The Antigua, Guatemala Spanish Immersion Solution

If wasn't fascinated by all of the elements combined in the 'language/tourism/volunteer' industries, I might not have stuck around Antigua so long. The mild Mediteranean climate and surrounding cloud-ringed volcanos are certainly gorgeous. I could find anything I could possibly imagine by tripping down the cobblestone streets.

My initial plans for Antigua were temporary. I guess I was hanging around around waiting for a magic transformation of my language abilities. What I failed to figure out via any research is that serious Spanish students don't waste a lot of time in Antigua. I even asked the Spanish/Latin American Studies Department of the University of New Mexico if they could direct me to a good program in Guatemala. They said, "Sorry, we don't have any relationships with any institutions in Guatemala."

HOMESTAY

For two months time, i tried to get comfortable with the homestay thing. At the best one, there was a tannery on the other side of the fence (at times really smelled like death), but I had semi-reliable WIFI and cable in my room. The food was excellent, but on the downside there was generally a lot of screaming. At the worse of times, I viewed them as my alcoholic foreign exchange foster family. They went to bed late and woke up early; providing only a short window for quality sleep (which is problematic for me in general)

At first I was the only student, but at the end there were a couple of

youngsters from Scotland, a college student from Iceland, and the

Swiss-Australian world traveler family (two parents, 27-year old son).

Lively dinner conversation, lots of boozing between the father-son of

the family and the guy from Iceland (who has come to stay with them in

Guatemala three seperate times but has to be hospitalized at least once

on each visit for alcohol poisoning)....and only by a coldish shower

between midnight and 6 am could ensure that all water would not

suddenly stop while my head is covered in shampoo.

UN-NAMED CHARITY ORGANIZATION

The Spanish school didn't steer me towards this project as much, saying that I wouldn't get to speak very much Spanish while changing diapers and feeding the babies. As at my job at Southwest Airlines I couldn't deal with the Make a Wish Foundation kids (I would just look at them and start crying and run the other direction), I wasn't sure I could deal with a visual confrontation with starving kids. A girl from Scotland, my daughter's age (17) before she really got caught up in la furia (alcohol) really enjoyed going there every day and explained that it wasn't all as overwhelming to the senses as one might gather about such a place from a Feed the Children telethon.

The facilities were clean and fairly cheerful, but after feedings many of the babies would continue gnawing on our shoulders. Even though they were apparently still hungry, the volunteers were told that there wasn't any more formula.

A couple months later, when I was "working with" Guate Linda Language Center (see below), I had an interesting conversation with a former employee of UNNAMED CHARITY ORGANIZATION She was in charge of distributing donations. She said she got in trouble for doing what she was supposed to be doing, eventually quitting her job on the principle that about 25% of the funds actually made it to the children. Though the organization helps a lot of people, mostly it helps the Americans in charge fund a lavish lifestyle. When donors wanted photographic evidence that kids were receiving clothes/toys, etc., UNNAMED CHARITY ORGANIZATION would take pictures of the kids with the goods. The kids didn't actually get to keep the items after they modeled them.

UNNAMED CHARITY FUNDED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

This was my first volunteer project, I attempted to do in conjunction with my six weeks of "Spanish Immersion"/homestay. Here I was abandoned with a different group of 25 students each day, with nothing resembling a lesson plan, to teach English. The classroom teacher was supposed to be in the room with me but she had several other roles at the school-cleaning, food prep, handing out quetzal at the end of the day. No amount of empathy for the burden she carried made made me competent to be in charge of that situation.

My experience in improvising activities as an educational assistant at Albuquerque Public Schoool in classrooms for 'emotionally disturbed' and 'behaviorally challenged' students provided me with little insight about how to teach English to beginners.

Ana Luisa, who admitted she was ill-equipped to teach English, wanted me to help prepare the students for their upcoming written and oral English exams. From first grade to sixth grade, the students did the same exact thing. Over and over again I was to drill them with something that went like this:

Good Afternoon

How do you do?

My name is _______

My favorite food is _________ (chicken)

My favorite animal is __________ (chicken)

My favoriate friend is _________ (chicken)

In another horrifying exercise Ana Luisa abandoned me in a hot smelly classroom with 25 sixth graders and a bilingual techno-trance pop song called 'Remember Summer Love' all we had to work with was copies of the song and an hour. The second time the song came up, even with the boom box and the CD, I doubted my capacity to extend that activity for an hour. Just as Ana Luisa was about to tell me about her other responsibilities outside the class, I told her I would have to leave too.

