Guatemala!(Part 2, Final Part)

Welcome back! In this post I'm going to talk mostly about my volunteering experience here, and all the fun things I did!

Starting off, day four was the first day of volunteering! My and my friend were assigned to make flower crafts with pairs of children in the Montessori classroom. Since the entire point of the trip was to bring our love for art to those we work with, we decided to make crafts! The entire plan of the craft was to make six different cutouts using the traced guidelines of the children's hands, then form them into a flower. It was difficult communicating with them though, since the majority of them only spoke and understood Mam, but even so, we had the help of one of the kitchen staff's daughter to help us translate. She was so sweet, and even made us drawings to take back home!

Just look at how cute these kids are! It was also a good thing that their hands were so small, that just meant that their hands looked much more like petals than my classmate and I's big hands did.

After doing this with all of the Montessori classroom children, we moved onto packing bags full of rice, sugar, beans, water, oil, and other food staples to hand out to the homes in the nearby village for when we went to visit the school there!

(I added hearts on everyone’s faces for the sake of privacy)

After that, we enjoyed some free time while the children left school. My classmates and I drew with our adorable little drawing and watercolor sets in the garden outdoors, where we drew still life images of the buildings and plants around us!

On day five, it was our turn to help around the lodge and learn more about the specific Mayan culture in the area we were staying in. So myself and my friend were assigned with cooking lunch, where we made tamales and made a dish called pelika negro. Even though this is coming from someone who barely cooks, making that dish for so many people even though we were with pros was insanely hard. I never realized how much patience you really need in cooking, because when I was roasting the sesame seeds, it took soooo looongg!

Either way our hard paid off because lunch ended up being delicious!

Later in the afternoon I had a sort of ‘workshop’ where I would learn the tradition of backstrap weaving with some pros! I learned that backstrap weaving is a common tradition among Mam households, and when I tried doing it I truly realized how long and tedious the work is. It was so easy to make even the smallest mistake, yet these amazing women are able to craft the most complex patterns without a trace of mistake! I brought home that weave, and you could unfortunately tell which part I did and which part the woman I was with did…

Then, day six came around and it was time to deliver the bags we had made earlier. We piled them onto our bus and headed for a small school nearby. Surrounding the school was a small community, and we took turns crafting with the kids, and handing out bags to the families.

My classmates and I taught the kids how to make origami frogs, hearts, and boats, and the fun thing about the frogs was that they would jump if you flicked their paper legs, so you can probably guess which craft was the most popular!

After hanging out here for a while we returned back to the headquarters, where we enjoyed a lovely meal and went to bed.

Day seven marked our teary departure from the Xela Aid headquarters, where we headed to Antigua and enjoyed a nice lunch before we flew back home.

And that is all for my visit to Guatemala! Thanks so much for reading todays post, and I'll see you next time!