Don Diego

About once a week I walk 40 minutes to sit in this room with this man. Don Diego Adrian speaks five indigenous languages and a bit of English and German. He has traveled to many countries teaching about Mayan culture and language. He is a Mayan Priest. He literally wrote the K'iche dictionary. Every time we have class his warm wife, Pascua greets me with a smile and a hug.  Also every time we have class roosters crow just behind me in the yard, his grandkids dodge in and out of the room, always looking at me unblinkingly and a cat or two is shooed out of the house. Always to my left is an alter of mixed devotions with a bucket of wilting flowers. He gives me lessons on a small, green chalkboard that hangs crookedly on the wall. 

K'iche is a really difficult language to learn; not so much because of it's structure, as it is similar to English, but because the sounds are so strange to my American ears. Although class can sometimes be frustrating because of the difficulty of the language and also because Don Diego is aging and can sometimes loose track of the lesson, I always leave happy I was there. Last week, Don Diego taught me the words for about ten different birds. All of them, as he described, "are about this big (making a small cupping motion with his hand about 5 inches above the table), black (or blue) and live in the corn". 

This is the scene Johnny and I were greeted with as we walked home after a day of travels. Something always seems to remind me of how beautiful this place really is.