Left to my own devices and one of four English language books in the class, I experienced a single teaching success at UNNAMED CHARITY FUNDED SCHOOL:

The only text in the book began with "we can jump" and built up by adding a line and repeating the rest, until the last page ended with this:

We can jump

We can snap

We can clap

We can jump on a mat

We can slip and trip on a ship

And get wet

When I proposed my idea, Ana Luisa said it would be too hard for them "but I haven't taught them the verb 'poder'"

So she does a brief lesson with

Poder=Can

She proceeds to write on the board:

I can

You can

He cans

She cans

They can

We can

I couldn't tell her why there is no 's' in the third person form of 'can' or why he or she walks or swims but infrequently 'cans'. I guess though you could say "she cans yams." All I could tell her is that in English, cans usually has something to do with 'latas'

I made an outside activity with hand gestures and the book where together we jumped, snapped, and clapped and fell on the ground. They loved it and wanted to do it over again faster each time. The next day it was back to the 'my favorite friend is chicken' routine.

LOS BOMBEROS

Though I'm not particularly cut out for blood and guts, I decided maybe via some ambulance/fire truckruns and learning first aid in a life or death situation that Spanish fluency would be scared into me. Besides my embalmed grandfather, I've never seen a dead body before. I think that this volunteer situation is some kind of joke that the school plays on the students. Honestly, I'm probably not the one for this job so it's probably better that they scared me off after approximately three days worth of them trying to court me as their communal volunteer girlfriend

UNNAMED CHARITY ORGANIZATION #2

After the English classes I did at 'UNNAMED CHARITY FUNDED SCHOOL' though they would have liked me to I wasn't very excited about teaching English, so I didn't even try. Another volunteer from Ireland, an accountant tried to teach English about three times a week. I asked if I could hang out with her to try and get ideas. The lessons were excruciating to watch; numbers, days of the week, seasons. I can still hear her shrill voice resonating in my head...Mon-deyyy, Teu-oos-dey, Wen-eees-deey....

Unlike me, she had come to Guatemala with 'an organization' to whom she paid a lump sum to for the complete volunteer-Spanish school-homestay package. The 'organization' provided her with the dubious lesson plans that failed to take into account the fact that once the one whiteboard and a marker shared by five classrooms was tracked down and employed, the younger kids couldn't read the Spanish translations of the words that she mispelled nor understand the mispronunciations of the Spanish words made possible by her two weeks of immersion lessons.

While I resigned to reading Jorge el Curioso Monta en Bicicleta, she showed up with a smile on her face, and she tried to teach English, I'll give her that. She also went scuba diving in Lake Atitlan because she must have only read the English language promotional materials about the "deep sapphire water and crystal clear visibility." I guess she missed out on the part about how Hurricane Stan destroyed the inadequate sewage infrastructure and how the lake is now full of poo and cynobacteria. I said oh my god you went scuba diving in there! My homestay mates from Scotland only ate lunch next to the lake and then were vomiting blood for a week!

-UNNAMED CHARITY ORGANIZATION #2 FAMILY CASE STUDY

At the center's Christmas party, the mother of one of my students befriended me and invited me to celebrate Christmas with the family. She'd heard all about me via her son 'Dilón,' who always signed up for reading time. I suspect Dilón is gifted, but like the rest of the kids at the project, so eager to learn, he doesn't have enough resources to meet his potentials. 'Kenia' is a year younger than me and became my new friend. I didn't know what would happen when I crossed personal boundaries with families of the program. Since I couldn't buy everyone's family a Christmas chicken and whatever else ( andfeeling really great about it at the time), maybe I shouldn't have done it.

Regardless of the dilemas the friendship would soon present, I don't regret it. The friendship provided further insight into the circumstances that made the children eligible for the assistance of El Buen Samaritano. Kenia, the three kids, and their one-eyed alcoholic father (who had a history of being abusive and was sometimes around) all live in a garage. Given the stairway to the uncompleted second level of the structure, their living structure is not completely enclosed from the elements. Ammenities include two beds, a table and chairs, a stove and cable tv. There isn't a refrigerator. Between the two parents, reported income is less than $200.00 a month, but they didn't have to pay rent because the garage belongs to Kenia's employer. Kenia reports that she's paid Q100 per week to work as a domestic helper, which is roughly $12.00. Sometimes she earns extra money doing laundry or manicures and pedicures. While all three of her children are citizens of Guatemala, Kenia is actually Nicaraguan. Her illegal residency status means she's limited to under-the-table jobs within the informal sector.

