in Xela are bright yellows, blues, oranges, etc, and the narrow, hilly streets are set against a dramatic background of volcanoes, with houses built into the green mountainside. There were also a lot of cafes with personality, especially in the area around the Parque Central, that became our regular hangouts because we liked the eclectic decorations and friendly people.
During the first week we were in Xela, when Kelly and Firuzeh were still traveling and just passing through for a few days, Ross, Kelly and I were sitting around talking, and Kelly was recounting how she and Firuzeh had spent the day running around town trying to help Firuzeh arrange to pay private school tuition for a 6-year-old girl who was living with the host family in Xela that they were staying with for a few days. Basically, this family had adopted the 6-year-old girl after her mother, a prostitute who had boarded with the family, abandoned her. Since the family could not afford to give the adopted daughter the same private school education as their other children, Firuzeh wanted to give her that opportunity. Anyway, after Kelly finished her recap of their exhausting day, Ross replied, “Well, I spent my morning working on my script, writing a battle scene between G.I. Joes.” 
Since Kelly arrived in Xela later than Ross and I did, and ended up staying in a hostel while we were living with our host family, we spent a lot of our time meeting up and hanging out in cafes in the afternoons (since I had classes from 8-1 every morning, and Ross was spending his mornings doing script-writing), so we could exchange hostel/host family stories, talk, and do Spanish homework (in my case).
We had some brilliant “meeting of the minds” conversations in those cafes—for example, one day when I was complaining that I had no idea what to write about for my Spanish composition homework, Kelly commented that during one of her language lessons, she had told the story of the cow that started the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Just as I was thinking, “Wow, I’ve never heard this story,” Ross said, “A cow? You mean the cow that supposedly started the Chicago fire?.....(pause)....How would a cow start an earthquake?” We decided that after this cow wreaked havoc on Chicago, it probably packed up its suitcase to take its troublemaking ways to other major cities, setting its sights on San Francisco, and may well have been responsible for a number of other natural disasters in US history.
One café, Blue Angel, offered a room where you could watch a movie from their DVD selection or bring in your own DVD, so Ross and I watched a bootleg version of Walk the Line one day, and another time we brought in a bootleg, Spanish-dubbed Thundercats DVD, one of my most important purchases in Xela. Since Ross, Kelly and I became regulars at Blue Angel, we got to know the family running the café—they were really nice and friendly and had a 2-year-old son who kept us entertained by toddling around, throwing oranges across the floor, and shouting profound things like “wawoo!” There were a few times when a Swiss family with two small boys, slightly older than Wawoo, was also in the restaurant. They would play together—and by “play together,” I mean that the Swiss boys would build things out of boxes and Styrofoam while Wawoo would make noise by violently rattling sheets of newspaper next to them. One night, Wawoo’s parents had put a baseball cap on him, and he was walking around with a plastic coffee mug full of water or juice, looking like an old man. He walked up to a girl our age in the restaurant, and she asked him a question. He just stared at her for a second, and then turned and walked away, shaking his head, coffee cup in hand. We imagined he was either saying “No, no, that won’t do at all” or “Dames!” Since we were regulars at Blue Angel and always had fun chatting with the family there, on our last night, Ross gave Wawoo a ball as a parting gift. After we told them goodbye, the mom chased us down the street to give us each a bar of chocolate from the restaurant, which was pretty cool.
Other cafes had quirky things like crooked bookshelves (reminding me of some of Daddy’s recent home improvement attempts in Pittsburgh), but one thing was pretty consistent across all of the cafes there: the cheesy American music, featuring such classics as “She’s Like the Wind” (Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing), “All for One (And All For Love)” (Sting, Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams, The Three Musketeers), and several Air Supply numbers. I couldn’t decide whether these blasts from the past made me homesick or just nostalgic, since they didn’t seem to like to play anything recorded after 1995. We were also subjected to what is possibly the worst song I’ve ever heard, a 1984 duet called Perfect Combination. (Seriously, look it up and download it. You’ll thank me. Or at least check out the lyrics here: http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/print_song/107251.html.)
