Xelajú Part 2

Week #2 is done, and I have a patchy knowledge of irregular and reflexive verbs to show for it. I felt a lot more satisfied with my studies at the end of last week, but I think this is a function of what I was learning. For example, in the first week I learned to say the following:

“Hello, my name is Becky. I’m 26 years old. I would like that onion. How much does it cost? Thank you, have a nice day.”

And in the second week:

“The soldier distributes rice to the poor people. Then he goes to the bathroom and brushes his hair. He also forgives his sister.”

Sure, it’s nice to know the verb for distributing foodstuffs and supplies. But how often will I be distributing foodstuffs to poor people, and how often will I want to buy an onion? Additionally, when that wacky verb is among a list of hundreds of verbs that you’re supposed to eventually be in command of, it gets a bit overwhelming. But this is me griping and feeling a bit frustrated. I will admit that in that list of verbs there are the useful ones like “to want”, “to think”, “to know”, “to remember”, etc. And I’m starting to use them. About as elegantly as a two year-old, but communication is improving.

What else? Last Tuesday I went on a walk to the cemetery with my teacher. He showed me the tombs of a couple of dictators, as well as a bullet-hole-riddled part of the cemetery wall where the aforementioned dictators used to have people executed.



This photo was taken in the tomb- and statue-less half of the cemetery, where poor folk were buried. The volcano Santa Maria is in the background. It was quite peaceful.

I was planning on building stoves on Wednesday, but there isn’t any money to purchase materials for new ones at the moment and all of the half-finished stoves have been completed. So I studied and hung out with my host family instead.

On Thursday I helped out with the school dinner again. I baked brownies, which was no small feat given that the oven’s temperature dial is merely numbered 1 to 5. They turned out pretty tasty, although I don’t know how well they paired with the rest of the meal, which was chicken teriyaki and rice.

I went and saw Shrek 4 en español on Saturday. All I have to say about that movie is, “Meh”. What was interesting, however, was the straight-out-of-the-US food court in the mall the movie theater was in. There was a McDonald's, Taco Bell, Domino’s, Charlie’s Cajun Cookery, New China Express, Subway, Burger King, and a Pollo Campero. What you may not know is that the latter is a Guatemalan company that has since made it "big". Last I checked on their wiki page, they’re in seven different countries, have a headquarters in the US, and have recently partnered with Walmart. I haven’t seen this company in Denver yet, but I have a feeling I will shortly.

On Sunday I toured the coffee plantation "la Dicha" with some folks from school. It was really interesting. Here's a quick lesson: so, coffee grows on trees. The bean itself is inside a berry, which, when ripe, turns from green to yellow to red. For example:




The berries are harvested by hand around October/November in Guatemala, and taken to the processing buildings on the plantation, where the berries are sorted, skinned and depulped, fermented, divided by weight, then dried. After the beans have been dried they're either roasted then distributed, or distributed "green" and roasted elsewhere. As for the quality of coffee produced on these plantations, it turns out that there are twelve grades. The finest, biggest, most flavorful beans (grades 1-3) are the most expensive and are exported to Germany and Japan. Grades 4-12 are sent elsewhere, like the US. The low-end beans are usually what is used for flavored coffee. The worst coffee, the beans that came from the small, unripe, green beans in the above picture, are made into instant coffee, which is (very, very unfortunately) what the majority of Guatemalans drink.

After the plantation tour went on a hike to a secluded lake at the base of Santa Maria. It involved, among other things: 1. Walking across a way-wobbly bridge with questionably sound wooden planks;



2. crossing a river that was pleasantly warm from being heated by the volcano;



3. hiking through an African savannah-esque prairie; and



4. ending up at a secluded (also heated) lake at the base of Santa Maria.

Unfortunately, it is the rainy season (also known as winter) here, so the impending afternoon rain was obscuring Santa Maria. Regardless, the hike was really pleasant. Along the way we encountered lots of villagers carrying insanely heavy things with their heads. Like large logs. For example:



Other things they carried: Bushels of banana leaves. Several children. A couple of swaddled turkeys. Firewood. Bags of cement. I have a feeling this is why neck and back pain are common complaints in the clinic.

