Chwitxirbal Rural Stay

     Well, our first rural stay is officially over with. Going into it, I definitely did not know what to expect. The community we stayed in is a small very rural community called Chwitxirbal (Twit-city-bal), which sits about 30 minutes up in the mountains above Xela. The whole community of Chwitxirbal consists of about 15 families. As one could imagine our arrival to the community was widely known and anticipated as our group of 15 students and 2 coordinators occupied 9 homes in their community (2 to a home).

       We were welcomed with such open hearts and arms. In retrospect it was just 5 days out of our whole semester, but I could just feel how special it was for the families to have us there, how much it meant. We arrived on Sunday and we were received by the mayor of the town and our families. From there we all dispersed out into our host families. My family was the Victoria family; there was an older lady, her daughter and 3 younger children. As tends to be, the more rural communities are densely indigenous populations. The majority of the families there speak an indigenous language as their primary language and Spanish as their secondary. This surprisingly made communication a bit easier, since from both ends we were trying to speak in a secondary language. Going into this I didn’t think that our families would have running water or electricity, but they did. There was running water to the sink to do dishes and we had a light in our room, they had a latrine and a wood burning stove.

     The food we ate there was so fresh and tasty, the corn to make the tortillas was freshly ground and there queso fresca and milk was straight from the cow fresh. With every meal we had this really wonderful hot drink made from masa (ground corn), it was surprisingly sweat. While we were there we had to opportunity to have a cooking lesson with a local woman. We learned how to make envueltos, a Guatemalan dish. Enveuelto literally translated means to wrap, but basically they are any vegetable dipped in this egg batter and fried. We also had fresh chamomile, mint and lavender tea to go with our meal.

     I think the highlight of being in Chwitxirbal was the different dynamic with our teachers from PLQ. For the four days, they all road a bus up into the community in the morning and we would have our class there. This week was special though, we all were intentional in finishing up all of our graded tests and works so that we could just hang out and have conversations with our teachers. We went on hikes in the mountains, walked around the community and just soaked up the beauty of our surroundings. It was really a beautiful week.