There are three, I guess you could call them "team leaders" or guides for our program. They are with us through out the entire program and facilitate all our traveling (besides that which we will do on our own during our free weekends and spring break) and coordinate certain learning activities or service projects. Joe (or chepe ) is an American. He participated in this program himself when he was in college and then came back to central America after he graduated and has never left. He no lives in Managua, Nicaragua when he is not on the road with a student group and recently married a native Nicaraguan. Ruth is a ligado, or none indigenous Guatemalan. She was born in Guatemala City but went to high school in the states which is where she learned English but moved back to Guatemala and has been working with this program for about 5 years. Fidel is an indigenous Guatemalan (of Mayan decent) and has had an amazing life experience ( is spoke of his village during the time of war in Guatemala in an earlier post). He later traveled to Guatemala city for college and then was invited by a priest from the University of St. Thomas (in st. paul, MN) where he learned english and studied theology before moving back to Guatemala. They are truly amazing people and I'm sure I will tell yall more about them later.
Yesterday afternoon Fidel took us up to one of the central markets of Xela (another word for Quetzaltenango) where we did a learning project which he called a Social-Economic Survey of Quetzaltenango. The 10 of us split up into 4 groups and each group had a specific topic to gather information on, school supplies, food, clothing and medicine. Fidel then gave each group Q50 (50 Quetzales). Quetzales is the national currency of Guatemala and the exchange is about Q8 to 1 dollar. So Q50 is about 7 dollars and some change. This is the minimum wage in Xela per day. Thats right the minimum wage is $7 something per day. However the majority of the population does not make the minimum wage in Xela. So our project was to go around the market and shops talking to vendors and people on the street (a good application for our spanish!) and research how far our Q50 would go towards our respective topics. My group had school supplies. So we compared prices of various vendors and stores regarding your average school supplies (pens, pencils, backpacks, notebooks....etc). We also talked to a shop owner who sold school uniforms (children in central america wear school uniforms to both public and private school) about the difference in prices of uniforms for public and private schools as well as the difference in tuition costs for these respective schools. Thats right public schools have tuition here too. We were all to see how much we could actually purchase with our Q50 and then we'll give our supplies and other things to a rural community we're going to visit next weekend. It was a truly eye opening experience to see how going without for a lot of families here is very normal. For example the average cost of one backpack was Q35-Q75 depending on were you looked. Almost a days wages just for a child's backpack. Tuition for public schools is Q80 and up per month and this is to get your child into a class room of about 80 kids with one teacher. Private schools are Q800-Q1500 a month and this gets your kid into a class of only 40 students with one teacher. Education is one of the most prevalent problems in Guatemala and this project really showed my how this affects the average family. After a while we all met back up together and each group shared their findings. My group was able to purchase and couple pens, pencils, two notebooks, a ruler and a small pencil case with our Q50. However school supplies are obviously not the only thing families need (i.e. the topics of the other 3 groups). In the spirit of a never ending cycle, the fact that an average family of 5 in this city can not live on Q50 or even Q100 if the mother works as well, forces the children to work and not go to school........and leave their education behind. It was an awesome and disheartening experience to put yourself in the shoes of the majority of this country even for just a moment but wonderful to get out a speak to these local who, for the most part, were extremely friendly and willing to share their experiences with us.
Last night a couple of us went with Fidel to a pick up soccer game of students and teachers from the language school we will be starting at next week. We play small sided 7v7 in a turf field enclosed in fencing and covered in aluminum roof. There were a ton of people who came to play so we split up into 4 different teams and just rotated every 5 minutes or so. Winner stayed on the field and let me tell you that winning was not always good:) Its been a while since I dusted off the leg muscles, my chucks don't provide the best touch or ankle support and i still haven't quite acclimated to the elevation yet. But it was just an outrageous amount of fun. There is a wide variety of foreigners who attend this language school from europe to australia to canada and it was just and it was a light hearted affair full of jokes and jabs at each other (some of which i understood :)
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