For our traditional weekend excursion last weekend, we went to Quetzaltenango, otherwise known as Xela (pronounced shay-la). It's Guatemala's second largest city and it's located in the highlands. This is the place to go to learn Spanish and volunteer. I think if I were to do something like this again, I would go there. There isn't too much to do as a tourist in the actual city of Xela, but the surrounding highland villages are really interesting to visit. On Saturday, Amanda got sick so I was flying sola. I went to a travel agency to see if I could join any tours, but they said there were none confirmed that day. So I had to do it on my own. I ended up hiking up a mountain in Xela with just me and a guide. ... read more

This week has been eye-opening. After being here for nearly a month, I'm only now really experiencing the two sides of life that I had heard about. The dichotomy between rich and poor is very evident here, as I talked about in my former blog. This week I had first-hand experiences with both sides. On Monday, we visited the Popol Vuh, a Mayan museum at a the fancy, private university here in the city. We had an interesting tour with the docent, and then afterward had a little pottery activity to practice making pottery like the Maya. During this time, I had an opportunity to speak more with our docent. It turns out that she had gone to high school in America during the early 1980s in Pennsylvania at a boarding school which cost $1,500 a ... read more

Yesterday afternoon was a sobering break from the constant celebration of last week. We started our afternoon activities at the tomb of Monsenor Girardi, who was a bishop in Guatemala who wrote a book entitled "Guatemala, never again" in which he listed all of the names of those who were murdered during the civil war and the people responsible. He was murdered two days later. He is looked upon in Guatemala as a martyr to peace. Last week we visited the human rights foundation that he created. The tomb was decorated with colored sand, flowers, and messages. This week is the 10 year anniversary of his death, so there are a lot sign and posters around about him. Next, we went to the city cemetery. It sounds very morbid, but you can really learn a lot ... read more

Wow, this has been quite a week and it's only Wednesday! This weekend we went to Antigua, the original capital of Guatemala. We left on Friday afternoon and took a bus from the city. It was quite an interesting experience! There was a guy who hung out of the open door as we were driving and shouted "Antigua, Antigua" as we went down the street (he's called a brocha, the same word as a paint brush). People would randomly get on where there were no bus stops, and we squeezed in there about 7 to a seat, where only 4 usually go. Other than that, it was pretty uneventful. Antigua is much different than the city...it is a beautiful colonial city only about the size of 12 blocks square. The best part was we could actually ... read more

These past two days have been pretty crazy! Yesterday I started at the school were I was assigned to teach with my partner, Amanda. The first day was supposed to just be observing the classes. We arrived and met with the Principal. She was very friendly and explained how their NGO, CAFNINA, functions. The school is actually only one of their programs. She of course explained all of this in pretty fast Spanish, but I caught the gist of it. After that, we went to our first class. This class is the older level. They are between 12-20 years old. We just sat in on their math lesson. Their teacher is very young and nice. The kids are pretty loud and a bit disruptive, but not in a disrespectful way, they just like teasing each other ... read more