Last Day in Xela

As I wait to lead my last experiment here in el Colegio Miguel Angel Asturias, I will add a few random pictures from this week.

The 1st graders learned about friction by making hovercrafts out of CDs, pop tops, and balloons. One kid made the discovery that you don't actually have to take the balloon off each time you want to inflate it!

The kindergarteners learned how to change the pitch of a rubber band by stretching it in different ways. Aside from the musical part of the experiment, wow they made a lot of noise!

Christie had her classes make signs about oral hygiene and post them around the school, my favorite being this cartoon.

Christie left yesterday for Antigua, and I will follow her this afternoon to meet up with her friend Jess, climb an active volcano, and then travel for another week. I'll be sad to leave this town, this school, and my host family, but all good thing must come to an end, right?

Ode to Chicken Buses

The main transportation in Guatemala is the Chicken Bus. It's quite the cultural phenomenon that I will investigate in this post.


First, you take an old U.S. school bus. Then you repaint it lots of bright colors. It's a must to add lots of chrome to the sides and the front. The more the better.




If possible, you should also paint on curtains to the front and side windows. Each bus must also be named after a beautiful woman, a famous saint, or a town, making sure each bus has its own identity.








As for the inside, well, first you have to add racks along the top to store everyone's stuff. You also need bars to hang on to for all the people who have to stand and want to stay relatively upright as you whip around the mountainous curves.





Once those structures are in place, you need to plaster pictures slogans on every available surface. The sides work great for slogans, while the front and the roof work the best for cartoons, pictures, and Bible verses.




You then need to supplement the pictures with 3-D objects, the most popular being tassles and fringe, or stuffed animals. You can never have too much.





Now the bus is ready to be filled. And again, you can never have too many people. First, each seat must hold 3 adults. If you don't squeeze in tightly enough, they will shout back and ask you to collaborate with them and sit pegadito (literally, stuck together). Then you add at lease one child to the lap of someone in each seat. That makes 4. Once the seats are filled, people must fill in the aisle space, or the small space in between knees. Even after there is physically no more space, the bus attendants will request you to keep moving back and filling in, and the people oblige.

You may be wondering what happens when someone needs to get off. Good question. Everyone squeezes and maneuvers, and you jump off the back if you're closer to the back than the front. If you had stuff on top, the bus guy will climb up on top while the bus is still moving and then hurl it off the side (or slide it down the ramp they set up on the side of the bus) for you.





The last great feature of the chicken bus are the vendors. Vendors of everything imaginable come on and shout their speech, hoping you will be suckered into buying their product. We've seen candies, stickers, pencils, chicken tortillas, drinks, plantain chips, eyedrops, stencils, CDs, parasite pills, and Vitamin B pills twice! You also see lots of preachers who come on, preaching and seeking funds for their church. This one old man didn't seem too interested in money, but he sure did preach for the entire ride, even as people moved to available seats to avoid him!





Don't get me wrong. There are alternatives to the chicken bus. The most common is the microbus. While it avoids all the flair and the vendors, you don't fare much better in getting your own seat.








There is also the ride-on-top-of-any-vehicle option, as chosen by this man. He actually looks pretty comfortable!






For long-distance trips on which you have lots of luggage and you want to have your own seat, you can pay significantly more and ride in a pullman bus. Here you may even be lucky to get seat covers with pockets, handy for holding your drink!



But at the end of the day, we all know we love the chicken bus the best. After all, where else will you actually see chickens in the laps of ladies as you bounce along? Where else will you hear the blaring banda music accompanied by the constant chirping of a young chick? Nowhere but Guatemalan Chicken Buses.

A little bit of everything

Here are some of the pictures I've taken in the past few days:

In school, the 2nd graders learned about electricity and circuits by trying to light three light bulbs with a battery and some wire. Lessons I learned:

Kids can't share.

Kids who can't share cry.

Karla will never be a 2nd grade teacher!

Christie is wrapping it up with all her kids and their oral hygiene lessons. Having handed out toothbrushes and toothpastes, she now regularly brushes with them after snack-time. It really is impressive how the teachers have kept up the teeth-brushing every day! So for all those who wondered whatever happened to our 100+ pounds of toothpaste and brushes, they made it into the hands of kids and teachers alike, and will continue to do so for at least another year!

Because another volunteer left today, the school had a farewell ceremony for the three of us yesterday. They first sang the school anthem, Queremos Paz y Libertad (we want peace and liberty). Then each grade presented a song or a speech, along with cards for each of us. It was so cute! At the end, I got to give hugs to over 200 kids, which took awhile, but was endearing!

