Real World: Xela

This week Team Esperanza is in Quetzaltenango, more familiarly known as Xela. Xela is the 2nd biggest city in Guatemala, and we're living right in the center, so its fun to be in an urban (and thus very different!) environment. Our group gets one big apartment, and everyone gets their own room. Its a pretty big apartment! Anyway, I like to think of our week here as the third world country version of the Real World - put a bunch of 20 year olds together in an apartment and make them work together, and see how they get along. Haha. So far, so good.

Since we have a kitchen, people want to cook their own food. Buying breakfast food, fine, buying yogurt for snacks and stuff, fine ... but cooking dinner is getting to be too difficult! First of all, if we want anything but dried foods (pasta) you have to go the actual market where you buy food from indigenous people. Then its a pain to disinfect and or boil (likely both) all the food to get rid of parasites and stuff. The kitchen is like 50 years old ... you have to light the stove with a lighter (which somehow I ended up being the only one who knows how to do it, and you also end up burning your hands trying to do it) .... no one really knows how to cook anything, either. Example, last night as our appetizer we had "nachos" - slices of questionable cheese melted in the microwave over stale chips! Haha. Its sort of fun though, having to figure everything out ourselves! Oh, also, we don't have utensils. See left picture. I'm looking forward to our dinner out tomorrow night though. The convenience is certainly worth 4 to 5 dollars to me. Ha.

Today we visited a Spanish school called El Portal. This activity sort of falls under SolCom's program called AsesorPorFavor - which is basically a free consulting service. Theres a bunch of Spanish language schools throughout Xela, but this specific one is nonprofit, and uses the proceeds to provide scholarships to very poor children with single mothers. Its a good concept, but since theyre fairly new and somewhat out of the way, they don't have a ton of business. Anyway, we were there giving them some ideas on publicity and marketing as well as some cost cutting tips. (We want to sell them a water filter to save money on buying agua pura). This week we're going to make up a more attractive brochure to pass out to hostels and such.

Anyway, the water I put on to boil about 30 minutes ago is starting to bubble, so its time to put in the pasta (yay). I think we have leftover "nachos" tonight too. Yay, again.


Xela is a really awesome city though, very authentic, so so far I'm really liking it!