Life as a (really poor) translator!

Dear Y´all,

Good Morning! Kevin here with another update on his experiences in Guatemala! This week has been a bit different than the usual for me, because rather than going to language school the whole week, I´ve been spending some of the days this week going with some doctores de los Estados Unidos a Santa Maria de Jesús, un pueblo cerca de Antigua. Most of the doctors (all from Lubbock, Texas) don´t speak mor´n a lick of Spanish. The organization that is responsible for organizing the even is called Guatemala Sana, and they´re a group that tries to bring doctors from other countries to small towns in Guatemala. From what I can tell, they contacted my language school and asked if they had anyone who could translate for the doctors...  so here I am! The whole week I was almost certainly the least qualified translator, because of the other three translators, one is a girl that works at the school and two are going to be working at the farm with me, but of those two, one is much better in Spanish than I, and the other is a Nurse Practicioner who worked with a hispanic population in DC at some point, so she´s got tons of medical terminology down pat. However, even if I was the last qualified, I did still manage to make some positive contributions, which was quite rewarding. My favorite translations were the ones where the patients only spoken the Mayan language of Kaqchikel. In those situations, we had two people who spoke Kaqchikel and Spanish, so typically the doctor would say, "So... where do you have pain?," I would give a rough estimate of the question in Spanish, the other translator would speak to the patient in Kaqchikel, the patient would respond in Kaqchikel, the translator would tell me in Spanish what she said, and then I would tell the doctor what she said... in theory. There were also some doctors that only spoken Spanish around, but sometimes they could understand other people´s Spanish better than us and would simply say what the other person had in slightly easier terms for us to understand. It reminded me considerably of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Xtbbo_lHqAs. Anyway, that´s been a considerable amount of fun.

In other news, we took a trip to the Volcan de Pacaya about an hour away from Antigua this past weekend, where we climbed up a decent percentage of the way and stopped near the top to take pictures, roast marshmellows (heated by the volcano) and generally explore. I don´t have a camera with me, but whenever I actually manage to get pictures from someone else, I´ll work on puttin´some of ´em up. We all got up at 5 am in order to do this, because we went on a morning trip to avoid all of the massive amounts of rain we normally experience in the afternoons. Sadly, it was ridiculously cloudy that morning anyway... which was sorta unfortunate but also kind of cool to look at.

Anyway, I´d better run cause I only have two minutes left on this computer!

Buenas tardes!