Yesterday at lunch time, we had every single member of our family present at the table! I don't think this has happened since I got here, so I took a picture. Literally one minute later, the doorbell rang and ended the perfect moment! Clockwise you see me, then a new girl Sarah, then Julio the

long-term resident from the capitol (2 years!), Carlos and his recently-arrived girlfriend Sarah, then Jenny and Quique. That's right, we now have a Karla, a Carlo, and 2 Sarahs! Yikes! Bikes! Oh, and that's Tofi, our dog who eats more bread at every meal than I do!

At lastly, after 13 hours or work, I finished my scarf! It was a little anti-climactic and I just wanted to be done, so I think the quality dwindled at the end. It always amazes me the rollercoaster of emotions as one undertakes a project. First excitement, then disappointment, then boredom and apathy, and lastly that feel-good feeling of knowing you made something all by yourself from start to finish!

And one last picture with Carlita because she's just so cute and actually smiling in this one!

Weaving, part 2 of many

Due to the exam schedule that the students have this week (unbeknownst to me), I was able to go weave this afternoon for 3 hours. After a few rough-looking rows, I got the hang of it and it doesn't look too bad, if I do say so myself! I made plenty of progress, but it pales in comparison to how much I have left!

As you can see, it is a back-strap loom where you sit on the strap that connects to the poles of the loom. The monotony was broken up by eating birthday cake for my teacher's son and by watching Karlita run around and wreak havoc on all the yarn and poles laying about! I can't wait to go back tomorrow!

Market Day

Sunday brought us to the lovely town of Chichicastenango, home of the country's biggest market. For almost three hours we wandered the crowded aisles, row after row of stall after stall of clothing, jewelry, wooden masks and instruments, journals and postcards, tortillas and chicken. We bought plenty of gifts for ourselves and for others, and we left when our money ran out!

The church steps were crowded with vendors of candles, flowers, chickens, and who knows what else! The aisles were crowded with Guatemalans and foreigners alike, carrying all sorts of great stuff like this basket full of chickens!

A Day at the Beach

Yet again, Christie and I decided not to go out dancing on Friday night, which turned out great for us both. She went to bed at 8 p.m. and I played scrabble with Julio, Carlo and Jenny. Due to spanish being our second languages, Carlo and I were granted use of a dictionary, allowing us to take 1st and 2nd place, respectively.

Saturday morning we left for the beach around 9 a.m. We were told that it was 2.5 hours away, giving us plenty of tanning time (or shading time, as Christie chose). False, not true. We arrived at the beach after 4 long hours of chicken bus rides, ready for some waves. Amazingly, it wasn't touristy at all, to the extent that I don't think some of the people on the beach had ever seen a pasty white person before! At least, the adolescent boys hadn't, and they oh-so-casually meandered to where I had previously been tanning in private. Christie gave them a good tongue-whipping and I tanned in relative peace for the remainder of the hour I spent soaking in the sun.

Before I burned, I decided to call it a day and we ate an unimpressive, though expensive, lunch at a beachfront comedor. I had to cover the head and tail fins of my fish so Christie could eat her chicken in peace!

After a total of 3 hours in the beach town of Tulate, we boarded a bus back to Xela. Though it went insanely fast on the roads, to the extent that it flew over the speedbumps, it then stopped for half an hour in two separate towns, bringing our daily travel time to 8.5 hours. Some might say 3 hours on the beach isn't worth it, but it was--if not for the glorious sun, then just to get to see a town well off the beaten gringo path!

Weaving class!

After my morning classes today I headed off to Trama Textiles, a women's cooperative that provides fair wages for their weavings and their teaching. I had gone once to just check out the processes, and I loved it so much that I decided I MUST weave a scarf on a back-strap loom! They say it takes about 10 hours, and I'm not realy sure I have that much time during the week before 5 p.m. but I will MAKE time because it's so cool!

I began the process with debanando, or combining two threads into one ball of yarn. The individual threads are too thin, and this process also allows you to combine colors if you wish. You put the skeins of thread on these spinning wooden contraptions and wind away! It took me 1.5 hours just to debanar 4 colors of string, and I took a break to take a picture with Carlita, the cute little snot-nosed girl running about the shop. She's the daughter of Oralia, who is one of my teachers.

I then moved on to urdir the thread around some wooden pegs, making a certain criss-cross pattern that you need to put it on the loom. For one scarf you need 180 threads (each one is really doubled), and this process took me another hour. I actually went pretty fast because I got a rhythm down, thanks to all my sweatshop work!


