Guatemala_Uno

This weekend I was at La Playa de Ixtapa en Guatemala. As many of you know, Samuel and Hannah Reyes, and myself traveled to Guatemala on Saturday. No sooner then two hours after we landed in Guatemala we were on our way to the coast for a night with the Reyes family. Sam’s father is apart of The Aero Club, a club for pilots in the area. This club has a little resort on the pacific coast, well not right on the coast. About a ¼ of a mile off the coast runs a channel where the resort rests. Now this club is a club for pilots, so naturally there is a landing strip on the property. How cool is that! To get to the ocean one need to take a boat, however not the fiberglass boats we have grown accustom to in the states. This boat was a narrow wooden hulled people hauler with a 10 hp marine engine on the back. We took this boat Sunday morning to get to the beach were we spent our time doing multiple things. We swam in the ocean for a while, did some buggy boarding, played with crabs (which there were so many), ate some snacks, tossed the disc, and overall just had a great time. The resort has a pool where we hung out and talked and a little restaurant where we ate all our meals. Perhaps it was because I was up at 3:15 in the morning that I sleep really good that night, despite a party taking place in the room. Driving home from the coast provided me the opportunity to talk with Sam's mom, Becky, about guatemala. She told me all about the people, the landscape, the way things work in the country, what the needs are, and so on. It was so interesting and so different then the states.

Like I said earlier we were there with pretty much the whole Reyes family. Some of then spoke english, some of then did not. This was both good and bad. Good, because it allowed the opportunity to start getting firmiluar with the language. Bad, because it made me realize how much I have to learn and because I wanted to here there stories, what they do and where they have been. It's an uncomfortable thing, a humbling thing attempting to communicate in another language. I'm realizing really quickly I need to be ok with being embarrassed. I need to be ok with failing, with being corrected, with not having control of things. I stepped off the plane with the mindset of using every moment as a learning experience, and opportunity to learn the language. I soon found this mindset taxing and unsustainable. In a way, I expected myself to see significant improvement with in a day. Like some how I would be conversing with ease to those around me.  The Reyes family is welcoming, loving, kind, tender and caring. And am so grateful to be with them and have their support in this process. I was thinking of my good friend Ben and Laurie who both went to South America on their own. And having only been here for 48 hours, have come to respect them all the more. I really don't think I could have every made it this far if it weren't for the help of the Reyes family. So I'm learning to take each day at a time. Learning 5 words this day and a couple of phrase. Understanding why you conjugate it this way and not that the next day. And praying for help along the way. I don't think I will fully understand what is taking place in my life here until I arrive back in the states, or may I fully grasp it till many years from now. I honestly really haven't had an opportunity to just think. All I know is this whole thing is just new to me.