Day 7- San Juan Laguna

Starting off with Sunday, we spent the entire day with our homestay families. Many of us went to church in the morning. My family wore the traditional Guatemalan attire, which included women in large, colorful dresses -- very interesting. Some of our families were related so we went to people's houses for family meals and spent the afternoon with them and the rest of the extended family. For example, Alex and I (Kamran) had lunch together. My host mother is the daughter of his host grandmother and Dylan's and Jason's host mothers are cousins. Monday morning we had Spanish lessons until noon and some of us had active lessons in the town at the church and at different shops and gardens. After returning to our families for lunch, we split up in the afternoon. Half of us went to a local school and the other half had cooking lessons. At the school, we watched the two documentaries briefly described in the previous blog with the Guatemalan students and discussed the issues in them and their prevalence in our lives. We also talked to each other about our cultures and differences, which was an eye-opening experience. A lot of us learned about various aspects of the Guatemalan culture that we didn't know about previously and vice versa with the Guatemalan students. For example, I attempted (with an unknown degree of success) to explain insurance to them, something they had never heard of before. They told us about how when they are hurt or sick, they go to the village culandera (a kind of healer that was the subject of one of the documentaries we saw) to be cured of their ailments instead of going to a doctor as we do in the United States. And in the cooking class we learned to make traditional pepian, a Guatemalan dish consisting of boiled chicken and rice in a spiced tomato puree. On Tuesday, we are going to have Spanish lessons again in the morning and then switch roles in the afternoon (the school and the cooking class).

Text: Kamran
(Primary) Photos: Dylan