I then began the tedious process of amarrando el telar, or setting up the loom. You first put each end on a wooden peg and hang it like a hammock from one end and the other end you strap around your butt. On one end you have to separate each individual thread and group them into groups of 20. Then you do the same to the other end, only not grouping them in groups of 20. THEN, you have to prepart the via dura, or the strong string. In this picture (that is of my teacher working on another girl's scarf), you can see that she pulls the strong orange nylon thread between each string, alternating up and down in your hand, and then she puts it on the small wooden pole. I didn't take pictures of myself doing this step because I was concentrating too hard! I didn't have the right tension at first, so I had to start this step over, but in the end Oralia said it would work and I felt good about having done it myself instead of having it done for me!

All this took 4.5 hours and they had to close. So technically I haven't actually eevn learned how to weave yet, but I will on Tuesday and then I'll only have 7-8 hours to go!

Evening Entertainment

Although most nights this week I have been busy working on the puzzle I started (assuming erroneously that others would help), Wednesday night we went out for dinner at an Indian restaurant for a farewell to Kellie, one of my housemates. Julio couldn't make it, but Jenny, Quique, and Carlo (goofing off with Quique's glasses) were all there, so it was a lovely and tasty family dinner!

After walking back in the rain, Carlo, Kellie and I headed for a Karaoke bar two blocks from our house. Amazingly, they had one of my favorite songs, ¿Qué Hago Yo? that I must say, I say wonderfully. I also sang my favorite salsa song ever--La Vida es un Carnaval--that earned me a fan club from the gentlemen from one table over! We danced a bit, but we were so tired by midnight that we left before I could see if I won the prize. Luckily for me it was a bottle of rum that I wouldn't have taken anyway!

After such an eventful evening, Thursday night I worked on the puzzle and went to bed at 9 p.m.!

School Pictures

Here are just a few of the pics I've taken here at the Colegio Miguel Ángel Asturias.

The 4th-6th graders are each working on their own projects in class, so I have been much too overwhelmed with helping each of them to take pictures! With the preschool through 3rd graders, I have them doing the same project as a class, so here are a few highlights.

The kids in Kinder (preschool) performed paper chromatography on black markers. Unfortunately, after asking them to explain what they had done, they said the colors came out after writing on magic paper. No! It's not magic, it's science!

The Prepa (kindergarden) kids studied the transport of water and air in plants.

The third graders mapped the different tastes on the tongue. The bitter got great facial reactions!

The 2nd graders crushing corn flakes to later pull out the iron with a magnet. Note the effective use of the elbow. I also saw a few boys using their foreheads to crush the cereal!

Lastly, these are the enthusiastic 4th graders hoping everyone votes for their class candidate Laura. Each grade has selected and promoted one candidate to be the presidente o presidenta of the school. The current 5th grade class won the past two years, so there's quite the reputation to upkeep. This photo was at the recent rally where each candidate presented their party, slogan, and platform. It was so great to see young students politically active!

Lucky Transportation

Early on Sunday morning Chrisite and I set off for the market town of Momostenango with the hopes of finding shawls and socks and other good woolen clothing they are said to have. We found none, but we thoroughly enjoyed the pine-forest mountain scenery on the way and a typical breakfast once we arrived. We also enjoyed seeing the rickety carnival rides (this pic's for my grandma!) and the festively-decorated church.

Defeated, we headed for a place sure to cheer us up--las Fuentes Georginas, natural hot springs up in the mountains east of Xela. They were incredibly hot and steamy--just what we needed to relax and savor the day. The best part was the transportation to and from:

Normally you take a bus from Xela (75 cents) to the road that leads to the springs, and then you pay a pickup truck to take you the 8 km up (should be about $4.50). We missed the stop from the bus, so we had to walk back down the road a bit. Along the way, one guy offered to take us all the way for $7, which we flatly refused. We then asked some other truck (with two girls in the back) if they would mind taking us to where the desired road branches off. They were actually going to the hotsprings, too, so they took us all the way and refused to take our money!

Once we were sufficiently heated and relaxed, we headed back to the parking lot to find a pickup to take us back to the main road. Instead, we found that same family just getting into the car! After trying to explain profusely that we really weren't following them, we hopped in and got a ride all the way back to Xela!! The oldest daughter is in medical school there, and they were all there to visit her. What are the odds of them going to the same town as us?!? Slim to none, but pretty cool!