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.