Actividades Diarias

It feels good to be back home in my home away from home! After a 4-day evacuation, my host family greeted me with hugs and my favorite dinner of fried plantains, queso blanco, tortillas, and black beans. Even my favorite bottle of “PicaMas” hot-sauce was sitting next to my plate! To my sister, Anya– Tabasco and Crystal definitely have some competition... bringing you back some PicaMas! I finally feel tranquila (calm) and things are getting back my new definition of “normal”.

My language class facilitated our first activity with youth today! Our activity was called “Actividades Diarias”. Our goal was to get a better idea of a typical day in the life of a Guatemalan youth. This information would allow us to see gendered differences in the lives of Guatemalan youth, determine free space for planning future groups/activities, and serve as an introduction to time management! We had a week to plan our activity! This meant figuring out all the logistics- find a space, a time, some enthusiastic jovenes (youth), purchasing our materials, stepping up our Spanish game, and most importantly, figuring out our refa (snack) for our jovenes. Originally, we hoped to have 30 something jovenes participate but we quickly realized that we set the bar unrealistically high, considering we had less than week to prepare. When the day for the activity actually came, we got our first real-life Peace Corps lesson…. Only two showed up. But these two were so totally up for our activity and pumped to participate! We played a really fun dynamica (icebreaker) where you pretend you’re a celebrity (Messi or Shakira are always the most popular- I chose Rigoberta Menchu). It was a great way to earn a little trust and break our jovenes out of their shells! After playing our dynamica, we began our actual activity, and provided our jovenes with markers and posters to create their daily schedules. We discussed their perceptions of their own free time; how they could better utilize it, and when they thought would be a good time for youth activities. I also couldn’t help but notice the gendered differences in their daily schedules. Where the boy had free time to platicar (chat) with his buddies, the girl was helping prepare meals, tidying her room, or washing clothes. This seemed to come a surprise to the boy. In the future, I would love to have the boys create a schedule of what they perceive is a girl's daily activities and vice versa. It would really interesting to look at their different perceptions of each other’s days.

Facilitating an entire activity in Spanish was definitely a challenge! But the information we got was really valuable and important for the future when I’m trying to plan activities for the youth in my community.

Tomorrow, I am headed off to a rural, indigenous community to stay with a currently serving volunteer for four days! Word has it I’ll be helping facilitate cooking classes for the youth in her community! I’ll let yall know how that goes and if I’ve perfected my tortilla making skills!

My language class! 

Me checking out Oscar's daily schedule! That's our refa in our hands... choco strawberries!

Adrianna with her Actividades Diarias

The whole crew!