Say What?

I have a general rule here in Guatemala...don't ask, don't tell.  This goes for everything...especially food.  I believe in this philosophy so much, that I don't even worry about what I'm eating anymore.  Don't tell me, I don't want to know.  I'll just sit here and eat my pig brains in peace, thank you very much. 

Sometimes I don't know what meat I'm eating.  It all looks the same to me, so I figure it's something I've had before.  At a recent meal, I sat down to a plate of meat, rice, and the usual red sauce we have here.  "Delicious" I thought, "I'm hungry!"  I ate it quickly and finished first (as ALWAYS happens...this comes from having 15 minutes to eat lunch when I was in grade school and we weren't allowed to finish our food if we weren't done.  Ain't no way I'm missing out on any of my food!)  After I finished, someone at the head of the table asked, "Wow, you really enjoyed that cow tongue, didn't you???"

Say what?

The best part is...I did.  I enjoyed the cow tongue.  Had I known it was cow tongue BEFORE I ate it, I might have eaten it begrudgingly and found a reason to say I didn't prefer it, just because, who goes around saying, "I love cow tongue!"? 

Lesson:  You never know if you'll like something until you try it!

AND

Don't ask what you're eating.  Just eat it and smile. 

Old as the hills...and then some

It's official.  I'm older than the hills...and then some, according to recent studies in my third grade class.  We all think it's "cute" when kids think we're older than we really are.  But really??  Yesterday, it came up that in the "old days", there were no forks to eat with, so people used a different kind of utensil. 

"Miss Rigel, did they have forks when YOU were little???"

Seriously.

"No dear, we didn't have forks.  In fact, Methuselah and I were good friends.  We sat around and ate with our hands like cavemen.  They came out with forks not long after Methuselah died at the age of 969.  He would have loved to have seen that invention.  Good thing I was around to see it.  Lucky for you, you get to eat with forks now."

Is it because I'm wearing my hair differently?  Is it because I fall asleep at 7pm?  Is it because I have grey hair that these darling children haven given me...and point out to me daily with no mercy?   The only thing that keeps me from crawling in a hole and dying (since I'm that old, it's apparently time) is the fact that the mother of one of my boys told me the other day, "My son came home the other day and said, 'Miss Rigel is so beautiful, mom.'" 

At least I'm a "beautiful" old lady. 

House Hunters International~ Guatemalan style!

Today, I went house-hunting with my fiancé.  We decided we should be on that TV show, House Hunters International…I mean, we do live in Guatemala and all.  I had to laugh at the conversation I would imagine us having with the show host~ “So, what’s your budget?”  My response would be something like~ “definitely much less than you make in a day.”  As you might imagine, house hunting in Guatemala is not quite the same as house hunting in the States.  I had to laugh at my 3 criteria for our home.  (By the way, I use the term ‘home’ interchangeably with other words like ‘apartment’ and ‘condo’ because they are basically all the same thing here.) 

1.     1. Safe~ by this I mean that I would like to live behind a gate that is guarded by a man with a gun.  I realize that sometimes this is a false sense of security considering other factors, but it just makes me feel better that someone is (usually) always watching my house/complex, they have a weapon, and could possibly deter someone from disturbing me or my family. 

2.     2. Clean~ I realize that this is a relative term.  I’m not talking sparkling, I’m just thinking it would be nice not to have rats, mice, scorpions, or other giant creatures…at least not on a daily basis as a consistent bothersome problem.  My definition of clean has changed since moving to Guatemala.  Your house is as clean as you make it.  You can only get concrete floors so clean before you just give up and call it done.  Even on tiled foors…with the rain, bugs, dirt, dust, volcanic ash, etc. sometimes you just gotta let it go.  I’m working on that…

3.     3. Near my school~ the reason this is in the top 3 is not because I’m lazy or picky.  We will only be having one car, which means Daniel will more than likely be taking me to school in the mornings and picking me up in the evenings before/after he goes to work.  If he is unable to take me or pick me up on certain days, I want to live close enough to where it’s not severely out of someone’s way to take me home or pick me up.

My roommate pointed out that maybe I should include in my list such things as “hot water” and “ability to flush toilet paper.”  Eh, I suppose those could be numbers 4 and 5.  J  I’m not banking on ever being able to flush toilet paper again, so that one isn’t quite as important, and if I don’t have hot water, you better believe I just won’t be showering everyday…especially when the inside temperatures dip into the 40’s at night and early mornings.  Yes, I said INSIDE temperatures.

