Windows and Doors

There is a weight that lifts when you laugh for the first time in another language. I mean, the laugh itself doesn´t change, or at least that is a level of comfort that I have not yet had the privilege of attaining. But there is a little glimmer of hope when you first hear something funny and manage to make people laugh with you for the first time. The subtleties of the language are hard to describe, and I am sure I would just leave you all shaking your heads if I tried. But one thing is clear: geekiness follows us fluidly through the door that leads out of the terrain of our mother tongue. My joke was grammatical today, but at least they laughed. Perhaps they were laughing at nuances beyond my reach, but I don´t even care. It felt so good to laugh.

The last few days have been incredibly full. The school that I am attending offers many activities outside of the classroom context, so I have taken a salsa lesson, stumbled through an explanation of renewable and non-renewable resources with my limited vocabulary, watched Indiana Jones in Spanish, and learned about the education system in Guatemala. As far as I understood, their system is a lot like ours in its structures. Students attend school for 12 years, receive grades like ours, and have many of the same classes. The fascinating part of the lecture this evening was that the ideology of the educational system neither matches the reality nor serves the people in the way that it should. According to the laws, each child has the right to go to

 school, but not every student can. (Sound familiar?) And the school provides an education that advances the student through each grade, but it does not take into account teaching standards or the needs of the individual student.

Through my questioning of various locals, it seems that the local Mayan language, which is spoken by almost every adult here as the first language, is endangered, so to speak. The children can understand it because it is spoken in the classroom, but not all of them can speak 

it fluently. Many of the Mayan traditions are passed down through this language and are thus in danger of being lost with the language itself. But since Spanish is more effective worldwide, most schools teach with it. The students in this area are therefore combating an additional barrier by speaking one language in the home and being expected to excel in a different language at school. It reminds me of the immigrant children in the United States who are at a similar disadvantage when they learn to speak Spanish in the home but have to learn English in school while also learning all of the topics that each student is taught. If they manage to make it through all of that, I suppose they reach an advantage later in life by being bilingual.

The speaker´s criticism tonight of the Guatemalan school system is that it is too rigid and does not honor the ethnic diversity of a nation that houses four major ethnic groups. In this area, it has always been the tradition to attend school from February to November and then have a 

break during the coffee picking season.... You are catching on? It is crucial for the local economy to have the labor of the students during the harvest, but the national system does not take these kinds of local issues into account. There are also many holidays that are celebrated nationally but that are not relevant to all of the citizens, but the calendar lacks holidays for key 

Mayan holidays. Certainly there are a lot of common concerns in our own country. Of course, this information is all what I have come to understand with my broken Spanish, so take it with a grain of salt. I will keep asking questions and finding new sources of information to paint a balanced picture. For now, it is fascinating to look through this lens. The school offers the opportunity to volunteer with local children to enhance the effective outcome of the educational system, so I may participate in that when I can communicate a bit more.

Be sure and laugh a few times today. It is easy to forget how important it is. Here´s a little help for those of you who know how to count to five in Spanish: What do you call four bullfighters in quicksand? (Scroll down for the answer.)







Cuatro Cinco... Get it cuatro ´sink-o´? He he. Some of you can guess who told me that one!