Dos Dias

Yesterday was a pretty average, non-eventful day. Other than going to see our Brazilian friend Paulo play at an open mic, and his friend singing T-Pain while playing a ukelele... not much eventful happened.

Today we did our usual routine of Hilary: Spanish, Me: Send emails, walk and talk to schools for two hours. But the director of Casasito, Alice, asked me yesterday if Hilary and I would go to the Los Patojos project today and conduct a survey for a Canadian elementary school program. So I agreed and Hilary translated the questions in her Spanish lessons, and then we went forth with our laptops and ventured to Jocotenango (the village where Los Patojos is) and did our thing. If you remember from earlier blogs, Los Patojos is crazy, so it was quite the interview session. We were interviewing kids from ages 6-9 ish about life in Guatemala so that the Canadian elementary school could teach their kids about Guatemalan life. We both remembered doing similar things in elementary school, so it was kind of fun! I'm not sure how accurate the survey was though... There were some 12 year old boys whispering answers and intimidating the younger ones, especially the girls, during their interviews.
It was a blast though, and Hilary actually took some pictures!




Hilary insisted on taking a Tuktuk back to Antigua


Me showing the movie Flyboys to the kids


And for some good affirmation of my decision not to try and compete with traffic on a motorcycle here... On my way to coffee this morning I ran into a crowd around an unconscious man being put on to a gurney and a crushed bike.

Any title suggestions?

Yesterday: After deciding on a Spanish school, Hilary started adjusting to Guatemalan speed... Work from 8-12 then eat and sleep for a couple hours, then do a little more work or food-prep from 2-5.
I received some very welcome news from two sources yesterday about the tour. One was from the ladies of Santiago Zamora, telling me that one of the Spanish schools I had talked to had gone on a tour last Friday. Also, the school Hilary is attending and which is the largest school in Antigua, after some negotiation, committed to doing at least 1 tour every other week. This was big news for both me and the ladies of Santiago Zamora.
I'm starting to understand the reason that I am needed here. The ladies are perfectly capable of running the tour all by themselves. The problem for them, as they told me, is that when they walk into a Spanish school in their native dress, they look no different than the random beggars who walk into doorways banging their cups on the counter. Whereas when I show up with my legal pad and pen, with a polished pitch and "American" clothes, the desk attendant doesn't shoo me out, they call the director. The sad part about this is that I understand this, don't see it changing, and have not a single idea of how to fix it for the long-term.
Right now I think I may ask the head lady of Santiago Zamora to start coming to the schools with me so that I can introduce her as my boss, and forge the relationship between her and the school so that when she walks in she is served a glass of cold water, not a dirty look and a "get out of here, beggar."
The problem with this is that directors come and go in many of the schools, or some other white person walks in 6 months later with shiny brochures and a polished pitch and the director switches to back to the for-profit tours. I can't figure out how to make it stick.

But overall, progress is being made!

A Friend

After a night of stressful flights, Hilary arrived this morning. She had to sit at the airport from 6am until 11 when my shuttle finally arrived. I apparently food poisoned myself though with the pizza I made (I think a risky looking bag of dry yeast for the dough is to blame). Anyways, I got about as much sleep as Hilary, and woke up puking and other sorts... So I took a shower and brought an empty yogurt container on to the shuttle and proceeded to ride with my head hanging out of the window for an hour while the driver picked other people up. After this ridiculous delay, we finally left Antigua. After several mysterious stops at random houses, we finally got to the airport and picked up Hilary. 2 more hours of mysterious stops followed this, and then finally we were Antigua-bound. I don't recommend that driver. What a nightmare.

But we made it and Hilary took some pictures at dinner because we were both too exhausted/distrustful of home cooking to stay in. So here we go!

A little clothing repair...

Doña Luisa's wonderful restaurant and bakery

Hilary Fighting off sleep deprivation!

"We'll take your picture if you take ours"

A success

I visited the Los Patojos project yesterday. (This is a project I was thinking about volunteering at during my spare time). In short, Los Patojos is the manifestation of the absence of Ritalin in the village of Jocotenango. I don't mean this in an "these kids should be sedated" sort of way. It is just where all of the kids who for some reason don't do, can't handle, or have been kicked out of regular schools go. The only regulation that seemed to be in place was "smoke on the street." They let the kids choose what they want to study. So in one room there is one kid trying his best to break holes in a drum set, in another, breakdancing, and so forth. My personal opinion was that this should be an after school program, not simply a school. As many of you might think, it is weird that I would be against a "choose for yourself" curriculum. The problem is that these kids sit for maybe 5 minutes and actually practice something. As I sat and observed, I witnessed so much impulsive behavior that I felt like screaming. A kid would go pet the dog, run to a guitar, strum it, run to the sink, get a drink, run to the patio, breakdance, run to a classroom with an active lesson, scream, and so on. Multiply this times the 150 kids squeezed into small dirty area, and it was chaos. I couldn't see the "superior learning" that I was being told existed in that environment compared to the traditional schools. Yes, I saw kids physically in a school who otherwise wouldn't have been, but they were not "in school." They were only seeing their impulsive and undisciplined behavior get positive reinforcement. Casasito is one of the only organizations who fund Los Patojos. The director reminds me very much of the main character in the movie recently nominated for an Oscar Exit Through the Gift Shop. In short, I have a project that I may design and give to them to use in their teen program, but I can't work there. I have listened to the rationale for this approach to education, I have witnessed it in-person, and I definitively have concluded that these children are not as well prepared to enter the globalizing world as their peers in San Mateo and Santiago Zamora are.

