Estudiamos Español in Antigua, Guatemala por Semana Santa.

Our schooling has commenced, finally! We arrived in Antigua for the start Spanish School during the week of Semana Santa, or holy week (it has surely been our most interesting Easter ever; stay tuned for more on that to come).

We arrived at our homestay the day before classes began to find that it was more of a very nice dormitory for Spanish school students, plus a very large family (still haven’t even quite figured out all the connections or who lives here and who doesn’t). While this wasn’t exactly what we had in mind when signed up to live with a family, our new “mom” is wonderful, the food is great, and the house is comfortable. We also thought it might be an added bonus of having other students to commiserate with about our struggles at communicating, only to find that everyone else seemed to be fluent already (including a pet parrot that can speak better than us). Apparently we missed the memo that you should be an expert at the language before coming to school… oops. Gives us something to live up to. So through most meals we are the mute ones at the table, hoping a question won’t be proposed specifically to us, so we can go on pretending with our head nods and smiles that we know exactly what everyone else is talking about.

But we are not the only ones in Antigua struggling with the language. All around the city you see foreigners (gringos) attempting to speak with a native. You can tell the gringo is new because conversations usually sound the same. The Guatemalan will spout off an entire paragraph of strong Vs, rolled Rs and Ns with the little squiggly thing, and the gringo will answer with the one word he is sure he can pronounce, “Si.” This will be followed by another long paragraph, or possibly just one very long word and then again it will be followed with a little more hesitant, “Si.” It is actually quite brilliant. While “yes” is the first vocabulary world you learn, they actually don’t teach you “no” (which coincidentally in Spanish is also “no,” should have figured that one out) till about week three. So by the time you start to understand what they are asking, you have agreed to pay double the price for the language school, forgo all your meals and have signed up for every top dollar excursion they have. With my Spanish being particularly slow, I think I might have agreed to become their live-in house keeper and given up all rights to my first born as well.

But school is finally starting to help. First we started with the basics- learn the alphabet. It’s been a struggle but we’ve almost grasped it. Brooke then decided that it would be better to jump straight to past participles, subjunctives, imperfect and preterite tenses. Considering I have no idea what these English words even mean, I have decided to stick with, Hola and Grassy-ass. But it’s not like either of us can truly communicate anything without breaking into a full blown game of charades, so I don’t feel too behind.

Really building up that vocabulary is probably what we need the most. Unfortunately though, when they thought up Spanish they decided to make it fun for English speakers and so they made the “A” sounds like “O”, “E” sounds like “A” and “I” sounds like “E”. So when I am speaking I tend to confuse things like “hombre” (man) and “hambre” (hunger). When I say “Tengo hambre” I should be given delicious food (after all, I said “I have hunger”), but instead in my poor pronunciation I say, “I have a man” which in this country (not quite as homophobic as Jamaica, but close) might get me beat up.

But really, we have learned a lot and are getting better every day. Not only are we taking advantage of one on one instruction for five hours a day, we are also studying on our own for another three or four. We’ve also had the chance to look into organizations we and The GROW Initiative can link with in the near future. Learning the language first is a must before we can really do any good here in this beautiful country, and we are well on our way.