Aqua Magic y la Vida Tranquila

Adventures

The last couple of weeks have been fairly calm, that is to say, there haven't been any overnight trips and work at Safe Passage has gotten to be fairly routine. That said, I have had a few adventures. The major happening is that I went to Aqua Magic-- a beachfront waterpark a couple hours away in Puerto San Jose. Actually, I went on back-to-back Saturdays, because it so happened that my classes happened to be scheduled one weekend after the other. Classes go on this kind of field trip at the end of a week when they have been working with a support team (a group of volunteers who come just for a week), together with the volunteers as a reward for the kids and the culmination of the experience for the volunteers. Actually, there's a blogpost on the Safe Passage site describing the day's itinerary, so I'm not going to go into too much specific detail, but the day's a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun going down the slides with and teaching pool games to my kids. My younger class had gotten to take swimming lessons because of a United Way grant, but the older class missed out and I spent a lot of time trying to teach some basic buoyancy. The real highlight though was braving the waves-- most of my students had never seen the ocean before, and most of them were terrified of being swept out by the current, so as we went out to jump waves, my hands were squeezed white several times and all the kids alternated between screaming and laughing manically. I didn't bring my camera the first time (with the 8th graders) but I got some pictures the second time around (with the 5th graders):

My other excursion in the last couple of weeks was a 2 hour hike up to Earth Lodge--an ex-pat hostel/avocado farm in the mountains above Antigua. My friend and I walked up, chilled on the hammocks/couches for a while, breathed deeply, and a delicious nutritious lunch. In addition to the views from the top, it happened to be Corpus Christi in a couple of the villages we walked past, so we saw these beautiful paths of saw-dust designs leading to altars. When we were walking there, they were all still being put together, and by the time we left, they were all abandoned and messed up. Apparently, they are just used for a brief procession (we caught a brief glimpse of one). While sawdust designs and parades are all good and nice, the celebrations can get a bit annoying because they involve fairly constant firecrackers, which really don't sound any quieter even after hearing 30 in the course of 5 minutes.

I got a bigger taste of religious celebration right here in Antigua. Monday was Saint James's Day, and Santiago is the patron saint of Antigua, so there were quite the festivities. Unfortunately, I was at work and missed the bulk of the festivities, but what I caught was still quite cool. There were several parades through the course of the day, and we caught the very end--a high school drum and bugle corps proceeding a float bearing the cathedral's statue of Santiago, escorting the float into the cathedral. The night before, I saw a marimba ensemble, which consisted of 46 marimba players, 4 bassists, and 3 drummers all playing together. That night I joined a huge crowd in the park and watched Casa Blanca, a popular band that had several tremendous musicians. Most of their songs were jazz and salsa, but they closed out with two interesting choices-- "El Amor" by Tito El Bambino which is a popular ballad by a reggaeton artist, and then "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown. The former was nice, the latter was bizarre, due to the singer's... interesting variations in melody and pronunciation, but the song was saved by an amazing five minute drum solo.

I had one other adventure, which wasn't really an excursion. On the way back from Safe Passage, I got off the volunteer bus in front of a mall with the intention of going in, buying a ticket for the upcoming Wisin & Yandell show (they're a very good and extremely popular reggaeton group), and then catching a bus back to Antigua. However, due to construction and uninformed security guards, I ended up making my way back and forth and back again among three of Guatemala's major malls, trying to find the correct kiosk. Fortunately, the return journey was still and adventure but went a lot smoother-- I had no problem taking my first chicken bus all by myself (chicken buses are old school buses which are given crazy paint jobs and are filled up with guatemalans three to a seat, which really means two and a half people in each seat, with the people sitting on the aisle sides hanging out into the aisle and meeting up in the middle so that its 6 people wedged together all the way across).

