I`m enjoying life in Xela so much that I´ve decided to stay here until pretty much the end of March which cuts my time to travel in S. America down to three months. To be honest, I´ve decided that I don´t really like packing my bags every other day to go from place to place. I much prefer staying in the same place for a long time and as I´ve got plenty of friends in Xela it makes sense to stay here.
I`m actually very busy at the moment with various jobs that I`ve had over the last few months. I currently find myself as the guide for my Spanish school. My mate who was the guide had to go to Huehue for a couple of months so I manage to have found myself as the guide for the afternoon activities. I speak reasonably decent Spanish and know the towns, volcanos, hot springs etc. around Xela pretty well - as I speak English it is obviously helpful as not that many students speak much Spanish. The job obviously throws up numerous challenges such as students asking questions which I don´t know the answer to. Luckily, over the years I have picked up a useful technique to help me out in this situation - namely, MSU (Make Sh1t Up). One particularly eager student asked me what the population of a town was - rather than admit that I didn´t have a clue I decided to do what any self-proclaiming Guatemalan would do and make a number up. I knew the population was somewhere between 3000 and 4000 so to make it seem more authentic I made it something like 3545...
Over December and January I was teaching 3 work experience students English in between planting trees and digging up earth. This was actually very rewarding as I´d never taught anyone anything before (except maybe some funky MS excel formulae...). Teaching was a lot harder than I thought it would be but after you build a rapport with the students it is quite good fun. My three students seemed particularly fascinated in learning terms of abuse for their boss in English.
In addition to these two jobs, I`ve obviously got the "tree planting project" (thanks to Mr. Martin Threakall for providing me with the technical term for what I´m doing). The reforestation is not progressing at quite the pace Mario and I would hope largely because we are both busy with other things at the moment. However, we are going to buy a pile of fertiliser, soil etc. next week to prepare la tierra to plant the trees which we hope to start in the coming weeks...
