Parlez-vous Español?

Today, around 5 p.m., Levi and I rounded the main plaza in Xela and found ourselves sucked in by the bright lights of the city's main cathedral. Levi had me pose in front of the church (a top five on the activity to-do list for fallen Catholics). As I was posing, I spied a mob of angry people across the street, banging on the windows of BanCafe, a recently bankrupted bank in Guatemala, which was one of two banks in Guatemala that gives microloans to women. The bank went bankrupt because some of its higher ups were sending money to the United States. The bank's 12,000 employees have been laid off and those with accounts with less than 10,000 quetzales won't get their money back. (To put that in perspective, that's about a half year's salary for middle class Guatemalans.) Not that it seems to matter how much you have -- Levi's teacher told him that even those with more than Q10,000 haven't seen their money, which they were supposed to get three or four days ago.

As we watched the mob grow larger and angrier, a Catholic procession marched by. About 20 older men were holding up a large, wooden platform carrying a large plastic saint -- was it Joseph? I don't know. Trumpets played, women wept and for just a moment, the crowd quieted down, perhaps as a show of respect.

Fittingly, military men followed the Catholics. A woman standing next to me informed me that these sorts of protests were occurring at BanCafes all over the country.

Otherwise, this is our last weekend in Xela. We celebrated with kids from our school by drinking Gallo (the national brew) in a tienda and dancing at La Paranda, a sweaty, smokey gringo-Guatemalteco dance joint.

We're headed to Nicaragua, where we'll be writing about the presidential elections on November 5. The Central Americans newspapers report that Oliver North (he's still around?!) told the Nicaraguan people that if they vote for Daniel Ortega (HE's still around??!!), they'll suffer consequences. He mentioned sanctions and screwy commerce. Can't the U.S. just leave Nicaragua alone already? And where's Jimmy as all this is going down? (That's right -- Jimmy Carter is also in Nicaragua, but to ensure democratic elections.) I'm telling you, Central America will not quit the '80s.

The U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory to Americans traveling to Nicaragua. But after reading the news down here, I worry that the Americans are to be more feared than the Nicaraguans. Then again, one of Ortega's people killed a reporter for 'negative' reporting. Oy vey.

My teacher had me write a five page essay on No Child Left Behind when she found out that I was an education reporter. It took me about three hours in a smokey coffee shop, but the exercise was worth it. One problem though -- how does one translate No Child Left Behind into Spanish? Maria Eugenia (the awesomest maestra) and I spent a while trying to figure it out, but she was more interested talking about Guatemalan education. Here, 0.05 percent of all students who enroll in elementary school graduate from university. In rural areas, teachers don't bother showing up to class most days because of the strong labor unions.

Guatemala, like the United States, is attempting to reform its education system. A new law has gone into effect, which may as well be called No Girl Left Behind. Until a few years ago, girls worked in the fields alongside their fathers while their brothers went to school. On Wednesday, I attended a conference on the state of public education in Guatemala and a teacher there told me, 'Tourists believed that fathers were progressive, inviting their daughters into the fields, when in fact, they were just denying them the right to an education.'

1. People smile in the streets and ask you how you're doing for particular reason. Little school girls say 'Buenas noches' to you like you're their BFF.
2. Licuados (a sort of fruit milkshake) and hot chocolate are yummy no matter where you are.
3. Xelaju is a gritty, polluted city surrounded by spewing volcanos and those lushy, poofy kind of clouds. We're so high up that the clouds surround us.
4. Experiencing all this with Levi, who is hilarious, patient and loves to analyze every interaction and conversation with others as much as I do. It's his birthday today and he's got a bad resfriado. Poor Levi.
5. Learning Spanish with my maestra, Maria Eugenia, the best teacher ever. She teaches me about culture, about social mores, about what's going on politically in Guatemala. She has a million opinions on immigration to the United States, but mostly, she's terrified her sons might leave the country, never to return. She indulges my bungled attempts to express my loaded opinions even when she is having hot flashes, which she does often. But it's not all play. Maria Eugenia is strict and super directed. So directed that when I handed out cookies to the patients in the clinic waiting room (that's right, I spend five hours a day studying Spanish in a clinic), she didn't pat me on the back for being That Super Nice Gringa. Rather, she scolded me for saying, '¿Quieres una galleta?' to the mothers and children. I should have been more formal, she said. I should have said, 'Quiere una galleta.' Then she grilled me on verb tenses.

My disclaimer to this post is that racial issues everywhere are complicated and often very ugly. But it's so much more interesting when the racism you're witnessing is not in your country and you're not a part of it.

With that behind me, here's a little background: The white-looking people here are white because of the Spaniards who arrived hundreds of years ago and the Germans who arrived about a hundred years ago. The white people are, generally speaking, the richer people (the president's last name is Berger, and his VP is named Stein) and the browner people are, almost as a rule, the poor. By brown, I don't just mean moreno, Spanish for dark-skinned and dark-haired. I mean the indigenous people, who are mostly of Mayan descent. The indigenous people here are proud of their culture -- they wear brightly colored reds and yellows, speak indigenous languages and are said to be more shy than the Ladinos, though I haven't found that to be true.

