Educación para Todos, Spanish School
1) On the first Monday of your classes, you will be taken to meet your family at your new “home”. Staying with a Guatemalan family is one of the most important parts of the language/culture experience. Living in a Guatemalan home, you will be practicing your newly acquired language skills from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. We seek families that treat students like an additional member of the family, inviting them to take part in daily activities and conversation. The families are asked to provide you with a private room, a desk with a lamp for studying and three meals a day (including weekends). If students arrive a few days early, they may stay with the family until their classes begin for a small daily fee.
Most of our families have been with the school for many years and have experience with having foreigners in their homes. They all take the necessary precautions with cooking and handling food. They are also able to cook based on the student’s dietary needs, for example vegetarians, lactose intolerant, etc.
2) Staying in the class all day does get tiring. It also does not allow for our students to enjoy the beauty of nature and culture that Quetzaltenango and Guatemala has to offer. To help with this, we organize weekly activities and trips. These activities are in the form of movies, lectures, documentaries and group lessons. We also take hikes to indigenous villages, visit many area NGO’s and meet with local community organizations.
For those that want to see more of the surrounding area and enjoy the beauty of the land and people, the school also takes weekly excursions such as volcano hikes and trips to the beach, hot springs, hot baths, steam baths and area markets. Some of the places that we visit are:
Mayan Ruins at Abaj Takalik
Beach at Champerico
Hike La Muela
Las Fuentes Georginas Hot Springs
La Leguna de Chicabal Crater Lake
Villa Alicia Swimming PoolnMariposario and Lake at Panajachel
Markets at San Francisco el Alto, Momostenango and Totonicapán