guatemala part 4: antigua . . . still
well, this will be a short one i guess, as i have all of five minutes in which to compose it, but i´ll do my best to capture the sentiments of the week.
we´ve been in school. yes, i just had my last class with diego and no i don´t speak spanish now. i do, however, try on a nightly basis to form a sentence using the subjunctive, so that´s something. mostly i´ve just learned fun things like in mayan communities it´s considered beautiful to be cross-eyed or to have a peanut head. who knew! and this from the greatest civilization ever to happen across this crazy world (according to diego, of course . . . the man loves los Mayas).
what else . . . oh yeah, we went to jocotenango and helped a woman clean loads and loads of mud out of her house. it was a very powerful experience and inappropriately, i can afford absolutely no time to talk about it, but there´s really something to shoveling heavy mud from a woman´s living room into wheelbarrows and finding boots and children´s toys and handing them to her, who is standing there with you scooping the same mud with a bowl. this is over a week after the storm initially hit guatemala.
anyway, we´re hoping to leave antigua tomorrow to head north to places that were more affected. there should be a volunteer opportunity for us in chimaltenango, and indubitably more in the lago de atitlan area before we head norther to todos santos where there is said to be a riot of a day of the dead celebration including day-long drunken horse races or something to that effect. look forward to THAT update.
we´ve been in school. yes, i just had my last class with diego and no i don´t speak spanish now. i do, however, try on a nightly basis to form a sentence using the subjunctive, so that´s something. mostly i´ve just learned fun things like in mayan communities it´s considered beautiful to be cross-eyed or to have a peanut head. who knew! and this from the greatest civilization ever to happen across this crazy world (according to diego, of course . . . the man loves los Mayas).
what else . . . oh yeah, we went to jocotenango and helped a woman clean loads and loads of mud out of her house. it was a very powerful experience and inappropriately, i can afford absolutely no time to talk about it, but there´s really something to shoveling heavy mud from a woman´s living room into wheelbarrows and finding boots and children´s toys and handing them to her, who is standing there with you scooping the same mud with a bowl. this is over a week after the storm initially hit guatemala.
anyway, we´re hoping to leave antigua tomorrow to head north to places that were more affected. there should be a volunteer opportunity for us in chimaltenango, and indubitably more in the lago de atitlan area before we head norther to todos santos where there is said to be a riot of a day of the dead celebration including day-long drunken horse races or something to that effect. look forward to THAT update.