Damas y...cebollas?

I´m realizing that I have yet to say much about the class aspect of this program. So here we are:

Yesterday (Tuesday on account of the national holiday on Monday) we began our third and final week here at Proyecto Linguistico Quetzaltenango. Friday is our ¨graduation¨ ceremony, which includes a traditional Guatemalan dinner, provided by the faculty, while the students are incharge of drinks.

Each weekday for the past two-plus weeks, classes have started at 8am, with a break from 10:30-11, and then continued til 1pm. Some days we have group activities (with just the CGE group) and some days there are cultural, political, or otherwise educational activities planned by the school. My teacher is great, though we´ve been having communication difficulties the last couple of days. (I think I´m to the point now where my Spanish is not SO simple that it can just act like English. It´s causing me troubles.) Right now I´m working on the subjunctive form which, I would bet, just caused all of you Spanish-speakers and -learners out there to give a big, fed-up groan. It certainly does for me. But all in all, I´m getting things decently.

The big challenge for me, linguistically, is to remember the things I learned one or two units ago, as new information gets packed into my not-so-spongy-anymore brain.

Next week, the group splits into two to head for a one-week stay at rural language schools. Classes there will be only 4 hours each day, as opposed to 5 here. There won´t be a set curriculum; we will simply decide, with our individual teachers, what things could use more time. One of the opportunities we´ll have in my group (in a PLQ-affiliated school in La Montaña) is a visit to a regular, non-cooperative coffee finca. I´m excited about this because we are going to be visiting a couple cooperative/fair trade growers and it will be good to have a basis for comparison.


Today, we visited a Mayan priestess (sacerdota) who told about the twenty major spirits in the Maya tradition and allowed us to participate in a ceremony. Interestingly, we were scheduled to meet with a husband and wife priest/-ess couple, but we were unable to. There was a change in the law regarding personal identification in Guatemala today, which caused some unrest on local levels. That in turn caused some highways to be cut off in various places, so out original presenters were stuck en route and had to turn around. [Just a note, we´re all more than fine here. We didn´t even know this had been happening until Joe told us why the plan had changed.]


In general, things here are going very well. We have been here almost a month -- at the end of this week, we will be one quarter done with the program, which is hard to believe! As always, I will try to keep updates coming as often as I can manage.

Until then...