What I've described above is what little I know about Guatemala's race issues, based on what I've heard from my teachers, the guidebooks and the national newspaper, Prense Libre. But then I got talking about race with my host family. I had just learned the word moreno and it came up in conversation. My host mom, as a sort of teaching lesson, grabbed her husband's arm and said, He's as dark as an indigenous person.

So I asked her husband, whose name is Reuben but whom my host mom calls Gordo, Are you part indigenous? The whole family guffawed. Absolutely not, my host mother replied. His mother is El Salvadorean, which is why he is as dark as he is. Ha ha ha, she said. You think we're indigenous. ¡Dios! I looked at Levi nervously and tried to change the subject. Well, we're both so white here, I said, poking fun at our lingering Seattle palor. My host mother looked at me apologetically. You're not very white, she said. Levi, he is true white. And my sons, they are muy blanco.

I couldn't believe it. Based entirely on who she liked at that table, she had categorized who was pure white (she likes Levi more than me) to very white (she was annoyed with her sons that day) to not very white (me, the student who impolitely says hola instead of buenos dias and keeps her light on too late at night).

There have been other racial conversations with Berta, a bossy evangelical church lady who stands about 4'9. Last week, she told me about the 130 other students she's hosted, including several black students. They smell bad, she said. I nearly choked on the dry tea cake she was feeding me. Oh? Yeah, she replied, I had to scrub down their rooms after they left. I didn't know how to reply, so I thanked her for the tea and left the comedor. Later, I remembered a former college roommate of mine named Alvedo, who swore that white girls smell funny after they've been in the rain. He said that to me one day after I'd walked in from a New York downpour. Damn, he said. You white girls smell strange when it rains.

It was only appropriate that the one super socialist teacher at my Spanish immersion school was assigned to me. Benedicto stands a little over five feet, wears a short ponytail and drinks more coffee than anyone I have ever met. He's also nice, super super nice, and I agree with him that there are many problems in the United States, particularly education in the South Bronx and the Iraq War, but, well, teach me how to say ¨good night¨ already.

A sampling of notes from my first day at school:
El campesino = farmworker
Salario minimo = minimum wage
Injusta = injustice
Refugiado = refugee
Potencias = power

To be fair, I learned a lot from Benedicto in the last week. He was patient, engaged and he taught me more than just the above. Halfway through the week, for example, he taught me how to say all sorts of things related to amoebic dystentery. He also taught me how to offer to buy him a doughnut. Sigh. All socialists are mooches, I guess.

(Sorry about that amoeba post. I was still pretty sick when I wrote it and didn't censor some of the ickier bits. By the way, did I mention that the whole episode -- diagnosis, lab results and medicine -- cost me under $5? In the U.S., I imagine I would have paid over $200 out of pocket.)

But about Maria the Mayan Drug Dealer:
Maria is a Mayan woman who lives on the steep hill leading up from the docks of San Pedro. Walk up that hill and you'll see two women shouting ´´jugo de naranja!´´ at you. Between them are two double doors that will lead you to Maria. She looks no different from the other Maya women in town -- traditional woven Qu'iche skirt and shirt, children and dogs running about and, of course, a business to run.

Enter through the double doors, ask for Maria, and she'll greet you with a small sample of cocaine. Ask for the cocaine, and she'll introduce you to crack. Ask for pot, and she'll ask you what kind. A true businesswoman, this Maria. I found out about Maria from one of San Pedro's many chatty waitresses, who was shocked that Levi and I hadn't stumbled across her in our short week there. Another traveler who had been in San Pedro for three months said that crack is a growing problem among the Maya in San Pedro, especially since the main drug dealer -- that's Maria -- appears to have a deal with the police.

The guide book promised that few travelers get amoebic dystentery. Even fewer get the worst kind -- the bad kind of traveler, it said, the kind of traveler who happily licks poo off street venders' slimy fingers. Apparently, I am that traveler.

When I described my symptoms to a captive audience of medical students at my Spanish immersion school in Xela, they told me that it was travelers' diarrhea, to let it pass. When I described my symptoms to locals -- blood, mucus, runs -- they all had the same response: amoebas. They all had stories about amoebas in the same way that Americans have stories about having their wisdom teeth pulled. And they give advice about amoebas in the same way that Americans give advice about cars -- detailed, confident and usually wrong.

To find out whether I really had amoebas, the doctor leading around this group of medical students had me poo in a cleaned out jar of Nes Cafe. A small jar mind you, not the large Costco economy size that wouldn't have splashed everywhere. I delivered my particular brew to a laboratory around the corner from my school, where several men in white lab coats hung about the waiting room. One took my sample, observed it and furrowed his brow and then proceeded to pass it to the others. Embarrassed, I said, 'I walk to the laboratory with my poo,' and they roared with laughter. Lesson learned: Men everywhere, from the day they can identify it, find shit hilarious.

Levi would probably have considered me a joykill last week except that this bout has allowed him to talk about poo and intestinal animals without abandon. He has researched the critters on the Internet and in a travel health book. He has even choreographed an amoeba dance to Lionel Richie.