Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

There are 2 large shopping centers in Xela and recently Wal-Mart bought both of them. We’ve been shopping at a small grocery store near our school. I was reminded of Hugo Chavez’s recent speech at the UN when I realized the devil is all around us. The director of our language school is a Guatemalan woman and we had a short discussion about some of the criticism Wal-Mart receives in the US. It was interesting to hear what she had to say about Wal-Mart. I took her point to be that when people in Guatemala barely have enough to eat they don’t worry about things like business practices, the effects on small-businesses or working conditions of the people producing goods sold at Wal-Mart. I’ve never seen it as a real luxury to be able to criticize Wal-Mart and choose to shop elsewhere, but I guess it really is.

Every day our school has special activities. We’ve been to a weaving cooperative run by Guatemalan women, yesterday we had a cooking class and today we took a trip to a small town about an hour away from Xela. [read on]

Somehow our blog has deteriorated into more information about the people we are living with than what we are up to. All that is definitely a part of what we are experiencing, but I thought we should try to tell a bit more about Guatemala. On a side note, our guest house is almost empty. Most of the people we have been writing about have left and we honestly miss them. Despite all their peculiarites (like the fact that Paul sleeps with a headband on – and please don’t ask me how I know this) we have really enjoyed the last week with them. In addition to this I believe that Matthias and I are probably just as good fodder for all of their blogs as they have been for ours.
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I was walking through the kitchen at the guest house we are staying at when I heard water running.  I asked Paul “Is it raining?”  He answered “No that’s Bonnie in the bathroom – a floater.” 
Paul ... [Continue reading this entry]