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Published: February 17th 2008
Friday afternoon was spent shopping in the large market a 15 minute walk from where we live. It´s huge and stocks almost everything you can imagine but takes a while to find your way around. The fruit and vegetables are excellent and very cheap - we bought a huge pineapple for around 50p and only paid about twice that for the rest of our veg to last us a few days. Hugh was feeling a little under the weather so collapsed in a heap on the sofa when we got back and I made some dinner. I think we were both asleep not long after 9pm!
The alarm went off at 5.30am the next morning as we had arranged a trip to a nearby dormant volcano which has a lake in the crater which is a sacred Mayan site. The bus took us to the house of a Mayan priest, Efraim, who lives at the foot of the volcano and it was still only 7am when we set off up through the fields behind his house. Many people in the small town grow corn, potatoes and other vegetables and to our surprise there were things growing on very steep slopes
quite a long way up. Efraim was very interesting and told us much about the area and his family.....all in Spanish but we think we understood most of it! After about an hour of climbing up through the fields we arrived at the entrance to the Park and from there it was about another hour up to the look out. In one direction we could see down into the crater where the lake is which was very beautiful. In the other direction there were hazy views to Santa Maria volcano, the one that is in the pictures taken from the roof of the school. This volcano is still very active though through a hole at the side, rather than at the top. This mini volcano, called Santiaguito, erupts regularly and, as informed by Efraim, punctually at 9am a huge plume of black smoke spewed out into the sky looking rather dramatic. I expect it would be spectacular close up.
From the crater edge we followed very steep steps down to the side of the lake where there are a number of Mayan altars regularly used for ceremonies. Efraim explained a few of these and told us some stories about
the lake. We also each threw a piece of corn into the lake and made a wish. Strangely while we were there there was an Evangelical group further round the lake who started to sing hymns with great gusto which echoed around the crater making it a rather odd experience. It is clearly used by other groups than the Mayas as a spiritual place but for the Mayas nature is the equivalent of God.
After spending some time around the lake we climbed back up the edge of the crater and then set off back to Efraim´s. He was aware that Hugh was not feeling on top form and part way down performed a kind of cleansing ceremony on us with branches from a bush which he used to hit us on our legs, arms and back. Hugh had seen this before in the small town near Antigua but it was quite strange to have it done to us. Of course I´m a big skeptic about these things but I didn´t feel as stiff as I expected the day following the walk so, who knows, maybe beating with a few twigs is the answer next time we go walking!
Having started early we were back home by early afternoon and had a quiet rest of the day. We had decided that Sunday was a rest day but we still walked up a hill outside the town to get great views. We acquired another dog for the walk (did I tell you about the one which followed us home and slept outside the house all night?) which caused mayhem when we came across other dogs in the neighbourhood but he insisted on going all the way up and back with us. Maybe I´ll have got over my fears by the time we get back?! We spent the afternoon working on our Spanish and suddenly the weekend was over and we were back at school again....
And what a week - it just seems to get busier! Spanish lessons every morning as previous weeks. We´d both got different teachers this week as the school believes it´s useful to have a different teaching style and get used to different accents. However, Hugh had Marivel, who I had the previous two weeks so she already knew some of his stories! I had Karen who is teaching part-time and studying Politics at
University part-time - an 8 year course with 2 years left. Many university students here only study part time as they need to work to pay for the course and books etc so it often takes many more years than at home to finish a course.
In one lesson I chatted with Karen about my job and she talked about the equivalent here. I was already aware of SAT (Superintendincia de Administracion Tributarias) as their office is only a couple of blocks from our apartment (and they have posters up because they are trying to recruit new staff......I wonder if they have any use for an investigator?!). Actually, as I had thought, it´s a pretty dangerous job in Guatemala as most money in the country is in the hands of drug traffickers and corrupt politicians so I imagine you choose your cases carefully. I had already noticed a shop near the apartment that had it´s doors locked and a big sign stuck over them saying that it was closed due to improprieties in its taxes and Karen explained that closing a business down for a period of time is the next step after fines - maybe we could try
this at home and they might answer our questions a bit more quickly! In particular I think that Customs roles are pretty scary, especially those at border posts. Karen told me she knows somebody at one border who is supposed to search all lorries going through to Mexico. However, she will sometimes get a call from her boss telling her that the next lorry is fine and does not need to be searched so she just has to let it through.......well, what would you do?
