On arriving
in Xela we decided it was high time we did something about our appalling
Spanish. A quick scout round the local schools revealed that most were closed
on Saturdays but the one that was open had a beautiful old courtyard and it
only took Josh (one of the owners) about 10 minutes to convince us to sign up
and that it was worth staying with a local family too. Consequently on Sunday
we went to meet our host family and moved into one of their guest bedrooms.
The family
we stayed with consisted of a mother, one of her grown-up daughters,
non-identical twins who were about 12 and the little granddaughter (from
another daughter) who was 3 years old. They didn´t speak any English and had 4
rooms that they rented out to students. For 6 days we stayed with them, went to
Spanish school, conversed via dictionary and ate beans. The family were really
friendly although the number of students and lack of any other source of
visible income meant they did seem to treat it rather like a business and
dropped some big hints about the presents their other guests had bought them. We
ended up buying the kids a memory game, which was a great opportunity for us to
learn the words for different animals.
One of the
other guests (a German girl called Lea) was also in our school so we did lots
of things with her and the other students. Each day the school offered trips or
activities so we went to a mirador (viewpoint) over the city, to see a church and
weaving in a nearby village, to some natural hotsprings and then listened to a
lecture on Guatemalan history. It was really interesting to hear all about the
civil war here and to understand more about the national psyche. On the last
day of the week, the school hosted a dinner for the students that we all bought
food and drinks to. We somehow got landed with the main course so our international
group was treated to proper English spag bol – mostly because we were craving
meat after a week of beans!
