We´re having fun, I swear! (Melanie)

Greetings from the beautiful highlands of Guatemala. Melanie reporting here. All your kids are fine. They´re taking good care of me and I´ve been behaving myself.

We were greeted at the airport by sunshine and our Guatemalan trip leader, Carlos Duarte, a photojournalist. We headed right to Antigua where we redefined ¨eating¨ and Carlos talked to us about safety issues in Guatemala. We got our second wind and frolicked on the cobblestone streets of the colonial ex-capital city.

The windy mountain path up to Xela provoked my penchant for motion sickness. I threw up on the side of the road. Nice.

Before coming to Guatemala, we reviewed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are 30 universal human rights as defined by the UN. Each student chose 2 human rights that they wanted to focus on while here. Last night at dinner we talked about human rights issues that Guatemala and the US share.

Today we visited the Miguel Angel Asturias School where we learned about their program which is rooted in raising political and social awareness. The director of the school was exiled to Mexico in 1981 for being a student leader speaking out against the government. When he returned to Guatemala, he got his education degree and founded the school. We explored the little school and played soccer with some students (see picture). Then we skimmed the national newspaper for articles that related the human rights we each chose (see picture of Jeremiah and Patrick).
Later we visited a women´s weaving cooperative where we learned about how coops are a form of economic independence. We benefited from a crash course too (see pics).

We just left from a visit to the cemetery where we noticed that many of the tombstones were from deaths that occurred in the 1980s. It was during those years of the infamous civil war that massacres were occurring throughout the highlands.

Note to the parents...Your kids know how to eat. They are wonderful.
Note to teachers...Students are making connections to the readings they´ve done of Rigoberta Menchu and In the Time of the Butterflies.