McMurry University students Erin Bodiford of Fort Worth, Raven Laird of Lawn and Sarah Leeth of Temple spent the month of June studying Spanish and Hispanic culture in Antigua, Guatemala.

Antigua had been the capital of a Spanish colony for 200 years before the United States declared their independence. The history goes way back. For example, one of the very first universities in the Americas was established there, and is now a museum of 18th century Guatemalan paintings. The old colonial architecture has been preserved throughout the town, along with cobble stone streets and the massive ruins of cathedrals damaged by earthquakes.

The girls soon learned to interact well with the family they were staying with, to use their Spanish while shopping, eating in restaurants, asking directions and so on. Toward the end of their first week they visited a very large, sprawling, special needs hospital to see what the volunteer opportunities were, and the guide conducted the hourlong tour in Spanish. To the intense gratification of the McMurry students, there was no need for me to interpret.

By the time they left Guatemala, with four weeks of determined learning under their belts, Raven, Erin and Sarah were able to sit and chat in Spanish for hours (literally for two or three hours), with their new friends and/or host family.

The first weekend relief from four hours of class work a day was a Saturday climb up Volcán Pacaya and a Sunday drive to a beach. Antigua is surrounded by volcanoes, so one doesn’t have to go far for a climb up Mount Pacaya, an active volcano, where the students could get close enough to red hot lava to roast marshmallows. The students hiked up, while I rode a horse on a winding, steep path through the thick jungle growth.

The next day, it was a two-hour ride by shuttle bus to the beach at Monterrico, on the Pacific coast. The sand there is a combination of dark brown and black volcanic grains. The dark beach slopes abruptly down into the water and gets very, very hot by noon. I sat in the shade and watched people burn their feet, hopping into the shade when they forget to put on sandals. The surf is roughly six feet high, and crashes thunderously against the steep beach. The students had a ball, and wisely avoided the rip tides. The life guards invited me to sit in the tower with them so I could watch the students comfortably, and not get sand in my swim suit, nor my skin scraped and burned like the poor souls tumbling around down in the churning water.

The second weekend excursion was a five-hour bus ride to Mayan ruins, just across the Honduran border, at Copán. The site has been well developed (cleared, identified and marked) by archeologists, scholars mostly from the United States and Europe, who have called Copán the Athens of the Mayan culture. Apparently it was a thriving urban center from about 300 B.C. to about 400 A.D. with up to 30,000 inhabitants at its peak. Two of its rulers particularly catch one’s attention, Eighteen Rabbit and Chicken Smoke. Really, those were their names! Their funeral monuments were among the most prominent.

The third and final weekend excursion was to what many travelers have called the most beautiful spot in Guatemala, Lake Atitlán. The lake is volcanic in origin, formed by an eruption some 84,000 years ago. Guatemalans call it the eighth natural wonder of the word. It was well worth the drive up the mountains, with the hairpin curves, the popping ears and the vistas of plunging valleys, the glimpses of the road recently traveled, now a tiny ribbon far below.

The first week in June was constant rain, day and night. The girls began to think they had made a bad choice of where to study Spanish. Fortunately, after that it was a daily dose of beautiful sunshine and intermittent showers pretty well every day. The students got a little tired of rice, beans and chicken, but they went prepared to adapt, and they did. They didn’t drink the tap water, nor eat lettuce in smaller restaurants, nor use ice in their drinks at the beach, etc., and no one got sick.

The language learning and cultural broadening gained are too valuable to be measured in dollars. When you talk to these students, you will see a new confidence, a new maturity, a kind of “settled strength with humility” that wasn’t there before, or at least that is now stronger. And you will find them quite willing to engage someone in conversation in Spanish!

Dr. Bill Short is a professor of modern languages at McMurry University.