Xela y Esculea de la Montaña

¡Hola! I don´t have much time to write because I´ll be playing in a futbol game in the next half hour, but I´m here and I´m well!

Last I wrote from San Cristobol in Mexico. The next day was crazy trying to get to the mountain school. We figured out that we took about 6 different type of transportation that day. In Mexico, we were taking charter buses, but none existed once we entered Guatemala. That morning, we took a microbus to the small city at the border, then a taxi across, a cart on a motorcycle to the bus, a ¨chicken bus¨ to Huehuetenango, another chicken bus to Xela, then another bus to the mountain school. Chicken buses are the yellow school buses that have been put out of comission after use in the US. Owners paint them and decorate them to their liking and then illegally cram tons of occupants in them to make more money. We were squished in a bus with the locals... a bus that was made to carry a fewer amount of people of child size. The buses ride the curvy mountain roads and stop anywhere a person is hailing it down.

I´ve been studying spanish with a crazy local named Tito and I´m eating every meal with a family in the nearby pueblo. The mother of the family I eat with this week makes amazing food! And their daughter loves to read so I bring books from the school´s library for every dinner. It rains every afternoon here since it is the rainy season. The school has a field of coffee plants and a medicinal plant garden. They are building a small futbol field for the children of the pueblo. Sasha, Elisa, and I have been helping the groundskeeper transplant the grass.

I´ve been meeting awesome people at the school, other travelers with similar interests. One girl came with the three of us to climb Santa Maria, a volcano near Xela, this past weekend. That was an intense hike! I got a little bit of altitude sickness but all is well. It was beautiful and there were cows living on the top! You could see an active volcano from there as well. I was truly happy that I could have a real conversation with our guide in Spanish.

Next time, I´ll write more! I miss you guys! love, Ari