Day 2: March 12, 2020

Spanish school. Walking tour. Coffee farming. Volcanic eruption. WHAT. A. DAY.

Today was our first full day in the city, as we became acquainted with Antigua and the daily life of our future patients. We began bright and early after a full 10 hours of sleep (thanks, daylight savings) with a morning of conjugations, vocabulary, and la practica! We split into groups based on our Spanish-speaking ability and learned basic conversational Spanish or medical Spanish from teachers at a local Spanish school. After 3 full hours, some of us were prepared for a full day of interpreting while others were still learning how to sing “cabeza, hombros, piernas, pies” [head, shoulders, knees, and toes].

 

Next stop: a walking tour of historic Antigua with Digna, a local organization that employs individuals with disabilities as tour guides to “increase the respect, equality of rights, and human dignity of persons with special needs in Guatemala in order to improve their quality of life.”¹  Our wonderful tour guides taught us about architecture, history and legends while they encouraged us to immerse ourselves in the city during colonial times.

We continued our introduction to life in Guatemala with Alberto - a local coffee farmer from San Miguel Escobar, just outside of Antigua. We followed a coffee bean from branch to cup through the process that Alberto and his family perform every day to make his direct trade coffee. Buying directly from the farmer, eliminating the middleman, increases his income from $0.05 per cup to the price of the full $8.00 bag. Our tour guide, Hugo, emphasized the significant impact that direct trade coffee farming has had on Alberto’s life and family. Students got to help him peel, roast and grind the beans for an excellent cup of coffee. We learned that before a woman can get married in Guatemala, she must learn to hand-grind the coffee beans, thus we chose Sara, who is getting married in September for this task.

We ended the night with a bumpy road and lots of switch backs to a mountain side restaurant overlooking Antigua and its famous (and still active!) Volcano del Fuego. Every 10 minutes or so, we saw small, bright orange explosion as the volcano made its presence known.

Exhausted, we returned home to organize ourselves for the health fair and clinic tomorrow. Hasta maῆana!

Sara & Kristen