Advertisement
Published: August 7th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Buenas dias!
Wow, well what a week it´s been!!
I have had spanish lessons every day from 8am to midday one to one and it´s intensive....verbs, vocab and more grammar for four hours. Then off to the market place where I pìck up the "chicken" bus to my school in the little town of Itzapa. ¨(I still haven´t worked out why they´re called chicken buses yet!) The school where I am teaching is in a little town called Itzapa which is 50 minutes away from the town where I´m staying (Antigua). The bus goes through lots of little towns picking up and dropping off people, it will stop anywhere and is often full with three to a seat. Once we arrive in Itzapa it´s a 10 minute walk to the school which consists of 6 classes. The children we are teaching come from indigenous families where there is often 6-10 children per family and hardly any money, many of the children are sent to work in the fields with their parents so do not go to normal school. In the project the children come for half a day and is probably the only education they will get as it is
not free in Guatemala.
I have "clase cuatro" and am teaching 7 to 10 year olds. In each lesson we teach some grammar, followed by some maths and then we often finish with some colouring, for most of the children who come to our school this is pretty the only time in the day that they get to be "children" as they are often sent out to work by their parents to help the family. Most of the families live in one room houses (huts) so living conditions are pretty cramped and uncomfortable. The kids are amazing though, so full of energy and life, they love skipping in break times and are all keen to learn. We teach in the morning and afternnon and have a different set of children for each session. During the day we give out bread at the beginning of the lesson and then after break time
some fruit to the children (for some of them this may be all they eat that day). At 4.30 we then take the bus back to Antigua. From Monday to Thursday last week I was in bed by 9pm because I was so tired, so much going on but
I´m really enjoying it.
My host family are really nice as well, they always talk to us over the meals and last week we had a conversation about music and my guatemalan dad put on a cd of typical guatemalan music with marimbas, it was brilliant and really made me feel welcome, every day when we come in from the schools they always ask how our day was, so my spanish is improving but fluent i won´t be when i come back but should be able to converse quite well.
The weather has been really nice so far, not too much rain and nice and warm and sunny.
This weekend just gone 7 of us volunteers went to Lake Atitlan. It was an activity filled weekend starting at 8am and a drive for 2 hours close to a town called Panajachel. We rode bicycles for 4 hours, after 2 hours we went on some really hard off road and just before the end I managed to fall straight over the handlebars onto both of my knees, it was pretty painful and they are now quite bruised but I survived. When we arrived in Panajachel we wandered around the market then
got the boat for 40 minutes to a remote hotel in the cliff side, it is called Casa del Mundo and I would highly recommend it. It is like a liitle paradise and like something out of a James Bond film ("man with the golden gun" springs to mind) You can only reach it by boat and has the most amazing view of the lake and volcanoes surrounding it. In the evening everyone eats together and the food was brilliant. There are hammocks everywhere so you can easily just while away the day or night relaxing.....not for us though....the next day we were on the lake by 9.30 in our kayaks making our way over to the little town of San Marcos, from there we hiked back to the hotel through remote villages, banana plantations, avocado trees, coffee plants, orange trees and amazing views of the lake, we arrived back at the hotel knackered at 3.30 and had lunch then made our way back to Panajachel by boat and had a drive back to Antigua, everyone was totally exhausted but all agreed that it was an amazing trip and that the lake was amazing, I would definitely like to try
and visit it again before I leave.
Today was good, had my spanish in the morning then off to Itzapa for school in the afternoon, next week I will be full time on the project which I am really looking forward to. It´s really tiring in the week working all day in the communities and having to converse in spanish all the time but it´s a beautiful country and the people are so friendly that it makes the challenge more enjoyable.
That´s about all for the moment, hope all is good with you all (in UK, Ireland and Australia!!)
Hope to hear from you soon
Lots of love
Sal (tu amiga en Guatemala) xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 12; qc: 49; dbt: 0.057s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb