Guatemala Field Station Blog

In contrast to most students who attended Guatemala Field Station this year, my background is in nutrition rather than linguistics. I am a registered dietitian/nutritionist. I arrived in Tecpán, Guatemala three months ago to begin a year-long fellowship with the  Maya Health Alliance/Wuqu Kawoq , a non-government organization that provides mostly home-based health care in Mayan languages. The fellowship is sponspored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation . To me, learning to speak local languages is important in order to break through cultural barriers, build trust with patients/clients and to see the world in new ways. You can read more about my interest in languages on my blog www.indigenouslinguist.com . Pictured Above: Guatemala Field Station Teachers Lajuj Batz (Left) and Ixkamel (Center) This year, I set a target for myself to speak the Mayan language of Kaqchikel at 80% fluency by the end of my fellowship. There is only one small problem with this goal --

Volcán de Fuego , less than 20 miles southeast from where we are in Patzún, began erupting around noon on Sunday, and continued with fresh eruptions this afternoon . Pyroclastic flows, which can travel at over 100mph, are burying people and towns. The official death toll so far is 70, but hundreds or thousands of people are still unaccounted for, and thousands have been displaced from their homes. The news here is a constant cycle of horrific death and destruction. Here in Patzún, we're doing what we can by donating clothing, shoes, and toiletries for rescue workers, survivors, and evacuees. Isabel's host mom, Doña Gloria, and her two daughters helped us find the right stores to buy everything, and helped us carry all our bags to a church that was collecting donations. (A quetzal goes a long way here--we were limited only by what we could carry!) Emily with an armload of boots. Akshay and I carry bags to the church  with Isabel's host family. You can help

Xseqër k'a! Buenos dias! As previous field school participants have noted , the immersive Kaqchikel classes are intense. Our instructors speak almost exclusively in Kaqchikel, and we don't use a textbook or other written demonstrations during class. I joined the class on the fourth day. My only preparation was the first lesson of this short online course , so all I knew was a few greetings, yes and no, and thank you. I didn't know what to expect, and I was worried that I'd be too far behind to catch up. Instructor Lajuj B'atz' plays  sakonel , with Ixq'anil  (Polina) as his client. No hairstyles were harmed in this  language lesson.  The class began with an exchange of greetings (yay, I understood that part!), and then launched into a review of the previous day. Before I knew it, my classmates were howling and crawling and hopping around: turns out we were reviewing vocabulary for animals. In a typical language class, the teacher would pr

We've already finished the first week of this year's field school, so we have a lot to catch you up on! This is the third annual trip to the Guatemala Field Station  in Patzún for the summer field school .  Students and faculty visit Patzún for a month, including two weeks of intensive language classes and two weeks of mentored research and data collection. Last weekend the first group of linguists arrived in Patzún and settled in with their host families. On Monday, they began the immersion course in Kaqchikel. It's a diverse group of students from different universities and stages of training: Akshay Aitha just graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Linguistics and Applied Math.  Caleb Ewing is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Florida. Brecken Keller is an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science.  Polina Pleshak is a graduate student in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Lomono