Christine´s School and House

My walks to and from the school are always most interesting. Women in traditional dress crowd the streets, often carrying a basket of goods on their head. It reminds me of pictures that I have seen of the women in Africa. How they balance those goods, I just don´t know.

Yesterday, not far from my house, on a street corner was a donkey with a huge load of firewood on its back, and a cute little old man, with leather worn skin, standing behind him. A business man, trying to make a few Quetzals that day.

Just a few Quetzals here (8Quetzals= $1) makes a big difference to someone. The minimum wage here is only about $200/month and unfortunately over half the country lives in poverty. Guatemala is one of the 10 poorest latin american countries and I can definately see the differences in quality of life between Chile and Guatemala.

There is also a business that cooks some type of food in a metal oil barrel. They cut the barrel in half horizontally, stuck a torch underneath, and that´s their makeshift stove.

MY HOME AWAY FROM HOME

This is the street that my house is on. It´s the two story on the right.

This is my house on the outside. The outside looks are deceiving.

I´ve noticed that there are not near the amount of homeless dogs roaming the streets as I saw in Chile.

MY SCHOOL

I arrive to the school around 10am or so every morning and spend some time studying before I head back to home for lunch.

This is my school.

I really enjoy the fact that the school offers an activity every day. Sometimes they are in-school activities, like a cooking class, and sometimes outside, like hiking or a tour. Yesterday there was a salsa class and of course I HAD to check it out. As you can see below, I definately signed up for it.

We ended up going to a discoteca called La Parranda, a local "club" that offeres salsa on Wednesdays. The class started at 8:30pm and afterwards there was dancing. The clubs/bars close at 1am in Guatemala and I was out of their around 11:30. It was full of gringos trying to learn to salsa but the funnest thing I saw was.......to make that "club smoke" the bouncer would have to walk to the floor to hold down a button hanging from the ceiling to make the smoke come out.


Until next time,
Christine