Long Time No Write

Wow it is have been a long time since I have updated this thing. Part of it has been laziness and the other part that I have been really busy. Lets see what have I been up to in the last month. Well one of the reasons that I was so busy is that I was acting as the coordinator of Proyecto Linguistico Quezalteco. Carrie the normal director was in the United States attending the United States Social Forum. Check out the website if you did not hear about it. www.ussf2007.org. It was pretty fun to do her job for a week or two. I worked about 35 hours per week and it felt like a long week. I guess that is what happens after 6 months of hardly working at all.
Now my parents are here it has been fun showing them around town. They have been here for a week now doing some of the little trips from the school and hanging out with me. This week they will be studying at PLQ so that they can speak a little more Spanish. They are already talking about coming back next year if things go well this time.
The other big news in my life is that I actually bought a plane ticket home at the end of August. Well sort of home. I am actually flying out of Cancun straight to Ketchican Alaska to go to my friends Katy and Amos' wedding. That should be a ton of fun. Get to see some old high school friends and hang out in Alaska for a couple of days. Then I am heading back to the Cincinnati. And from there who knows where.

Super Cute

Last week the English class that I had been working with performed a play. Nana another student and at PLQ was helping out and since she does theater in the States we decided to try a play here with the kids. The story which they chose was of Tecun Uman. A mystical Mayan warrior who fought against the Spanish invaders. Nana wrote the play in English than we worked on translating it to Spanish so that they could actually understand what they were saying. This is the opening scene with me hiding behind the curtain making sure they were saying their lines correctly.
The kids were super nervous backstage before the show. Most of their parents were there and a whole bunch of students from the school. They did really well though most of them even memorized their lines even though we did not require them to do that. It was really good for them to work up to something rather than just learning some random vocab words with out much context. Here is Kevin the King of Spain in his castle . We also did a little bit of social engineering and cast the boy that was getting picked on during class as the lead role. And it seemed to work. They seem to accept him more now. We did have to put one foreigner as a stand in for someone who did not show up but it worked out well.

The picture above is Tecun Uman fighting Pedro Alvarado with the Quetzal bird looking on from the chair. As well as the two narrators and lots of dead folks on the ground. On the right is the final bow a little disjointed but at least they got there.

Fame or Infamy

Well I am not sure if this means that I am famous or infamous or maybe just that I go out to much but there is a photo of me in this month´s issue of XelaWho. It is a silly free monthly that is put out here in Xela. There are some pretty funny articles sometimes and they always do this imitation of the society pages in a paper where they have pictures of people that they take at the local hot spots. King and Queen is one of my favorite bars. That night was Carrie´s birthday party. In the picture with me is one of the bar tenders. Yes, I go by Jacobo here most of the time (pronounced ha co bo). It is the Spanglized version of my name and a bit easier for Spanish speakers to pronounce although there are quite a few native English speakers that call me that as well. Check the picture out here...
http://www.xelawho.com/barfly/index.htm