Stamps

Something that I noticed while my parents were here is that there seems to be a fascination with stamps here in Guatemala. I am not talking about the kind that you stick on envelopes and send letters places I am talking about the rubber kind that you have to have a stamp pad for. When I was with my parents in Antigua we went to get some ice cream. The process at this place was that you tell the cashier what you want they ring you up and print out a receipt and hand it to another worker who than stamps the receipt and gives it to you and than gets your ice cream. Now why they need to stamp the receipt I have no idea. Then I was reading a book that I got from the library here at PLQ and noticed that there was a stamp on one of the middle pages that said PLQ. I decided to count how many PLQ stamps there were in the book and in a two hundred page book there were more than 30 stamps. I mean I can understand one or two so that the book can not be stolen but 35 seems to me to be a little excessive. Who knows maybe there is some cultural reason that Guatemalans use so many stamps. If anyone has any insight on this please feel free to let me know.

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.