We also went ziplining that day, which was quite spiffy, but during this activity those in our party with any exposed skin lost a fair amount of blood to swarms of noseeums, also known as MotherFin' Bloodthirsty Gnats. Horrible.

More photos are posted on Flickr. For now I should get back to studying the past tense. I'll leave you with a photo of how we heat water down here:

Xela

I'm in Xela, and all's well:

-Spanish Program: Pop Wuj. I chose it for its well-developed medical Spanish program, but it turns out it is pretty swell in general. They do a ton of community outreach: they sponsor a daycare center in a nearby village, and send volunteers there daily; through scholarships they send close to a dozen poor children to elementary school; their medical clinic is darn close to free, and travels to the mountain villages every Wednesday; and they send students up to area villages to build stoves for families who previously cooked their food indoors over an open fire pit. Last Wednesday I went on such a stove-building trip. It was amazing to see how different living conditions are up in the mountains of Xela. Houses are a couple of tiny square rooms with cinder block walls, dirt floors and roofs made of corrugated plastic or tin. If you're well off, your bathroom is an outhouse next to a tiny plot of corn. If you're not, you don't have corn and your bathroom is your neighbor's tiny plot of corn. Chickens, dogs, and turkeys wander the streets, which are worse than any barely used logging road in Colorado that I've been down. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to get any good photos of the village, but I got a couple of the stove my group was working on. They're posted on Flickr.



That's my teacher Ulises next to our half-completed stove; he's about my age and is getting something like a masters in economics and business at the university. The stove he's standing next to is 2/3rds done. The base is a cinder block rectangle filled with dirt to hold heat, the upper layers are brick held together with concrete on the outside and clay on the inside. Next week we'll put a few more layers of brick on, then top it with a stone slab with a central metal plate where the "burners" are. Add a small metal chimney tube out the back, and voila! a cheap, safe, fuel-efficient wood-burning stove. I'll be back to build more for sure, but at the moment we're running low on funding to buy material for new stoves, and the funding comes entirely from donations from the States *nudge*. If any of you are interested in making a donation, it costs $125 for the materials to build one stove. Contact me if you're interested. For more information on all of Pop Wuj's community development projects, go here.

-Class: Great. Five hours of one-on-one instruction with Ulises Monday through Friday. My class is from 8am-1pm, which is usually spent learning crazy amounts of vocabulary and chatting in broken Spanish. Afternoons are typically spent studying and running errands around the city with friends.

-My Spanish: In one week of instruction (really only three days, since Monday morning was orientation, stove-building day was a bit of a wash, and I spent all of Thursday afternoon baking cookies instead of studying) my Spanish has progressed like, woah. It is still totally, utterly broken, but I can at least buy produce from street vendors without wanting to cry afterward, and can explain to my host mom what I'm going to be doing tomorrow. The latter is really amazing, because on Monday all I could basically say to her was a word salad of hola/si/no/gracias/por favor/me gusta/yo quiero/bueno/agua/hasta la vista, baby. Likewise, my vocabulary has gone from about 25 words to at least 300, although turning those words into sentences is still really, really dicey. But, gosh, all of this in three days! It makes me excited to think about how I'll be doing /six months/ from now.

-My host family: One mom (Lucrecia), five daughters (Cindy, Michelle, Jessica, Cathy, Mari), one dog (Luna), one cat (Sol), one grandma (haven't figured out her name yet), and one grandson (Rodrico). Michelle and Mari are studying to be doctors. Cindy is a lawyer, and Cathy's studying to be one. I'm not sure about Jessica, but she's in a Catholic high school. Luna is a puppy beagle, and likes to eat my earplugs. Sol is a tiny little white cat with a large wound on the back of her neck, courtesy of Luna, who hasn't quite figured out how to operate her mouth and paws. Grandma is the epitome of what I think a grandma should be: stout, long silver hair in a braid, kind eyes, leathery face, bad hips. She is always telling stories, but in a really thick accent, so I can only make out about one-in-fifty words. Unfortunately, when she introduced herself to me and started chatting, that one-in-fifty word I can catch was not her name. Whoops.

Dad is a trucker based somewhere in New Jersey. He sends money each month, which is the family's primary income. It sounds like he hasn't been able to come back home for six years or so.

