Hi friends and family! I am going to attempt to give an overview of whats been happening lately as weve been completely out of contact with too many folks to be able to send emails individually. My hope is that once we settle down a bit more, we will be able to continue with individual correspondence, as I always feel badly sending “group emails” its so impersonal. Please forgive in advance and know that if we had the time, and the internet connection, we would be writing to every one of you!
We finally got to Guatemala last Weds, and immediately put the kids in their new school.
The picture above to the left is the walk to school with Isaiah and Aden in the lower right. On the right is the hotel we stayed in the first week. (havent figured out how to get these pictures in the right place on the blog posts. [yoni]
London was a cold and rainy blur of visiting with friends and family, attending a fantastic Bar Mitzvah, and preparing for Guatemala. The kids’ school is a collection of open air type rooms surrounding a dirt courtyard with a playground and ball field. Its definitely Central America, and none of these spaces would ever pass code anywhere, but luckily Aviv is past the point where I have to worry that she will eat peeling paint, and though very simple and barebones, it is kept clean and has a very campy feel. The boys have integrated well so far, they are in mixed age groups with a combo of Guatemalan kids and gringos, and the kids are meant to speak English in school, except during Spanish. The boys will not be able to get much out of the Spanish in their classes, as everyone is fluent, so we will hire a tutor for them a couple afternoons a week. At $4 per hour for private tutor, we will all do it. At first glance I think its going to be a great experience for the boys, its so different here that being able to speak English all day for them feels necessary, and the gringo kids who go to the school are also so different from them, that even that is a huge change. They have all grown up here, and various mixed nationalities of German/Spanish, Swedish/American, etc, so that English isnt even their first language, though they all speak it. The teachers seem great, and it’s a small enough group that they have already made friends and were even invited to a birthday party this past weekend.
Aviv has had a more difficult time. She was placed in the “kinder” which is 4-6 yr. olds, and she is the only gringo in the group. While this wouldn’t seem like a big issue, since all the kids have just started school, none of them speak English yet! And for many of them, Spanish is their second language since most people here are Mayan and speak an indigenous language. Aviv was miserable and of course I felt terribly as the trip in general has been hard on her, all the moving around and lack of routine, weird food, etc. On the third day of school she moved herself (!) to the younger group, because the teacher in the 3 yr. old group is American and at least feels very familiar to her, plus the class is much smaller and there are some mixed kids in there who actually speak some English. The first group was large and it seemed hard for her to get individualized attention. We were literally bribing her with toys to get her to go to school last week.
Once we dropped off the kids, we commenced in earnest to find a place to live. This seems to be a primarily word of mouth endeavor here, asking everyone and literally anyone if they know of anything. Any of you who know Yoni well know that he loves this type of wild goose chase, chatting up the man on the street type activity, so we ran around with Sebastian, a tuk-tuk driver and our new BFF, looking at all kinds of dwellings. I am not exaggerating when I say we were shown literal shacks without running water in the kitchen and outhouses for bathrooms. True they were very cheap, but we werent going to live in them, I mean, we are way past that! We were also shown large homes behind huge rock walls with an abandoned feel but could certainly be fixed up. One such place we looked at was like a fortress, with a pool in the courtyard and the feeling of past splendor, with a “guardian family” living on the grounds. The place had a weird vibe, and when we looked at it a second time with one of the moms at the school, she told us the previous owner was involved with one of the drug cartels and died when a substance he was smuggling exploded in his body. The police were there for months, they cleared everything out, the wife now lives in Brazil and the lawyer will rent it to us for a very good price. Fantastic, that sounds like just the place for us. Additionally we were shown a gorgeous property, owned by gringos who are away for a few months, simple yet beautiful small houses set perfectly amidst the jungle grounds, with a waterfall out the window and serene gardens. These types of properties are a bit isolated from the town and although foreigners live in them, they just didn’t feel safe to me. After all, there must be a reason why all those homes are behind immense stone walls and locked with big dogs just beyond the gate. And it’s a long winding walk back from the school, one that I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting the boys do alone. We finally took a house owned by one of the hotels and in the back of the hotel property. Spending a few days walking the area by day and by night, I decided that security really is the most important thing, particularly as there will be several nights when Yoni will stay at his clinic, and I need to feel comfortable alone with the kids. At least the hotel security are around here 24 hours. And there is running water in the kitchen! Now we just have to get used to washing all our fruits/veggies in a bleach solution, and reminding the kids to only brush teeth with bottled water.
Today is our first day of real life, having dropped the kids at school, then Yoni off to the dock to negotiate a price across the lake to his clinic, and me left to go to market and figure out how our home life is going to work. Aviv is only in school until noon, so I will have about 3 hours to myself in the mornings. Luckily I can send the laundry out, or that would have been a big time sink. Driving up the winding switchback road from Guatemala City to Panajachel, we passed many small villages and our driver pointed out cisterns in the middle of the towns where all the women were washing clothes(in the pouring rain, I might add). He told us the women work in the fields in the morning and then come to do wash in the afternoons since there is no running water in the homes. Aden piped up, “Mom, that means you can go in the morning to wash, as they’ll all be in the fields and it wont be crowded.” Thanks, Aden, for that fantastic idea. Needless to say, I found a place to send out our wash immediately. At 5 quetzales or <$1 per pound for wash, dry, and fold, its worth it.
The town is a mile high up, surrounded by large volcanic mountains, on the edge of the lake, and the views are truly breathtaking. Yesterday, with the task of home hunting finally behind us, we went out of town a bit to a nature reserve, wonderful hikes across long swinging bridges that crossed waterfalls and jungle with great opportunities to observe groups of spider monkeys swinging from tree to tree. It reminded us of all the walks we took in Costa Rica, very similar terrain. Yoni and the boys did a zip line tour that looked terrifying, luckily for me Aviv was too young so I was able to stay with her.
We also took a boat ride to Santiago Atitlan on the other side of the lake where Yoni’s Clinic is. The lake is huge and the fast boat takes 30 minutes to cross. Some boats have life vests, some don’t, and I was very happy we decided to schlep one of our own for Aviv. Because it’s the rainy season, the weather turns quickly in the afternoon and the ride back was very choppy. Poor Yoni, that’s when he will be returning from work. The Hospitalito is a two story open air type building much like the main gathering structure at a camp, very rustic and basic. They actually do surgeries there, though I cant imagine. As we were shown around I made a mental note not to get sick for the duration of the trip. Yoni is at his first day of work now, so I’ll be interested to hear how it is there, and hopefully he will report.
Weekends we plan to do small trips around the area, though the drive up here was so windy that I am reluctant to do it again. We have some Jewish contacts in Guatemala City where we hope to go for Rosh Hashanah, and depending on how its all going, we may leave this area a week early and travel around the country a bit. That is totally dependant on how the kids are doing with school and their life. The boys were anxious to feel settled after so much travel.
That’s all for now and I will attempt to post this and have Yoni weigh in some other time.
Jordana
No comments:
Post a Comment