Nov '13 - Jan '14

After a brief sojourn back in the UK - a wonderful week seeing my mum, Simon's family, old friends and meeting five newborn babies! - we flew to Guatemala, a slight diversion from our original travel plans, to attend the wedding of my step-sister Paulina to her now-husband Claus. Their wedding was brilliant, and soon our intended two-week stay in Guatemala ended up stretching out to two months… as we spent more time with my dad and family we realised that this was an ideal, and rare, opportunity to spend some precious time there, and so we started to look for excuses to stay on….these came about in a Spanish-language course for Simon, and some voluntary work for me - all good for the CV of course - and so now it was official, we would stay for Christmas and New Year's Eve and take a sabbatical from our sabbatical!

For the next two months we felt like we had been jettisoned into a very different world, as my family spoilt us rotten and our photos started to look like something from a luxury holiday brochure….Simon and Vicky in a helicopter / sailing around the Belize cays / deep-sea fishing off the Pacific coast etc - certainly not the backpacker norm. That plus weekly games of tennis and even a few thwacks round the golf course made us double check our age, as you'd think we'd recently retired or something....

Anyway before you stop reading this in disgust I'll move on to the other side of our time in Guatemala…. With Simon enrolled in Spanish school and my voluntary work in place, we shifted ourselves from Guatemala City (where my family live) to the old capital of Guatemala, Antigua, which is 45mins away and where my dad and step-mum have a second home. Antigua is a beautiful colonial city which moves to a very different pace of life to the capital, with its cobbled streets, beautiful buildings and a sense of relief at being able to walk around (which you can't really do in Guatemala City). We rented a scooter for a month which gave us some independence (and bruised bottoms as we juddered over Antigua's cobbled stones daily) and we soon settled in to a new routine, Simon dropping me off at my 'school' every day before he went off to his school in Antigua.

So while Simon was conjugating Spanish verbs, I was working at Education For The Children (EFTC) - a UK education charity which supports children and young adults from some of the poorest communities in Guatemala. The office was based at the foundation's school, Escuela Proyecto la Esperanza ('School of Hope'), in Jocotenango, a town just outside of Antigua. Many of the school children come from the poorest of backgrounds, living in corrugated iron shacks with mud floors, and wouldn't normally have access to education. Although public education is free in Guatemala, essentials such as books, materials, and school uniforms cost much more than the average family can afford. Furthermore, many of these children face incredible hardships such as homelessness, abuse, domestic violence, starvation, abandonment. To reduce the barriers to education these children face, EFTC also supports the children and their families with nutrition, medical and psychological support, help improving their living conditions, and provides a Safehouse for the most vulnerable children. It is the sort of charity that does so much that you think they must have a huge number of staff and resources, but like so many amazing charities that do so much with so little, it's incredible what they do manage to achieve.

I didn't quite know what to expect, or know what I would be doing, when I turned up on my first day…but was thrown in the deep-end and spent the first day in the classroom, helping some of the younger kids make Christmas decorations (the school term had finished but the school was still full every day as it was running holiday clubs and activities)…it was a lot of fun and I could have quite easily stayed on doing that - the kids are so, so cute - but I soon realised that however fun it was getting covered in glue and glitter, I was going to be far more helpful to the charity on the PR side of things (my arts & crafts skills having not had a huge airing recently). So I installed myself in the office at the school, and working with the UK director and other staff (mostly Guatemalan) as well as a couple of team members in the UK, helping them on the PR and social media side of things for the next month or so. I absolutely loved it - the people I worked with were so lovely, and so passionate, and the school itself was a wonderful place to work - full of laughter, love and happy smiles - with a lovely location backing onto a coffee farm and with the local volcano looming high (you are never too far from a volcano in Guatemala).

It also felt good to be using my brain towards something constructive and worthwhile, something I very much wanted this trip to include, as opposed to just a year-long loaf-athon. It also gave me real insight in to what daily life is like for the majority of Guatemalans…a very different side to the privileged life that we are used to there, a lifestyle that is only enjoyed by a very small percentage. Guatemala has one of the worst inequality gaps in the world: for example there are more private helicopters per capita than anywhere else in Central America (some stats say in the world), despite the fact approximately 75% of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line, and 50% in extreme poverty. The shocking socio-economic figures of Guatemala really came to life when I accompanied a school teacher and the in-house psychologist on one of the many home visits the staff conduct, in the process of enrolling new students and evaluating the home and family situation of said students. We took a walk up to Vista Hermosa, a slum on a nearby hillside where the majority of the school's students come from. 'Vista Hermosa' translates as 'beautiful view', which this local community certainly has, but turn away from the view and into the homes of these families and it's far from 'hermosa'…seeing how little these people have was such a stark reminder as to how lucky we are and the things we take for granted. Beyond the very rough living conditions, one of the main images that stuck with me was one family's home where a little boy's only toy was a forlorn-looking, broken truck…for some reason that was the most heart-breaking. In the face of all this hardship though, what equally struck me that day was that everyone still greeted us with huge smiles, and people were going about their day laughing and talking, as if they didn't have a care in the world, despite the fact that their home was nothing but a corrugated shack and looked like it was about to fall down the mountain side (which many of them do during the many mudslides that occur during Guatemala's rainy season). It made me fall slightly in love with Guatemala, and the amazing human spirit inside so many of its people. I think the best summary however of EFTC's work and the circumstances of its beneficiaries is in this video, filmed for their 10th anniversary…I applaud anyone that has time to watch the whole thing (20mins) however even the first five minutes gives you a very good (and powerful) picture.

As for Simon's spanish, well that is still work in progress! He enjoyed his spanish school though, and like me enjoyed the fact that we both had a 'project' - apart from Project Wanderlust - and that for once we actually felt like we deserved our weekends. His spanish teacher Gladys seemed quite taken with him (she was our age but with a 17-year old daughter), and I am sure she kept flirting with him, or at least that was my interpretation whenever he relayed their conversations back to me ("You look like my daughter's boyfriend, he is very good-looking", "I really like your hair, don't get it cut..")

We had a wonderful Christmas, and as a lovely bonus my mum arrived in Guatemala on 24th December, so we ended up celebrating Christmas with far more family members than we ever thought, as we'd just assumed we would be somewhere totally random over those dates before we decided to extend our stay in Guatemala! Then with the new year festivities behind us, and the start of the new year, it seemed a good as time as any to move on and start our travels south through Central America. Our two-month pit stop had been amazing, and saying goodbye was incredibly hard (and I am not referring to leaving the luxurious lifestyle we had become accustomed to) ….but with strengthened family bonds, some very happy memories and a new addiction to Homeland and Downton Abbey (hurrah for box sets!) off we went…I don't know when we will next get to spend such an extended amount of time in Guatemala, but we will always treasure the time we did have and the opportunities it gave us.