These dramatic love songs provided the perfect soundtrack for Ross’s award-winning “postcard date” move. While sitting in Café Baviera one day, Ross spotted an attractive girl he seemed to be running into everywhere in Xela. So, in what could have been a scene straight out of a movie, Ross bought a postcard from the café and wrote on it, “I notice you everywhere—I don’t know if that means you are everywhere or just really noticeable.” He signed his name and gave his email address, and then gave the card to the waitress to deliver to the girl. When Ross later told me this story, I commented that it was a cool way to ask someone out, to which he replied, “Yeah, I didn’t hang around to see her reaction,” and then did an imitation of himself hurrying out of the café, fists clenched and elbows swinging in power-walk positions, narrating in a falsetto voice, “running down the stairs, running out the door…” (We figured if that’s how he made his exit, she could have followed him and tracked him down pretty easily, no email address necessary.) The girl later emailed Ross and turned out to have a boyfriend, but she was still very impressed by the awesome gesture.
But the Romantic Escapade Award goes to Kelly, whose stalker, Greg, tracked her all the way to Mexico. We first endured Greg’s company one (very long) night when Kelly brought him along to Blue Angel, where we had planned to meet up after dinner. We had heard a few stories from Kelly about a guy from the dorm room at her hostel who insisted on hanging out with her every day and “liked to talk a lot,” as Kelly put it mildly. Since Kelly needed a break from Greg and didn’t know how to get away, we figured, why not have him join us at dinner—what would it cost us, really?
Our will to live, as it turned out, because Greg was like a multivitamin of bad conversations:
1. Boring topics, explored in great detail
“I am hard to buy Christmas presents for. Usually people just have to get me books or music, and with music it’s usually best if the people just buy themselves the CD and burn a copy for me. Sometimes my dad gets me the same music he likes, or if one of the bands we like has mentioned another band in a radio interview, like on NPR, my dad and I will get that CD. Or, when my dad and I buy something and Amazon suggests a band in the ‘people who bought this item also bought…’ section we might find a CD we like and get that.”
2. Pretentious comments to show us just how bright and insightful he really is
“What is it with kids liking things that explode? I know I was really into explosions when I was in third grade—of course, I was probably the only one in my class who understood the physics behind it, because I read up on it.”
(While watching the Blue Angel owners’ little kid, “Wawoo,” run around rolling fruit across the floor)
Greg: “You know, we have so many fancy toys in the US, and sometimes kids just enjoy playing with a stick. I think that says something about our society, like by buying them flashy toys we’re impeding something.”
Ross, observing Wawoo: “Like the simple joy of kicking fruit at a door…”
3. Introducing new conversation threads as an excuse to rattle off an inane fact he finds impressive
Greg: “What is everyone’s favorite type of animal?”
Jessi: “Dog.”
Kelly: “Turtle or platypus.”
Ross: “Panda bear.”
Greg: “The Peregrine Falcon, because it has a diving speed of over 175 miles per hour. That, and the wolf, because that’s what my last name means in Serbian.” (As Ross later pointed out, even people whose last name is “Wolf” in English don’t feel the need to cite that as their favorite animal.)
4. Stating the obvious as if it’s new information
(While following Greg through Central Park, a very obvious main landmark in the city, and seeming to wander aimlessly in it)
Jessi: “Where are we going right now?”
Greg, serious and feeling revelatory: “Well, right now we’re in the park.”
At the end of the two-hour “more about me, Greg” show, Kelly, Ross and I were visibly exhausted. When Greg mentioned, “For some reason, I’m not tired at all,” I wanted to tell him, it was because he wasn’t on the listening end of that two-hour conversation.
Ross and I walked Kelly and Greg back to their hostel, and since Kelly and Greg lagged behind us a little (probably lost in scintillating conversation), Ross and I replayed some of Greg’s comments to ourselves.
Greg: “Local children are either fascinated or terrified by me—it’s probably the beard.”
Ross wanted to say: “No, it’s cos he’s a fucking windbag.”
Greg: I have a supportive family—all the people who matter were encouraging me to travel.
Ross wanted to say: Yeah, cos they wanted him out of the country!”
Ross and I then played “would you rather”—that game where you ask questions like, “Would you rather parachute into a pile of manure or only be able to hear one song over and over for an entire year”—except in this version, one option was always, “Would you rather be stranded on a deserted island with Greg, or…”
As we neared Kelly and Greg’s hostel, we noticed a very drunk local guy walking in our general direction. As we waited for the hostel owners to answer the door, we watched this guy jump up and down in puddles while singing. He then came up to us and tried to slurringly introduce himself. Just then the hostel owner opened the door, and Ross and I were faced with a decision—walk home now with this poster child for sobriety, or go inside with Kelly and endure a few more minutes of Greg’s company. In the end we decided to put our physical safety before our mental health, and went inside with Kelly and Greg until the coast was clear. As we walked in the door, Ross observed, “I think we just lived a Would You Rather.”
