My Host Family

My first day at Pop-Wuj, I´m met by the mother of my host family whose... name... I... just can´t friggin´ remember, godammit! And I don´t have the nerve to ask her again. She´s short, plump and has a slightly manic but pleasant manner.

She leads me to her house less than ten minutes from the school where I meet her husband... whose name I also forget. Though he is friendly enough, his demeanor is much less outgoing than his wife´s and he makes no real attempt to be social with me. There are also two sons, Cesar who is roughly 16 and watches Simpsons in his closet-sized room before bed, and the other is a young man I´ve only met once in passing. When I asked her who else lives in the house, the mother said she lived with her husband and two sons, but the older son is never there. From discussion I´ve vaguely overheard, I think I´m using his (tiny, bare) room and he´s been staying in a hotel. I could be wrong.

The house itself is, to say the least, modest. The family is middle-class, but middle-class in Guatemala is the equivalent of a struggling working-class family in the States. There is a decent-sized main room that functions as both living room and office/study room. The laundry is done by hand in the kitchen. Cesar´s closet-sized room I think is technically a closet. My Spanish instructor tells my that many workers in Xela only make 1 American dollar a day, so I realize how signigicant it is that 70$ of the cost of my classes goes to my host family.

The meals are modest but sufficient - eggs, beans and tortillas or a soup with one chunk of chicken at the bottom - and after sleeping in close proximity with four other stinky backpackers on a thin mattress, it´s a great relief to have my own room and soft bed. I only wish I was able to overcome the language barrier and actually get to know these people, but it´s so difficult.