Interesting Stuff!

So, I've been learning all kinds of interesting things over the last couple of days about the people group we will be with the majority of the time in Guatemala. I just wanted to share some of the more interesting things I've learned : )
The Acateco people are Mayan and live in the mountains of Guatemala (it will probably be cold most of our time there). They are passionate about corn. You are not a real Mayan man if you do not grow corn. Corn is not animal food like it is in the US - corn is people food. A meal is not complete until you've eaten corn tortillas - even if you ate an awesome huge steak, it wouldn't be complete without the tortillas (the Acateco word for tortillas is "pot"). Corn also has a spirit that the people are very careful not to offend. For example, you might see a random stalk of corn growing somewhere by itself, but the people wouldn't cut it down or their crop might fail. Also, on the rare occasion you would feed an animal corn, if they don't finish all of it, the people have to pick up every single kernel of corn that is left on the ground. Corn is SO important that every kind of corn has a different name ( for example, corn in general is "ishim" and corn on the cob is "awa'l").

Enough about corn : )
In this culture, emotions are all in the stomach (as opposed to the heart in the US). For example, the common greeting literally translated means "is your stomach good?" to which the response is "mine is good if yours is". Also, the translation of "I'm sorry" means "make your stomach big". The list could go on and on...

Some other random facts:
- they have different words for counting different items such as inanimate objects, animals and people
- "huh" means yes
- they use the spanish greetings (buenas dias, buenas tardes, buenos noches) but not really anything else is in spanish

Anyway, just wanted to share the fun of some of the cool stuff I'm learning!

Some updated prayer requests:
-safe/uneventful flight on Friday afternoon
-that our three day village stay (from Thursday to Saturday) would go really well (I am so nervous about this part - they will basically divide us into small groups and drop us off at the village on Thursday and pick us up on Saturday)
-for health (that we wouldn't get sick and also for my asthma: it's usually very mild and not a big deal at all, but one thing that aggravates it pretty badly is altitude. We'll be pretty high up most of the time, so I'm a little bit worried about that...)

Thanks for reading and for your prayers!