You might think that was the last we saw of Greg, since he left Xela the next morning. You’d be wrong. Kelly had given him her email address because he was going to San Pedro and was going to find out more information on a chocolate-making workshop Kelly was interested in. Later the next day, he had emailed Kelly with the link to his blog, where he had posted excerpts from what he perceived to be a very deep philosophical discussion they had had. After Kelly received that email when we were at the internet cafe, she suggested we head back to her hostel, adding, “I can guarantee Greg won’t be there.” “Can you?” Ross asked. “He could be blogging from anywhere.” We then conjured up images from the movie When a Stranger Calls, when the babysitter calls the police to report creepy phone calls, and the police call back to say they’ve traced the call and it’s coming from within the house. Only in our version, it was “HE’S BLOGGING FROM WITHIN THE HOSTEL!!!!!”
Luckily, we did not encounter Greg at the hostel that night, and moved on with our lives over the next week or so—Ross writing, me going to language school, and Kelly traveling to San Cristobal, Mexico to renew her visa and do some sight-seeing.
Then one afternoon, while Ross was writing on a terrace that overlooked Central Park, he saw what looked like Greg walking through the park. Just the possibility of becoming entrapped in conversation with him sent a shiver down Ross’s spine—this was mitigated only by the comfortable knowledge that this Greg-looking person could not see him. That night, however, as Ross and I were finishing our dinner at Blue Angel, Greg materialized next to our table out of thin air, soaking wet from the dark, rainy night outside. Since my back was to the door, the first thing I saw was not Greg, but the mixture of surprise and horror that crossed Ross’s face as he exclaimed, “Greg!” followed by “Um……how was San Pedro?”
Greg: Good. I’m going to San Cristobal tomorrow. (insert thunder/lightning/scary music here). I guess Kelly’s not around?
Ross: No…no she’s…not here.
Greg: (recalling a comment Kelly made in passing a while back): Last I heard from her, she was headed to San Cristobal.
Ross and Jessi: Hmm….yeah maybe, I think she was traveling, but I’m not sure where…
Greg: (looking at our empty plates) Are you guys leaving now?
Ross and Jessi (previously having had no intention of leaving anytime soon): Yes!! Yes, we are.
Greg: Okay, then, I’ll just sit at that table over there.
As soon as Greg turned around, I looked at my watch and noticed we had a narrow window—15 minutes—before the internet café across the street closed. I stayed behind to pay while Ross bolted across the street to send Kelly the following emergency email:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ross Conkey <rossconkey@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 9, 2006 7:48 PM
Subject: WARNING!!!!
To: Kelly Heekin <kelly.heekin@gmail.com>
K! A heads up, I was at Balcones Enriquez today and swore I saw Greg walking around the park (still in the park). Well, JD and i were just at blue angel, and he showed up all right, and tomorrow he's headed your way to San Cristobal...just FYI, keep your wits about you...I tried not to implicate you, saying that I wasnt sure WHERE you were, after he very interestingly asked with great conviction... JD and I also made our quick exit from BA.So, keep on your toes and buy some mace. We'll pray for your survival...See you in a few (hopefully, if Greg hasn't talked you to death)...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unfortunately, our warning came too late—Kelly was sitting on her bed in the hostel dorm room in San Cristobal when she heard a hostel employee say, “Kelly Heekin” and point to her bed. She looked up to see Greg standing beside the employee—he had gone to the hostel she mentioned staying in and asked for her by name! Greg spent the rest of his time in San Cristobal being Kelly’s very own personal wet blanket, and I’m sure he wrote a painfully dull blog entry about it after.
Luckily, Kelly made it back to Xela safe and sound, just in time to join Ross and me for the entertainment in our hostel (we had decided to spend our last week in Xela in a hostel instead of a homestay, since it was more convenient to be on our own schedule).
The morning after our first night in Hostal Don Diego, Ross and I were awakened by loud, low-pitched shower singing that was punctuated by a noise that was a cross between a duck quacking and an electric guitar strumming—“WAAA’EH!”—every few seconds.
