(As always... please excuse grammatical errors... I just can{t seem to get this 3rd world technology to work for me). I am halfway through this experience as of today. What an experience it has been! We are working 6 days a week right now and we are one tired group of design/builders. Luckily we have had a chance to play a little as well. We had yesterday off to enjoy Antiguq and the morning included actual real eggs, real guatemalan coffee and real bread. By the word ...real, I mean things that actually were eggs, coffee and bread... not a watered down, dried out versions of all typical of Guate. It was a beatiful day in Antigua... we were lucky as it has been really cold at times.
Anyway... hopefully a few of these pictures actually upload. And I will describe briefly and you will just have to guess which ones are which.
First... we experienced a ridiculous down-pour a few weeks ago which actually completely flooded the street in front of our house. Somehow this tiny tuk tuk (the best form of a taxi in the world) made it up the street. The floods have subsided and we have had two weeks of sunshine, but it can be really cold and windy some days whereas we wear every piece of clothing we thought we would not need in Central America.
The next pictures includes me poking a stick into (mysteriously hard) flowing lava up at Vulcan Pacaya. The lava was flowing around us as we ate lunch and roasted marshmellows on the lava. No joke. Very cool experience. We watched Vulcan Fuego puff smoke and steam yesterday while the sun set. It is odd to be surrounded by active volcanoes on a daily basis and that it is completely normal.
There is a picture of our final design and the status of the play structure as of Thursday. It actually already looks quite a bit different as of today after by today (it is Monday). I spent Saturday designing and building an 8 foot monkey that will be hanging from one of the decks and will act as a crawl structure for the kids. Four more weeks of construction! I only have one minor injury at this point (other than bruises) which included slicing my finger open while reaching for a nail with my stupid knife blade not complete closed.
My favorite day in Guate was Nov. 1st for All Saints Day for the Kite Festival. My roommate Hilary and I were the only two females that helped pull a kite that day. It was a blast. It is oddly exhilerating to hurdle graves while pulling giant paper kites. I could write an entire book on this day, but will save you the reading. All I can say, I will never look at Nov. 1st or cemetaries the same way... The spinning wheel is a ferris wheel that was spinning out of control just outside of the cemetary.
We also went white water river rafting (my first time ever and all the directions were in spoken in Spanish - a tad scary at first, but in the end was so cool)... it was a fun experience. There is nothing like doing unsafe sporting events in a developing country! At least we had helemts and life vests from the 1980s.
The last big event was the election that took place last weekend. The green guy won. The entire election was described by the orange guy and the green guy (even the Guatemalans referred to the two canidates as orange and green!) The election seemed peaceful (at least thus far) and we have not endured any protests, violence or visible rejection of the Colom.... yet. We will see... The UN was here to ensure that the election was... fair. How they managed to determine that the election was without corruption is beyond me in a country of chaos.
I think that is it for now. All the best. KP
