Teaching and Learning in Panajachel: Picnics, La Playa y Kaqchikel

I guess no news, is good news….it meant I was busy and loving every minute of my last few weeks in Panajachel. But, I have missed quite a chunk in my blogging so I am going to take it back to early May.

Jason, who teaches 4^th and 5^th grade (with baby Luke), began planting the idea of a combined class picnic in his students’ brains a few weeks before the end of school. It became incredible incentive to complete all their homework and study for their upcoming finals. They were ecstatic!! We had 2^nd graders holding 5^th graders accountable and older siblings helping the younger siblings to complete their homework at home. The deal was, every student from Miss Allison’s 2^nd/3^rd grade and Jason’s 4^th/5^th grade had to complete and bring their homework for the 3 weeks leading up to this anticipated, epic picnic! I’m not sure Jason and I really realized all that we had signed up for, but sure enough one sunny Wednesday afternoon, our two classes marched through Pana, crossed the river to our designated picnic spot by the lake, and took over the entire park for 2 hours! Parents and students brought food to feed a village! It as an afternoon of basketball, swimming, food, swings and fun! Only in Guatemala can two teachers get away with such a field trip without permissions slips and med forms….but the parents were aware and many came to spend the afternoon with us!

And we are off....crossing the river!

Setting up our lunch spot

Susana and Maria

Yeshua

One weekend in May, Carlos, Sammy, Michelle and I piled into the Solomon’s Porch shuttle and drove out to the coast to spend a few days in Monterrico. It was a weekend of Spanglish at it’s finest. Carlos and Michelle both speak English and Spanish fluently but Sammy is working on perfecting his English while I am working on perfecting my Spanish so we proved to be a great team. Lucky for us, the UEFA Champions League final was that Saturday afternoon, so the four of us camped out in our hotel restaurant and watched the game with all the waiters and whoever tried to pass by but got sucked in. There were tears and laughter…screams of excitement and horror, as we watched Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid fight till the death. We thought we were in for a long depressing evening, when Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid (Carlos and Sammy’s highly preferred player and team) were down, with only 2 minutes left on the clock. But when Ronaldo scored to tie it up, Carlos began running laps down the restaurants aisle hugging any human that came in his track. Reactions of obsessive soccer fans are truly universal, however this specific scene and line of reactions and events were truly a cultural experience! Soccer IS life!

Another truly cultural scene I experienced in the last few weeks of school occurred on the stage of AMA. Stella, our amazing Kaqchikel teacher, had been rehearsing traditional Mayan dance performances with our students for 3 weeks leading up to the event. The day of the performance all of the primary students came in their full traditional Mayan traje, and preformed a few routines in front of the whole school. It proved to be the event of the year. Parents came from as far as 2 hours away to see their students participate and embrace their heritage with pride. It was humbling to watch the parents who still dress in the typical garb in the audience, beaming with pride as their sons and daughters perform their ancestral routines. In Pana the traditional clothing indicates who is of indigenous decent. However, generally, those of indigenous descent live up in the foothills and have less access to education and resources. This is another grandiose generalization but on the streets of Pana those wearing traditional traje are treated with less respect than those that dress in western clothing. The fact is, most families in Pana are of indigenous descent but have over the generations stripped themselves from those roots. With that in mind, it was a very touching afternoon seeing our AMA families of indigenous descent, watch their sons and daughters in traditional attire perform with pride in front of their whole school.