Safe Passage

I now only have a week and a half left working at Safe Passage, and yet up until a week ago, I was somehow still convinced that my time here could still be responsibly rounded to a month (to be fair, I hadn't yet fully decided that my last week would be spent visiting Lake Atitlan, and 3 1/2 weeks is somewhat close to a month). Fortunately though, I haven't been stressing my departure so much, even as a lot of the volunteers who arrived with me have left in the last couple of weeks. As always, working with the kids has been a lot of progress, interspersed with periodic frustration. On the one hand, I feel like I'm getting closer to having real personal relationships with a lot of the kids (especially after going to the waterpark with them) and I also do feel like I'm getting some big academic concepts across, especially in math. On the other hand, as the whole things becomes more routine, I've noticed that the thrill of seeing a kid understand something new has dulled a little bit, and since my surroundings are no longer as new and exciting, my occasional bouts of boredom when there's not really anything to do have become even more boring. I'm pretty sure I'm already over-dissecting my experience, and that this isn't that interesting either, so I'm just going to share a couple of anecdotes/happenings:

• A couple of volunteers who were part of a medical support team (they provide one week of free open clinic for the community) decided they wanted to do an art project. As a result, instead of normal value-centered art class, my 5th graders made origami frogs and crowns. The challenge was then to make the frog jump into the crown. However, my kids' skill and enthusiasm brought the activity to a new level-- by the end of the class, many crowns were intricately colored, others had all kinds of origami embellishments, and a couple of boys had managed to jump their frogs into a stack of 6 crowns-- at least a couple of feet high.
• My 8th grade English class recently started a new project that involves inventing a futuristic product and making a pamphlet to advertise it. The idea is that it gets them to make complete sentences and to expand their vocabulary, especially with adjectives. Because Guatemalan schools do even more to stifle creativity than American ones, a lot of the kids seemed very lost at first when they were given the assignment to invent something, but the creative juices got flowing eventually to a certain degree. One group of boys just wanted to sell water, but market it with all kinds of silly English phrases they'd picked up from Reggaeton. They eventually decided to make it a bottomless bottle of water, after we made them realize what they had wasn't really an invention, much less futuristic.
• One group of three 5th grade boys who go to the same school had tests coming up, so I took them outside to help them study. The first thing we worked on was memorizing the names of the Chiefs and Conquistadores of Central America. I tried to help the kids come up with pneumonic devices, but it's a lot harder to do in not-my-native-language. The ones I came up with weren't great and were quite silly, but I think the boys all had the names down by the end, so I guess I got the job done.

Upcoming Events:

-Wisin y Yandel Concert (preceded by a minitour of Guatemala city)

-Scuba diving at Lake Atitlan

-Saying goodbye to everyone

-Coming home

Alternando Entre Viajes y Realidades

Camino Seguro and Realities

I've now been here a month, which means my time is just about half-up. This is sad to me, not because I expect to be disappointed by the lifestyle I'll go back to, nor because I feel like I'm not getting enough time here to do what I want to, but because it reminds me that I'm going to be leaving the kids who I've dedicated so much time to building a relationship with. I'm a little bit sad for me, just because I'll be losing these people I'm getting to care about, but mostly I'm finding it hard to deal with the fact that I will be abandoning them in a certain sense. Even more than teaching Algebra and English and how to do research online, what I really have been trying to get across to the kids is that there are people who care about them, people who will be devoted to listening to and dealing with their concerns, people they can trust. And yet, even though I've been up-front with them about how long I'm staying, I realize that any amount of that message I manage to get across is going to be tainted in their minds by the fact that I left.

