Guatemala: My First Week

Despite the record high winds, I made it out of Washington on Monday without incident and arrived in Guatemala on time. I was met at the airport by a driver from the school, who picked up me along with two other students who arrived at the same time, a nurse mid-wife from Chicago and her friend from Long Island, who were traveling together. The area around the airport is the sort of industrial area you might find in any large city (though with substantially more air pollution). On the way out of town, we passed by just about every American fast food restaurant that you can imagine, along with a local one from Guatemala, Pollo Campero, that you can now find in the D.C. area.

Antigua (full name: Antigua Guatemala, which means “Antique”), is about an hour away from Guatemala City. It was one of the original capitals of Guatemala (there have been several), abandoned in the late 1700’s following an earthquake. Though the Spanish government at the time prohibited people from staying, some people never left (especially the area native people, who simply moved in to the abandoned homes of the Spanish), and the city was eventually repopulated, it’s Colonial era buildings intact. In recent decades it has become a major Central American tourist destination, and more recently, the home to several dozen language schools.

Despite the tourist presence, Antigua has maintained its own character. In my first few hours I had a major feeling of déjà vu from my time as a high-school exchange student in Mexico. The look, the feel, the smell of the streets brought back a rush of emotions and memories of my first time being in a place that was so utterly other from my own home. Not just the language, but the people, the food, the customs are foreign. Also in the same way, I am here alone. Not that I am not surrounded by people, but like that first trip to another country (thirty years ago! can I really be that old?), I have no one with me to process the experience or debrief the day. To tell the truth, I’m not all the wild about it when Cheryl and the girls are gone for more than a couple of days. A month here alone is going to be a long time. (Somehow I imagine it is much easier for seventeen year olds to venture off to foreign lands than for forty-seven year olds.)

The family I am staying with could not be more welcoming. Tere works as the accountant at my language school. Her husband, Rony, works in the office of an American-owned poinsettia farm. (He explained that they grow seedlings, which they then prune and ship to the states, where they are grown to full size). Together they have three small children, Edwin 11, Maria 9, and Joel (pronounced Ho-el), 7. I have my own room—small, spartan, but adequate—and a bathroom which I shared this past week with another border, a twenty-nine year old police detective from Switzerland. The house has many rooms, and is typical of Latin America with a plain front facing the street, no windows, and then a central courtyard. They have space for several borders, and another woman from North Carolina just moved in this afternoon. Clearly, this is an important part of their family income.

We eat meals with the family except for Sundays, when we are on our own. They are very good natured. The children clearly are accustomed to students who are beginners in Spanish. They politely introduce themselves and speak slowly when they ask questions. Tere especially makes sure to ask us about our day, and spend time each evening in conversation. There really isn’t much of a common room in the house, so after dinner I usually retreat to my room to read. This week, at least, I have been so tired—the mental effort to speak Spanish all day is exhausting—that I have been in bed most nights before nine.

(Sleeping here reminds me of Cuba. Like my stay there in the seminary, there are two barking dogs right outside my window and somewhere in the distance a rooster that does not wait for dawn to crow. Somehow I imagine in most cities in Latin America there are barking dogs outside the window.)


So far the Probigua school has been great. I have a private tutor named Rosa Maria. I’m not entirely sure her level of education, but she seems to have been to university. She is up on current events, and knows a lot of Guatemalan history. She’s been teaching at the school for some time, and she is very good at what she does. We spend a great deal of the time in conversation, and then move for a few hours to grammar lessons. She is just as happy to tell me about her life as she is to ask about mine. She is Roman Catholic, and we have talked a lot about the church. This is the first formal Spanish instruction I have had since high school, and while I can get along pretty well in conversation, I find I don’t remember much of the grammatical rules. Yet after just four days of classes, I am astonished at how much is coming back. I don’t think I will be fluent after four weeks of classes, but I do think I will have mastered the basics. Already I am feeling much more comfortable switching between present tense, conditional, preterit, and subjunctive. The bigger challenge, really, is the vocabulary, but that too will come over time.

This first week I signed up for seven hours of classes a day. Next week I think I will scale back to six (maybe five!). After four or five hours my brain refuses to process more information. Yet not all the time has been spent in formal instruction. This week we had two field trips. The first was to a girls’ school that Probigua supports. Probigua stands for Proyecto Biblioteca Guatemala (Guatemalan Library Project). The founder, Rigoberto Zamora, is a former seminarian who started the school to support a children’s literacy project in the rural areas. The local school we visited is run by a convent and is a boarding school for indigenous girls from small villages throughout Guatemala. At the school they earn a teaching degree in order to go back home and teach. The day we were there they were doing a presentation of song and dance for a group of Swiss supporters who had donated computers for the school. The girls were each dressed in their native dress, which is quite beautiful, and they explained the symbolism of the various colors and designs.

On Friday we went to a local Macadamia plantation that is owned by an American and his Guatemalan wife. They grow trees that they then give to farmers in the rural areas to cultivate, providing a source of local income, helping to sustain the rural population and reforest farmland at the same time.

I am learning that this sort of social conscience is not at all rare in Guatemala, both among the Guatemalans themselves and American expatriates. Tuesday night I attended a lecture at a funky American-owned “Rainbow Café” by an former U. S. foreign service agents who retired to Guatemala seven years ago, and founded a family planning and educational project. (Guatemala has a very high birth rate, and it is not uncommon for a young Mayan woman to have five or six children by the time she is twenty-five). They also screen for cervical cancer—a major cause of death among Guatemalan women—and provide sex education for teenagers.

Today, Sunday, I met up with members of 4th Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Jack and Joy Houston, who have lived here in Antigua for about six years. Jack is a retired editor for The Chicago Tribune, Joy is an overall trouble maker (in the way only a sweet, sixty-something year old lady can be) who first came to Guatemala was an “accompanier” with the Presbyterian Church in 1996, just before the end of the Civil War. They are very involved with the ex-pat community, and helped broker a relationship between 4th Church and a Presbyterian school in one of the rural areas. (Pilgrims will know what I mean when I say they remind me very much of the Farriors.) Together we went to worship in the Cathedral, which was a very nice service, and packed with people of all ages and background. I couldn’t understand the entire sermon, but the priest was a very good preacher, and fun to watch and listen to.

Afterwards we toured the Cathedral ruins (worship is in a restored chapel, but the Cathedral itself was destroyed by the 1773 earthquake, and then damaged again in the 1976 earthquake).After lunch, we went to watch a procession in honor of the 350th anniversary of the death of Hermano Pedro, who was sort of like a Guatemalan Mother Theresa, just recently canonized as a saint by Pope John Paul II. In addition to the music and fire crackers, they had constructed “alfombras” in the road, which are decorative murals made of sawdust, sand, and flowers. (They are all over Antigua during Lent and Holy Week).

The also took me to a medical mission in a renovated church building (with a close association to Hermano Pedro) run by the Franciscans, but with doctors from all over the world, including many who come through a program organized by a Presbyterian Church in Houston. It is very impressive, and provides continuing care for several severely disabled children, along with remedial care and surgery. People come from the entire region for their care. I may go by while I am here to volunteer.

Yesterday was a pure day off. I went to a hotel where the school has a relationship and, for $15 a day, I could use the gym and swimming pool. It was a very nice way to spend the day! Tomorrow, back to school!