As for Spanish, I think I´ve reached the point where my speech has got slower than before because I´m now up to 13 tenses and I just have too many choices of verb conjugations to be able to get there quickly. The last couple of weekends we have bought the local Sunday paper and I´m pleased that I can now at least get the jist of most articles (even if I´d rather not as there are endless depressing stories about corruption and problems with gangs and drug trafficking!).
For volunteering this week I was helping with English lessons with the younger kids for 3 afternoons. I was working with Rachel who is from
Liverpool. She is studying Spanish, French and Italian at University and spent last summer at the school and has just returned for a few more months. Her Spanish is excellent and she deals with the kids very well making me feel a little inadequate. However, the age range and range of abilities is pretty wide so we ended up giving a lot of individual attention during the class and I think I was able to help quite a few children with what we were trying to do. But of course they´re just like kids anywhere, wanting attention and playing up given the opportunity. There´s a couple of real terrors who drive you mad but they´re also pretty bright and sometimes are probably just bored because we can´t give them enough to do while there are other less able kids in the class. We´ve learned from sitting with kids doing homework that the focus of attention in the main schools they attend is often on mundane and, in my opinion, fairly useless stuff. Many of them arrive with homework which involves copying individual letters or numbers in a way that can be used to do joined up writing. Or they have
to copy a page of text out of a book. But they don´t seem to have to understand it or be able to tell you anything about it afterwards.
Hugh has been helping update the school website with some photos this week as well as helping in art classes. In the first class they were making cards for Dia Del Cariño/St Valentines Day (different class from mine the week before) and at the end he was very touched when one of the girls gave him a card she had made.
H:
I don't feel the art classes went that well this week, although some of them certainly got something out of it. It's the same group of kids that I was previously helping with English (and Sarah had this week), but this time the person I was teaching with didn't have a greater command of Spanish than me, and after a while the kids began to take advantage. It was interesting that some of the kids who struggled with reading and writing did really well at the art projects.
I've also started updating the project's website
El Nahual . I had originally thought about asking people at John Lewis
for suggestions on how to improve the site, but when I looked at the code I discovered that it's a bit of a mess of frames, tables etc. so it's best to leave the structure well alone and just do what absolutely needs to be done.
Back to S:
And then there were the other activities - lecture about our Nahuals (like horoscopes but using the Mayan calendar) on Monday, group discussion about Mayan ruins on Tuesday and International lunch on Friday (with more curry from us....different but still veggie) though sadly salsa classes were cancelled. And that was just midday stuff, then there was group meeting Monday night, writing group Tuesday night for me, Hugh played football on Wednesday night and on Thursday we watched a very funny, though pretty crude, film, Knocked Up. In spare moments we prepared for classes, did Spanish homework, shopped for food, cooked and slept. By Friday night I was asleep by around 9pm despite very loud music from the bar across the road!
Hope everybody there has been having as fun and interesting a time as us. I know I keep asking but it would be great to hear from a few of you if you have a spare couple of minutes. Thanks to everybody who is keeping us in touch with things at home - we do still like to know what´s going on.
Lots of love
S + H xx
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jonathan
non-member comment
Hi Guys
I'm still here, still reading. I'm about to have a fortnight's leave though so may not be able to comment whilst I'm away. Itinerary is now Swansea --> London --> Cornwall --> Swansea (Marrakech just being too difficult to sort along with everything else that's going on at the moment). You're both looking and sounding good and I'm dead impressed that you'll come back from all this speaking Spanish. Keep up the good work. J x