Dalama Adventures Tale of two corporate types ditching their jobs and traveling the world for 14 months... check out all photos, blogs & interesting tid bits at http://www.dalama.net

We wake up at 5:30 a.m. to the sound of fireworks.  We thought the fireworks in the morning in Antigua were more for the Independence Day celebration, but as we learn, in Guatemala every birthday is celebrated early in the morning by firing off rounds of fireworks.  We lay awake, waiting for the 7:00 a.m. breakfast call.  We still can't shower, so we decide to wear our "yesterday bus clothes" over our dirty bodies, all ready for the big first day of school.  Kind of a let down from our childhood experiences of being fresh, clean and presentable on the first day of school.  We head off to the dining room for our breakfast.  We're starving and ready to feast.  We're served up another batch of eggs, this time scrambled along with another piece of stale bread, this time sliced with a layer of cold beans smeared inside.  We get a cup of boiled water for tea. Our hopes for a good breakfast quickly melt away, and our stomachs growl with anger.  We scraped our non-edibles into the garbage, washed our plates, and smeared toothpaste on our teeth to be somewhat presentable... again, with no potable water, we can't even brush our teeth.  We're going to make a lovely first impression at school.

Luckily our house mom walks us half way to class this morning, to the point where we can see the top of the school building.  We thank her and climb the steep hill to the school; this hill which will serve as our main source of exercise during our time in Xela.  The school is a small building with private classrooms around a central open-air courtyard.  Each student gets their own small classroom with is a great set-up for the one-on-one learning experience.  Everyone here is taking five hours of class each day.  We've opted to take the early sessions, starting at 8:00 a.m. and ending at 1:00 p.m. so that we can participate in cultural activities during the evenings.  We head directly to the office and they assign us a teacher and inform us we'll complete registration activities during the break.  We're still not quite sure what to expect, so we head out to the courtyard to socialize with the other students.  This school is pretty small, and it's low season right now, so there are only about 15 students in total attending classes.  Everyone knows each other here.  Darrin and I are the only new students starting class this week, and when the school bell rings to indicate the start of class, they introduce us to the group, everyone introducing themselves to us, which was a really nice touch and made us feel welcome.  

Everyone gets a new teacher each week, unless you've requested to keep your teacher from the week before.  My teacher is Edwin "sin-pelo" (with little hair) - there are two Edwins, one with hair, and one with much less.  I get the older, more experienced Edwin.  Darrin gets Miguel Gonzalez, a younger teacher... and off we go to class.  The lessons here at ICA are very unstructured.  While the teachers, most with degrees have undergone eight months of teacher training, they are given the latitude to present the material the way they feel best conveys the lessons.  Typically half the class is spent having intensive conversations on politics, economics, culture, people and Guatemalan custom and lifestyle, and other half is spent on grammar, verbs and other new topics for introduction.  Everything is in Spanish - none of the teachers are permitted to speak with us in English.  Equally as challenging, all the administrative staff only speak to us in Spanish, so it's hit of miss with the instructions they give, and what we actually receive/understand.  We've been used to classes with much more structure - a book, workbook, general class syllabus.  My first class is spent reviewing what I know and don't know.  It's been nearly seven years since my last Spanish class and I'm really rusty.  The basics still need to be reviewed.  We cover a ton the first day and my head is spinning.  Same for Darrin - we wonder how we can possibly handle this pace and intensity for four weeks.  We're also challenged to set reasonable goals for ourselves.  the others in our program are from Europe and Canada, and speak their native language plus English, French, and other various languages with similar grammatical structure to Spanish.  We're intimidated by their rapid pace of learning and speaking, but also encouraged.  We realize that while we'd love to be fluent in a month, it's a completely unrealistic goal.  Still, it's tough not to want to be able to wake up in the morning and be able to understand everything and have the correct words and tenses flow from our tongues.

Class ends at 1:00 p.m. and we rush back to our home for the "big meal" of the day.  Guatemaltecos typically eat a small breakfast (desayuno) and dinner (cena) and a large lunch (almurezo).  Almurezo is a big family event where a full meal is served and all family members come home from work mid-day to enjoy time together.  We rush home, and are served a half of one check breast each, rice, tortillas, refried beans and really soft mushy plátanos.  No one else is home besides our house mom, so she sets out our plates and another cup of tea, as she still has no drinking water.  We scarf down the food and I do my best to speak Spanish with her, armed with my dictionary.  Having the dictionary was a big help, and she seems to understand what I’m saying to her, however, I still struggle to understand what she says in return.  We thank her for the meal (tiny as it was), and learn that at the end of a meal we're supposed to say , "Gracias y Buen Provecho."  We head back to school to pay our tuition and board and to catch up with emails.  We also check out some reference books from their library to help supplement and structure our learning process a bit.  

After day one, we're energetic after our full day of learning and homework and are aggressively reading up from our borrowed reference text books to fill in the missing gaps.  Back at our homestead for dinner we are seated alone.  I think the rest of the family is served and eats after us, as we've had no interaction with anyone except for our house mom.  Yet another plate of eggs, beans and tortillas.  The eggs have bits of hard black things in them which I mistakenly take for pepper, not realizing they are actually bits of teflon from the one degrading frying pan she uses to cook everything in.  I think we jinxed our luck in Antigua, being so very grateful for having beans again.  The school apparently instructs the families they arrange home stays with, how to cook for foreign students.  They request specifically that families don't serve eggs and beans for every meal.  Apparently our home hasn’t received the same instructions.  However, we wanted a true appreciation for local life, and we are getting a real experience.  For this we are grateful.

The shower finally works, so we both indulge in the small trickle of water that's warm, and feel a bit cleansed after a long two days of travel and study.  We'll sleep well tonight, despite the fleas and empty stomach.