I'll write more about my host family, the house, the food, Pop Wuj, and life in Guatemala in the next post. For now I'll leave you with a picture taken during the prep for dinner on Thursday. We cooked/baked for 70 folks, mostly from the Timmy Foundation, who donate medical supplies and send medical volunteers to help in our clinic. We made guacamole, pico de gallo, corn bread, chili, and cookies. Everything turned out great.

Antigua

In a nutshell, Antigua is quaint cobblestone streets, charming colonial buildings, and /gringos everywhere/. The city is sometimes faulted for these things (¨it isn't the 'real Guatemala'¨), but it worked out well for me: spending three relaxed days there was a good transition from home in the states to being a solo female traveler in a country where she doesn't speak the language(s).

I spent most of my time in Antigua wandering the streets with hostel insta-friends, reading in various coffee shops, establishing my beer preferences (Moza > Gallo), and trying my hand at purchasing things. And purchasing things, my friends, is scary, because it involves /speaking Spanish/.

So far my interactions with the locals have been either pleasant or utterly embarrassing, and whether an interaction falls into one category or the other is completely determined by how much Spanish I have to speak. "Pleasant" goes like this: I say "buenas tardes" and smile, random local returns the greeting and smiles, we pass each other a bit happier than a moment ago. "Utterly embarrassing" is any conversation consisting of more than ten words, and usually goes like this: I have a conversation prescripted in my head before I enter a shop. But inevitably (admittedly fewer than a dozen times at this point) my planned conversation is derailed when, being friendly or wanting additional specifications of my request, the shopkeeper/barista/baker/market vendor asks me another question. Which I usually don't understand at all. Hilarity ensues, and much gesturing and one- to two-word sentences later, both parties are a bit exhausted.



On the up side, I successfully bargained during my last market purchase in Antigua, getting an avocado for Q3 ($0.38) instead of Q4 ($0.50)--still gringo-priced, but there isn't much I can do about that.

Besides the above-mentioned activities, the only other noteworthy event was climbing Acatenango, one of Antigua's neighboring volcanoes. It was, to borrow one of Caleb's phrases, insanity sauce. I went through my hostel's affiliated company, OX (Outdoor Excursions), which is run by a bunch of super-fit expats. Ten clients, our guide Lisa, and two police escorts went. We left at 5:00am on Saturday and drove an hour into the hills on really hairy rural roads. Around 7:00 we got to the trailhead, a deep culvert between two hillside corn fields, and began climbing. The grade of the hike wasn't any more difficult than a Coloradan 13er, but the terrain made it tough--unstable volcanic sediment, which eroded away easily with rain, resulting in a deep fissure snaking along the trail with us. Several folks were really good at falling into it. Repeatedly.



After an hour of farmland hiking we entered ¨the cloud forest¨. Which, as far as I could tell, meant ¨foggy rainforest¨. We did two hours of switchback hiking through that, which actually was really pretty and enjoyable. Then, about three hours into our hike, just as we got above treeline, the insanity sauce started, i.e., it started raining. Basically, then this happened:
-It made the hike turn into something like walking up a mountain of wet cement;
-No one except for our guide and the cops brought rain pants, which made everyone completely soaked from waist down;
-The increased physical and mental demands of hike+rain broke the will of one of the hikers, so we had to carry her pack, and a bit later, pull her by a stick up the mountain;
-Once we got up to the false summit, everyone's soaked pants made everyone really f'in cold and some folks were starting to look hypothermic.

So, rather wisely, our guide recommended we head down rather than hike the additional hour up to the true summit in dense fog and rain. We still took the typical summit photo, but I think we only made it to 12,700-something feet, about 300 feet short of the top.

On the way down we opted for the steeper, quicker, "more adventurous" trail. And wow, it was amazing. I can best summarize it by saying: Fern Gully + buckets of rain + the scene in Honey I Shrunk the Kids where the kids go screaming down a mud/water chute made of grass and mud. Really cool.

* * *

I've since moved on from Antigua, and am now in Quetzaltenango, or Xela (SHAY-la), where I will be spending the majority of my time if all works out well. I'm staying with a host family, who are all very nice, but don't speak English. With me not speaking Spanish, things are a bit awkward at the moment, but our language barrier will work in my favor once I start picking up their language. And that begins in earnest tomorrow morning, when class starts.