This became our daily wake-up call, and often the first person we saw in the mornings was its source, a middle-aged American man whose personal style was of the “overalls with no shirt underneath” variety, clomping down the hall. He was friendly and seemed to have been there a while—on several occasions we saw him giving English lessons at the hostel. After Ross overheard the man teaching the student by using the example, “I went to the store, WAAA’EH!” we determined the noise was a Tourette’s-type thing. We also pictured flocks of Central Americans who had learned English from him wandering around the US saying, “I would like to order the salad, WAAA’EH!”
When Kelly returned to Xela and arrived at the hostel, the first thing she saw when she looked in the window at the courtyard area was the guy (who always seemed to be sitting there), who greeted her by way of looking her in the eye and exclaiming “WAAA’EH!” before the hostel owner let her in. The guy also used his special talent 1) to imitate the door bell whenever it rang (“WAAA’EH-WAAA’EH”), 2) to announce he was done brushing his teeth (“WAAA’EH!”), 3) as a question as Ross and I left the hostel one day (“WAAA’EH?”), and 4) of course, to eliminate our need for an alarm clock by waking us up every morning at 7 a.m.
One day, Ross was absent-mindedly walking down the street and passed the hostel by a few steps without realizing it. But luckily he heard a faint “Waaa’eh” just as he was passing by, and thought “Oh! Here it is.”
One morning we heard a loud burp outside our room, which we thought fit in perfectly with the early morning singing/WAAA’EHing in the shower. We said “I wonder which guest that was,” but when we opened the door on our way to get water, no one was there. We went with the only logical explanation—he had burped and vanished in a gaseous haze, his patented ninja move. We should have seen it coming a mile away.
Nope, nothing strange about these rides...
Another good thing about our hostel was that it was right next to Central Park, and October just happened to be the month when Xela celebrated its patron saint with a small carnival every weekend. There were merry-go-rounds, cheap plastic toys, cauldrons of whiskey punch, and—best of all—chocolate-covered churros (fried dough sticks that kind of taste like funnel cake). We were not above ripping open the bag at the end to lick all the extra chocolate.
The streets of Xela were also kept lively by the stray dogs running around everywhere, which was both nice (because I like dogs) and sad (also because I like dogs). One day Ross and I saw a little dachshund outside a house, and figured that one had to be a pet because you never see stray dachshunds running around. We decided it would be funny, though, if a pack of stray dachshunds was always running through the streets terrorizing the other dogs, rounding corners in a menacing, collective short-legged gallop.
Another cool thing about Xela was that it was a good jumping-off point for some cool excursions. Kelly and Ross went on a 10-hour volcano hike that started at 1 a.m. so that they could watch the sun rise over Xela from the top of dormant Volcan Santa Maria, overlooking another active volcano that spewed ash right before their eyes.
Kelly and I also took a day trip to the market town of Chichicastenango, which was full of colorful chaos in the form of hammocks, blankets, bags, scarves, and traditionally dressed Mayan women. The bus ride itself was the main adventure—several hours in each direction of getting jostled all over the “chicken buses,” as they call them there, which are basically converted US school buses that have been painted all these psychedelic colors. They’re the cheapest way to travel, but they sling you across the seats along all winding mountain curves, and people are pretty much sitting on your lap by the end. Also passengers can throw their stuff on top of the bus because they have these metal rails on top, and guys ride up there with people’s stuff and secure it so it doesn’t go flying off a cliff during the trip. They never close the front door of the bus, and guys who work with the driver just stand there hanging out the door, calling out to anyone along the road who might want to hop on and pay for a ride. At one point, a guy climbed out of the open door at the front of the bus, stepped on the ledge of one of the open bus windows, and hoisted himself onto the top of the bus while it was still moving full speed along the mountain roads. People in Guatemala are crazy.
School in Canton Xetuj
Since Xela is also known for its language school and volunteer scene, I was able to have a few interesting volunteer experiences. For my 4th (and final) week in Xela, I stopped taking language classes so I could volunteer at a primary school in Canton Xetuj, a village just outside Xela. The school, which goes through grade 6, was in session from 8:00-1:00 every day, with an additional afternoon session for 6th graders. So I got to start off each morning with the school’s director, Sonia, picking me up in Central Park for a frantic ride to school (the first day when I tried to fasten my seatbelt in the passenger seat, she laughed and casually told me there was no longer a seatbelt on that side), and then Sonia dropped me back off in Central Park every day a little after 1:00.
