all quiet on the western front

[update - photo - on the right is my abuela thelma, and on the left another abuela from over the road from our house, at the garden of medicinal plants and trees in San Jose.]

hi everyone

long time no blog.

not too much to say about last week after last blog, i bumbled around in belize, then bumbled back to guatemala at the weekend, to flores. had a drunken night out, but no poker or car crashes or fights etc. bought a nice new notebook for my spanish homework, and a new watch as i mysteriously lost mine during the drunkeness. of course got the same retro casio one, even cheaper here than it was originally.

so, am now in a little town called san jose, over the opposite side of lake peten itza to flores. i´m living with a family in a little blue house halfway up the steepest hill i´ve ever had the misfortune to live on (yes even more steep than haugh end and gipsy hill put together, it´s like scaling a mountain going home after school). thank god i don´t have to cycle it. the house i live in is very basic, people here are very poor. it has a tin roof, and 3/4 high walls, so when someone is snoring in the other side of the house you can hear it quite clearly. the kitchen is at the back, outside but with a sort of roof, an open wood fire (very bad for health), and properly outside is the toilet and shower. there are chickens and dogs and cats and pigs wandering around, along with the various children who live here. i can´t figure out properly the family structure here, basically there is abuela (grandma) thelma, and abuelo ipolito at the top of the family, and at the bottom there are 4 ninos, rosie who is 1, justino is 1.10, angelita is 4, and alessandro is 6 (7 tomorrow). somewhere in the middle are their parents, but the children seem to call everyone mama and papa, so it´s hard to know who belongs to who exactly. not that it seems to matter out here, it is all one big family really, there is massive emphasis on the family unit, and the community in guatemala. sometimes there are other children from other houses who may or may not be related to my family, i have given up trying to fully understand it.

so each day abuela makes me breakfast at 730 (today was porridge, other days i´ve had plantain, pancakes, pineapple, water melon etc), then i abseil down the hill to school. my teacher on the first 2 days was umberto. he yawned his way through the 4 hours each day, i´ve never seen such a poor attempt at someone being interested in what they are doing. another good lesson for me in what not to do for my TEFL course... it got quite tiresome, he would disappear off to make phone calls or just look at dogs or cats over the balcony, then tell me how tired he was, then tell me he´d had a new job offer (quel joy!), then talk at me for half an hour about guatemalan politics and corruption and environment. as you know, i am interested in all these things, and it´s all part of the learning experience, but i had lost interest in him as a teacher by then so couldn´t find it in me to listen properly. yesterday he left the lesson at 8ish (which is also the time the lesson starts), to go and make a phonecall, and at 8.30 i had a new teacher. turns out umberto was busy organising some other event in town, some visitors from southern guatemala, coming to plan the next year of activities of something or other, and he didn´t have to time to also be a teacher this week. which suited me totally fine. i´m not convinced he would ever find the time to be a teacher with that attitude but that´s not my place to say it.. my new teacher, marisol, is completely the opposite to umberto, she actually teaches me spanish! she´s training to be a lawyer too, and we have very interesting conversations about the situation in guatemala, and how things are in england etc etc. and lots of grammar and lots of homework, perfect combination.

