Earth Lodge

This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit Earth Lodge - a wonderful lodge just 20 minutes outside of Antigua with absolutely stunning views, delicious home cooked meals, and an extremely friendly and international staff.
I was particularly moved by the work that co-owner Briana is doing in the public school of El Hato - a nearby small village. I am more and more convinced that it is these initiatives (small scale, and person to person) that can truly make a difference. With no overhead, every quetzal donated to her project is guaranteed to be spent on the children who most need it. Read here to learn more about this initiative.

Teaching Spaces

To be resourceful is always a prevalent, yet unpredictable, learning opportunity that these kinds of fieldwork programs offer to our students. This year, in particular, we have had some challenging moments when it comes to teaching spaces - not always knowing if we have to hold an impromptu workshop

on the property of one of our collaborators, or if a particular meeting room will be open, if we may just have to teach in a hallway

, or as it happened last week a few times -

in a basement garage (hoping that the owner of that car wasn't going to have to drive it out!)

Overheard in Antigua, Guatemala

A family of tourists overheard at one of the many stalls of Antigua's large artisan market:

Man (holding a football/soccer jersey up) asking vendor, "Do you have a jersey from America?"
Vendor (referring to the Latin American football teams that are called 'America') replies in Spanish, "No, that one is not from America."
Man, "Do you have from America?"
Woman (clarifying on behalf of her husband), "From the United States?"
Vendor, "Are you trying to ask how much it costs?"

I did not have time to stop and help translate, but I would've enjoyed the opportunity to remind this family that, particularly in this part of the world, 'America' is all of us - North, South & Central America. Interestingly enough, Guatemalans often refer to the U.S. as 'Los Estados.'

Workshop: Basic English

This week was a tough one to attract participants to our workshops because everyone is either participating in or preparing for this weekend's festivities, in celebration of San Antonio de Padua (the town's patron saint.)

However, we kicked off our workshop series with English workshops. Below are spreads from a booklet that students designed, printed, and colored in by hand, with the colors and basic words in English and their phonetic translation to teach pronunciation.

Consulting with Jeremias, a local self-taught graphic designer

Yesterday morning, two of our Parsons students and I met with the designer for the municipality, Jeremias. He was actually hired as a computer technician, and has ended up also designing all the marketing materials for the local government and its events.

He was interested in our feedback on his design for a vinyl banner promoting a local artisan women's association "Caminemos Juntas."

Our students did a terrific job in taking him step-by-step through a graphic designer's decision process, emphasizing less is more, the importance of white space, and the cardinal rule of not stretching typefaces.

BEFORE:


AFTER:

Jeremias was very happy with the end result, but was not sure if the client would be OK with removing the two oval images next to the main heading.

I'll report back once it gets printed!

One Country - Two Beauty Queens

Miss Universo Guatemala 2009 and Miss Reina Maya 2009. Who truly represents Guatemala?

First session in San Antonio Aguas Calientes

Students organized a successful information session for Monday afternoon. It was promoted via posters that were taped around town, flyers they handed out, word of mouth by walking door to door, and via a man on a tricycle with a megaphone who rode around town broadcasting the purpose and time of the meeting (video on that coming soon.)




During the meeting teams of students facilitated small groups of San Antonio citizens who were asked to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of the town. We now have this list which establishes a framework within which we will run workshops about culture preservation in tourism.



The meeting ended with a digital storytelling workshop in which the members of each team had to describe San Antonio through one of the senses - "San Antonio tastes like...", "San Antonio smells like..." One of the students rapidly edited a movie from everyone's clips, so that we ended the day with the participants seeing themselves talking on a large projection.