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?

futbol and bolsas

I am so sore from playing futbol yesterday. I felt fine last night, but today . . . ugh. At least it was a lot of fun. My friend Sarah was sitting on the sidelines watching, and she later described this scene . . .

We were playing on a small field with artificial turf and a roof (nice, since it was raining, per usual), located in the middle of nowhere. The guy who drove us out there was the fattest Guatemalan I have seen, and he hung out on the bleachers on the other side of the fence with his tummy hanging out, laughing and laughing at everything that happened in the game. At one point, some cops dropped by and watched the game for awhile, too. Then, near the end of the game, a woman in traditional Mayan garb walked by (between the bleachers and the actual field) with like 3 cows. Not to mention that pigs and roosters were the background noise to the entire game!

Anyway, it was fun. Some of the boys (and one of the girls) were really good. I mostly just kicked wildly and tried to stay out of the way of the players on my team who were actually good. (We kicked the other team's ass.)

The boys threatened not to shower before our hippie-themed-party at school that night (so as to be fully in character), but thankfully they did. Hippie night was not as lame as I imagined, and the "adult" pinata that we got for the birthday kids was a blast. The rest of the night was fairly short lived. Went to the dance club, and then went to the after party, but apparently someone didn't pay off the right people, as the policia shut down the after party really early.

As a side note, everything in this country exists in bag-form. It's really weird. I guess the plastic to make bags is cheaper than the plastic to make bottles (or, at least, less), so stuff is in bags. For example, you can get bottled water . . . in bags. Some of the normal American brands, like Hellman's mayonaise, for example, also come in bags. Oh, and hotels have little ketchup-like packets of shampoo instead of bottles, which actually makes way more sense size-wise.