Spring semester has come to an end, so teaching and grading and going to classes are over until August. However, my workload hasn’t decreased at all. I’ve been doing a lot of preparations for summer lately. I’ve got this massive project in the works that I’ve been thinking about since Fall 2015, and it’s finally coming to fruition.

First, for four weeks during May and June I will be attending the University of Maryland Summer Field School in Patzún, Guatemala. The first two weeks are intensive Kaqchikel Mayan language classes (I get to learn to speak Mayan!), and the last two weeks are mentored bilingual education research. I’ll be going around to the local schools and giving the second graders a few tests of numerical cognition and mathematics achievement. This is really exciting for me, because there’s a huge lack of published cognitive research and education research in Guatemala, and especially among Mayan people. I think this is an incredible shame as the Mayan languages use a unique base-20 counting system. This base-20 system, where there are 20 individual digit systems, is dying out as the spoken numbers are being replaced with the base-10 Spanish numbers instead as more people are educated in the Spanish-speaking school systems.

Hopefully I’ll be able to scrounge up 40 children bilingual in Mayan and Spanish that can actually count in Mayan. Since the children I’ll be doing this research with are students at the Mayan-Spanish bilingual schools, I’ve got a slightly better chance of finding them. Even if I don’t get as many kids as I need for this project, the data I collect will still be useful in some future work I’d like to do.

The second part of this massive endeavor is going to be collecting data in the dual language immersion schools here in Utah. I’ll be giving the same measures from the Guatemalan portion to 160 American kids in English-speaking classes, English-Spanish bilingual classes, and English-Mandarin classes. Mandarin also has a pretty cool numerical system that’s transparently base-10, so I’ll get to compare a cognitively “easy” numerical system (Mandarin), a difficult one (Mayan), and two intermediate systems (English and Spanish).

It’s a massive undertaking that’s been putting a lot of stress on me for the last few weeks. I’ll be using this data for my second year project, but that milestone project can’t officially be proposed until this coming September. I can’t get any funding through the department until the project proposal has been accepted! That’s fine for the Utah data collection in Fall, but it puts me in a massive pickle for my data collection in Guatemala this summer. The testing procedures that I’ve been anticipating using are expensive, time consuming to prepare, and somewhat difficult to prepare at all when I haven’t been able to buy them yet.

In talking last night with my labmate and labmentor Salif, he helped me realized that I’ve been trying to juggle way too much with this project, especially with everything else that’s been going on in my life recently. If I keep this up, I’ll just drop all the balls I’ve been juggling and make a massive fool of myself. So, I’ve decided that I’m dropping the biggest and scariest of my testing procedures in favor of focusing on the ones that are smaller and easier to handle. It’s a bit disappointing, as I’d been hoping to implement this procedure here for a long time, but it makes the preparatory work load much less intimidating. It’ll also cut off about an hour of testing time for each kid, giving me more time to actually interact with other adults and maybe even have a little free time while I’m in Guatemala.

I struggle with some social anxiety; making and keeping friends seems impossibly difficult sometimes. There are people I consider very good friends that I haven’t spoken to in years, but am too anxious to strike up a conversation with at this point (sorry ya’ll). But with Rue, it was so easy. Becoming her friend and staying close was as easy as breathing. She was just so profoundly GOOD, it was hard not to become her friend. 

Rue passed away on Monday, April 24th. The circumstances of her death were so preventable as to be farcical; she was let down by many of the institutions and protocols in place to help those who found themselves in the situation she did. It should never have been allowed to get as bad as it did or go on for so long. It feels farcical to even have to talk around the situation like this, but that’s the way of it right now. She was systematically let down and she died for it. 

Her passing and the circumstances surrounding it have given me new purpose. In my mourning process, I’ve become stuck at “anger”. Not at Rue, but at the systems that let her slip through the cracks when she went to them for help. My anger is being channeled into changing those systems, so what happened to Rue is never allowed to happen again. Her reports should have been taken seriously the first time and the problem nipped in the bud immediately.  

Rue was everything a university should strive to have in a student; extraordinarily intelligent, humble, passionate, with a unique and powerful perspective on what she studied. The university should have fought tooth and nail to do right by her- as they should everyone that makes up the student body, graduate and undergraduate alike.  

