Quick Update

Picture to the left: Flowers in the CASAS compound.

Just a quick update...

This morning I came to town with my host father (he calls me his brother). We went to his office at the Mennonite Central Committee headquarters and participated in a men's bible study. I was able to pick out isolated words, but not enough to put anything together to know what was being said. When I was introduced there seemed to be comments that I was not a gringo ("Yankee from the north"), but was welcome as one of them - at least that is what I hope the comments were about !!!! ;-). Even though I understand very little, situations like that are helpful because they give me a sense of the cadence of the language and help me identify sounds and words.

Later in the morning I spent time with the Registrar/Technology Specialist at SEMILLA/CASAS. He is quite young and a fairly recent employee. My first two technology tasks will be to look at ways to get better reports from their database and to help them more fully develop their website. Our discussion was interesting because he is learning English, and I am learning Spanish. There were many times of laughter as we each looked at the other with blank expressions. At one point we had to get a translator, but translating technical computer terms is not that easy!!

My second Spanish lesson did not produce the headache I had on Monday. I hope that is progress. One of our activites was a memory game - turning over cards with pictures and words, then trying to match them. My teacher did better than I - not because she is a native Spanish speaker, but because her memory is so much better than my memory. I never did well at that game.

Tomorrow I leave on a 4-day trip with the AMBS (Elkhart Seminary) group. So there will not be any posts to this blog until I return. I also have a good bit of Spanish homework to do - write 21 (simple) sentences using all the various forms of 'to be' and including indentification, descriptions, time/date, emotions, etc. I may not be able to post anything until Monday or Tuesday evening.

As I write this I'm reminded of one very noticeable difference between Guatemala City and Goshen - the length of time for sunrise and sunset. Due to the many mountains and volcanos around the city, the transition from dark/light and light/dark is very rapid. By the time I realize the sun is setting - boom! - it is dark. And in the morning it seems like a light switch goes on when the sun rises.

Pictures:

Left - hillside on outskirts of Guatemala City at night.

Right - Volcano in the background. You can see the base of the volcano under the clouds and the tip of the volcano above the clouds. (Click on the pictures to get an enlarged view.)