Antigua, la ciudad

In all my focus on the students and what goes on in the classroom and at the project I have failed to talk about the place where I am living, Antigua. It is a beautiful old city with stone streets, old buildings and lots and lots of ruins, especially of old churches. The city is also surrounded by volcanos as I mentioned earlier, and has frequent earthquakes; some big, lot of little ones. Actually there was a slight earthquake the other day. One of the volcanoes is active and you can see puffs of smoke coming out of in some days. Lately it has been a bit cloudy so we haven´t seen much. I hope to climb some of them, maybe this weekend

... after we get through parents day that is!

Yesterday on the way to the project there was a lot of traffic on the highway towards Guatemala city (there always is but there was even more than usual) After a while of stop and go we finally came to a scene were there were about 30-40 men and at least 20 police officers, lots of police motercycles and trucks and a whole lot of chaos. Some men were face down in the back of a pickup truck being brought away by the police, and others were still arguing, shouting and making a scene at the gas station. I am not entirely sure what brought on the conflict, nor how long it took to settle it down, but my host family said it had to do with gas prices being so high and it was some sort of protest. I know one of the teachers couldn´t make it in to the project yesterday as a result.

Today, my morning class couldn´t go to the pool because there was some sort of bacteria problem at the facilities that we use:-( The students were as a result not very cooperative, and we didn´t have a planned activity so we spent a little time scrambling ot set up an activity at the computer center before bringing them down there. I then went off to the kitchen to help put together food bags and participate in an assembly line of lunch meals. Tonight I am going to come up with an activity to do with the parents. It will be really interesting to meet all the students parents, and I hope the big day goes well!!