So, off we headed with ourselves and a cell phone.  That’s all you really need here to search for a house.  You just drive around asking at the garita if there are any houses for sale/rent in that neighborhood.  Sometimes they have no idea but they can usually give you a phone number to call.  Other times, there are signs posted for houses that are for sale or rent.  I’m not kidding when I say that we probably stopped at 20 colonias.  I got so tired of hearing them say, “Fijase que no hay…” Blah, blah, BLAH, BLAH!  I even got out of the car with him each time and went with him just up to the gate so they could see that he was with a gringa.  Usually I don’t pull that card…usually it’s best not to pull that card, but someone advised me that it might get better results since people like to rent/sell to gringos.  It didn’t work for me.  Things like that usually don’t.

We tried to have fun on our house hunting adventure by stopping at colonias that were CLEARLY out of our price range.  We would walk up like we were Mr. and Mrs. Joe Cool and ask, then run back to the car laughing when they told us the price.  My favorite quote of the day is when Daniel said, “Yeah, I have an idea.   If we have 10 children and sell them for $100,000/each, then we could afford to live here.”  When we stopped at one of the colonias, we couldn’t find the guard.  So, we rang each of the buzzers for each of the 10 houses outside the gate on the little keypad thingy to see if anyone knew if anything was available.  We kept pressing the buttons and no one answered until the end and by that time we were laughing so hard because we both just kept pushing random buttons that the lady just hung up on us.   “Hola, buenas tardes…hola?  Hola?”  J  We were both a bit frustrated and tired by the end, so we were just trying to lighten the mood.

If you had been riding in the car with us, you might have gotten sick from the stopping and starting so much, as well as common phrases like, “Ooh!  Stop here, these look cheap!”  or “Oh, these don’t look nice at all.  They would be perfect for us!”  By 5:00 Daniel said, “That’s it.  No more today.”  I heartily agreed.  We were able to find some that are in our price range (our price range starts with a 0, haha!), but there is nothing available right now.  Pray with us, please for something to open up in the next few months!

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where I live.  I really don’t care.  As long as I’m with the one I love, I truly don’t care if that’s on a dirt floor washing my clothes down by the river or in a palace with the finest clothes.   Hot water, no hot water, tarantulas, snakes (hey, we’re all family, right?  J), no a/c, no heat, etc. 

No me importa.  

Just so long as I see this everyday…

I need to learn Korean

As many of you know, my class of kiddos is quite diverse.  I LOVE it.  I love hearing them talk and going back and forth between English, Spanish, Korean, back to English, some more Spanish, etc...all in one sentence.  While I enjoy hearing it and think it's quite adorable, I get lost when the Korean words start coming.  I can handle English and Spanish, but Korean is another story.  I don't understand it at all.  So, when there was an "incident" the other day on the playground, I was "up a creek without a paddle" as my dad always said.  Here's what happened.

Student 1- "Miss Rigel, Student 2 called me a bad name in Korean!"
Miss Rigel- "Student 2, what did you call Student 1?"
Student 2- "I called him a lajdflkajoiiwehfoajkdjfweoa."
Miss Rigel- ".........."
Miss Rigel- "Ok, Student 2, don't call Student 1 a lajdflkajoiiwehfoajkdjfweoa again, please.  Jesus wants us to be kind to one another."
Student 2- "But Miss Rigel, it's not a bad name!"
Student 1- "Yes it is! A lajdflkajoiiwehfoajkdjfweoa is a akldjflwjeeaoeijf and a oiwejojfalkjaldflk and that's not nice!"
Student 2- "No it's not!  alkdjlajklwjeoirjealkfjakd is a bad name, but lajdflkajoiiwehfoajkdjfweoa is not.  weioruialjdlkfakflwefjlweoijflakfjlwajoeijaoijeiwawoaijfowejioajfowjowfaojidfa....."
(At this point, I was beyond lost, so I had to end it.)
Miss Rigel- "Ok, Student 1 and Student 2, please just be kind and maybe take a little break from each other right now." 
Students 1 and 2- "Ok, Miss Rigel."
Miss Rigel, walking away defeated- "I need to learn Korean."

And just for kicks, an adorable picture of some of my Korean loves...these were not the ones arguing, by the way.  :)

They are too cute, I could just eat them up!  :)

Sign-less (is that a word??) streets and Starbucks

The title of this blog is brought to you by my roommate, the one and only, CeCe.  :)

I consider myself to have somewhat of an ability to know where I'm going, how to get there, and stay on the right course (we're talking driving here, people, not life....that part I have NO CLUE about).  Today I got lost.  Of all things, I was leaving Wal-Mart.  I've left Wal-Mart many times and gotten home perfectly fine.  The problem is that, today, I parked in the parking garage underneath the store because it was really busy.  So when I saw the sign that said "Salida a Periferico" I took that exit because, well, I wanted to get on the Periferico.  Assuming (we all know what happens when you do that!!!) that the road I would come out of out of Wal-Mart would be the Periferico, I started driving.  I quickly realized that I had no idea where I was.