I heard about the school through a German charitable organization, Secure Perspectives, that started working with the school in 2004 to help improve the health, education and infrastructure in the community, focusing on the primary school. The community of Canton Xetuj has an elected mayor and committees that take care of community matters like education, water and health, and the education committee founded the primary school 7 years ago as part of a national education development program, providing basic school materials and teachers’ wages. The school also occasionally receives support materials from NGOs and religious organizations.
The school itself was built from direct donations from the US and Germany, and consists of 6 classrooms for 6 primary school grades and 1-2 nursery school grades (some grades share classrooms). The classroom walls and ceilings are a patchwork of corrugated tin, plywood and old billboards and other road signs, with space between the walls and ceilings to let in light, since there is no electricity. The classrooms have dirt floors that the students and teachers sweep in the mornings to clear out the stray paper and even out the puddles that may have collected from the previous evening’s rainfall. Apparently the children used to sit without any real furniture, on uneven boards balanced on crumbling bricks, but through donations the students now have secondhand desks, chairs and learning material.
The school also has a recently added “kitchen space” near the classrooms, with a sink and running water, so that the teachers can prepare the vitamin-fortified milk-type drink (I think it comes in powder form) that they serve the kids as a snack, along with cornflakes or bread (these kids aren’t necessarily lacking food at home, but are often lacking important vitamins and minerals in their everyday diets, so this is beneficial). I’m not sure who provides the funding for the snacks—whether it’s the Guatemalan government, foreign aid or a private donation.
The school also has an area outside the classrooms for recess and PE, with a small basketball court and a field for soccer, relay races and other activities. The teachers play games with the students at recess, which I thought was cool—one day I played a modified version of basketball with the 6th grade girls and Sonia, the school’s director and 6th grade teacher. The kids seem to respect her and at the same time feel very comfortable around her. In fact, overall I was struck by how casual the school was. The kids all seemed very happy, and there wasn’t a lot of drama or stress among the older kids or tantrums and fights among the younger kids. There was also much less structure than in US schools—I’d often see one or two of the younger kids who had escaped from their classroom running around outside, and the teachers didn’t seem too distraught about this.
The older kids tended to get their lessons by the teacher reading from the classroom’s single textbook on a particular subject or writing the information on a marker board at the front of the room, while the kids copied the info into their notebooks. I think this may have been a combination of the Guatemalan school system’s teaching style and the lack of resources in the school. The school also seemed to have a fair number of art projects tied into their lessons. It would have been interesting to have been able to be there for more than a week and really get to see how their education system works, though.
Since the children in Canton Xetuj often grow up under difficult circumstances, Secure Perspectives works with the local school to increase children’s opportunities through education, and also to set up health education programs and doctors’ visits to keep the children healthy (sometimes at their checkups, the kids have up to 5 kinds of parasites in their bodies). Since I’d told them I was interested in public health, they let me work with a few of the teachers to give quick nutrition and health lessons to the kids, using one of the school’s health handbooks. This was nice in theory, but a little awkward, since they just sort of handed me the book and stuck me in front of the classroom with a marker board and limited Spanish skills as my only tools…haha. But the teachers helped me out, so it ended up working out fine.
Sonia also let me look through a comprehensive health education program that a Secure Perspectives volunteer had researched and put together, which was really well done (although the school had not yet had a chance to implement it). The health education program included information on basic nutrition, dental hygiene, treating cuts and injuries, exercise, ways to prevent diseases through hygiene and living environment, drugs and alcohol, AIDS and STDs, properly preparing food and water, and how to use medical services (like visits to the doctor’s office). The lesson plans in the pocket included not only age-appropriate info for each grade, but also activities, games, art projects, cooking lessons, discussion topics and field trips to make it all very interactive, which I thought was cool. It was also interesting to me how these lessons for elementary school kids contained familiar info like how to brush your teeth and wash your hands, which was drilled into me since before I can remember, right next to exotic diseases you read about in travel guides when you’re older, like cholera, dengue fever, dysentery, Chagas Disease. I guess it’s all equally relevant in Guatemala.
