Home Sweet Home

Here is the place we are calling home while we are here. The name is Hotel Uxlajay. The name is a Mayan word, pronounced "oosh-lah-HAI". It is about a block and a half away from the Transitions office, where we have to be each morning at 8:30 AM. We have all three meals of the day here, and the cost is quite reasonable, even in Guatemalan terms. Four of the guys share two rooms and a bathroom. One guy - the editor, who needs solitude for his craft - is in a single room with a shared bathroom. There are two rooms with two girls each, and each with a private bath. I have a single room with a private bath.

We have our production meetings here, generally scheduled either around mealtime or the end of a shoot. Students do ten-minute writing prompts at the beginning of each meeting, to reflect on their experience. Then we get down to the business of planning the next day's shoot and assessing the one we just did. We are at a point where we have a lot of footage shot - much more than we need. Next week, we will be picking up B-roll and doing another shoot in the little town of El Hato. We have also begun to transcribe and translate the footage - a tedious task. Although a number of the members of the group can "get around" in Spanish, probably only two of us are able to do accurate translations, so that task will fall to us.

The students pictured above are, left to right, Lindsay Castillo, Kelly Hernandez, Jean-Pierre Bitchoka, and Erin Walter.