Saqarik friends and family!

For those of you who don’t know, I’m spending my summer in Guatemala/southern Mexico learning K’iche’ Maya (the most prevalent of the many indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala) and “doing research” for school (essentially looking for a possible project for the coming year). I’ve been here two weeks now and figured it was time I started my travelogue emails up again! If you don’t feel like getting periodic updates from me, just say – I won’t be hurt! My internet access is rather sporadic at this point, so if you write to me, I apologize if it takes a while to get back to you.

In any case, like I said, I’ve been in Guatemala for almost two weeks, having arrived a few days late due to some hiccups during a trip to Morocco to reunite with a number of my college friends. The first week of classes – the K’iche’ (means “many trees”) program is being run jointly through University of Chicago and Vanderbilt – was spent in Panajachel, a rather touristy town about 2.5 hrs outside of Guatemala City on Lake Atitlan. Panajachel is mostly composed of restaurants, hotels, coffee shops, and places to buy any sort of artesanias you might associate with Guatemala. The program put us up at a very nice hotel complete with conference rooms, a pool, and a nice restaurant that fed us breakfast and lunch every day. We spent our days alternating between crash course K’iche’ lessons to prep us for living with families that speak very little Spanish and cultural lectures from our professors to orient us to our surroundings.

There are 12 students in the program and three professors; most people are linguists or anthropologists, and we’ve been split into an intro class (people from all over) and an intermediate class (students mostly from Vanderbilt who have been studying the language for the last year or so). Mostly it’s grad students who have traveled in Latin America before, but there are a couple people who have little experience with rural life and who are discovering all the quirks and delights of living out here for the first time. Everyone brings a different background and different interests to the program, making for a wonderful diversity of knowledge and a great opportunity to share insights and information. It was great to have a first week with relative creature comforts in Panajachel to get to know each other and figure out the basics of the language before heading out to our home stays, but I think we all knew that our language skills weren’t really going to improve until we got to Nahaulha and our temporary families.

We arrived in Nahuala – the 8000 odd person seat of a 15,000 person municipality about an hour up into the highlands from Pana – on a Sunday afternoon in two “minibuses” or shuttles overflowing with too much luggage, supplies for the school, and some rather carsick students. After been greeted by Manuel (or Wel in K’iche’), the coordinator and host of the program in Nahuala, we were sent home with our families to unpack and settle in. I’m living near the center of town with an extended family of mostly daughters, only one of whom speaks much Spanish. My host mom and dad – nan To’n and tat Mikel – are both weavers, though because tat Mikel has been sick since I’ve arrived, I haven’t seen much of either of them. Rather, I spend most of my time with the daughters: Mari’y (Maria) is the oldest and married to Wel (not the same as our coordinator), and they have a daughter named To’n (Antonia) who is 5 or 6; Kla’r (Clara) is the next oldest and she and Mike’l (Michaela) seem to do most of the housework; the youngest is Xe’p (Isabella), who is probably 14 or so and still in school.

Mike’l is the daughter who speaks Spanish and has become my translator/guide to Nahualha and my family. She’s about my age and actually a very good teacher – before she’ll tell me what anything anyone has said means, she makes me repeat it in K’iche’, laughs and helps me with my pronunciation, and then translates for me. In return, I give her some English words and attempt to help around the house a bit. This is mostly futile – my tortillas (the mainstay of all meals) are still pretty pathetic and the sisters mostly relegate me to the corner of the kitchen nearest the fire/stove to stay warm and entertain them. Unlike Chiapas, we get more than beans, tortillas, and weak coffee here, but those still form the basic food groups of my family. Add in eggs, noodles, various kinds of meat (including some small, very bony fish that pretty much silenced everyone at dinner as we tried to extract all the bones before choking on them), bread (kaxlan waj or “Spanish food”) and fruit, and you’ve got my diet at home. We’re fed a pretty big lunch at school everyday, so no one is complaining about lack of food, though some of the other students have had to try some things – cow stomach and other intestines, mostly – that haven’t been terribly appetizing.

Our school is in one of the many buildings constructed with remittances around town that remain mostly empty, waiting for brothers in the States to come home and fill them (this is the case in my family as well – the only brother has been in New York for 12 years now and I’m the only one living in the very well built and very empty part of the family compound built with the money he’s sent home). It’s in one of the cantones (vaguely suburbs or hamlets), about a half hour walk mostly uphill from our homestays. Of course, it’s in the coldest part of Nahualha and none of us really came prepared for the rainy season in highland Guatemala. We spend most of the day in class, half of it with our American professors going over grammar and half of it doing one on one or two on one with local native speakers to practice pronunciation and conversational skills.

K’iche’ is my first non-European language and is rather like a puzzle much of the time. There are some sounds that we don’t have in English and plenty of glottal stops that can make all the difference between saying “youngest child” and “shit” (apparently one of my friend’s host families got a very good laugh out of this while she was trying to do her homework with them one night; she didn’t realize she’d been calling the youngest kid a little shit until a few days later). We’re all having a pretty good time with it, though, and none of us are above laughing at ourselves when we trip over our k’s and q’s. Hearing the language all the time at home is definitely helpful, and though I still don’t understand the majority of what’s being said, I catch more grammatical constructions and vocabulary words every day. I’m still pretty limited to declarative sentences and basic questions, but my family has no problem with these and with giving me more words to expand what I can say. I often know they’re talking about me even if I can’t tell what they’re saying, but I just practice my grammar in my head and nod and smile. I’m sure that in the next few weeks things will just keep getting better!

Right now I’m in Xelaju (also known as Quetzaltenango, but all the cool kids call it Xela) with most of the other beginning students, enjoying our weekend off. We’ve all been filling up on Italian food, French toast, and lattes and buying ourselves warm clothes from the used American clothing stores – I found a giant Old Navy fleece and some new leg warmers that are going to make all the difference in the coming weeks. It’s not hard to get from Nahualha to other places around the highlands – we just stand out on the Pan American highway and hail any of the old school buses (foreigners call them chicken buses) passing by that happen to be going where we’re headed. Most are covered in religious decals and painted bright colors and they blast pop music or evangelical songs as they rush past. It’s an occasionally nauseating and sometimes terrifying but always amusing way to travel. I don’t think there are as many actual chickens on the buses as there used to be, but they’re great for people watching. We’re not sure where we’re headed in the coming weeks, but I’ll send another email when I get the chance!

I hope you’re all enjoying your summers and if you’re going to be anywhere in Guatemala in July or southern Mexico in August, let me know and we can try to meet up! I’ll be flying out from Cancun at the end of August and probably taking a few days beforehand to enjoy the sun and sand on an island called Isla Mujeres off the coast, so if anyone wants to join me, I’d love the company!

Ki’nloq’oj (love you all!)