My students have been doing a lot of swimming, snorkeling, and fish eating, alongside our closing of course activities processing and analyzing our course, preparing them to go home and face the USA again. Today one of my students asked why I wasn't participating in the activities myself, just simply facilitating them, and the first thing I thought was, Well I'm not going home. Although there is relief in going back to Guatemala, it's still not a place I can "let go" in; I still have to speak a second language, go out of my way if I want to find gringa-food, see lots of hard sights, and can't flush the TP.

So in the meantime this island is a trip. I haven't worn shoes much, the cabbies listen strictly to reggae, you can eat fish anywhere, you can find sand anywhere, the sky is blue, someone said they saw a monkey, and there's a sunken pirate ship just off shore. My co-instructor said, You know something has gone wrong of the "Central America Roots of Rebellion" course (the name of this Dragons gap-year semester program) ends on a Caribbean island eating lobster paying in US dollars.