Miriam will be spending the summer in Antigua, which is about 4 hours from Xela. Four hours if the buses are on time, and the roads haven't flooded. (May - October see a lot of rain.) While in Antigua, she will also be studying Spanish. But as a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt, she'll spend the majority of her time in musty archives, doing research for her dissertation.
I will be in the highlands, living at elevation in the second largest city in the country, with a population of just over 100,000. I'll spend 5 hours a day studying Spanish with one-on-one lessons, and once I'm considered proficient enough, I will begin volunteering in the afternoons in local health clinics and possibly rotating on a traveling rural health team.
Although Spanish is the national language, the majority of the population are indigenous Maya, with many additional indigenous languages. I have the option of learning one of those languages as well, K'iche', but since I'm already focusing on Medical Spanish, I'm not sure how much I can take on. My dream goal is to be proficient enough upon returning to be able volunteer as a medical interpreter at a place like Siloam Family Health Center. But I don't think that is very realistic since I will only be there three months. Worst case scenario, I am pretty confident that I will be able to come home and perform patient assessments in Spanish during my final semester of nursing school.
I will be living with a host family who do not speak English, and this is what has me the most nervous. Not them in and of themselves, but the first several days, living in a stranger's house, not speaking a common language. My hope is that within a few days I will have picked up enough to have basic conversations with them over meals, but who knows.
Finally, why? For one thing, I have been restless for a while. The last time I was outside of the United States was the summer I spent in Prague (my true love city) in 2003. For another thing, this summer feels like the last one for a while where I can do something like this. That something being taking three and half months off and living in another country. Next summer, God willing, I will be in a nurse residency program and for the 3 - 5 years after that, I'll be doing a master's program. And somewhere along the way I'd like to settle down and acquire some kids :) So I felt that if I didn't do this now, I might not get to for a long time. Also, I desperately want to be bilingual, and I want to serve the Spanish speaking population here in Nashville in my nursing practice and volunteer jobs, and I haven't made headway on learning Spanish here in the States. So why Guatemala? For one thing, Miriam, one of my best friends, will already be there. And at 4 hours apart, it's feasible that we will be able to travel together many of the weekends, hopefully throughout Guat and into Mexico and Honduras as well. In practical terms, Guatemala is relatively cheap, is gorgeous, is pretty safe, and is allegedly one of the easiest places to learn Spanish because it's fairly accent free.
That's all for now.