So, all in all, volunteering at the school was really interesting, and the kids and teachers were great. The kids were all so friendly and my camera ended up being a big hit—I started off taking a few pictures of the kids, but pretty soon they were off snapping candid shots of their friends and siblings, doing all my photo work for me. The 6-year-olds got really excited when they figured out how to snap a few pictures of butts (including mine).
This is what happened when I let them play with the camera...they thought this was pretty much the funniest picture ever taken...
During my last week in Xela, I also spent a day at Primeros Pasos, a small nonprofit organization with a medical clinic that serves rural communities in the Palajunoj Valley, near Xela. The clinic targets medically underserved and uninformed women and children in rural communities, providing free dental care, medical checkups, and medications and vitamins to patients who would otherwise be unable to afford doctors’ visits and medical care. In addition to improving access to medical services, Primeros Pasos has a Healthy Schools education program in 10 primary schools in the area, in which volunteers schedule days to teach children in every class at every school basic health info on nutrition, dental hygiene and other ways to stay healthy. The clinic also does yearly checkups and lab testing for the children and provides medications as necessary—for example, when doctors diagnose children with parasites, volunteers deliver anti-parasite medications to the schools the following week.
Since the school year in Guatemala generally runs from January to October, their clinic had finished with its health education classes for the year, but I was still able to visit the clinic, talk to the coordinator, Jessica (who is half Guatemalan but grew up in Rhode Island) about their activities, and observe the doctors providing medical consultations to the kids whose mothers brought them in for treatment (mostly for things like stomach problems caused by malnutrition or parasites). I asked Jessica, the clinic coordinator, for a list of supplies the clinic needs—a lot of the medical supplies are cheaper to buy locally than in the US, but some supplies, like vitamins, are cheaper in the US. Since Primeros Pasos provides dental and medical checkups and treatment to about 4,000 children each year for around $5 per child, I was interested in how they make that happen—it’s partly the donations, partly through knowing how to spend the money they have effectively, and partly because they have dedicated volunteers, like health educators (mostly expats) and medical residents (mostly Guatemalans) who volunteer at the clinic.
Another cool thing about Xela having a lot of volunteer organizations is that they sometimes hold interesting charity events. During our first week in Xela, an organization called Quetzaltrekkers—whose volunteers lead hikes in and around Xela to raise money for Escuela de la Calle, a school for street children—held an arm-wrestling competition at a local bar to raise money for the school. Basically, to get into the bar, you could arm-wrestle one of the Quetzaltrekkers or pay 10 quetzals (a little over $1) if you were “too scared to arm wrestle.” If you chose to arm wrestle and won, you’d only pay 5Q to enter; if you lost, you paid 15Q. We drew names out of a hat, and I ended up going against a Danish guy. He pretended it was a close competition for a few seconds, so I laughed and told him he might as well get it over with. Needless to say, Kelly and I both lost, and paid our 15Q. Ross, on the other hand, somehow drew the name of one of the female Quetzaltrekkers, Justine…so Ross won and only had to pay 5Q to enter.
Once inside, we grabbed a table, got a few cheap Cuba Libres (rum and cokes), and then Kelly decided it was time to dance. When Ross and I pulled the “I need one more drink” card, Kelly set her sights on a dance instructor with good moves. Since she was a little shy about going up to him and asking him to dance, Ross pulled a middle school “my friend wants to dance with you” and pointed to Kelly. The guy said sure, send her over, but Kelly never went—it was almost as if Ross had made it AWKWARD or something.
Kelly continued trying to get us to dance, with lines like “When I get back from the bathroom, y’all are dancing!” When she came back from the bathroom, I tried to hide under the table, so she dragged Ross to his feet. Seeing a chair was in front of him, he said, “Oh, my path is blocked, I can’t….” But Ross eventually danced it up for a little while, and after that Kelly found some local Guatemalan cowboys to help her practice her dance moves.
We got to talk to the Quetzaltrekkers a little bit that night, and they seemed like really cool people—there were around 10 of them, from different countries. During the rest of our time in Xela, we frequently passed Justine, Ross’s arm-wrestling nemesis, on the street. Ross liked to wait until she passed and say under his breath, while pointing to his arm, “Hey Justine, watch out for this gun—safety’s off!”
Anyway, before we knew it, our month in Xela had flown by and it was time for Mama’s Guatemala visit.
To see more pictures:
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AZtGbhkzbNWWY&emid=sharshar&linkid=link5
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