Xela

June 15th, 2006
Xela, Quetzaltenango Guatemala

So like I said yesterday I had written this very detailed post about my 9 days in Xela and it was destroyed by a power outage. Those of you who aren't my parents might find this post a little boring but I'm going to try and keep with the interesting stuff while still giving you a chance to understand what my life is like here.

I arrived in Xela Monday June 5th, after what turned out to be a very long but not too bad of a ride from Coban, via Guatemala City. "Guate" as the capital is called, is a dirty sprawling mess and I understand why the guidebooks tell people to skip it. The ride to Xela was uphill for 4 hours, literally driving through clouds in the mountains, and I had decided to take a chicken bus- not because it's cheaper but because I would have had to wait 3 hours in Guate for a motorcoach, and belive me after traveling several hundred miles in a matter of days I was not about to wait around.

So my gig in Xela is like this: I pay $135 a week for Spanish School and that includes 5 hours each weekday of private tutoring in a program crafted to my needs (we're emphasising medical terms), a homestay, 3 meals a day, use of my señora's washing machine, and a whole host of activities during the week such as movies, speakers, and even Salsa dance lessons... yes I now can salsa (read: needs practice)

So I got to school around 6pm and they called my señora and she came to school and we walked back to the house. Home, as it turns out is only 2 minutes walk from school, just around the corner and 1.5 blocks, which is great. Let me just take a minute to describe "home" here in Xela for the folks back at my real home:

THE HOUSE
My house is shaped like a big square, and it's probably 30' by 30' give or take 5 feet. The living area of the house is shaped like a backwards C around a courtyard which has no roof and is open to the sky. You enter in an iron gate and make a right and there is a sheltered hallway which is open to the air but not exposed to rain. At the first corner you have my room, straight ahead, and a living room to the right, off of which is a small bedroom separated by a curtain. My room is very big, probably 10' by 10' with a queen bed. As you make the left and continue down the hall there's a second, half size room adjacent to mine, and an equal sized kitchen next, in the far corner of the house. As you hook your last left down the third leg of the C, you see two small stalls on the right. The first houses the shower and the second the bathroom. On your left is the sink. Between them is a basin where clothes are often washed by hand, or large platters may be cleaned. Finally on your right is one large bedroom. In the courtyard there is a washing machine under a small roof, and there are lines running every which way on which clothes are hung to dry.

THE INHABITANTS
When I moved into the house there were 9 people living there plus me. Here are the actors:

Ben´s host family:
Neida- the señora (call her Neida, not señora)
Jesus- the papa (call him Juan)
Neida- the 20yo pregnant daughter (she doesn't live in the house, but with her husband elsewhere)
Jesus- the 19yo son (he is also Juan)
Miguel- the 10yo son (aka Miguel Angél, aka mi amigito, aka mi hermanito)

The in-laws (don't ask me which side)
?- the mom, I don't know her name
?- the dad, I don't know his name either
Cindy- the 4yo daughter, and the most charming and cute little kid you could ever imagine
el bebe- I don't know how old it is, but it cries a lot

The in laws all sleep together in the final room. Jesus Jr. sleeps in the small room next to mine. I have the biggest room in the house, at least equal to the in law suite. Neida and Jesus Sr. share a room with Miguel, but in separate beds, which is off of the living room.

Two dogs are unhappily inhabiting the house as well. They are Coki the 3yo cocker spaniel, and Perla the 5yo mutt. They are both on 5 feet of chain, which they are rarely let off of, and they spend about 20 hours a day- literally- crying or barking or otherwise begging for attention/food/water, all of which they rarely get. It's truly a sad thing and I try to take care of them when I can. Their water bowls are often bone dry and I don't think they like their steady diet of corn tamales anymore than I do.

This is the one paragraph of my blog where I'm going to sound like a brat. I'm not complaining at all because believe me, I've been staying in a lot worse hostels and stuff for the last couple of weeks, but I have two issues with the place I live. First, it's filthy. When I moved in there were about 100 flies in the kitchen, and I try to put it out of my mind that I see flies all over the dog's poo in the courtyard, and I also see flies all over everything we touch and eat. Yesterday they hung a glue trap in the kitchen, and I counted more than 50 flies on one side of it this morning. There are now less than 20 flies living in the house. All 10 inhabitants share one bathroom, sink, and shower. You cannot flush anything but excrement down the toilet in Xela, so we all make a daily contribution to the wastebasket next to the toilet. To Neida's credit i've never seen paper on the floor, but I swear that basket is always full. Also to Neida's credit I see her sweep and mop all the time, like nearly every day... it's gotta be really hard to clean up after 10 people and keep things tidy. I'm getting past all of that with pepto bismol for my stomach and a pair of house slippers I bought here. The second complaint is that my house is a MAD HOUSE!!!! 10 people- two under the age of 5, three televisions, and two very very unhappy puppies makes for a LOT of noise. Throw in loud neighbors who blast American music, roosters and strays which crow and bark constantly, and I can really never sleep through the nite. I keep earplugs by the bed and I use them a lot. I really never get any peace at home.

