This month I've started traveling to a city called Malacatan on the weekends to teach English classes. If you're looking at the above map, point B is Malacatan and the solid white line just to the left of it is the Mexican border. Malacatan is a little city in the department of San Marcos (Guatemala has departments, not states) and when I go there I'm pretty sure I am the only white person those people have ever seen (with the exception of the teacher who went before me). In the academy that I work at we change teachers every two weeks for weekday classes and every month for weekend classes, but the previous teacher who'd been going to Malacatan had been going for the last 7 months....so I could potentially be going over there every weekend until I head back to the states.
I love the city; it's small and fairly easy to navigate, the majority of the traffic is due to the many tuk-tuks they have running from place to place (see the photo below if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say tuk-tuk), and the people I've met there have been really nice and really helpful if I've had questions about anything.
My students over there are also pretty cool. I have a class with 3 kids (two boys and a girl, 13-14 years old) and then another class with a boy who I think is about 8. Normally, I don't like teaching kids because they don't really want to learn, and that's kind of true of these kids too, but we have a good time. They all love playing soccer so whenever we take a break from class that's what they wanna do (both classes are 4 hours each, so we take a lot of breaks to play games). The class with 3 kids also likes to play spoons...but the kind where you put the spoons in random spots around the room so even if you're the one who got the set of 4 you might not get a spoon. Haha!
The only thing I really don't like about Malacatan is that it is so hot all the time. It's humid and just straight-up hot, so when I play soccer with my students I get wiped out really quickly from the heat. I learned very quickly that the only way to survive over there is to wear a skirt instead of jeans and to wear an airy shirt instead of my thick work polo....and I also need to drink way more water than here in Xela. Really, if it weren't so hot over there I'd be totally fine with going every weekend until I leave Guatemala, but it is so hot and only getting hotter as summer/the rainy season is starting to kick-in. Oh yeah, I love the rain here! I mean, I like the rain in Tacoma, but I've always loved thunderstorm rain way more...there's intense thunderstorm rain here with thunder and lightning and everything, plus it's not freezing cold here when it rains!!
The city is 3.5-4 hours away from Xela by bus, and I have to take two buses to get there. So yeah, I spend about 8 hours on a bus so that I can give 8 hours of classes, but I stay the night over there and it's way more relaxing than getting up at 3:30AM on Saturdays to travel to Huehue to teach (that's what I was doing all last month). Plus it's conveniently located right by the Mexican border so that when I need to border-hop to renew my visa I'll already be right there. (Actually, I need to do that in the next few weeks...I'll let y'all know how it goes)
Funny/super gross Malacatan story #1 (ok, fine, there's only one so far...but I'm hoping for more in the future): My Saturday morning class is with the 8-year-old boy and he has a little wiener dog that doesn't understand the meaning of personal space/seriously, don't jump up on me. So I was playing soccer with my student and all of a sudden the maid starts calling his name, telling him to come quick because the dog ate a mouse. The dog's running around with a little tail hanging out of its mouth and then it spits out the mouse on the floor....this mouse is just a little baby and it would've been so cute if it weren't a mouse and if it hadn't just come out of the dog's mouth. Well the mouse is still alive and it's kinda wiggling around so the dog eats it again and we're running after the dog trying to make sure he doesn't spit the mouse out somewhere we can't find it. The dog spits out the mouse again and this time it's dead. So we block the dog from being able to eat it again while the maid sweeps up the poor little mouse to throw it away. We're all super grossed out by this and my student is running around the house yelling "Que asco!!! Que aaasssssccccoooooo!!!!!" (basically it means, so gross!) I mentioned already that the dog is really an up-in-your-grill kind of dog, right? Well the dog keeps trying to lick me, but I know what's been in that mouth and I don't want that all over my legs....so we were pretty grossed out by that, but life went on. We continued with our class and started working in the book again, but then the dog jumped up on the couch and started making sounds like it was going to throw up. Sure enough, it threw up on the couch. "Aaaahhhhhh!!! Que asco!!!!!!!!!" But it gets worse....the dog jumped back up onto the couch and ate all of its barf. So we jump up and start running around the house being super grossed out, my student is yelling "Que asco!!! Que asco!!" and I'm trying really hard to think about something else so that I too don't barf and watch the dog eat that too. Of course, we had a great laugh about it, but still. So. Gross. I never want to have a little dog like that because I'm pretty sure I'd be reminded of what happened last Saturday every time I'd see the dog.
Anyways, yeah, so I'm going to Malacatan every weekend and it's a pretty great place (minus the suffocating heat). If you've tried to reach me during the weekend and I haven't responded it's because I don't bring my computer with me...I already have enough stuff to take with me, there's no space for my computer, also I don't want it to get jacked.
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