Central America

Cross Cultural Program

Eastern Mennonite University, Fall 1994


NOTE: This page was created by me, Micah Yoder. Any opinions expressed herein are those of me, not necessarily those of Eastern Mennonite University. I am creating this page with the hopes that you will realize how fun and educational EMU's cross cultural program can be!


September 7, 1994: After a five hour flight on TACA International Airlines, we arrive in Guatemala City. This is where we will be spending most of the next two months, studying Spanish. We will be living with a host family and generally living the culture. Sure, we also do some touristy stuff, as you will soon see ...


This is a picture of people hanging out at the CASAS (Central American Study And Service) center, where we study Spanish and use as a base for trips. They were probably waiting for class to start in the morning.


Family Life in Guatemala

A picture of my Guatemalan host family. They were a lot of fun to stay with. Despite my limited Spanish skills, I was able to teach the two boys how to play Monopoly after I bought a Spanish edition. We had a lot of fun. They also liked to kick soccer balls around outside the house, and I sometimes joined them.

This picture was taken standing on the roof of our house. We lived in the La Brigada section of Guatemala City. It was a somewhat dangerous area of town. The houses looked sort of "slummy" but on the inside they were very liveable.


Spanish Classes

Our group of 29 students broke up into several small Spanish classes, with 3-5 people per class. The homework was challenging, and sometimes 3 and a half hours a day of Spanish got a little old, but the teachers tried to liven it up a bit by teaching us songs, playing games, and going on field trips. Field trips included museums, a hospital, and the Guatemala City Zoo, shown above. Our teacher is second from the left, I took the picture.


Extended Trips for Education, Adventure, and Fun

One of our weekend trips included seeing a project which helped widows earn a living by weaving and selling Guatemalan Indian items. Many of us bought souvenirs from them. We then went to the tourist town of Chichicastenango, where there is a giant Indian market and a church used by both Catholics and worshippers of "traditional" Indian gods.

The most memorable trip from Guatemala City, for me anyway, was north to the Peten district of Guatemala and Belize. In Peten, we visited the Mayan ruins at Tikal. This is a place where we climbed death defying sides of ancient temples, but were rewarded with magnificent views, like this:

We also found a great opportunity to advertise EMU:

I am in the middle of the bottom row of the E.

The night after the Tikal adventure, we stayed in a luxury hotel, the Hotel Camino Real. Late at night my roommate and I discovered we had company....

The next morning, after searching all over the place for it, I finally found it when attempting to put on my shoe and wondering why my foot wouldn't go in all the way. Spiders can make things interesting. I found the tarantula incident funny, as I know that most tarantulas are harmless, but a little more serious incident was a scorpion falling on me from the ceiling of our campo house in Nicaragua after I had just gotten in bed. Credit should be given to Tom Eshleman for helping to get it off me (and not knowing it was a scorpion at the time because it was pitch dark).

The next night we stayed in a little hotel built out over Lake Peten.

Onwards to Belize

In the same exciting, action packed trip, we Visited German Mennonites who had settled in Belize in the 1950s. They now have an impressive business empire, including a virtual monopoly on chicken production in Belize. They also run a dairy (which makes just about the best ice cream I've ever tasted) and a farm machinery company, among other things.


Travel

November 1, 1994: Our bus finally showed up, after we worried that it wouldn't make it. Then it was off to the border of Honduras to begin the second stage of our trip.



Here we are, filling up most of a public bus on our way to Honduras. We would become very familiar with busses over the next several weeks.

The excitement of the first week in Honduras included the Maya ruins of Copan, visiting Habitat for Humanity and a school in San Pedro Sula, and staying overnight in the Mennonite retreat center in La Ceiba.


The BEACH!!!

We spent two nights on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands of Honduras. We swam, played on the beach, and took a glass-bottom boat to another part of the island. We also took this boat, which was kind of fun:

Free Travel

After most of us students had boarded the small plane which was going to take us back to the mainland of Honduras, the leader, Ray Horst, walked inside the plane, sang "Managua, Nicaragua is a wonderful place," and left. And off we were. The mission: to travel in independent small groups from La Ceiba, Honduras to Managua, Nicaragua in 4 and a half days.

November 7, 1994: Here's me and Jen Eriksen on the first night of our free travel, which we spent in Tela, a coastal town in Honduras. We were waiting for someone else to come so we could play Rook, a game seen much on our trip. In the meantime, I'm listening to my walkman because I'm kind of a news buff. I was listening to the Voice of America coverage of the next day's Congressional elections (and loving the predicted outcome).


Well, here we all are two days later attempting to hitchhike from Comayagua, the site of a US military base which we visited, to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. We didn't have much success, but another group claims to have hitchhiked almost the whole trip from La Ceiba to Managua.

Friday, November 11 could have possibly been the wildest day of my life. That was the day which we were supposed to be in Managua, but were still in Tegucigalpa in the morning. We didn't have a clue what we were doing, and just hopped into whatever various busses, taxis, and jeeps that people would tell us to jump in. Crossing the border into Nicaragua was a pain, and we couldn't find anyone to change our money. So there we are, in a strange looking Nicaraguan bus, having no idea where we're going, and having no idea how we're going to pay the fare when they collect. They finally agreed to accept our US dollars and the bus ended up in a town that had a connection to Managua, but we were ripped off by some bus drivers and then had to ride 4 hours in a very tight bus with all our heavy luggage basically on top of us. When we finally arrived at our hotel in Managua, we got a nasty surprise: Another group decided to stay longer so our reservations had been cancelled! They told us what other hotel we were supposed to go to, so we hopped into yet another taxi. If that's not bad enough, the taxi driver had absolutely no clue where this hotel was. We finally made it though, and were very glad to see the rest of the group.


Los Campos


Here I am on a mule, which I had to ride for two hours to get to my home for the next six nights - campos (fields) in rural Nicaragua. (In the background is the Mennonite church of Teostepe.) The people there were much poorer than my Guatemalan family, and our food consisted mostly of rice and beans, with occasional platanos. Here are my roommates, Tom Eshleman and Dave Farrow at the table in our house:

(This is the same room in which the aforementioned scorpion fell on me.)

One of the drawbacks to the campos was the almost complete lack of privacy. Everywhere we went, the kids of the community would be staring at us. About the only place where you might get some privacy is in the outhouse, and even that's not guaranteed because of the distance between the wood used to build it.

However, the people and especially the kids were amazing. We had a culta (church service) almost every night, and the kids still wanted to be with us and sing more after it was over. There was very little secular influence in the community, and it showed. There were no TVs, and the only radio was usually playing a sermon or Christian music of some kind. Here's the house and some of the family members:

Other things we did in Nicaragua that I won't expand too much on:


El Salvador

We spent a week in El Salvador, studying the history of the conflict there, visiting communities which had been affected, and visiting the United States Embassy (which is the only place in El Salvador where you can flush toilet paper in the toilet).

Sorry, I don't have any pictures from El Salvador. If anyone else in the group would like to contribute one for the use of this page, that would be great.


The Home Stretch

Back to Guatemala for the final week. By this time, most of us can't wait to get back to the states, including me. The weekend of December 1-4 involved a trip to the Lake Atitlan area, where we saw a 4th anniversary commemoration of a massacre by the military in Santiago Atitlan:

On Saturday the 3rd we took a ferry across Lake Atitlan to Panajachel, where three friends and I had what was probably the best meal of our lives:

December 9, 1994: We found ourselves at Guatemala's La Aurora Airport, once again boarding a TACA plane, but this time bound for Washington/Dulles International Airport.


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