All The Preparation Stuff

This will be a short post, I promise, and then I'll actually start writing about the trip. But I thought it was worth it to point out a few things about how we prepared for this.

I became part of the choir in February, at which point they had already been rehearsing for about a month. We held rehearsals about every two weeks for about three hours. The first month or so we really focused on pronunciation, and then after that focused on the musicality (is that a word?) of our performance. Frankly, it was miraculous to me how quickly everyone picked up the pronunciation. It's not easy stuff, especially when you're not just speaking; you're singing. So not only did we really have to nail all those tricky consonants and glottal stops and all of that, but we also had to work in breaths, timing, and a bunch of music stuff I don't know the names to. 

It was also miraculous to me how quickly I picked up the music. I've done high school choir, but I'm no expert, and most of the people I was singing with were pros. Like, literally, professional singers and performers. They'd look at a piece of music and just...sing it. I usually have to hear it about ninety times before I can pick out my harmony (I was singing alto). Or sometimes, we'd be singing and someone would stop and say, "There's a typo in the music. It says it's a C but it should be a D." How they could hear the difference between two notes, I don't know, and it was kind of overwhelming to me to be a part of this group. I sometimes felt like I was the only one just not getting it. But then one day I realized...I was getting it. Somehow, I was learning music that I was certain was beyond me. 

About a month before we left we started collecting donations so that we could purchase hymnbooks and triple combinations in Q'eqchi' to donate to the members in the Polochik. We also had a fundraising dinner just a few days before we left. I was amazed at how many of my friends and family made donations to help us purchase these books. 

My parents, sister, and brother-in-law all came to the fundraising dinner. Mike had hired a Guatemalan chef to make real Guatemalan food, and we came early and decorated the walls and tables with Guatemalan flags, dolls, pictures, fabrics, toys, and all kinds of stuff. My family and I had fun with the Guatemalan food--we've never been especially adventurous eaters, and I'm sure the food was much different than what they had expected (I'm not sure what, exactly, they expected, but my guess would be something a little more...Mexican :)). My poor sister couldn't eat anything at all; she has potentially deadly food allergies, and with the food all prepared together, there was no guarantee that she'd be safe eating. She settled for a few corn tortillas.

Thanks to my awesome sister for snapping
this photo of us singing at the dinner!

After the food, we performed. It was the first time we had sung in front of an audience, and I was pretty nervous. I especially wanted my family to feel the Spirit of what I was doing. They had supported me, given encouragement, made donations both for the hymnbooks and to me personally to help me get to Guatemala, and it was important to me that they understand how I felt about what we were doing. Mike introduced each song before we sang, and some of the performances were a little rocky, but I felt like we still did pretty well. Then Mike announced that we would be singing a hymn that would make the audience jealous; a hymn that was well-known and well-loved in English but was not part of the official hymnbook. He asked if anyone had any guesses. My family was sitting pretty close to the front, and I heard my dad from the audience say, quietly, as if almost to himself, "Come Thou Fount." Mike explained that  though this song is not found in English, it is part of the official Q'eqchi' hymnbook. I saw my parents whip out their cell phones to take video of us singing, and after that, they filmed each song. As we finished the last song, God Be With You Til We Meet Again, I made the mistake of finding my parents' faces in the crowd. Their faces were wet, and I could tell they felt the same Spirit that I did. In that moment, I felt like my family was closer to understanding how I felt during the mission than I had at any other time.

After the performance, we had a brief meeting to discuss last-minute stuff before we left for Guatemala in just two days. Mike surprised us by presenting us each with our own copy of the Q'eqchi' hymnbook. I held it in my hands and turned it over and opened it and flipped through the pages, and I was just giddy with excitement. I couldn't wait to see the native Q'eqchi' speakers see those books and hear those hymns.

A Brief Explanation About Q'eqchi

For those of you who don't speak Q'eqchi, let me explain to you why I had difficulty learning it.

Spanish has a few sounds that are new to English speakers. That trilled "r" is probably the most difficult to master. But for the most part, with some minor training in pronunciation, you can pick up a Spanish text and sound it out.

But Q'eqchi is just full of sounds English speakers never use, and the pronunciation seems totally backwards. Q'eqchi uses an apostrophe to signify a glottal stop (that cutting off of air you get in the back of your throat when you say the word "uh-uh"). Also, the letters c, k, and q all make a different sound (and the q does not say "cua" like it does in English). On top of that, c', k', and q' all make a different sound than their non-glottalized cousins. The glottal stop is difficult to pronounce, way back in your throat. Then, just to add some fun to the mix, the letters are different. The letter "w" says something like "kw," the letter "y" says "ty." Oh, and in case all of that wasn't confusing enough, Guatemala has just updated to a new, better orthography (the way words are spelled and sounds expressed). So letters in the old orthography have totally different pronunciations than in the new.

And this is all just pronunciation. But with a little practice, you can get the hang of that.

Then you have to start learning words.

Spanish is a Romance language. It's based in Latin, so there are many words in Spanish that are very similar to our familiar English words. This does not mean, as my dad would like to think, that you can take just about any English word, stick an "o" on the end, and...voila! Spanish! But there are a good deal of cognates, words that are similar in both English and Spanish.

There are no cognates in Q'eqchi. Q'eqchi is a Mayan dialect, totally unrelated to anything we're familiar with, and there are no words borrowed from English (though some are borrowed from Spanish).

And THEN, when you've got the pronunciation and you've memorized the words, the grammar is CRAZY. Things don't get conjugated the way we're used to. All nouns are possessive, and who or what they're possessed by changes their spelling. And Q'eqchi has particles of speech that don't even exist in English.

But wait! There's more! Once you've got all THAT figured out, you learn that Q'eqchi is poetic and figurative. Which is awesome and beautiful. It seems to come from the soul rather than the brain. A common English greeting would be, "how are you?" But in Q'eqchi you ask, "ma sa laa ch'ool?" meaning, "Is your heart happy?" And as beautiful as that all is, some Q'eqchi phrases are like riddles, puzzles you have to figure out to understand what is actually being said, even if you understand all the words in the sentence.

And that is why Q'eqchi is hard. 

PS: If you're curious to see how Q'eqchi sounds, lds.org has a selection of talks from General Conference available online that you can listen to, such as this one. You'll hear first the original English, which will be overlayed by a translation in Spanish, which then gets translated into Q'eqchi beginning about 6 seconds in. It's President Uchtdorf's wonderful "Forget Me Not" talk from the Relief Society Conference in November of last year.