Amazing

"CURIASIDADES Y NOVEDADES PRODUCTOS AMERICANOS," says the silly sign on the store next to our Xela home. I´m still too ashamed to look in the window and see what we americans are up to. Heather peeked and told me they are miniature horse figurines.

Anyway, what an amazing couple of days, couple of hours we´ve had. Heather and I, together with a very small group of other students and instructors, just had our rich world rocked in la Stopia, a cluster of neighborhoods made out of corrigated metal, cardboard, bits of cement block, and, at one point, a wall made from various car parts, hoods, roofs, chasis, etc. Our school sponsors a small project -- basically bringing bags of fresh food, vegetables and bread, to four small hovels, where many children live with just a couple of women.

We entered their encampment by crossing a drainage ditch, where dead birds and various bits of Dupont basura, trash, lay scattered about. When I gandered over the side, a kid was picking a cellphone out of the grey water and putting it to his ear. The children are ages, say, two to ten, and they immediately swarmed us all, grabbing our hands and hugging us, and taking us back to an inner courtyard of little pigs, scruffy dogs and, of course, more trash.

Needless to say, our senses were peaking. The food was given out, about ten grocery bags worth, plus lots of individual pieces of bread to roughly 25 children. Let me just say now, these are beautiful kids, healthy looking for the most part, and soon as I figure out how to put pictures on this thing I´ll show you.

Eventually, we went into some of the one-room lean-tos, where there were gapping holes in the walls and creosote on everything from the cocinas, cooking areas in the same room. Inside, Heather and I met Wilson, an 8-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, and his mom, Isabel. Wilson, Isabel told us, is always sick from the cold. He does an impressive impression of a gallo, rooster. He laughed constantly while we were in there, and I did the token tourist thing and took his and my picture. And then showed it to him. He has a nice smile.

Then we took all the kids up to a dry, grass playing field, and helped them with their homework. I had Ruth and Danny. You may have noticed that many Guatemaltecos have very Gringo names. I don´t know the story on this yet, as my Spanish still sounds much like a radio dial changing channels every second. Anyway, Ruth, who is six, had an assignment to draw pictures of palabras, words, that begin with A. I only know six words in Spanish that begin with the letter A, and it took an hour to think of them.

Eventually, the kids stopped caring about the tarea, homework, and everybody started playing games. We did some ring around the rosey, jump rope, and of course, futbol. I was no match for these kids and was immediately relegated to the goalie postion. I couldn´t understand how they said it in Spanish, they just smiled and pushed me between two would-be goal posts. Rocks.
In the end, they all hugged us. It was fantastic, and Heather and I are still smiling at each other even though we are exhausted.

In other Xela news: the city trash workers went on strike this week, and believe me, this is a disaster. There is trash everywhere in Xela already, I can only imagine what happens now. Also, it seems that it is a Gauatemalen tradition to light off a brick of firecrackers, outside the door of any home where someone has a birthday or something to celebrate, between four and five in the morning. Apparently, we were the victims of infilade fire yesterday morning, because I don´t think anyone in our home had a birthday. And finally in the news, I had finally had my first bowel movement after five days, the last two of which were miserable, and Heather, I believe, is still shit-spray.

On Saturday, we plan to hike around the dormant cone of Volcan de Santa Maria, and already around the square, people are setting up booths for Carnival next week. Again, amazing.