Community Lovin'

Things have been super busy, but really quite enjoyable the past week. Our month of camp came to an end last Thursday. We met so many wonderful people through that process, particularly through the many volunteers we had from both communities.

As a thank you to them, we had all of our volunteers from both camps over to our house for lunch last Friday. Sarah, our resident chef, cooked a scrumptious lunch of salad, toasted rolls, roasted garlic, and pasta. Everyone stayed and chatted for a few hours, and we had a great time laughing and getting to know each other even better. Here's a picture of all of us after lunch:

Tuesday through Thursday of this week, each of the four of us lived with families in the community. All of us had a great time, and it was cool to see how all of us had a pretty unique experience. Jess and I stayed in Cooperativa, while Ja and Sarah were in Central. Jess and Sarah stayed with large families, while Ja and I stayed with smaller ones. Some of us picked beans while others learned artisan crafts like beading and sewing. I think all of us learned how to "tortillar," or make tortillas.

I can say for certain, though, that all of us fell in love with the families we lived with. Not only did we have the eye-opening experience of living the daily lives of our community members, but we were able to form deep relationships with many different families in the communities. We are all so glad to have had this experience, and I look forward to seeing how it will affect our future programming efforts.

In case all of these beautiful community experiences weren't enough, we have also been invited to Willy's house for dinner tonight. Willy is one of the Primaria Central teachers, and we have been to his house in Sololá for dinner once before. His family is always so much fun to hang out with :)

Suffice it to say, it's been a great past week or so. I have gotten to spend time with so many wonderful people, and I feel blessed that this is my job.

Next week, we have our second MPI retreat to San Marcos La Laguna, which is one of the Lake towns. We will be discussing future programming options, as well as assessing our personal strengths and weaknesses. After that, we'll only have a few more days until we're all headed back to the States for winter holidays!! It's crazy how the time flies!

Until next time,
Nicole

PS- If you would like to read more about my personal experience in my home-stay, check out my personal blog.

Camp is Coming to an End

This is our last week of summer camp, which is exciting and a little sad at the same time. I am going to miss hanging out with the kids, but it is exhausting.

I cannot believe that it is almost December! Our time here has gone by so fast, but we are all really excited to go home and visit our families in a few weeks. Until then, we have some exciting things planned.

This Saturday, Community Enterprise Solutions will be doing a campaign in Cooperativa like what they did in Central a few weeks ago. Hopefully it will be just as successful or even more so! During the first week of December we are going to be doing homestays in Chaquijyá . This is going to be a great way to become more familiar with the culture of the community we work in, and it is also a great way to get to know individual community members better.

During the second week of December we will be going on our second team-building retreat. We will be going to San Marcos, which is right on the lake here about 35 minutes away via boat. After that, we are off to the states for vacation until January!!!

-Sarah

Sunday Snapshot: A Very Manna Thanksgiving!

Guatemala doesn't normally observe Thanksgiving, but we made sure we did!

Of course, we still had to go to work. So we just brought Thanksgiving to camp!

Our Thursdays at camp usually involve 2 special activities. I was left alone for my special activity this week, so I seized the opportunity to do some fun Thanksgiving things.

First, I made a brief presentation of the typical foods we eat (who doesn't love learning about food?).

Then, we made HAND TURKEYS! It's one of my favorite Thanksgiving activities. Even in college, we made hand turkeys in our sorority. I had each kid make their turkey and write something they were thankful for in each of the fingers.

Finally, we made a Thanksgiving Tree! This was perfect because it also tied in our environment theme. I made a very rudimentary tree out of brown construction paper and taped it to the wall. Then I gave each of the kids some construction paper leaves and asked them to write something they were thankful for specifically from the environment. They taped their leaves to the tree.

I think they got a little confused because they taped the leaves on the entire tree trunk, but that's okay. It's still cute :)

Here's a close-up of some of the leaves:

We also observed Thanksgiving at the house that evening. Sarah did a great job cooking and making our table look nice:

At our feast, we had fried chicken (okay, so not turkey), mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, toasted rolls with butter, cranberry sauce, apple cider, and pumpkin pie! It was delicious!

Happy Thanksgiving from MPI-Guatemala!