The rain in spain may flow mainly in the plains, but in Guate, the rain is just EVERYWHERE

Buenos dias!

Life in Guatemala is continuing onward. This week was productive I'd say. I am still trying to get the hang of things and figure out what my nitch here will be. But I think I am getting a pretty good idea. I don't have much time, so I'll just give a quite day by day run through.

Monday: I worked in the morning with Habitat on the same house (its slowly but surely coming along), and in the afternoon I went with a Japanese lady named Kumi to help a family plant a garden so that they could have an extra source of income and nutrition.

Tuesday: We traveled about an hour away to a small highland village to check out an organization to see if we'd like to work with them. The organization is called SHARE (based out of the US), and they work with nutrition, medical clinics, education, and distribution of food. We sat in on a nutrition lesson about child health being taught to some native women. You wouldn't believe the problem they have. The women start feeding their babies real food when they are about 3 months old, and start giving them bottles of coke and coffee instead of breast milk. So this program teaches what and when to feed your babies to try to change the mindset.

Wednesday: I worked again with Habitat (we got rained out about two hours into it), and then I left with Kumi again to distribute vegetable starts to a farm literally in the middle of nowhere. We drove about a half an hour out to the edge of a mountain, and then hiked an hour in on this tiny trail uphill the entire way to a tiny farm, carrying bags of supplies. Mind you that this was all in the POURING rain. We then spend the next couple of hours planting in the POURING rain, and then walked back in the POURING rain. It was great!! I honestly loved every second of it. The location we were at was probably the most beatiful place I have ever seen, and the people were so wonderful. They tried to teach us their native Mayan language, and we tried to teach them English. It was a blast.

Thursday: I spent all day in the local orphanage (GCP- Guatemala Children's Project) teaching theater for therapuetic treatment. I LOVED it there. The kids are so willing to love, and don't care in the least I don't speak their language. They have been through horrible things, and thrist for a strong foundation of structure and love. The amazing thing about this orphanage is it is LDS run, so the kids all learn the gospel while they are their. It gives new hope and faith, and truly changes lives. The goal of the orphanage is to reunite the children with family (usually aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc), and they have a HUGE success rate. They work to stablize the families, and usually the gospel is brought it. This orphanage does SO much good! Now for the bad news. Their sponsers have decided to stop funding at the end of this month. This means that unless they find someone else to give funding, the orphanage will be shut down. It absolutely breaks my heart! I don't even want to think of what this will do to the kids.

Anyway, that is it for this week! I must head. Thanks again for the support!