La Escuela de Español Miguel Angel Asturias

Miguel Angel Asturias Spanish School

Miguel Angel Asturias Spanish School is located about a 5 minute walk from the Parque Central, the center of downtown Xela.  It's named after a Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, diplomat, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He was on ly the second Latin American to receive this honor.  He is a source of national pride for helping establish Latin American literature's contribution to Western mainstream culture and at the same time drawing attention to the indigenous population of his native country (thank you, Edna and Wikipedia).

On a typical school day, I volunteer at the public hospital in the morning and have Spanish class in the afternoon.  I wake up around 6am, get ready, eat a quick breakfast (I tell my host mother to leave it out the night before so she doesn't have to get up so early to cook), and walk the 5 minutes to school to meet up with other students at 6:30am to take the buses to the hospital to arrive there by 8am.  The hospital we go to is not in Xela, but in a town called Totonicapán.  We walk to catch a microbus, which is really just a large minivan that serves the urban area.  The driver has a helper that hangs out the sliding door -which remains open the whole ride unless there is a policía nearby because it is actually ilegal - and calls out their destination.  Sometimes it gets so full that people are sitting on each other's laps, and it always seems to be the ones in the very back corner that need to get out first.  In the microbus we ride to la Rotonda, which is basically the entrance to the city.  From there we take a "chicken bus" - very colorful old school buses - for almost an hour to Totonicapán (or just Toto) and get dropped off right in front of the hospital.  The buses never refuse a ride to anyone because it's too crowded.  People will sit on top of each other, stand in the isles and hang out the open door before they wait for the next bus! 

I get back for lunch with my host family around 1 or 1:30pm.  Then class starts at 2pm and goes until 7pm, with a 30 min break in there.  Each student has one teacher with one-on-one tutoring for those 5 hours.  The teacher changes every week unless we put in a request to have the same one.  Right now there are only 7 students including myself; in the summer months it gets up to 35-40 students!  Most of them hardly know any Spanish at all, but you can hear their improvement over the few weeks that they are here.  Since I already know a lot of Spanish, my classes are mostly conversation and learning medical vocabulary.  The school also hosts various different activities such as watching movies in Spanish, visiting indigenous weaving cooperatives, or tours to old churches in the area.  There's always something to do here!

Woman weaving at Trama, a local women's weaving cooperative

Iglesia de la Hermita in Solola, the oldest church in all of Central America