well this is day four in el salvador and so far so good. classes have been a little on the abstract side, which means it's been over my head. all in all we've had good class discussions and lectures from my professor. the deal with liberation theology is basically that it looks at jesus as a subversive person and focuses more on the preferential option for the poor that should exist. this form of catholic theology really came to fruition out of the salvadoran civil war from 1980 - 1992. archbishop oscar romero was a huge icon for liberation theology and [View Full Entry]

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well i made it to el salvador! after my last blog i called my cousin marguerite to check in and explain how i'm doing. well from there she was gracious enough to extend an invitation to visit my other cousin Richard's Pacific house in Guatemala. Usually, the trip to Antigua from Xela shouldn't take that long, but the road construction made me about two hours late for meeting Marguerite and Tomas, which i felt terrible about, but they were great. So from there, we drove to Richard's house and met up with Richard, Ruth, their daughter Ruth Maria, her husband Javier, [View Full Entry]

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now, i'm convinced that i'm not going to remember everything that happened in the past week, but i'm going to do my best here: so wrapped up my studies at the language school here in Xela which was great. There was a graduation ceremony and all the other students and teachers showed up. The students were in charge of bringing the food while the staff would bring the drinks. Well, since I don't know how to cook anything, and luckily another friend of mine doesn't either, we went in on a massive pizza together which was a huge hit. After that [View Full Entry]

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so on friday i leave for Colomba where i will have probably limited internet access, so the next time i'll be able to post won't be until i'm in el salvador. It's crazy to think i'm 1/3 done with my semester abroad. My group and I took part in a Mayan Ceremony on tuesday which was fairly interesting. Later we found out what our Mayan symbols were. I'm not entirely sure what to make out of all of it. I was only able to understand bits and pieces but apparently my metal is silver, i have headaches daily and cramps once [View Full Entry]

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alright, considering my last blog attempt did not work out very well, i hope that this will all work out. so, last week we met with a businessman here in Xela who does development work with small businesses. he had a really interesting perspective on how guatemala needs development, but that often entails sacrificing culture and environmental rights, but so often those are the sacrifices that need to be made in order to have economic stability but more importantly economic growth. but he was specultating that within the next four years or so, guatemala will have the #1 tourism industry in [View Full Entry]

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well let's see, i believe the last time i posted i hadn't done the following: We all woke up at around 5:30 in the morning last saturday to hike up Chicobal, which is a volcano in Xela with a lake in the crater. the hike wasn't that bad. it started off being freezing (the mornings here are actually really cold), but once we were about half way up it started to warm up. There were some pretty great landscape shots. When we got to the lake there was an indigenous group singing along the shore, so we didn't want to venture [View Full Entry]

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Okay, let’s see what has happened so far. We left Guatemala City at around 8:30 on Wednesday and got in to Xela around 1:30 or so. We had lunch here and had a little bit of class with our country coordinator. We went out to the markets and split into groups to buy food, clothes, school supplies, and medical supplies with 25 quetzales each. Apparently 25 quetzales is the average daily income for rural Guatemalans. I’m not sure what that translates into for dollars, but I think it’s really really not much. So I was in the group that was to [View Full Entry]

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okay, so mom, maria olga and her husband jaime dropped me off at the location where i was meeting up with the rest of the students. Before dropping me off, we had lunch at Richard´s beautiful house with his sisters, my aunt olga, elaine, stephanie, and margarite´s husband thomas. everybody has been getting along really well and we seem to be meshing. so yesterday was really the first day of the program. it started off with a little bit of a tour of zone 1 where we were staying. Richard and everybody thought i was nuts for staying in zone 1 [View Full Entry]

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wow, okay, try to imagine the MOST beautiful wedding you could ever be apart of, and then multiply it by ten. First off, the hotel we were staying at, Casa Santo Domingo, was unreal. Antigua itself is beautiful, but the hotel was out of this world. There were parrots just hanging out and the flowers were beautiful and there were probably thousands of candles that were all lit; it was amazing. There ceremony was beautiful, i was able to get a shot of the altar but not too much beyond that due to the thousand person guest list. The reception was [View Full Entry]

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well I finally got packed and made it to guatemala! when I arrived with mom my cousins and aunt olga met us at the airport to pick us up and then we went back to Maria Olga's, one of my cousins, house. There we all ate with the kids of my cousins who are around my age. The weather is unreal; it is so beautiful here! everything has been amazing and being with my family has been totally great. After lunch my cousins who are my age and I went to a mall. Not exactly a culturally enriching opportunity, but it [View Full Entry]

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