That's all for now. I'll be sure to keep y'all posted. Thanks for reading! :)

Guatemala City

Good news: my plane didn't crash, and I wasn't served a drink with amoeba-infested ice cubes. The flight was quite pleasant, actually. I sat next to a Ms. Sabrina and Mr. Sebastian, aged 12 & 7, who were traveling to Guatemala for a coming-of-age party, a wedding, and a funeral. They chatted me up the whole flight. We talked about our favorite cartoon shows, watched an episode of "Good Luck, Charlie", and they gave me the scoop on the best candy shops in Antigua.



The landing was amazing. For those of you who've been anywhere considered "lush", Guatemala City is probably similar to what you remember: densely packed tin-roofed houses clinging in clusters to hillsides, rising directly out of equally dense green foliage. I was fully engrossed in observing this city planning, and then I looked toward the horizon and /holy sh*t/ there was a volcano there! A perfect, green cone of a volcano. Pacaya, to be exact. Never seen one of those before.

Not wanting to brave a chicken bus on my first day in the country, I opted to spend the night in a hostel adjacent to the airport. Bad decision: once you got inside the hostel you couldn't leave unless by taxi or shuttle. No strolling about in my zona allowed, especially for a solo gringo female. The repercussions of doing so were unclear, but they're probably why most of the hotels had security guards holding shotguns by their entrances. Luckily, I met a couple of interesting people in the hostel who helped pass the time.

Those interesting people were Gabriel and Pete. Gabriel is a far-too-well-traveled young Canuck who just finished a 3.5 month stay in Guatemala. His trip included the following tidbits: 8 weeks on a Mayan organic coffee plantation eating "typical poor Mayan" food, a resulting 4 days in the hospital for treatment of amoebic dysentery, and, after his intestines and liver recovered, 4 weeks of tutoring at Pop Wuj (the program I'm enrolled in) that increased his Spranish from nonexistent to comfortably conversational. The latter is promising to hear. The former, his unfortunate intestinal problems, were actually a boon for me: he gave me his leftover Cipro. Score!

Pete was helpful in that he taught me how to correctly pronounce "huevos" so as to communicate "eggs" and not "testicles". Important knowledge if you want to start your day off with a proper breakfast. He also helped me schedule a shuttle to Antigua in español, where I am now. And oh, what a different place from Guatemala City is Antigua!

Freudian slip?

Flight attendant: "Thank you for flying Spirit Airlines, America's first ultra-low class carrier."

Welcome!

I've created this blog to keep anyone who's interested up-to-date on what's going on in my life. I'm going to keep this first post short, since I have about a dozen things I still need to accomplish today, and I'm finding myself a bit bashful at the moment.

The big deal in my life at the moment is that I'm heading to Guatemala early tomorrow morning.

Why? In a nutshell, 1. to learn Spanish, 2. to work in a medical clinic, and 3. to do research. The desire to do 1 & 2 has been around since the beginning of medical school, but it was easily suppressed in favor of memorizing T-cell markers and pharmacokinetics. That changed in third year, which is spent almost entirely in hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices. There I encountered Spanish-speaking only patients all the time (in some rotations, it was one in three patients). Translator phones were usually available, but even the most streamlined interview took at least twice as long as one where the patient and I spoke the same language, and I always felt like I was missing out on the other 50% of an interview, where word choices, pauses, inflections, and subtleties can sometimes tell you more about the patient and their story than what is actually being said. It was highly frustrating.

So I got it in my head to go learn Spanish. I briefly thought about some kind of program in the States, but figured anything that wasn't immersion would end up being unsuccessful. After a bit of research, I found a program in Guatemala that was well-priced, well-developed, and had a strong medical Spanish program as well as an affiliated clinic: Pop Wuj in Quetzaltenango.

I'm going by myself, although a friend or two will be enrolling for a month sometime this Fall. "Class" begins on the 19th. Until then I plan on spending a few days in Antigua getting adjusted to being a gringo.

That's all for now. Feel free to pass this web address along to whomever you think would be interested. I plan on updating this page at least weekly, and will probably reply to comments more quickly than that. Thanks for reading :)