Guatemala Summary

the team (left to right, you figure it out): me, John, Jillaine, Edwina, Kim, Jim, Deb, Megan, Lupe, Heather, CJ, and Marvin (our cool driver for the week)

phew! so it's been an extremely busy 2 weeks since I've been back home. with our long Texas trip and then my trip to Guatemala 2 weeks later, I've been swamped at work and home. I promise I'll put away the laundry tomorrow Dana! :-)

First off, I want to thank Dana for the fantastic posts! it was great to see all the funny videos when i got home (Aria was asleep).

so let's see. my last post (when i was actually there) was from the city of Panajachel. if i had brought my blackberry charger, i might have been able to keep sending posts. I tried to send a post that Monday, but that's when my blackberry decided it didn't have enough juice to email 2-3 pictures and a nice chunk of text. that post in its entirety is here now:

7/14/2008
"Woke up early this morning and had a delicious breakfast, then drove from the catholic retreat in Xela to the village of Xiabaj (She-ah-BA) to meet the children at their school as well as the teachers and principal. The Highland support project has several people teaching the women in the village how to create jewelry, so they can have another form of income.

"The children at the elementary school had presentations for us from each grade. The kindergartners sang songs and played little instruments, other grades showed how they weave detailed patterns from memory, others danced, and still others made masa (a type of dough from corn) and cooked tortillas over an open fire inside a classroom!

"Now we are heading to meet the families with whom we will work with to build the stoves in their houses. Another 2 hour bumpy ride, yay!

"Interesting to note: I didn't realize, but Xela is 8k feet above sea level, and Xiabaj is 10k! At that altitude, shortness of breath is easily attained :-)

after meeting the families, we went back to the retreat where we had a nice dinner and relaxed, preparing for the next 3 days of work. the team started our devotional routine where we would talk about what affected us the most that day, and then we would have our "medicine" — tequila shots FTW!! seriously, we were told tequila kills the bacteria that can cause "problems," and no one had "problems" all week.

I've stolen some pictures from my new friends' facebook albums, here they are!

walking back from the school at Xiabaj: at 10k feet, it's cloudy most of the time

Drink your medicine...

The beginnings of our first stove — Jim and I built 1.75 stoves in 3 days...

The family at the second house where we built a stove

the cake — for one of the mason's surprise 69th birthday party. the scar on my face — they told me to come up with a cool story, but the quick and dirty of it is i fell on my face. yeah.