care for a drink (or perhaps I'm manufacturing a candle)

I took a domestic flight today. I have the worst luck when it comes to seating on planes. On the last flight I took, the creepy man across the aisle (sitting next to his wife) stared at me for a full hour and fifteen minutes or so from take off to landing. On the flight before that, I sat next to humming woman, who hummed at such a fast clip I was a wee bit stressed out.

On my flight today, I set next to Guatemalan travellers. They seemed like nice people, that is until someone came to serve drinks. Strangely, no flight attendant on this flight spoke Spanish (was I in a parallel universe?) and my new Guatemalan friends apparently spoke not a word of English. When the attendant made a gesture of pouring a can of Coke into a glass, the couple looked at her as if she were a Martian. I translated "she's asking if you'd like a drink" into Spanish. Then I got to experience the joy of communicating the intricacies of their drink needs, from ice preferences to types of juice. Once the drinks were served, I also got to translate "thank you," because these Guatemalans were travelling in an English-speaking country and apparently hadn't yet figured out how to say that either.

OK, so if these Guatemalan people are travelling outside of their home country, methinks they're not exactly poor. Shouldn't relatively wealthy people in that part of the world have some grasp of the English language, however tenuous?

But even if they truly have no grasp (as seemed to be the case), how hard is it really to understand the gesture of a can of Coke being poured into a glass? I've travelled through some pretty far-off places where none of the languages through which I can stumble are spoken, and somehow I've always managed to make basic actions understood - and understand the basic actions of others in return. Context always helps, and methinks it's quite normal for a flight attendant to offer one a drink.

Did they think maybe that she was trying to sell them a deserted island, or teach them how to make a nuclear bomb? Guatemala has now dropped a country or two on my "must visit" list -- a good thing for my alarmist parents' ability to sleep, since it consistently ranks among the top 5 countries in the world for homicides.