I'm in Guatemala this month which has been my favorite country so far. We're staying in a quaint little Mayan town called Santo Domingo Xenacoj. Although most of the Mayans here can also speak Spanish, their native tongue is Kaqchikel, which is pronounced kinda like "catch-a-cow."
On a typical day this March, I wake up at about six AM and pray that our Guatemalan-sized toilet will flush my American-sized poop, and then get ready to go to a local school where we help cook (handmade!) tortillas, nutrient-enriched rice, and black beans for the students. After feeding the kids breakfast, we go to their classes where Professor Alessi and his colleagues teach English: numbers, colors, months of the year, days of the week, etc. One of our favorite methods has been to teach the colors, and then choose a student to come up to the board and draw an animal that is that color. Then we teach them the English name for that animal. Caterpillar in Spanish is "oruga." After teaching at the school, we come back to our living quarters where we eat lunch to some Josh Garrels music and then go out and visit with and pray with some of the widows in town. For dinner, we usually go to the market in the center of town where we can get fried chicken, rice, tortillas, beans, and a fried plantain dinner for about $2 USD. After dinner we come back to our dorms and have a fun but serious conversation as a team before going to bed on our flee infested mattresses.
Thankfully though, it's not always chicken and rice. For my birthday on March 6th, my team surprised me with what might have been the most appreciated chocolate cake these taste buds have ever come in contact with. We also stumbled across a burger joint which provides us with a second dinner option. One day, our host contact blessed us with his supernatural ability for cooking shrimp (barbeque shrimp, ranch shrimp, Italian shrimp, soy sauce shrimp… this is me drooling right now).
And sometimes instead of teaching, Professor Alessi likes to sneak up behind his students with a bucket full of water and perform surprise baptisms on them. Haha, on the Friday before Easter Holy Week, the principal of the school cancelled classes to celebrate with a "fiesta de agua" complete with water guns, inflatable swimming pools, water balloons, and even a couple firemen with their firetruck and water hose. We all got soaked, and the kids had a blast. Another unique day was when we went to a wheelchair factory owned by a missionary where we assembled wheelchairs. We used a rope and ladder to pass dozens of heavy wheelchair frames down from their storage shelves which must have been up to 50 feet high.
So that´s what I´ve been doing this month here in Guatemala, but I hope to post another blog soon describing how I´ve been feeling and what I´ve been learning. Thanks for joining me on this adventure, and remember to keep me up to date on yours!
