Guatemala Field Station Blog

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...

Xqa q'ij, k'a! We have learned SO MUCH in the past couple of days - it's absolutely incredible. The classes are really intense and everyone must participate, but there's no time for self-consciousness or awkwardness because you're already being called on to answer a question in Kaqchikel! What does juxb'äl mean again?! (photo credit: Omer) Tuq'! (photo credit: Omer) janila ütz tijoxela' (very good students!) (photo credit: Omer) Ixtoj (Sarah) studying hard! (photo credit: Sarah) The classes are completely immersive, which means that there's barely any Spanish (maybe a total of 20 minutes a day), and absolutely no English (except for a few hints here and there from fellow students!). But the teachers are amazingly good at making us understand what each word is referring to and encouraging us even when we're totally wrong about what we're saying. We started with the most basic stuff: Xseqër k'a! ( Good morning! ) ...

Good news! The audio recordings of our Kaqchikel classes are now all organized and available online in .mp3 version (for .wav you need to contact me directly) Here's a good visual representation of how much fun we had - bursts of laughter and/or clapping every 20 sec in this sample waveform: There are also many gems like this: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx3AZxTWgaReY3gwN182VkplVVE

On Monday 6 th started out daily Guatemalan, to be more accurate Tecpaneco, routine. We ate frijolitos, drank coffee and tried not to forget all those Kaqchikel words for body parts and fruits (for the latter we even don't know words in our own language sometimes). Everyday we came at Wuqu' Kawoq' office at 8 a.m. and our classes began with Xseqär k'a and ended at 4 p.m. with Chwa'q chïk . We listened and looked, remembered and spoke, tachapa' and tak'ütu , played and laughed a lot. Then we have our refacción and discusión on the roof or on the way there. Then more classes. After classes we walked and finally met all together at our regular spot – Café de aquí. (It is not an advertisement, but they have wi-fi and, of course, panini Tecpaneco.) On Thursday there was a market day, so we were curious to observe everything around the city centre and waste all our quetzales on pots , uqs and ch'ops . In Antigua we learned how to bargain more or les...

In our second week of Kaqchikel classes in Tecpán many things happened. We welcomed some guests from UVG (Universidad del Valle de Guatemala), which is a partner in the field-station project. We had with us the Director Ejecutivo Juan Carlos Villatoro, the decano (dean) Mario Morales, the coordinator of Turism Lic. Pablo Castro and one student, Samuel de León. The students stayed with us in class most of the time. They already knew some Kaqchikel and were able to catch up. The UVG people, including Pedro, and Masha met to discuss joint projects. Mario, Juan, Masha and Pedro after their meeting Dr. Peter Rohloff, one of the founders of Wuqu' Kawoq, also visited us during the week. He spoke with us in fluent Kaqchikel (picture coming soon). In this second week, we began more advanced topics in Kaqchikel grammar such as antipassives, causatives, positionals and directionals. We learned how to use transitive clauses with ergative and absolutive marking and also how t...

First day of learning, REAL learning. Classes started at 8:30 since the entire Tecpán wakes up early. It’s nothing like my usual routine, especially if you add making tortillas at 7am. But we’re still running on adrenaline. (wait ‘til posts from later this month) We started off by getting our Mayan names. One of the traditional ways of assigning them is to combine a Mayan name for a day of birth and the year according to the Mayan calendar. So my Kaqchikel name is Waqxaqi’ Ey. It’s fun and a tricky way to prepare us for learning Kaqchikel numerals. And some of the more advanced learners managed to find a hidden meaning behind their names. Chris is a bunny apparently, or a seed. We also learned about Wuqu’ Kawoq from its director Anna Kraemer. She told us the story of how Wuqu’ Kawoq started from recognizing the urgent need to fill in the gap in the areas of health care where neither government nor NGOs were present. And interesting enough, it was started by an doctor...