each day classes finish at 12, then it´s home to abuela for lunch. i never eat with the family, i think they just eat whenever and wherever, but i always eat at the table, and she will sit with me. i try to make conversation, she is really sweet, but it´s very hard trying to make chit chat in spanish when you can´t really speak it and i don´t think she´d be too interested in hearing me conjugate verb tenses or explain what the subjunctive is used for. then at 2, there is some sort of activity. monday was a trip to local mayan ruins called motun (which in mayan means full of macaws - there aren´t actually any there any more due to factors i can´t remember). they should change it´s name to whatever in mayan means full of mosquitos. i´ve never seen such massive noisy mosquitos, i spent the whole time running away from them, abi you would have hated it. i got bitten on my ear, and it swelled up to 3 times its normal size. my ankle too. anyway other than that it was a nice little excursion. tuesday was a trip to their local garden which grows lots of medicinal plants and trees, from which they make shampoo. sadly we didn´t make any shampoo or anything, just had a guided tour of the plants. wednesday was a trip to the academy of mayan languages, up the road from our house. very interesting, there are around 24 varieties of mayan languages remaining, the most widely spoken of which is chichi. maya itza which is the variety in this area, has 17 people remaining who understand and speak it. and around 30 others who just understand it but don´t speak it. the academy is working to try to preserve this dying language by teaching it to children, and writing it down etc etc. as usual the spanish conquistadors are to blame for this situation, they banned mayan speaking when they invaded, and destroyed most of the literature of the mayans. today´s activity is cooking local food with our abuelas, and then eating it for dinner i suppose. let´s hope it´s nothing too complicated therefore..

after the afternoon activity, i have dinner with abuela at 6, then generally either read, do my homework or play with the kids, who are very cute. so far i´ve given them my butterfly stickers, pencil crayons, pack of cards, and taught them how to play snap. i hope that is enough as other than that it´ll have to be my ipod and camera that go next. they have a tv in my house, which i don´t understand, given the level of poverty, and one of the dads has a motorbike, which i also don´t understand. i felt quite guilty at first, just about the general situation here, and was worried they may resent us foreigners coming here with our money and taking our photos and all that, but i reflected lots about it and decided there isn´t anything per se i can do about it (not meant in a defeatist way), and at least i am contributing something to their upkeep by choosing to do my spanish course here rather than in other more touristy places where they have more money. the situation here is really crap to be honest, the government, whilst ´better´than they´ve had in the past, is still neither good nor bad, nothing is changing as such for the rural villages. there may be increasing tourism in the country, but that only affects the places that are directly seeing the tourists, ie antigua, lake atitlan, tikal, rio dulce. as for the rest of the country, the money doesn´t trickle down to them as you would hope it would. there is no real access to education past the age of 12 unless your family can afford it, and mostly they can´t, and even if they can there aren´t enough schools within walking distance anyway. usually at the age of 12 you just work in your house with your mama and abuela, cleaning, cooking, growing things, washing clothes, passing the time. girls often have children at the age of 12 and 13. there is loads of domestic violence (thankfully none that i´ve witnessed or heard of, but marisol says it´s a huge problem here), massive inequality between men and women, and since recently there is also the fast growing problem of AIDS, for which obviously there is no money to deal with, nor enough education about it. 49% of children are malnourished in guatemala. i had read about all these things (see earlier blog), so was aware of them as issues, but it is really sad to talk to marisol and others about it and see how upset she gets. she asked me what i thought of guatemala- i said it was interesting, and hard to understand, and there seems to be a lot of both positive and negative things here, but the people are so friendly and happy despite it all and it must be getting better. she said we seem happy, but we are not, how can we be, we have nothing, we can´t trust our government, nothing is improving, we have no opportunities and no money. it´s all really upsetting, and it´s impossible to justify why they should live like that and we live like we do. to not have access to education, and clean water is completely wrong, let alone not having any health service to speak of. it makes me fully realise how lucky and privileged i am in comparison, but this inevitably leads to massive guilt and sadness.

not wanting to end on a low, so here are some random comments / questions:
why don´t you ever actually see mosquitos biting you?
i discovered what leaf-cutter ants do with all those bits of leaves, they spend all summer cutting them up and transporting them to their house underground, and then spend all winter living off the strange pulp that the leaves turn into. what a life. even more bizarre than mine.
the mayan cross is yellow to the east for the sunrise, red to the west for the sunset, white to the north for the north star, and black to the south for the underworld, and green in the middle for the ceiba, which is their national tree. also there are those 4 colours of corn (yellow, red, white, black), and of people in the world.

that´s it for today. got to do my homework now. hope all is well, how is the recession coming along back home?