Today is “El Dia Del Nino” in guatemala. Kids get the day off school, and their parents give them gifts. It's pretty cool. It's like (American) Christmas.
Anyway, my school supports something like 50 kids in various ways that enable them to receive an education. (I'm not really clear on the specifics; they're kids from outside the city who wouldn't go to school without this help. That's my understanding anyway.) Instead of the normal Friday night graduation party, we had a fiesta for the kids this afternoon. It was sort of weird, but I think they enjoyed it. We actually put on both a play and a dance for the kids. The dance was apparently some folk dance, but it's like the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I was in the play, where we did this story about the creation of man and woman and about how women have rights equal to men. (Oddly, the word for 'rights' (as in human or inalienable ones) is the same in Spanish as the word for 'right' (as in the opposite of left). I wonder why that is, or if it was simply imported from English?)
The school also fed all the kids hot dogs and cake. (They really like hot dogs in Guatemala, and they call them 'cheveres,' which is apparently different from Mexico.) They also gave all the kids little gift bags with candy. And socks. There were individual gifts, too, and extra gifts if they got up and recited a poem, did a dance, or sung a song. It was an interesting time.
As a side note, I don't have more pictures of Guatemalans in general and kids in specific because they are not too keen on having their pictures taken. It's not polite to do it without asking permission, particularly in rural areas or for indigenous people.
Other side note: “indigenous Guatemalans,” i.e., Mayans, look Asian. Except for the eyes, I guess. But I seriously thought this one guy was Vietnamese for two weeks. But no, he's just indigenous.
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