After a brief moment of internal screaming, I calmed down and prayed.  "Ok, Lord, please help me get back to where I need to be.  And please help me find a retorno!!"  A retorno is a break in the median where you can make something like a U-turn and go the other way on the major road.  There was no retorno.  See, Guatemala has this one problem...okay two.  If you start going the wrong way on a road, you are TOAST.  There is no place to turn around, there are streets going this way and that, nothing is straight, and you basically just end up crying.  The other problem is that there aren't street signs, usually.  I don't even know what road I was lost on.  BUT, I passed over this bridge that I remembered from a few weeks ago when I was with some friends (I was not driving at that time or I would have known what to do at this point!!).  So I called them a few times and did not get an answer.  Then the "major" road turns into a "not major" road going into a little town.  I made a few turns, hoping and PRAYING like crazy that it would get me back on the "major" road going the other way, eventually running into the Periferico.  I made it, only by the grace of God!  The good news is, I'm sure this will help me in the future.  At some point, I will go that way again, and this time I will know where I'm going...all because I got lost today.  :)

Mom, if you're reading this, you can stop breathing out of the brown paper bag now, I'm OK.  ;)  

While I was gallivanting around the city, my roommate texts me.  "Hey, the Starbucks is open at Oakland Mall!  Let's go this afternoon!"  Sure, sounds good, IF I ever get home!  But I did, so we went.  Apparently, I was bad luck to her because we had to turn around several times because of road blocks on our way to the mall.  We made it to the Starbucks and had a great photo shoot...I mean, we enjoyed our drinks.  :) 

"Sisy" and "Jenny"...whoever they are, I'm sure they enjoyed these...how do you get "Jenny" from me saying, "Amy"??

Yum.

Missionary quote of the day- I won't say her (oops) name to protect her identity:  "Oh, I like this one...and that one.  Let's get out of here before I steal something."  (We were in a shoe store at the time.)  :) 

I laughed so hard.    It was a good day.

Holy Guacamole!

I'll save you the excuses as to why I haven't blogged and just say that I'm here now!  Let's get started...this might take awhile.

I went back to Indianapolis from June 2-July 24.  I had a wonderful time seeing all (most) of you!  My boyfriend, Daniel, also came to the States with me for the first 9 days I was home.  It was his first time there, so, he was fascinated with things like carpet, dishwashers, garbage disposals, cheap prices (on certain things), safe driving, the lack of tinted windows, and FLAT land.

I arrived back home on July 24 and went straight to language school in Antigua.  I spent 2 weeks filling my brain with as much Spanish as possible.  I lived with a Guatemalan family and walked a mile each way to the school and back 4 times a day.  The family was so sweet and I really enjoyed getting to know them.  This is me with my "mom" Irma.

 This is the view from my school...BEAUTIFUL!!

I had so many wonderful cultural experiences in Antigua (not the least of which included me falling on the cobblestone streets).  Living with the family and speaking Spanish 6 hours a day was a difficult but very rewarding time.  I wish I could have stayed until I was fluent!

I left Antigua on August 6 and went to my new apartment!  I love my new place and my new roommate, CeCe.  We get along great..except...she forgot to tell me that I could flush the toilet paper at our house!  I just assumed we couldn't since you can't almost everywhere else.  6 weeks and I've been throwing the TP in the trash.  Sheesh... :)

School is going great.  I LOVE my kids and am so glad I have the same class from last year.  We did lose a couple and gain a couple, but I am so happy to see them every morning.  I spent quite a bit of time painting and fixing up my new room...I know you're dying to see the finished product!  ;)

Would you call the color on the walls "smurf blue" or "ocean blue"?  Be careful how you answer that!!  The real color is Azul Rivera with a can of white added.  That's exactly what you would have called it too, right??

Of course, I can't post without showing you pictures of my little people!  They are rotten sometimes, but I love them ALL the time.  :)  I have more to share, but I think that's enough for one post.  Look for another one coming soon!  I'm pretty sure I'll post before 3 months has passed...

The end and a new beginning...

On Friday, May 27, I said goodbye to my sweet little loves that I have adored since I first met them on August 23.  I don't know if I can even explain to you how much I love them!  It's a good thing I will be their 3rd grade teacher next year; I just can't give them up yet!  They stole my heart in a way I never thought was possible before this year.  :)

chapel is so fun!

all of the elementary teachers after an afternoon of Mary Kay treatment

I'm excited to go home for the summer and see family and friends, but I sure will miss my kiddos!  The next time I post, I will be in the States!  Leaving on a jet plane tomorrow.  Please pray for safety traveling!  :)