A Child´s Treasury of Ways to Kill a Chicken

Dinner was late last night and I didn´t begin homework until 9:30. By the time homework finished, I was too tired to even turn on my iPod. This keeps happening. My ¨reward¨for finishing homework is to lie in bed and listen to Chopin´s Nocturnes before falling asleep. But for the past three nights I´ve been too exhausted for even that. So I fell asleep immediately only to be woken up at 12am, 1am, 2am, 2:30am, 3am, 3:30a, 4am, 5am and 5:30 am at which point I just got up and showered. Our rooster, I hates him. We live across the street from a field which serves as a small dump for our neighborhood, I think I have mentioned this. The dump means lots of strays. And lots of strays mean Mr. Rooster is bothered quite often, and in turn bothers me. Keep in mind that our apartment is concrete tile floors, plaster walls, and very little furniture. The doors are metal, the windows are metal and glass. So every single little noise sounds amplified, especially when said noise is a rooster 2 feet below your bedroom window. I think he´s here for good. When A.´s dad stopped by 3 days ago, I thought it was to pick her up for an outing. Now, he and the chickens seem permanent fixtures. So I will have to rework my sleeping schedule around the rooster. Which means, naps in the afternoon, and accepting that I won´t be able to sleep in on Saturdays. All things considered, it´s only a hardship when I am in bed, passing the time by fantasizing about cooking the bird.

Last night, A. modeled for me her Mayan festival clothes, all handmade of course, and incredibly beautiful. Then, I let her play with my little handheld fan that I bought as a gag gift for MRM and me, and A. wanted to listen to the whir of it, and put it up to her ear, at which point about a third of her long, gorgeous, silky hair got tangled in the fan and ended up in a knot the size of a baseball. It was awful. She takes so much pride in her hair and I was sure that we would have to cut it out. I´ve never seen worse tangles. So, I carried her into the bathroom, sat her on the toilet seat, and perched myself on the lip of the tub, and poured almost my entire bottle of conditioner on her hair and worked it out single strand by single strand. It took over an hour. My arms were aching from the effort. But her locks were still beautiful once it was all said and done.

It´s getting really really hard having someone making all my meals for me, and giving me the largest portions. I am seated at the head of the table, and my plate or bowl is always overflowing, while K.´s portions seem to get smaller and smaller. At each meal I have tried to share mine with her, and she gladly accepts, but I haven´t figured out how to tell her to serve me the same as everyone else. I tried twice before and we just ended up talking at each other. I decided not to take the beach trip this weekend and instead stay home and try to do laundry in the pila and help with more household chores.

Classes are going well. There are only 6 of us enrolled in morning classes currently. 3 other students are traveling and several others attend in the afternoons. 2 are from Canada, the other three are from Iowa, Cali and Oregon. We all have very different backgrounds but are getting along well. After break today it was maestros vs. estudiantes in a game of English-Spanish charades. We tried to come up with really cerebral phrases that would be incredibly difficult to act out, but the maestros kept nailing our submissions over and over and over. I was able to guess my English words fairly quickly, but was only able to guess one of my Spanish translations. We lost, but it was close.

I requested my same teacher for next week. We seem to be finding a rhythm. There is no lesson plan here, they teachers just kind of wing it based on the materials on hand, what level you´re at, and what you´re hoping to get out of it. We haven´t started any ¨Medical Spanish¨yet but that will mainly be vocabulary anyway. At lunch today, Senor Gaucho asked about my skin, and I had to try to explain my autoimmune disease, ideopathic guttate hypomelanosis. Thankfully, melanin and immune system are a pretty straight translation.

I have felt really dumb all week, and am feeling tired of feeling dumb, but today I received a really wonderful email from my friend James, who has recently moved to Africa for missions work, and who is taking language classes as well. He is also a linguist, and for that reason, I take his advice on learning languages even more to heart. Which is basically this: don´t try to master anything. Be a servant. Be a conduit. Immerse yourself in the people and in the life of the place, and the language skills will come. This is opposite of what I have felt like I ought to do, so it´s nice to feel like I have permission to just be, just talk to people and engage them instead of holing up in a Western cafe memorizing vocab.

My family is Catholic. I am going to see if they´ll let me accompany them to church on Sunday. Allegedly, there are 100K - 1M Guatemalans waiting to be christmated in the Orthodox Church, but I haven´t been able to find them.

Oh, I found out recently that World Vision has approved me to visit my Guatemalan sponsor daughter, Lucia, while I am here. However, they want to transport me from Guatemala City, which isn´t the safest place on earth. So I am trying to work out meeting Lucia, whose village is apparantly only accessible by boat, and would appreciate your prayers that that happens.

My feelings about being her change by the hour. I love it. I´m bored. I´m homesick. I´m annoyed. I love it. I know that come August, I will be really really glad I came, but some hours August feels like a lifetime away. Hoping all is well with you in your respective corners.