The long and tiring day....

Today was a early start, I myself woke up at 6:30. We started off by going to the school for a early devotional prayer time, just for kids. The way that the kids act, you can see that they have so much love in them to give. As soon as you walk into the school, they have smiles on their faces and they come up to you and give you a hug. After we went to the devotional prayer time, we went to eat breakfast at the guest house, which is also called the yellow house even though it has been painted green on the outside. Breakfast was delicious; it was eggs, pancakes, toast and fresh fruit. After breakfast we drove out to the construction site and watched how they make the floor tiles, which was quite neat. Then we went over the very rickety bridge that we could have fallen though at any time (it only felt that way but Les said that they drive gravel trucks over it) and went to look at the new guest house that they are building in the middle of the hill. We took a quick tour of the rooms of the future guest house and bible seminary dorms. We got to work right away, moving clay and dirt from the middle of the courtyard that will become a small green space with flowers, bushes, and grass. Because we are so close to the sun, it was a lot hotter than it would feel if we were in Vancouver. We took many wheel-barrow loads of clay down part of the hill to a pile of clay that was already there. After a long ordeal with the clay, we went back to the hotel to get cleaned up before lunch. We all decided to take quick showers and part way through, the lights and heat went off in the hotel. We found out later that we blew a fuse from using all the showers at the same time. After we all got cleaned up, we went to the guest house to have lunch. We had delicious rice, stuffed peppers, bread, cucumber and watermelon. My group was on for dishes and we had to do them really fast because we were running late for VBS. When we got back to the school for VBS, we started with Roswitha (aka: Butcherette) doing an intro in Spanish. Then we sang songs in Spanish. The best part about the singing was that the kids sang with such passion and so loud. Then we played many tag games and got very tired. After playing games, we did our skit of creation. It could have gone smoother, but we are not very good at understanding Spanish; our acting was ahead of the speaking by a couple of days. After the skit we did crafts with the kids. We did colouring and painting, but they liked the colouring the best. At the end of VBS, we said goodbye to the kids until tomorrow.

We went on a drive around the block, even though the place we were going for dinner was right beside the hotel. We got to make our own traditional Guatemalan dinner, which was Dobladas (which means “folded once”). We walked to the mill to grind the cooked corn for the tortillas. We made tortillas, filled them with cheese, folded them over once, and then they were fried. They looked like perogies, but were made with corn instead. While Cheni was finishing cooking the food, we listened to Edgar’s (Cheni’s husband) testimony while Jessica (Les and Rita’s daughter) translated for us. I felt very fortunate to live in Canada because in Guatemala you have to go one day at a time and hope for the best. After the testimony, we ate the delicious Dobladas that we made. Then we said goodbye to Cheni and Edgar and drove less than a minute down the road back to the hotel for the night.

It is now 9:30pm and we are getting picked up around 6:30am tomorrow to go have breakfast at the guest house.

              Buenas Noches - Tanya Johnson :)