Today I made some good progress on the tour. I had a very formal (for Guatemalan standards) meeting with the owner of Christian Spanish Academy, and the director. This was my first big meeting here and I was nervous about deliberately showing up late, as is the custom here. David, the owner, commented on my Guatemalan timing, and was very pleased with it. The meeting went off very well, and they are planning on adding the tour to their schedule of activities. CSA alone will hopefully provide an extra Q2000 of income per month for the Santiago Zamora ladies, which is a huge amount for them and a definitive success for my project.

Hilary will be arriving tomorrow! Which means you all will finally get some pictures.

Day of decisions

So I had to decide on the motorcycle today. Those who are reading this and wish me to stay alive will probably be glad to hear that I decided against buying it. Apparently my haggling skills suck. We started the negotiations off at the guy's asking price of Q2500 (roughly $390) and somehow we ended up at a firm Q3000! How did that happen? I decided that the extra money just wasn't worth it. So I bought myself a consolation prize. A ukelele. It is a cheap piece of crud but maybe I can learn those Jack Johnson songs that just don't sound right on the piano.

The project goes well. If anybody ever wants information on Spanish schools in Antigua, I will have visited them all by the time I've left. The vast majority of them are simply the result of the following dinner conversation: "hey honey, we could park the car on the street during the day, paint 'spanish school' over the garage-door entrance, and start a Spanish school to earn some extra money."
Lesson of the day: a band's website may look as good as that of a famous band's, but in the end who do you want to hand over $50 to go see? The same can be said for Spanish schools.

There's this little kid in the central park who always tries to get me to let him shine my shoes. I would have given in by now, but my shoes are beat-up Sperry Top Siders... Can you even shine those? I mean, I have no doubt he can. He is my favorite person to talk to though. We discuss the philosophy of whether or not my shoes could possibly be shined. He insists they could and should. Obviously I have my doubts. But I have decided that my last day here I will let him give it a go. So much for the last two years of wear and tear that has made them look what I consider to be fashionable.

Mother's Day

It is Mother's Day here. Unfortunately one of the mothers in our San Mateo project woke up to a dead son. There is no doctor in San Mateo but hepatitis seems to be the suspect. I'm not sure what to say other than that this seems to be uncommon. Casasito is trying to pay for the siblings to see a doctor in Antigua as a preventative measure, but apparently the village members explained the "truth" about what vaccinations are to the mother; they explained that a vaccination is just a doctor injecting the disease they are trying to avoid into people. So the mother thinks that her options are to hope that her remaining children didn't become infected, or to guarantee their infection by getting them vaccinated.
I used to think that in international aid, keeping people alive with medicine was more important than sending them to school. That, however, is treating only the symptom. The illness that ails these villages is not something tangible medicine can treat. All you can hope for is that each generation will reject more of their parents' fallacies and keep learning to read and speak in a language that allows them to seek knowledge beyond that of their village's.
Meanwhile, the volunteer here who works at San Mateo is loading a miniature coffin on top of a crowded chicken bus in order to give to the mother of one of his students the ability to bury her son in more than the t-shirt he died in.

Climbing

I found the climbing gym. I will see you all again in a couple years.



Ahh, not really. But it turns out there is a climbing wall about three blocks from the volunteer house. One of the head volunteers from Brazil (Paulo) took me and my volunteer friend from Vermont (Jacob) to this rumored gym. It kind of felt like we were looking for some underground secret society meeting, walking around the dark back alleys looking for this indefinite location. Once we found it though I was quite astonished. What a wall! There was quite a group there, guys and gals climbing some pretty tough stuff. Of course they insisted that I lead the hardest, most exposed route there as my first climb. Porque no? So I gave it a shot. I made it all the way out on this overhanging ceiling that sticks out from the wall about 20 ft and my arms started to shake. Then I realized;
"Taylor, you just wandered into this random gym, picked up some frayed harness, put on some very used shoes that probably are giving you athletes foot, you are being belayed by a guy who's language you don't understand, and are about to fall with 40ft of air and a cement floor below you. What are you doing?" Then my stomach added it's two cents: "Why did you go eat a huge German meal and pint of beer before going climbing?" In all fairness, I didn't know I was going climbing... A long story short, I fell. But luckily everything worked out. But my stomach still isn't happy about the German food.

I also restrategized my approach to marketing the tour to Spanish schools today and talked to 5 schools, two of which were very promissing. One said that they might have too many people who would want to go! So that was a boost because I was Mr. cranky this morning because my original plan was failing so spectacularly miserably. (I walked for 4 hours in the hot sun chasing addresses that had changed or never existed).
In short, lesson of the day is, do things the Guatemalan way: eat a big lunch, not dinner and don't have a plan, things will work out if you let them find you. I don't think the shower is going to wander into my room presenting me with shampoo anytime soon though, so I'm going to stop typing and go to it.

Buenas noches