That's the end of the rant though. The family I have is so sweet and nice and charming that I wouldn't choose to live anywhere else. They explain things to me, help me learn spanish by teaching and correcting me, they don't talk over me, and they seem to have really embraced me as part of the family. They offer me advice (my house mom recently gave me tips for picking up Guatemalan women. It is a huge compliment to be called a "mango"), we share beers together, and a lot of laughs. Me and the Juans talk about futbol constantly, and watch a lot of it too. Miguel and I are very tight. He has muscular dystrophy and he falls down a lot. He has a hard time walking and an even harder time standing up once he's sitting. He needs help getting off the floor, couch, up from the dinner table, and sometimes off of the toilet as well. He's like my little brother and I've taken a lot of time to get to know him and I genuinely miss him when I'm not at home. I taught he and Cindy how to play cards and we play war and hide and go seek nearly every day.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Here's a short list of things that differ between "home" here and my real home in Atlanta. I often find my thoughts at the dinner table drifting and wondering what these people would think if they got a chance to come see where I live in the States. I have to believe they'd be blown away.

Hot water- we have it at my house, and that's a luxury. Many of my friends here don't have it. How it works- all of the water lines in the house have only one knob on the faucet because all of the water coming into the house is cold. However, surrounding the shower head is a little box which heats the water on its way out towards my body. It runs on electricity, clearly, as the two wires dangle freely over my head and deliver a hearty shock when touched with wet hands. I'm a head taller than everyone else in my house and I now look like I'm doing the limbo when I wash my hair because that sh*t f'ing hurts. I can also tell its electric because when someone else uses it all the lights in the house dim. The shower itself is basically a cement stall, and it's totally filthy. At the risk of sounding like a little baby I do wear sandals in the shower- to shield my feet from the cold cement floor and from the dirt that's there. Taking a shower is a comedy because of this electrical box. It only has a little power, and so the more you turn the knob and greater flow you get, the less warm the water is because the same amount of heat is distributed over more H2O. Simply put, the water pressure and temperature are inversely related. You can have a hard shower, but its freakin cold. You can have a nice steamy shower, but it dribbles down on your head. And don't forget that you are under constant threat of electrocution.

Driers- nobody has one at home in Xela. You can pay $3 to have a basket full of laundry washed, dried, and folded at a laundromat. I've not done that so far. I washed my clothes when I got here, and the wash only took an hour. It was the drying that annoyed me. It took 4 days to dry my clothes on the line. Why? you ask.

Weather- May to September is the "rainy season" in the highlands where I live. It's also called winter. We classify our four seasons by temperature and leaves growing or falling from trees. They classify their two seasons here by weather it rains every single day or not at all. Every single day in Xela it rains. It begins raining no later than 3pm, and continues off and on, at times very violently, throughout the night and until around 6am. Every time it rains the clothes have to be taken in off the line and stacked on a shelf. This can happen a dozen times before the clothes are dry. *as a side note I'd like to mention that it has not yet rained today, and it's 8pm, and it's totally freaking me out* It also never gets hotter than 75F here... never... not even today. It gets quite cold at night, especially with the rain, down to the 40s i believe, which makes for a VERY cold walk to the shower.

The kitchen- we have an oven, a stove with 6 burners of gas, and a microwave. We seem to be better equipped than anyone I know.

The tele- we have three. One in the livingroom, one in Juans room, and one in the in law suite. They are on 20 hours a day, at full volume, I swear.

The sink- no hot water there. Good thing I ceased shaving more than a month ago... nobody likes shaving with cold water.

Heat and AC. I'm pretty sure nobody has them here. I have a lot of blankets on my bed and I usually sleep in scrub pants and a hooded sweater. My room has a screen, not a window, which opens onto the hallway. I hear everything that goes on in the house and I feel every breeze that blows through the house.

THEN AND NOW
So that gives you a real good feel for what my living situation is like, I think. When I first got to Xela I was soooo exhausted from all my travel. All I did Monday and Tuesday nights is crash hard and sleep. I went to school Tues-Thursday but not Friday because I was sick (see below). I didn't like my teacher too much, but I learned a good bit. It's just that she hates soccer and doesn't like smartasses, and I love soccer and I'm a complete smartass.

Over the weekend I went to Lago Atitlan, the towns of Panajaxel and San Pedro La Laguna (see previous posts) with Meena and Michelle. Saturday night while I was gone, Neida the daughter delivered her first daughter, in the house, in her parents bed, with her husband Williams and her father Juan delivering the baby. No hospital, no doctor, no nurse, and no anaesthesia. I'm totally impressed with her strength and her character, and the spirit she's carried around the house since the birth of her baby daughter Catarin. However, this has made the house more crowded as Neida and Williams and Catarin now live in the house... so there are 12 of us now, three of whom are under the age of 5. The mom and dad moved their bed into the livingroom and put a dresser between it and the rest of the room. Neida and Williams brought their bed into the parent's room and they sleep there with their baby, as Miguel sleeps in his bed next to them. Like I said, it's a madhouse.

This week I've had 4 days of class so far and my teacher is great. I've learned 10x as much as I did last week.

This has been a crazy post with sooo much info so I think I'm gonna cut it there. Tomorrow I will post about my GI problems that began last Thursday (the 8th), the baptism which was at our house last Sunday (the 11th), and the orphanage which I went to this morning, dressed as a doctor with my white coat and a bag full of medicines. They've been stomach churning, joyous, and heart wrenching, respectively.