Ak Tenamit

There is nothing quite so foreign as the familiar turned strange, nothing so alien as a world we once inhabited showing a face we neither know nor understand. The Guatemala of my mind was a place of tortillas and smiles, a half remembered ideal of memory solidified by a passing year or two, but lying in bed on my first night at Ak Tenamit - a Mayan Community Project nestled in the Guatemalan jungle - I felt none of this. My kidneys burned fire while I lay sweating and jetlagged on a lumpy mattress, fever turning every shadow, every brush of the sheet into a close relative of the spider I had found cowering under my bed earlier on. It's hard to tell which of us felt the most fear as it charged towards me, a desperate thrust for freedom while my trusty just-in-case stick rained blows from above. I was still shaking after it became a stain on my floor, so I'd have to say it was me.

Reality, however, will intrude on whatever picture temporarily covers it, and in this case reality is a lot more pleasant than my first day would imply. Ak Tenamit lies inland from Livingston on the North-East coast of Guatemala, a boat ride along the Rio Dulce from sleepy Caribbean village to dense jungle in 15 minutes. Walls of vegetation rise and fall while fishermen cast broad nets from astride slim cayucos with the sure-footed confidence of those born on the river. El projecto appears without fanfare, a collection of tin-roofed buildings gradually disappearing into the jungle with boats clustering around a finger of dock that juts out midstream.

Started 20 years ago by an American, it is now run by a Mayan council and seeks to lift rural Guatemalans – particularly Mayan women – out of the cycle of poverty through education. They pay tuition if they can, if not it is subsidised by wealthier donors (mostly from abroad). No child is turned away, and ideally they enter at basico level and continue through 6 years until sextos and graduation. In that time they will learn about Mayan culture, music and history; gain knowledge of agriculture methods; have thousands of hours of practical experience in local businesses and hospitality sites and obtain some level of English. It is this last arena in which I enter the story, clambering to the dock with a USB stick of teaching ideas in one hand, long blunt spider deterrent in the other.

Almost 400 children means large classes, upwards of 50 in most cases. For someone like myself, pampered by private language school classes of no more than 16, this is a rude awakening. Their level of English is so low - no students above pre-intermediate and very few above beginner - that in many cases we must literally provide their first words. My ideas of speaking only English disintegrate in the first lesson, as if you want to be understood some Spanish is a necessity. Materials are also scarce, essentially only pen and paper, and there are not enough of any textbooks to go around. Nor is there electricity in the classes: no projectors, youtube videos, electronic whiteboards or any modern teacher's favourites to build a lesson around. I was told to lower my expectations of what to achieve in class before coming here; I did so, then had to lower them again once I stepped into a classroom. The time it takes to explain an exercise, teach vocabulary, deal with problems or in fact do anything increases exponentially with the number of students you have, and I'm still trying to figure out how to control a class without doing permanent damage to my throat.

Crocodiles have also been a problem. Not real ones, you understand, but the imaginary ones that creep into the mind after you hear something like “locals killed them all, but there might be a few left upriver”. No matter that every other person you speak to contradicts this idea, the first few times you slip into the murky river for some exercise or a bath, ideas lurk behind every ripple and shadow.

Food, meanwhile, is not so much a problem as a state of mind: accept that you will consume a great deal of beans and tortillas and the world becomes a fine place. Boredom will eventually take hold of course, but actually enjoying rice and beans in the first place helps a great deal, as does our proximity to the nearby town of Livingston and the plethora of delights it holds (fried chicken, for one). But I refuse to entertain the notion that Central America is a gastronomically exciting corner of the world, mainly because I've seen a few other corners and they were all a great deal more exciting. Exceptions are present, of course; we were treated to tapado yesterday, a fish soup made with coconut milk and spices that exceeded tasty by some degree. There is also Dona Pan, the Bread Lady, who paddles by in her cayuco from time to time to sell coconut bread (fairly reminiscent of coconuts and pretty tasty) and finger rolls stuffed with actual coconut (which defy description). Though breakfast and dinner are generally something other than the aforementioned staples, cravings often stalk me like phantom crocodiles: mostly I crave chocolate. Chocolate, and students who understand every word I say.

Cayucos have thus far been a source of great joy, but also great dampness. My morning commute to Nuevo Centro - the school site separate from where we live - involves 15 minutes of precarious balancing in a hollowed out log, which though well-shaped is not always the easiest to propel in a straight line. There is also a line of equilibrium, imaginary but oh-so-real once it is crossed, after which a person in a cayuco is transformed into a person furiously splashing next to a cayuco, and regaining the previous state is not as easy as you might imagine (or just as difficult, depending on your cayuco-based imagination). My phone has miraculously come back to life after joining me in this balance experiment, and general lessons involving not crossing lines and waterproof bags have been learned. One benefit of dark classrooms is that students won't necessarily notice you dripping as you stand at the front of the opening term's class.

There is definitely something to be said for paddling to work in a canoe, however. The first time you are unsure, too worried about balance to really enjoy it, but the return journey brings a broad smile as you realise many people are cursing lines of traffic trying to achieve the same thing. After that you start to appreciate the little things, like the same woman ferrying her child to school and back each day, the small but meaningful nods of acknowledgement from the boat drivers who pass you on the way, the dogs wondering whether to bark at you each morning. The time after that you get too confident and fall in, but the world is still a good place once dryness and a hammock have been regained.

My skills in Spanish are growing day by day, but this is by no means an immersion environment. The galera, our haven of hammocks and cockroaches, is filled with Americans - wonderful, curious, accepting Americans, certainly, but I am surrounded and thus forced onto the cultural defensive by sheer weight of numbers, and English is still our lingua franca. When not working we lie back and trade loving insults, the smell of Basil wafting on the breeze from our mini herb garden as we decide who is making dinner tonight. The local girls occupy the pier that reaches out towards the river, watching life go by and playing with their mobiles (this is rural Guatemala, but culture has extremely long arms).

The pace of life here is normally so slow that you can easily find yourself drawn in, taking lazy scoops with a paddle instead of the hungry swipes you began with, finding reason for that extra half hour in the hammock. As it slowly bends to kiss the jungle horizon, the sun cares not whether you made good time on the way back from school, even less what you are going to teach tomorrow. If that which scuttles in the shadows with too many legs could only find the same pace, life here would seem a whole lot easier.