Blogs from Quetzaltenango, Western Highlands, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 7

Yea so week one of the program was a blast. Lets see, I arrived in guatemala city last friday, and that saturday all the other kids in the program arrived. Everyone is super cool and have a great outlook on life. So I'm living with a host family and realizing how little spanish i know, but they are super nice and understanding. My host family consist of a mom and a grandma or mi madre y mi abuela. The mom will speak really slow and act things out for me but the grandma i can't understand... but I'm pretty sure she digs my haircut ha thats all I've gotten after a week of conversing with her. But yea, I'm still adjusting to the extremely small food portions and the lack of protein, very different from having ... read more

All right, so my location is not technically in Xela. In reality, I'm chilling in the in my parents' verdant backyard in warm, sunny, dry-to-the-point-of-crackling-skin California, and not in cool, atmospheric, clamorous Xela, but since I ended my last entry on a negative note (whining about the rain, boo-hoo), I felt it was important to expound on a place where I spent so much time and which I enjoyed so very much. So now, what I don't miss and do miss about Xela. I know lists aren't the most interesting format for writing, but for those of us who are, let's say, organizationally-challenged, they are handy-dandy. Forgive me. Things I don't miss about Xela: 1. The scary-ass transportation. Tourists who live on the fancy Pullman buses will scoff this off as paranoida, but I'm not talking ... read more

Dias 23, 24, 25, y 26 As hard as it is to believe, the halfway point has come and gone already! This week has been off to a little bit of a rough start… Monday went okay, I had Nuevos Horizontes in the morning and Stephen and I decided to split our days so we can maximize our time with the doctor. I went by myself and shadowed Dr Tere the whole time. We saw many babies nad children with ear infections, flu, and the common cold. When I first arrived, she handed me a pamphlet she for from the Health Center that has information on how to feed babies under 2 years of age. She had me look it over for a few minutes, then brought me out to the group of women who were ... read more

I´ve decided to change the blog, no more day-to-day descriptions, just general thing we´ve been up to. Right Xela. A bit of a nothing town really, not much going on and not particularly beautiful. On our only full day in Xela we decided to get a bus up to a village in the clouds called Fuertes Georginas. As we climbed up the green mountains we couldn´t see more than a few metres in front of the bus and parts of the road had been washed away through landslides. The hot spring baths at Fuertes were really nice, it was surreal being in the bath and also being on a mountain in the clouds. It was great to relax and take in the forested valley views as the clouds lifted. We returned to Xela very chilled out ... read more

Macayla and I arrived in Quetzaltenango Sunday night in the pouring rain and the power was out in zone 1. We had just spent a grueling seven hours on two cram-packed buses to get here and on top of that we missed our stop and went on to the next town. When we asked the bus driver if we had made it to our destination, he said we had passed our stop. He immediately stopped the bus, put our packs on the side of the road and left. Funny now, not so much then. Standing in the pouring rain on the side of the road in a country that you do not speak the language was upsetting. A taxi eventually stopped and we headed to a hostel that we had no reservations to stay. Another traveler ... read more