Spanish and People

With all of the fun excursions I’ve been taking the time to have while in Guatemala, I’ve received a few emails asking if I’ve even been succeeding in learning Spanish (which was, after all, my motive for going to Central America in the first place). Well, my Spanish learning went very well – largely, I believe, in thanks to the syntactical similarities of the Spanish language to French, and thanks to my acute auditory learning skills, honed from spending the last two years learning the orally communicated local languages of Togo. By the end of my first week, I was able to understand the gist of stories my host mom would tell me over meals. By the end of my second week I was able to respond to such stories, ask questions about them, and hold basic conversations with people in the streets. And by the end of my fourth week, I felt comfortable navigating the city on my own, and my school assessed my level of Spanish to be at the intermediate level. Personally I think that was a very generous estimation, but I certainly feel as if I gained a good grasp of the basics of the language – enough, at least, to allow me to continue to learn at a fairly rapid rate if I have continued exposure to the language. In this sense, I definitely feel as if the trip was a success. I have to say... it felt pretty good to be able to explain a whole customs form to a Spanish speaker who didn't speak a lick of English on the airplane back to the States!

I am also grateful for this trip for the very dear friends I made while on it. As I mentioned in a previous entry, one of my favorite parts of traveling is meeting people from all over the world. On this particular trip to Guatemala, my closest friends ended up being from countries including Guatemala, Germany, Belgium, England, Norway, and Canada. How neat to leave a foreign country with invitations to visit other ones!
My dear Spanish teacher, Amanda
My good friend from Germany, Sanne, with whom I went on most of my hikes
My friends from Belgium
My good friends from Norway - who I will be meeting up with in New York next week - and then maybe in Norway in January!
Me and my kids at the orphanage for children affected by cerebral palsy, where I volunteered
My host mom, Chiqui, and her granddaughter Sophie

In sum, I had a fantastic month. Now I just have to figure out when I can travel next! I’m thinking Haiti....

Easter week and Pacaya Volcano

When I first planned my trip to Guatemala, I chose to travel in the month of April because it was the last free month I had available to do so before starting school. Little did I know that April is the best possible month to be in Antigua – not just for its ideal weather at this time of year (sunny and warm and just before rainy season starts), but because Antigua is the center of the biggest Easter celebration in the country. Unlike the one-day celebrations that go on in the States, Easter is celebrated over the course of several weeks, most notably by the collective creation of alfombras and organization of street parades. Beginning in April, Antiguans are out on the cobblestone streets early on Sunday mornings creating elaborately designed “carpets” (or alfombras) made from colored sawdust or assembled flowers, plants, fruits and vegetables. People spend hours painstakingly laboring over the impeccable details of these ornate carpets, ultimately creating beautiful masterpieces only for them to be destroyed in minutes when the parades of purple clad men and women carrying outrageously heavy platforms bearing statues of Biblical figures involved in the story of Christ’s crucifixion trample over them. It is an extraordinarily big affair – the drama of it all being reinforced with the sound of blaring horns and deep bass drums that reverberate through the streets at all hours of the day and night. With Catholicism being the overwhelmingly dominant religious affiliation in the region, floods of people from abroad and neighboring countries including El Salvador and Honduras join Guatemalans to pack the streets of Antigua to watch these processions making movement through the streets nearly impossible. It was truly neat that I was coincidentally able to be around at the peak of this culturally unique celebration!












I have not been able to be home (much less even in the same country) to celebrate Easter Sunday with family for the last 3 years. But I always try to do something fun the day of to make up for the longing from that absence. This year I decided to climb Pacaya Volcano, which is one of Guatemala’s active volcanoes that erupted last May. Compared to Acetanango, this volcano was much easier to climb, taking only about an hour and a half to get to the top. Because it’s an active volcano, the terrain was slightly different as well; the summit was bereft of verdant life and made me feel like I was on the moon with the fog of the clouds drifting over its crusty, hardened lava rocks. We found some vents that opened up into the earth and which were emitting such hot blasts of air that we were able to roast marshmallows in the heat, and when we placed sticks across the vents, they ignited in flames. There was also a cave that hollowed into the belly of the volcano whose rock walls were hot to the touch and whose temperature resembled that of a sauna. The fog on the volcano cleared out a bit just at sunset enough to see Pacaya’s ever-smoking crater, and we descended the volcano in the dark under the stars.