Kenia eventually showed up at my apartment uninvited to clean and give me a manicure/pedicure. She seemed to believe I was financially equipped to have her as my personal assistant. She also showed up with secondhand clothes and shoes in my size, to sell me before she tried to sell it off at the mercado. I believe that she stole Q100 that was on the nightstand, which was not a big deal. By the last time I saw the family, as the kids ate ketchup and sugar and begged for French fries in the play area, Kenia was hitting me up for financial assistance with getting her residence status legalized. This is in addition to searching for her mother who ended up in somewhere in Mexico working as a hairstylist, after the coyotes took her money in an attempt to cross over to the US.

GUATE LINDA LANGUAGE CENTER

I gained a temporary access pass as an 'insider' at one of the Spanish schools/hostels/travel agency, via the party responsible for setting me up with my second month-to-month apartment. The global financial crisis made business at the school slower than normal, making it appealing to have extra warm bodies sitting around, and providing the appearance of legitimacy. After explaining the promotional work I'd done for El Buen Samaritano, 'Edwín' became interested in having me help revise the text on the school's webpage and wanted to know how much I'd charge for the work. I had the feeling that what he had to offer would be almost nothing and I'd never get paid anyhow. I thought maybe it was something I could add to my portfolio, so we made a trade arrangement. The school secretary, doña Matilda and Edwín had big plans for what I could do with the school. Possibilities included creating other promotional written materials, and using my airlines travel benefits to travel around the US recruiting university students to send to the school. My free pass would give me the insight into the Guate Linda Language Center that would give substance to my materials and sales pitch.

The school's electricity was shut off the entire time due to an "electrical problem." Though Edwín never admitted that the problem was paying the bill, I figured as much.

I ran around on several errands with Edwín, allegedly with the intent to work on the web page, but our meetings/wild-goose chase errands seemed to always extend beyond normal business hours, and accomplished nothing and suddenly he wanted to cook me a fine Italian meal. After I explained that it wasn't going to happen, he laid off the pursuit of my help with his multifaceted 'projects.' As I promised, I emailed him some of the suggested text changes to the webpage, but asked him some questions about some of the vagueness in the selling points that would have caught my eye as a prospective student. Besides the fact that I could enjoy my Spanish courses in a "beautiful outdoor garden environment" (by candlelight after it got dark) what made 'Guate Linda' different from the 200 other Spanish school/travel agency/hostels (equipped with electricity) in Antigua?

What you do to cater to individual learning styles?

What do you do to make the 4-6 hour classes friendly to the capacities of the human attention span?

How do you bridge the gap between the student's four hours at the desk with the one instructor and the real world?

He seemed more concerned that I emphasize the help the school offers with long and short term accomodations, ranging in cost and in luxury from dorm rooms, to family homestays, to private apartments.

"tell them, we're here to help you with all of your travel needs."

On the way to one of our fake business apointments, I once observed him in action as he negotiated clean bedding with a Mexican woman who had rented an apartment with her family for the holidays. I told them both lavandaría downstairs would charge them Q30.

As we left on an our way to another alleged business apointment he said "these people don't understand this isn't five star service."

My own apartment was roach infested, never had a fully operational kitchen sink, and the refrigerator had a gaping crack where the roaches could make their way to any food I dared to store there.

Edwín is the exception to the fact that most of my Spanish school/volunteer experience was otherwise not conducted in English. Incidentally, Edwín also advertised himself as qualified to teach Spanish, Italian, and English. (*ask me about the time I sat in on a tutoring session where he assisted a Guatemalan secretarial school student with some business English documents). When there were other people involved in the conversation, he was quick to translate, and it never seemed to register that with every single other person at Guate Linda, I spoke Spanish. I watched him lie at least 200 times in each language.

He suddenly became very busy but I kept showing up at the school to hang out with doña Matilda, who alternately discussed possible business schemes and gave me Pentacostal Christian infused Spanish conversation. She would sometimes leave me in charge at the front desk while she did quick errands.

THE END

It's a good thing I listened to my sense of impending doom and decided to get myself as far as Miami instead of to Hondoras. It would have also bad to find myself completely broke on the sketchy bus journey I was almost up for up through Mexico from the Southern Border all the way back to El Paso.