I love this place!

Wow, what a week we have had so far. Yesterday we traveled out to a city called Comalapa and were met there by martin, the town council man of Xetonox. It is a little pueblito of 87 houses (570 people). They have been working together to try and get running water up to the houses. They have already made an opening from the mouth of the river and are waiting for a pump donated from the Salvation Army to arrive. They plan put in 1000 meters of PVC pipe to get the water up the hill. They also already made the cement tank. But the problem is that they ran out of funding. We are hopefully going to be able to ´pay for the piping into the houses, but we don’t have the funding to get the 1000 meters of 3 inch piping (so if any of you have rich friends who want to supply water to a village, please let me know ). But we went out yesterday and helped dig the ditches. It was pretty tough work because a lot of the dirt was clay. We had pick axes and shovels, but it took forever. We all felt like we were on parade though because most of the members of the village, especially the children, had never seen North Americans before. The speak Kachequel, but also know Spanish. It’s a little tough for the group to communicate because me and 2 others are the only fluent speakers and then there are 2 other semi-fluent speakers. But we get by. One of the little girls yesterday gave me a little heart she had made in school for mother’s day. It was really sweet. Today we went to Antigua and went to the orphanage. We will be working there a couple times a week. It was a neat experience, but also really sad. It is an orphanage for anyone; that means baby to really old people. Most of them have some type of disability, whether physical, mental, or both. It should be really neat to learn from them and help out the staff there. On a lighter note, we got a puppy. He’s really cute. He’s a black lab-something else-mix, but supper cute and adorable. It is great to be here. It reminds me so much of Argentina. I can’t believe how similar it is. Only there are fewer bugs here and they are smaller. But there aren’t rich neighborhoods here like there were there. But one thing the same is that you can’t flush the toilet paper here either......and I had finally broken that habit too ! No, but it’s great. It is an amazing experience. I love you all. Take care.
Kirsti