Teaching has been tiring but rewarding, and the experience has been progressing nicely. After a week and a half, I knew all of my kids names and was able to get all of them to at the very least answer the questions I ask them. Since then, it's been steady progress in building relationships with them-- there are now a lot of kids who ask for my help before I offer it, a lot of them who say hi and bye to me without me prompting it, and a few kids who have shared some of the things that are troubling them from their lives. On top of that, I feel like I have made some progress with teaching the actual subject matter. Mostly I help kids with English and Math. English has been a little frustrating at times for a few reasons. First, I constantly have to overcome the notion that helping with homework means doing it for them. Second, the English the kids learn comes from disjointed curriculums and the teachers at their schools clearly don't speak English-- today I was helping one kid come up with questions in English, and he showed me the examples his teacher had given him, which included "Where live you?" among other...interesting sentences. Still, it's been satisfying to be able to give the kids some English lessons that they can feel more confident in, and seeing how that affects their enthusiasm for learning English. Math has been more consistently satisfying. The math I'm teaching is all the kind of Math I did back when I considered myself more of a math person, and it's really gratifying to be able to explain the conceptual underpinnings and see kids learn math by understanding it, rather than memorizing steps (although I can't pretend I don't also sometimes get frustrated and fall back on a rule I can't make sufficiently clear). I think that the class sizes here (40+ in any public school, and some private schools) keeps the kids from asking questions when they don't understand something, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that in each of my classes, all but a handful of kids approach math very cynically, expecting not to understand anything before they've even tried. It's really nice to give kids like that a good old fashioned "Aha! I've got it!" moment.

Travels

Northeastern Tour

Camino Seguro takes up 50 hours of my time in a normal week (including the twice-daiiy hour-long busrides) but being me, I've spent very little the rest of my time sedentary, as tired as I may be at some moments. Last week we had Thursday and Friday off, so I formed a group of 6 and made plans to take advantage of our time off by going on a whirlwind tour of Northeastern Guatemala. Wednesday night we caught an 8 hour overnight bus (we had seats, but some people were sitting on stools in the aisles) to Flores, a pretty island city in Lake Peten Itza. We jumped on a lancha (little motorboat) and spent the morning and afternoon touring the lake, first relaxing on a dock in lovely San Jose, then getting a tour (with a 10 year old and his 3 dogs as our guides) of a little peninsula with several archaelogical sites currently being dug up, 3 gorgeous lookout sites, and abundant wildlife (leafcutter ants, rattlesnake, etc.).

We then made our way to Tikal (Mayan ruins, once a city home to tens of thousands of people), where we slept briefly so that we could catch the sunrise tour. Unfortunately it was too cloudy to actually see the sun itself rise, but it was still stunning to see the forms of the temple emerge from the darkness of the jungle, with howler monkeys screaming and countless types of birds calling out. Walking around the ruins was also deeply impressive, and made all the more entertaining by our extraordinarily feisty, bitter, and self-assured tour guide. In addition to the stunning temples themselves, we got to see some pretty cool wildlife (including a scorpion in our room).

After Tikal, we found another beach dock to relax on for a bit in El Remate, before spending the rest of the day lazing around Flores, before we had to go catch our bus to Rio Dulce. Waiting for the bus was quite an experience. The agency we booked our buses through for some reason told us that every leg of our trip departed an hour before it really did, and wanted us there an hour before that time, which meant that twice (by the third leg, we'd caught on) we waited in a bus station for two hours. The bus station in Santa Elena (just across the bridge from Flores) was hot, dirty, and sketchy. Nothing particularly dramatic happened, but it as a truly surreal experience sitting there for two hours, all of us thoroughly exhausted.

Our bus arrived into Rio Dulce and we quickly made our way to our hostel and went straight to sleep. In the morning, I was the first one up, and was stunned to find the view that our $6 hostel afforded from its lovely dock/deck/patio/restaurant.

I took a stroll around Rio Dulce while some members of our party finished waking up, getting dressed, and eating. The town has a very interesting character. It has a bridge which I've been told is the largest in Central America, it has a very hectic main street, supposedly a culture leftover from when the town was the last stop before the daunting journey through Petén and up the Yucatan, and also a huge number of yachters because it is the safest port in the Western Caribbean during hurricane season. It was quite a contrast seeing 10-year-old street vendors and just a few hundred yards away, 10-year-olds on jet-skis pulling into a fancy American-style full-service marine gas station.

