Category: Living Abroad

You didn’t think I could cover a whole 6 weeks in one post, did you? (Read Living in Guatemala – the first visit first, if you haven’t already.)

This was our second encounter with ping pong, having first tried it with no instructions whatsoever at Timeberline Lodge, which pretty much meant two uncoordinated kids bumped a ball around for a bit. It was different at PLFM because most of the students (and all of the teachers, of course) were adults, and some actually knew how to play ping pong. I can’t say we were great at it, but we did get the basics and learned how to occasionally score points.

An early discovery was that we had never been taught to read a map. On that first day of class, at lunch time, we were all driven to Candelaria and dropped off at our respective houses. We walked back to school with our parents after lunch. At the end of the day, map in hand, my sister announced that she knew the way, and my parents let us go on ahead, presumably intending to keep us in sight. Not surprisingly, we took a wrong turn… several blocks before we were supposed to turn the opposite direction. We didn’t get too far before realizing our mistake, but it took just long enough that our parents arrived in Candelaria before we did.

After our first week at the school, being rather rambunctious children, we were assigned to one of the other buildings. (There were three; two were several blocks from the main building, but across the street from each other.) We’d start every week at the main building, because students were assigned a new teacher every week, then walk with our teachers to our allocated classroom. This meant we had to plan ahead and walk back to the main building just in time for break if we wanted to play ping pong.

There were other advantages to being near the main building… the store across the street sold gummy bears. You could buy a few ositos for ten centavos. (By the time I reached middle school, there were places selling gummy worms too.)

I watched a TED talk recently about how little we know about other places, mainly because the stories we hear about them come from single sources, typically repeated and not necessarily verified. Go watch it, I’ll wait.

I realized how uniquely privileged I’ve been, having lived in four different countries. I’ll skip the United States, at least for now, since that’s where most of my readers are located. I can’t really speak about living in England, as I was still wearing diapers at the time, so Guatemala is the logical place to start.

Our first visit to Antigua, Guatemala was to learn Spanish, spending six weeks in an immersion program. Every weekday, we attended a Spanish Language school, Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (or PLFM) where each student was partnered with a teacher, from 8am to 12pm, then again from 2pm to 5pm. In between those times, we went home for lunch.

Home, you ask? Yes, home was to the house we were staying at, families who partnered with the school to fill a spare bedroom or two, feed foreign students, and provide an opportunity to practice our Spanish outside of a classroom environment. Because we were still in elementary school, my parents asked that we all be placed in houses near each other, which is how we ended up in the Colonia Candelaria, a neighborhood at the edge of Antigua’s map. (The basic city grid is 7 streets and 7 avenues, and the Colonia Candelaria is just past one of the corners.)

We were given homework for those evening hours. Being young and on summer break, we mostly ignored it and played with other neighborhood kids. This, along with our youth and an aptitude for languages inherited from my father, turned out to be key to the immersion part of the program – interacting with people socially is immensely useful.

How was living in Guatemala at that age different from living in the United States? One of the first things you’re told when you arrive – and it’s certainly memorable – is not to flush toilet paper. We were told the plumbing wasn’t set up to handle it, presumably partially because of variable water pressure throughout the day. Every bathroom (well, the ones with walls and plumbing, at least) has a garbage can right by the toilet where you dispose of paper.

We were also introduced to pilas, the standard sink at most houses at the time. A household pila typically has a basin area that collects water, and an area to each side for cleaning – one for dishes, and one for clothes. Yes, as in handwashing your clothes; washing machines and dryers were not common at the time, though there was a coin laundromat in town you could use. Because of the variable water pressure, you fill the basin whenever you can – first thing in the morning usually had decent pressure – to use throughout the day. (It’s also the reason for my habit of morning showers.)

We discovered new foods, including corn tortillas, and exploring the market, where our allowance could buy wonderful things like a pound of raspberries for a quarter or handmade ceramic turtles. (The exchange rate at the time was about one to one, but the prices were cheaper than what we had back home.) That was the healthier option, since a quarter would also buy an ice cream cone; two quarters would turn that into an esquimal, which dipped the ice cream into chocolate shell and topped it with nuts.

Being young, we had a tendency to wander all over town with our teachers. We learned which colonial ruins had free days (Las Capuchinas was free on Tuesdays and Santa Clara on Thursdays), scheduling playdates with our friends, who we quickly learned only attended school in the mornings. On rainy days, we stayed inside at the school, learning Spanish and card games, such as Rummy.

After our six week stay, we returned to Miami having started friendships that would last decades. And we switched from the introductory Spanish class to the one for Spanish speakers.