I’ve seen the extremes of life in Xela.

I’ve seen The Future of this country.  Close to our apartment is this private school just letting out and all the kids looked sharp in their school uniforms. These kids are fortunate there are resources (Mom and Dad or other family members) that can put them in this school.

Yesterday was Father’s Day here in Guatemala and Leslie and I happened to be in a shopping mall to pick up some stuff after school.  We headed up to the food court to grab a bite and saw a lot of families also grabbing a bite to eat.

At a table close to us, we watched as a young woman was trying to take a picture of her group on her iPad so Leslie volunteered to take the picture with all of them.  They were gregarious and laughing so I asked if I could take their picture.  Sure!

After I’d snapped my picture, they brought out their smart phones and asked to Bluetooth my picture with their phones.  They’re intelligent, educated, technically savvy, independent and strong.  These young women are The Future.

Across the food court Leslie noticed a family having a bite to eat, but Dad and his young son were both wearing BurgerKing hats.  I walked over and in my halting español congratulated the Dad on Father’s Day, said I liked his hat and asked if I could take a picture of the family.  Sure!  After the photo, Dad whips out his iPhone and we Bluetooth my photo to him.  Another strong, middle class family with a Dad (and family) who will ensure his son has all the resources necessary for a productive life.  This young boy is The Future.

And I’ve seen The Maybe of this country.  Every Wednesday morning is trash day and the tenants from the 10 apartments in our complex put their trash bags outside the gate for pickup.  Over the past several weeks since we’ve been here, we’ve noticed these sweet young girls waiting outside the gate for every bag of garbage brought out.  They open every bag and scavenge anything of remote value.

They’ve chosen our complex because there are a number of “extranjeros” (foreigners) here and our neighbors have clued us in about the girls.  They separate the “good stuff” (plastic, cardboard, etc) for the girls into the green bags to make things easier for them and now so do we.

There’s obviously a reason they’ve got to scavenge.  They’re maybe not in school (don’t know for sure) but they certainly don’t have the resources of the above.  They, and many kids like them, may have a difficult and uncertain future.

This shy, sweet girl is part of the Mayan community, where the Moms and grandmothers meet to sell produce on the sidewalks around our school.  I know resources are tight for this demographic so I wonder what kind of future greets her every morning in the mercado.

And I’ve seen The Lost of this country.  The man on the left is having a seizure and the man on the right is in a stupor.

I’ve reflected that in many respects, these contrasts aren’t that much different from my country.  We too have The Future, The Maybe and The Lost.

After we landed in Guatemala City and got to our guest house, I wanted to take a shower.  Hmm, the first thing I noticed were the electrical wires to the shower head.  This can’t be too good I thought.

Well, I then assumed this shower had been used before me (and there wasn’t a plot to electrocute me) so I jumped in and gave it a shot – and got lots of hot water.

I’ve since learned most houses here don’t have hot water as we know it.  There’s no hot water for the kitchen sink or anywhere else in the house.  Only the shower with one of these electric heaters.  I’ve also learned most Americans and other foreigners commonly refer to them as “suicide showers”…

When we rented our apartment a couple of weeks ago, the very nice landlady toured the apartment with us, showed us the bathroom, turned on the shower but only very tepid water came out.  Yet that seemed to be the accepted standard so we just went with it.  But…!  No way was I ever going to use that shower – especially with that big scorch over the wires!

So – no hot water when we moved in.  But, we’d bought an electric tea kettle at Wal-Mart and a new red bucket to shower with – so life was good!

Meanwhile we’d seen this thing mounted on the wall of our small patio with a copper tube cut off and what would appear to be water pipes.  Could this be an old gas water heater?

Networking is key to lots of things in Latin America.  With the help of my Spanish teacher and her father, I was put in touch with David who came over to our apartment on Saturday and spent almost 3 hours working on the heater.  It worked!  Then a hop in his truck to a plumbing store where I picked out a new shower head.

This is our new shower PLUS we have hot water to the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink!  Life is good – and life is very good when you’ve got hot water!

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Everyone’s on propane tanks, so this is what our new setup looks like.  One line to the cooktop and the other to the water heater.

And because everyone’s on small propane tanks, you never just leave pilot lights, etc, on.  You shut everything off when you don’t need it.  So anytime you want hot water, just light the pilot light, wait about 15 seconds and you’re good to go!

What’s it like outside the gate? This is what we saw the first time we came to school in an old taxi – but wonderful driver!

A very typical street scene. The “famous” Mercado Las Flores is on the left with vegetable vendors set up on the sidewalk. Many streets are cobblestone which beats the c**p out of the vehicles…

View from our balcony. I love the sound of rain on all those tin roofs!

We’d heard about the intensive Spanish language schools of Quetzaltenango (Xela – Shayla – for short) from many people while in Mexico City.  So while our academic time in D.F. was excellent, we felt we needed to jump to the next level.

We flew into Guatemala City (Guatemala is just south of Mexico) and the next day took a 4 1/2 hour bus ride “up the mountain” to Xela. We’ve since learned and experienced that the bus drivers know within 1 MPH how fast they can go around each mountain curve before crashing off the road, so for about 4 hours we were flung from one side to the other as we took curve after curve.  But the buses are very nice and comfortable once you get yourself wedged in place.

Xela (this is a Google map link) is at about 8,000′ in a valley surrounded by the volcano Santa Maria and other mountain peaks.  The temperature is temperate (now) but gets cold in the winter.

We chose the Sol Latino language school because we’d met a Canadian nurse in D.F. who’d just spent 7 weeks there and recommended it.

Why is this different?  Immersion learning means one on one, 4 or 5 hours a day, conversation with a teacher.  Starting from scratch, students start to learn much like a 2 year old, with basic phrases (“I want a cookie”!) and working up from there.

Our teachers are excellent and we’ve found this is just what we need.

Leslie and Alicia

Don and Rony

We spent the first 3 weeks living on the 3rd floor of the school and during our morning class sessions wandered around Xela with Alicia and Rony looking for an apartment.

The front patio and entrance to the school. The building opens up to the side and back. Leslie and Alicia meet on the 3rd floor balcony (back balcony) for class and Don’s in an inside room.

The front gate/door to the school. This “look” is very common in Guatemala.

In mid-April we left the gorgeous, forested foothills of the Sierras and flew back to Mexico City.

I was surprised how comfortable I felt coming “back home”.  Because we took the red eye out of SFO, we landed in the dark (5:30 am) but I knew the airport, I knew where and how to get a taxi, I knew where we needed to go and I was comfortable engaging our taxi driver in conversation. So so different from when we first came to Mexico!

We spent a week in Mexico City for re-packing stuff for Guatemala (we’d left a lot of our “stuff” in the Casa) and to catch up visiting with our refugee friends and other good friends in D.F. (Distrito Federal, like Washington D.C.).  We even made sure we stayed in “our” old room where we’d lived for 10 months.

We also went to the top of the big Monument to the Revolution next to the Casa and looked down on another demonstration or political rally much like many of the demonstrations we saw while living in D.F.

Then on to our new adventure living in Guatemala!