She was also everything that one could hope to have in a best friend; loyal, kind, caring, an unmatched sense of humor,  and great taste in food that she loved to share. Rue once told me that if she was your friend, she was “your friend as f*ck”. She was so willing to go the extra mile to spend time with her friends or help with whatever they were going through. She must have brought her signature spicy soup to nearly everyone in her year when we were sick, myself included. I can’t help but feel like if the situation was different, if we were mourning someone else, she would have brought each and every one of us soup and held us as we cried. 

In friendship and in life, we were all truly blessed to have met her. I certainly was. 

At 8 this morning, we gathered in the hotel lobby for our first work day. Our hotel from last year, Cacique Inn, had a fire in the office so we got upgraded to Hotel Porta Lago. This hotel is so luxurious, it probably has room service. It has an elevator, the wifi reaches the rooms so we’re not forced to mingle at a common “wifi watering hole”, and there’s reliable hot water. I’ve been calling it Gringotopia. It’s embarrassing how nice it is, honestly. 

All of this, of course, is in extreme contrast to our work sites. For the most part, the aldeas or small outlying villages are the picture of abject poverty. Our work site today had electricity, but no running water. It’s surrounded by dusty cornfields. The homes are adobe or cinder block, the paths to the homes are well-trod, and the families are extremely kind and hospitable. 

We’ve split into Stoves and Homes, and I’m on the Home team for today and tomorrow. We’re working on putting the foundation this week. Today I clipped the wire ties for the rebar for quite a while with the help of Don Antonio, who taught me a little K’iche and chatted with me about his family. I also tied the wires into the rebar, made links out of some metal, and removed excess cement from the cement blocks. Best of all, I got to coordinate the coloring book and crayon disbursement to the little kids from the village as they got back from school. There’s a lot of pictures (and therefore proof!) of me doing these activities but for the moment I only have the photos I took myself. 

The future homeowners, Dulia and Nelson, are both teachers at the local school. Nelson teaches fifth and sixth grades, and Dulia teaches “los niños más pequeños” or the smallest kids. I’m excited to talk to them tomorrow about how they teach the Mayan numerical system. Professional interest, of course. 

I’m also really excited to see the kids again. They’re whip-smart and so cute. They filled up almost two whole coloring books after they got home from school. 

I think I’ve managed to make friends with all of the child vendors on the street today. There was Sara, who sells bracelets in the Artisans Market to pay for her middle school tuition (I gladly paid full price for a bracelet), and Christian who makes and sells shirts to pay for high school. I bought a shirt from him last year. Both speak excellent English from their time talking to gringos and from their educations. The souvenir market is quite intense here, as it’s all very beautiful and well-made and the vendors are extremely convincing. I made the wise decision to come down with a specific list of what to get while I’m here, and I feel I’ve done a good job of sticking to it. It’s very tempting to be overly helpful in invigorating the local economy. 

My group members keep asking what I’m going to do when I’m done with my doctorate. Honestly, I have no idea. I’ve been joking with them though that I’ll be coming back here to get some land on the side of the volcano to start a secret lair. I’m getting increasingly serious about it each time I say it though. Guatemala and Lake Atitlán grow on me every single day I’m here. 

Spring Break is here! There’s still a few inches of snow on the ground here in Logan, but apparently it’s spring enough to get away from schoolwork and stress for a week. It’s been a busy semester for me so far. I really kicked things up a notch from Fall by taking on data collection in a few different research projects, joining a language acquisition and brain imaging lab, and really starting to prepare my own research for implementation. I’m also taking more classes than I think I technically should, as well as being in the core group of a new grassroots social justice initiative. Oh, and I’ve been snowboarding and sledding like nobodies business because snow is super fun and I’m not letting it melt without getting my money’s worth out of it. But it’s time to take a break from all of this and engage in some “brick therapy”. 

I’m absolutely thrilled to say that I’m returning to Guatemala with Habitat for Humanity for my Spring Break. I’ll be exploring the aldeas of Sololá, building houses, stoves, and latrines out of adobe bricks. I’ll be practicing my K’iche and Kaqchikel Mayan, making a fool of myself with unfamiliar vowels and glottal stops. I’ll be soaking up sun on Lake Atitlán and practicing my “cultural diplomacy”. I’ll be missing my kiddo something fierce. But in the midst of it all, I’ve still got about 20 articles I need to read over the break, for classes and for “fun” (aka my own edification). I still need to write a paper about dual language immersion classrooms, and I still need to write a rocking thesis statement for a diversity and inclusion grant. And best of all, I need to suss out how much of the Mayan numeral system the Mayan kids know so I can start planning my dissertation. 

This is going to be AWESOME.