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It’s always tricky being a guest in someone else’s house. A delicate balance between obligation and relaxation. It’s no different, we discover, when you pay for bed and board as part of a homestay/language school experience in Guatemala. It still feels wrong. We still feel like big white bwanas. Probably because we are big - about twice the size of our diminutive hosts, a million times wealthier and white.

Logic tells us we’re being silly. Homestays are an integral part of the economy in San Pedro. They’re pleased to have us. But being a New Zealander says different. Having people wait on us isn’t right. We should be polite. We should help.

Actually I’m prepared to sit on these feelings no matter how hard but my friend is not. It’s possible he’s nicer than me or, when I’m feeling less kindly, I think it’s also possible he’s as desperate as a starving puppy to be liked.

So when he offers to do the dishes I’m not best pleased because that means I’m going to have to pitch in too unless I want to look like a total plonker. Plus they already like him more than me. Honest. They do. He laughs and hugs them all the time, does animal and musical instrument impressions which causes them to laugh and watches hours of football on telly with their son. While I go out drinking. Well, who would you prefer?

Doing the dishes takes him the best part of an hour and when I next offer to help (smiling outside, something else inside), I find out why. No hot water, no taps actually, well no sink really. Just a big raised tiled area with a pool of water on one side which is bucket-filled, a knot of steel wool, a bottle of anti-bacterial liquid, some stuff like green Chemico and a large plastic bowl. You scrape, rinse, rub with green stuff, soak in tubs of anti-bacterial infused water and then dry. Can you imagine?

The other thing that’s hard to do in a homestay is to tell your hosts what you want in the food department. This may be common courtesy but more likely it’s because my list would be longer than a J.K. Rowling book. It would start with no hot milk on my cornies, no more weak coffee (in a country which grows brilliant coffee they all drink watery dregs), no more corn tortillas which remind me of soft rubber cowpats, no more black refried beans which remind me of maconium (ask a mother) and no more chicken because it’s the only meat you ever get.

After which I would starve to death since that’s all everyone eats.

Oh yes, and no more cold dinners. I’d heard Guatemalan food wasn’t great but never thought my first meal would be cold fried eggs and chips. It is not, I discover as time goes on, an unlucky occurrence because we happen to arrive at an inconvenient hour. It is frequent and regrettable but no one, except us, seems to mind. And of course we are too polite to mention it. I dream of microwave ovens.

Oddly enough Rosa, my host mother, adores cooking and earns extra money baking towering tiered cake extravaganzas for special occasions in an industrial-sized kitchen with two electric ovens and an indoor wood fire. She could use some better implements (all hers are wobbly and blunt) and she’d kill for a cookbook. She’s soon begging me for New Zealand recipes and because this request seems easier than doing the dishes I promise to look up the Cuisine website and translate the recipes in Spanish. My Spanish can’t be that good though because Rosa seems to think I’ve offered to cook them as well while she looks and learns.

Which is how I end up spending four long days in a window-less kitchen wearing the ubiquitous Guatemalan pinny called a “delantal.” And I hate cooking. I even go to the market in my “delantal” to buy the ingredients. My friend, still doing a mere hour of dishes, almost wets himself laughing.

Still if I say so myself the borscht is a hit and the family hugely appreciative. Less so the pumpkin soup because a Guatemalan pumpkin is the same as ours on the outside but pale and watery on the inside. Even less successful is the French toast but I blame the fluffy bread which fell apart when soaked in egg and milk. Worst of all – well, a colossal failure of epic proportions actually, is the pavlova. I don’t want to make it. I really don’t. I say it’s hard. I say it won’t work. I say Cuisine doesn’t have the recipe on their website (they do now apparently) but Rosa is adamant. She wants pav.

Things go swimmingly right up until we have to put the perfectly beaten meringue mix on a baking tray. What is a baking tray asks Rosa. We improvise in true Kiwi number 8 wire fashion and use a large greased cake tin. The pav rises and rises and then sags slightly. But it still looks good. Even when we get it out of the oven it looks good. It isn’t until it cools that we discover it is all lid and no substance. We lift the thin sugary tablet out of the tin. The pav looks like an enormous biscuit.

Despite my culinary mishaps, the family are sad to see us go but there are new guests to distract them. A young American couple who overlap with us for one night. They’re charming. Friendly but confident. Straight-away they ask for hotter, stronger coffee and get it. They ask for hot food and get it. They tell the family they don’t like hot milk on their cornies and get that too. Lucky for the family and themselves no doubt, they actually like tortillas and refried beans.

And watching them issue polite but firm requests, I just know they’re never going to help with the dishes.

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