First Week in Xela
After so much vacationing around, we decided we needed a little rest and headed west to Quetzaltenango, aka Xela, Guatemala's second biggest city. The original idea was for Matt to take more Spanish classes while I did some volunteer work with kids during the week. Weekends were going to be spent hiking volcanoes and taking in all the sights in the mountains around. We haven't had much luck turning these plans into reality, but we've had an interesting time here so far...
We spent our first week at Pop Wuj, the non-profit, project-oriented school we mentioned before. Matt got his classes, but it soon became clear that the day care center I was supposed to work at was about to close for Christmas break. So I spent the week helping wrap us the season for the projects, preparing the big Christmas party for all the kids who receive a scholarship from the school, helping the American nurses and doctors with their free medical clinic, putting together Christmas presents and food bags for kids and their families, etc.
Matt and I (with other students and teachers) also went to a remote village in the mountains to help build a stove for a family there. It was an interesting day out, complete with a crazy chicken bus ride on dusty curvy mountain roads, the famous 'chumpipe' (which will be featured in an future post) and an authentic country meal of beans, tamalitos, eggs cooked over an open fire in the house. The stove looked pretty good when it was finished, but we put a little too much sand in the cement mix, and some of us still fear that it will end up crumbling apart sooner rather than later. Useless gringos we remain!
Yet as the Christmas week drew near, it soon became clear that everything was slowly shutting down. And as the school drew American students pretty exclusively and English regularly replaced Spanish for everything, we decided to try our luck somewhere else the next week.
Still, it was a very interesting week in many ways, as it gave us a chance to see some good projects, meet some good people, and play with a lot of cute kids...
Enjoy the photos- a lot of cute kids and traditional clothing!
