Casa Guatemala - part two

Casa Guatemala is so cool. I´m orientador for the Ninas Grandes ie from 13 up to 15 - they are very independent girls who know what tasks they have to do and do it without complaining, they are also hard to strike up conversations with. This is compared to the Ninas Pequenas and the Ninos Peqs who are constantly coming up wanting a hug and asking for my name! The smaller ones have accepted me very very quickly! I´ve also become a big of an experiment for them as they´ve discovered my piggy toe so often when I´m walking around I´ll be stopped by a group of kids wanting to have a look. They also want to look through my glasses!

At the moment I´m not bored of the food but rice and beans are in every meal - breakfast, lunch and dinner. The houses the children are in are full of colourful bunk beds, showers, toilets and electricity. The volunteers house has rats, no electricity, water only between 10am and 8pm and we´ve been warned of snakes and scorpions possibly trying to nest in the house. We are right by the pig sty, have mad cows & chickens going past and a hungry horse trying to come in. The 2nd day there I came out of the shower to find a pig hiding in the kitchen:)

The first two nights I wasn´t disturbed by the rats but last night something ran past my head (I wasn´t sure if it was inside or outside the mosquito net) and the beams connecting all the rooms have rats scuttling past. There are some mini lockers (with padlocks) so my freshly purchased bread from an indigenous family has been locked in there and is so far untouched by rats!

Next week I´m going to be doing a trial run as the needlework and dress making teacher as they´ve seen I´ve got an interest in that so I´m desperately trying to find information on making teddy bears, dress making and scrunchies! Who´d have thought it. I´m also going to making a fabric Twister game for the English teachers can use in teaching body parts and colours at the same time.

Casa Guatemala part 1

On Sunday I will finally be going off to the orphanage to work as an Orientador for the small children (basically a surragate mum for 30 kids from 4.30am until 8pm (when they get up to when they go to sleep).

So far Ive been working in the hostel/hotel associated with the orphanage which is 20kms downstream and near the town of Fronteras. Im in civilisation now but will be going over to a rat infested island sharing it with 250 children, 100 adults, and god knows how many chickens and pigs. Aparently there are some cows as well as a bull placed himself infront of the door to the voluntary dormitory the other day and refused to move and a horse regularly comes into the dormitory looking for food. Ill wait to see what happens:)

The hotel is very different as whilst I like talking to and helping the guests, all the Israeli guests have been a pain and most of the staff dislike the volunteers as they move on so often, and have made no attempt to understand my spanish. Ive gone from using spanish on a daily basis, being understood and complemented on the spanish, and translating for other tourists to not being understood by 90% of the staff and 50% telling guests not to speak to me as I dont speak spanish! However the two main people I work with are funny, serious and very good at their job and have definately made the hotel work more enjoyable, along with the views across the river:)

I am living in a dormitory at the top of the hotel with the volunteers, gekos, one bat and two dogs! The hotel is currently surrounded by water as the Rio Dulce, which the hotel is beside, has risen 1 1/2 meters in 2 weeks but as the rain stopped 4 days ago the level has gone down half a meter. The bar was flooded after 6 inches of rain in one night and if it rained the next night the dormitories, internet, bathrooms and lower part of the hotel would have been flooded! In the orphanage part of one school building collapsed and a boat was used to ferry the volunteers from their accomodation to the school as a walkway was waist high in water that was a mixture of stagnant water, pig waste and a bit of sewage thrown in for luck! 3 children have also gone down with malaria although this is contained (I am on malaria tablets). In Fronteras, the many marinas with boats stored on land have been in water instead and many homes and restaurants flooded.

Some photos are below but the website (http://www.casa-guatemala.org/) has details of the orphanage. The second page that pops up gives pictures of the flood in both Casa Guatemala and the hotel.
(Pictures - the reception desk and my colleague Estuardo (I turned photographer for the day to take pictures of Estuardo for his girlfriend), picture of Hotel Backpackers from the bridge, view of the land marina (ie. should not be filled with water!), impromtu 3 a side rugby match from flooded pontoons at the hotel)

El Salvador

A brief few days in El Salvador but long enough to have the weirdest day of conversations in my travels and to realise that I much prefer mountan villages and small towns to the dirty, unsafe, noisy and unnegotiatable cities like San Salvador. For once I was travelling with other people for a few days in a row!

We used Juaguay (the way it is pronounced sounds Japanese) a mountain village as a base for the region. The weird day was as follows:
* watched the france v. spain football match with some locals who were on neat vodka at midday * wandered around town. At the post office I ended up explaining the english political and voting system, our currency and why the UK is not part of the US and does not use US Dollars as well.
* at a school church I was being asked, by the children this time and not by their fathers(!) was I was unmarried and did not have children!
* at the post office I was asked to give an impromptu english lesson - numbers, greetings and the usual correction that sheep was not pronounced ship, shit, sheet, or chip. They cannot understand the slight differences in the way this is said in english!
* on the way back from the wander I treated myself to a US$2.50 manicure and discussed men, mosquitos, San Salvador, television, raising kids, men etc.

Its only at the end of the day that you realise how weird it was to have all the conversations in one go!

Pictures: Juaguay (me in the main square, a street scene with a dormant volcano in the background), Ahuachapan (a street market, paper colourful dolls sold in shops (these are used at childrens parties - the dolls are filled with paper and sweets and the kids basically dig into the doll with they fingers through the paper to find the sweets), Emiliano (my Argentinian fellow traveller) in a normal El Salvadorian central town street scene), the decorated inside of a public bus - imagine driving on bumpy roads in a decrepid bus with the dolls bouncing up and down and off each other!