Se Empieza-- Llego y Empiezo a Acostumbrarme

This post is quite long, but hey-- EVERYTHING is new at this point so there's a lot to say. Hopefully I'll be able to be more concise in the future. All the same, I'm writing more to document things than for whatever audience there may be, so I don't feel too bad. I guess the bottom line is, don't worry if you want to skim.

Sunday night, only an hour or so after my plane was supposed to have landed, I arrived in Guatemala. My plane had been delayed for mechanical difficulties in Dallas but I wasn't too upset about as it let me spend more time with the massage machines in the Brookstone. The whole travelling process went smoothly, though I was a touch frightened about a half hour before we landed because we flew right through the middle of a very electrically active thunderstorm. Anyway, I arrived and found my ride without any problem. Oscar, who was very friendly, laughed with me for a lot of the hour long ride as he told stories of awkward rides with nervous gringas who didn't speak any spanish. Soon, we pulled up to my homestay, a nice little red house in the northeast corner of town. I met the father, Hector who welcomed me, showed me my room, explained the shower, and politely left me to sleep. This house has two rooms for students, but until Sunday I'm the only guest. My room is cozy and comfortable except for the mattress, which is very worn down in the middle and has springs that stick through the top (for the first few nights I covered them with socks so they wouldnt poke me through the sheets, but I just flipped the mattress and put the bad that had been under it on top of it, so hopefully tonight I'll be more comfortable). Regardless, I've had no problem sleeping so far, so I can't complain too much.

For my first few days, the morning routine was the same-- wake up at 6:30, at 7 go downstairs and eat breakfast with Sandra, the mother. The family doesn't have the same meal schedule as the one that seems to be standard for homestays here, (7, 1, and 7), but someone (almost always Sandra) keeps the student company during every meal. Sandra is a very good cook, extremely nice, and tremendously talkitive-- a good combination of traits for someone who cooks your meals then sustains a conversation with you despite the fact that your mouth is full most of the time. Sandra is also very positive and optimistic-- the two sentences I've heard the most from her definitely have to be "Tu español es perfecto!" and "Te va a gustar!" ("Your Spanish is perfect!" and "You're going to like it!". Her positivity has definitely been nice these past few days as I'm still settling in and trying to make friends and figure out what to be doing and all that jazz. Anyway, after breakfast I head down to Escuela de Español la Unión where I've been taking classes. I have one-on-one lessons with Walter, who's in his late 20s, really nice, and a very good teacher. Mostly I we just ask each other questions about whatever, and he corrects me and teaches me vocabulary as we go. I'm glad I took the class because in addition to tidying up my grammar, I now have my own dictionary of Guatemalan slang. Probably even more importantly, I have mostly mastered conjugating verbs for vos, which is the even less formal version of you that is used here but is neither used in Chile nor taught in the US, but especially important to know as a guy here because if one guy addresses another as tú rather thanvosorusted, it is generally interpreted as meaning that you are romantically interested in them, which is not a message I want to be sending (of course people give foreigners some slack, but especially if I'm going to be working with kids, I'd rather avoid the issue). Classes go from 8 AM to 12 or 1 PM, with nice 30 minute break in the middle to mingle with other students. After class I walk 5 blocks to get home for lunch, then from there see how I can spend the day.

Each day La Unión (the Spanish school) has some activity that they offer their students. Monday they offered a free salsa and merengue class, so I went and actually had fun. Monday I also went for a walk with the intention of getting a little lost to explore the town, but I got a little more lost than I intended to and got home more than two hours later. Tuesday I didn't do whatever La Unión's activity was because I went on a walking tour of Antigua with the volunteer coordinator for Camino Seguro (my volunteer program) and a few of the other volunteers who are starting this week. The volunteers all seem cool people, and we decided to all go out that night to a one bar people had recommended to us, which is probably the most gringo bar in town (while there's nothing wrong with the place being full of foreigners, I found it ridiculous that they served Bacardi rum instead of one of the many Guatemalan rums that are supposed to be really good). Later in the evening, I joined some people from the Spanish school at the dancehall next door to the bar. For an hour or so they just played music for salsa, and there were some really good (intimidating) salsa dancers (I still attempted to pretend salsa competence once). After a while though, they started playing reggaeton and other music that you can dance more freely to and I had a good time. Wednesday after lunch, I went with some folk from the la Unión up to the top of Cerro de la Cruz, which has a great view of the whole of Antigua, with the behemoth that is Volcán de Agua as a backdrop.

Today instead of going to class I went into the capital, commonly referred to as Guate for a tour of Camino Seguro's facilities. I'm not going to say too much about it, because I'm sure I'll have a good bit to say once I'm more familiar with it, but it's really impressive how much they've built up given that they were founded just twelve years ago by one twenty-something year old. They have all kinds of educational and self-betterment programs for people who work collecting garbage in Central America's largest dump, which is pretty much right in the middle of the city.

The back 1/4 of the garbage dump-- a crowd gathers to sort through the latest delivery of trash

A stark contrast: a playground in the camino seguro compound, and just across the wall, shantytown built on landfill, and just past that the landfill (you can see a yellow truck)

So far I've had a pretty easy time settling in, but I'm eager to get started because while Antigua is really nice, really pretty, and full of old churches (both restored and in ruins), the fact that it's so full of tourists makes me uncomfortable for some reason--I feel like the presence of so many hapless Gringos makes locals assume at a glance that I can't hold a conversation in Spanish and that I'm just swinging through to see the sights. Maybe I was a bit spoiled by my time in Curicó, where I could blend in with a lot more ease, and there were hardly any foreigners to begin with. More than that, I want to feel like I'm doing more with my time, especially since I really believe in Camino Seguro (although they still haven't told me how exactly I'll be helping). 10 hour days will be exhausting but I think they'll be really rewarding. Plus, I keep hearing how great the community of volunteers is, and I'd like to have some friends I can call to hang out with in the evenings. So, I'm very much looking forward to what's ahead-- a tentative trip with a few people from La Unión to the underwater caves at Semuc Champey this weekend, then starting at Camino Seguro on Monday.

I know that this post is already a little bit absurdly long, but since it seemed like the most popular feature of my Chile blog, I'm going to do it any how. Without further ado:

three things that are different here

1. There are tons and tons of cars with heavily tinted windows. I suspect this might have to do with the presence of drug money, which people say is the reason for all of the nice cars around here.

2. Tortillas here are about six inches in diameter, and are doughier than those you find in the US, and are served with basically everything.

3. There's a lot to say about all of the ways in which money is different here-- its done in Quetzales (about 7.8 to a dollar), the same amount of it buys a lot more of just about everything except technology, but what I find most extreme is the difference in salaries. Examples: My Spanish teacher, who has certification and is one of the better teachers in one of the better schools, makes less than $3 an hour. My host-mother who is a certified physical therapist, only gets $12 for each 1.5 hour therapy session (if you consider all of the paperwork she has to do because she works independently, she probably gets just about what would be minimum wage in the US). The minimum wage here is just under a dollar an hour, and there are a lot of people who don't even make that, both because the law isn't well-enforced, and because so many people work in the informal economy-- including those Camino Seguro serves who collect recyclables in the dump, and many of the people I see in the street, trying to sell their wares to tourists. Even with cheaper prices here, that's often not enough to afford even just the things that Americas consider the barest of necessities.

I'm already rethinking my priorities, already re-evaluating the value of basic opportunity, already feeling like my perspective has started to change significantly.