Ya jun and Tahereh are students in the Beginning Senior ESL class The Day When I Discovered a New Culture in My Own Country my own country. One day when I traveled in El Salvador to a specific town, Ataco, I discovered another language in I didn’t know about that other culture. I had never heard anything about people speaking Nahualt. I just knew of a language that was called Cacaguira. In that town all elderly people speak Nahualt. They understand a little bit of Spanish, but their kids don’t speak Nahualt: just Spanish and a little bit of English. People with ancestral roots live in Ataco. That was very interesting for me because I’ve never heard about another culture in my own country: just my common Salvadorean culture. But in this new root, I got to pray with them. The way of the prayer for them was thanks for everything, not material things. They say thanks for the sun, the moon, the earth, and for food, and they pray in the direction of four cardinal directions. The God of theirs is the Sun God. It was very introspective because you connected with yourself and with the Pachamama: the word that they use to refer to Mother Earth. I remember that I questioned: what is your temple? And they answered me, “Our temple is that the sky is our roof, our walls are trees and mountains, and our floor is the Earth”. They live with simple things. For example, they don’t have big houses or cars. They don’t live with anything like that because they say that they preferred to live with “light luggage”. They just want to live in peace with others. They don’t have police or a delinquency because they live in harmony with they themselves. They don’t have restaurants like McDonalds or another fast food. They eat plants and herbs. They have good health. For me, it was ancestral travel, but in the real life they give you a great teaching. I would like to learn their language just so that culture is not left to die. But I think it is more difficult than English or Spanish. So, meanwhile, I’ve just been learning English. Bryan is a student in the Advanced ESL class in the evening
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