me siento un poquita mala

I think I'm finally coming down with the cold/sore throat that has been going around the school for the last month. Crap. Perhaps I overdid it a bit this week.

On Monday, for my birthday, I ended up being out until almost 4 am. Oops. I did make it to school the next day, but a bit late. My teacher, who actually was with me for the whole night, was on time and in much better shape than I was, I think.

On Mondays, the activity at the school is usually to teach English to kids in public school. Except, it hadn't happened for various reasons for my first three weeks here. (Independence week; the week after independence week; rain). I wasn't going to sign up on Monday, but my teacher is in charge of the afternoon activities this week, and he made me. They needed at least four students, and they were short one. I didn't understand why they needed at least four students until I got there. It's because there's 4 classes of maybe 20 or 25 11- or 12-yr-old boys.* Basically, Jose handed me a sheet of paper with the family tree on it and told me to teach them the words for the family.

Talk about ridiculous. And intimidating. I thought it was going to be one-on-one tutoring, which I felt like I could do. But no. And this is effectively the equivalent of an inner-city school in America. The kids don't sit still--ever. My kids were jumping up and down, yelling at each other, making paper hats and paper airplanes, etc. I didn't succeed in getting them to write anything down. About the only thing I could do was get them to repeat the vocabulary words.

And, to make matters worse, I tried to combine it with a phrase about names, which they had theoretically learned before. So I wrote down the phrase 'what is his/her name?' and 'his/her name is ... ?' Then I tried to ask a couple students individually--which just freaked them out. I successfully asked one boy the name of his mother before totally messing up and asking this other boy the name of his father. And then he had to explain to me that he didn't know because he didn't have a father. Yup, I'm a terrible person.

*As a weird side note, the reason that the class was only boys is that in the public schools in Guatemala, the girls (or boys) go to school in the mornings and the boys (or girls) go to school in the afternoon. In this particular school, the girls are in the morning, so it's only boys in the afternoon. In the colegios (the private schools), they all go to school only in the morning--at least in the lower grades. The kid in my house is home for lunch every day (as are the older brothers who work).

Today we played futbol again. I think I did maybe slightly better this time. At least for the first half of the game. By the second half of the game I felt like I was about to collapse. It was really sunny and warm in the sun today, but the air was really cold and hurt my lungs. It's actually gotten colder the last few days. The padre of my family said it was 4 degrees the other morning, which I guess is about 40 degrees fahrenheit. I find it interesting that they only use the metric system here, EXCEPT for weight, which they do in pounds. Go figure.

I can't believe my time here is running out so frickin' quickly. I only have two weeks left after this one, and this one's almost done, too. It's insane. It's going by too quickly. I wish time would slow down so I didn't have to leave so soon. I'm also running out of traveling time, but the weather has actually been absolutely beautiful this week, so maybe I'll go somewhere this weekend?

invierno

So, as it turns out, it's winter here in Guatemala. Also known as the rainy season. I knew that before I came, but I didn't really understand. Before I left, I looked up the weather in guatemala, and it showed highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s. And then I looked at another site, which said that on average it reaches the 90s and the lows are in the 60s. The first one was probably about right, but the second one was definitely wrong,or maybe for Guatemala City. Anyway, I didn't really pack well. Basically, whenever you're in the shade or it's cloudy, you're cold, and whenever you're in the sun, it's pretty hot. Thus, you are effectively dressed wrong no matter what. I brought with me one jacket, one sweatshirt, and one sweater. This means I'm wearing either the jacket or the sweatshirt every day. Yo necessito comprar unos sueteres.

Of course, as you may have heard, this year the rainy season has been particularly bad. It's apparently been the rainiest season in about 70 years, and that means lots of landslides. The highway from, Antigua to Xela is mostly very nice; 2 lanes in each direction and nicely paved. Plus, the pueblos along the way all have a bridge over the highway, so you don't have to slow down in the pueblos. But, right now, the road is in terrible shape from all the landslides. They had done a good job of clearing it up enough that traffic could pass, though. In many places, only one side of the highway is passable, and the other side has piles of mud, often 10 or even 20 feet high. In one place, in the mountains, half the road was simply gone. Like, the earth underneath the road had collapsed, and the road went with it. It's really bad for the country, as it will take them very long to fix all of the damage.