Un otra día ocupado en Xela

Yup, another busy day here in the Highlands.  I moved hotels this morning for a little change of scenery and some hot water, so I am now in the slightly more upscale ($11/night) Casa Doña Mercedes, right off the central park. I was going to go to Celas Maya this morning and just sign up for classes, but I wanted to look at two more schools, Utatlán & Ulew Tinimit.  Utatlán is in a beautiful covered plaza which I took a gorgeous picture of but can’t upload it right now at this cafe. I’ll check out the other one in the a.m. I think I’m going to go with Celas Maya though, it’s more expensive than the others, but it really does have the most activities. I’ll just sign up for a week and see how it goes. None of them require much of a commitment which makes me very very happy on so many levels.

I also started my new job with the clowns today. I wasn’t able to explain the job in detail yesterday since every internet cafe I’ve been to closes at 8pm and it takes so long to upload pics I barely have time to write. Anyway, payaso means clown and the Proyecto Payaso is a non-profit that uses street theater to educate different populationson preventing AIDS, including indigenous communities all over Central America. They are based in Guatemala and the organization is run by one of the founders, Stef, a very tall, blonde, friendly, French payaso. 

Now, I am normally quite afraid of clowns and I was seriously hoping I didn’t have to dress like one. Or, even worse, work in an office surrounded by rehearsing clowns. But thankfully, no necesito me preocupar. This excerpt describes the amazing atmosphere of the office, located in a rustic colonial building, close to the center:

¨We are a group of indigenous and non-indigenous Guatemalan, Peruvian, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Argentinean, Salvadoran, Spanish, French, German, US American, Dutch, Belgian, Canadian, Mexican and Australian. Our diversity is our strength, reflecting the need to engage with the widest possible range of individuals and leaders from the local to the international, in order to stimulate effective and empowered grassroots responses to the pandemic.¨

Such a perfect environment for me, and they are all so friendly and welcoming. I probably wouldn’t even mind that much if they dressed like mimes and only communicated to me with gestures. Alright, maybe that’s going a little too far. So today, I began selecting images from the past 10 years to incorporate in the design of their 2011 calendar, commemorating their 10th anniversary. I’m pretty much coming up with a graphic concept, working closely with Stef and Tony, and then executing the entire project using Photoshop en español and hopefully, InDesign. Right now, they have a program called FreeHand (which seems to be a light Illustrator with page layout features) that I haven’t used, but I’m not too worried about figuring it out. Oh yeah, and all the directives are in Spanish so I’ll really be putting my language study to use. Maybe mañana I’ll post some pics of their 2009 calendar, which was made up of images of murals volunteering artists painted all over Guatemala. Many of the murals were defaced because the work they do is quite controversial. Part of their performance involves not only distributing condoms, but showing how to use them.  One of the characters is a human-sized condom. 

Okay, I think it’s tamalito time. Back to work in the am and by tomorrow evening I should have decided on a school.