Anyway, we soon jumped on another Lancha, this time to do the stunning 2.5 hour ride down the Rio Dulce, all the way to Livingston where it dumps into the Caribbean. Words can't do the river justice. I'll try with pictures.

Livingston itself is quite a unique place. It can only be reached by boat, and is Guatemala's center of Garifuna culture. The Garifuna people are the primarily the descendants of West-Africans who lived freely on St. Vincent after their slave ship crashed there, but their genealogy and culture also draw from the indigenous peoples of the Carribean. Anyway, they were expelled by the British to Honduras, and have maintained their culture along the Caribbean coast of Central America. In Livingston, we stayed in a very lively, very fun, very Gringo $6 hostel called Casa de la Iguana, where we ran into 6 more Safe Passage volunteers. The hostel is the kind of place where you could hang out forever (a few do, and get paid a little bit for it), and we hung there before checking out Livingston's nightlife, which has a very lively dance scene for a town so small.

Next morning, we woke up, caught a boat to Puerto Barrios (which was United Fruit Company's main port, and is still a port for Chiquita Banana) , and from there caught a bus back to Antigua.

Playa El Tunco, El Salvador

The beaches in El Salvador are supposed to be a good bit nicer than those in Guatemala, so a friend convinced me to pony-up for a weekend trip to El Tunco, a surfers' haven beach town thats just 5 hours away. This trip was more about relaxing and enjoying so it requires a lot less detail. Some happenings while we were there:
tastiest fish I've ever had, which only cost me $3, having a table created for us on the street because a restaurant was full (and subsequently ending up with a 5 dog dog-fight under our table), some of the best ice cream/popsicles I've ever had, another fantastic cheap hostel, chilling on the beach, drinking a fresh $1 coconut on the beach, and taking a surf lesson (which was so much more exhausting than what I remembered).

Our trip back was also quite memorable, though not necessarily in a way I would have wanted it to be. Events included:
our driver stopping a number of times to pour water on his head, buy food, and give money to people for no apparent reason; our van hitting a bump and all of our luggage falling out the back; our driver telling me that he was sick and that the liquor he'd drank a several hours before hadn't sat well in his stomach (at this point we were almost back, and it was most certainly out of his system so there was nothing to be done), our driver and guide looking terrified as a car that had been following for some ways honked at us, and stopping for 10 minutes as we watched and waited for a tractor to turn upright a big truck that had flipped going around a bend.

Despite all that chaos, we made it back safe and sound, and ready to start another week of Camino Seguro.

I got a bunch of gushy reflection out at the beginning, and know that I still have a month to muse on everything Camino Seguro (especially since I think the bulk of my travelling is behind me), and this post is most certainly long enough already, but I don't want to end talking about travel because it is really kind of a bonus of being here, and isn't the central purpose of my trip. So, a quick anecdote. Many of the kids I work with in Camino Seguro come from rough situations, and while the kids will usually tell me if it's something at home or at school that's bothering them when they're upset, it's not often that specifics come out, so whenever a detail flashes out, it's a really strong reminder of what their reality is. The other day, one girl went to get seconds of lunch. I stayed with her, as did a two of her friends. As she was eating, her two friends were laughing, saying "She hasn't eaten all weekend! Her parents don't have any money! Her mom-- her mom looks like this!", they then proceeded to suck their cheeks in, to look as malnourished as they could. When I told this story to someone else for the first time, their response was, "Didn't you tell them to stop laughing?" I had to think for a moment, to consider whether I should have told them to stop. However, the thing is, this isn't one unfortunate episode, this is real life for these kids, and I think laughing with her friends helps the girl cope. She certainly wasn't bothered by it. It's crazy to imagine being at the point where you've been put in such an unfortunate situation so many times that laughing at it is more effective than fearing or resenting it. It's a different reality.