Welcome Back!

The Manna Guatemala team is back in business! After three relaxing weeks at home with our families for the holidays, we recently returned to our beautiful home in Sololá. Fortunately, Oliver, our flea-ridden cat had survived the holiday season as well. In fact, Santa dropped off a couple gifts for Oliver at the Roth household, so all is well. School will be starting soon, and we are very excited to begin our transition from in-school English instruction to after-school lessons. One of the highlights of the upcoming months includes the arrival of a new Program Director, Lorena, who we are all very excited to work with. Additionally, in the month of March, we will have four groups of Spring Break volunteers from Vanderbilt (who ya wit?!), Tulane, University of Georgia, and University of Alabama-Birmingham.  We look forward to showing these groups this beautiful country and introducing them to the friendly people. More updates to follow, so stay tuned to the blog! Hope you all had a very happy holiday season and here's to 2012!

Now it's time for the playoffs,

Cameron

Manna Resolutions

Fireworks are a daily treat in Solola.

Happy New Years!  We’re thrilled to be going back to Guatemala soon, and after a great break we wanted to share with you some of the resolutions we’ve made as we tackle the new year.  As always, we invite your feedback, questions, and requests in the comments below.

MPI Guatemala Resolutions:

• Increase our Sustainability: sustainability was a key topic of conversation in group meetings as we wrapped up the year.  We’re increasingly cognoscente of our program’s abilities to equip residents to continue what we start and we want this to be a central part of our program pre-audit.  In English, that means the teachers need to teach alongside us, and the curriculum needs to be one they can repeat.  In other programs, that means a renewed emphasis on partner orgs and community involvement.

• Get a community center: The week of Dec. 5 we had a promising meeting about a new room that could be converted for a meeting space and library.  We have another meeting coming up and hope to have this space ready to build out by the time Spring Break volunteers arrive.

Where our boss Dana is right now.  Jealous.

• Show our volunteers why we love our job: We’ll have three spring break trips and two rounds of summer volunteers.  One of Manna's pillars is volunteer development, and we hope to foster an interest in community service and international development.  We want the volunteers who come to have a fun and moving experience abroad, and that takes preparation on our part.

• See more of this beautiful country: We need to travel more.  Less weekends around the house, less holidays catching up on work.  The work will always be there, but if the next six months fly by anything like the first six, we won't have much time to fit everything in.  If you’re in the area, come along, there’s Semuc Champay, Rio Dulce, Tikal, and much more.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, here's to an even better 2011.  All the best.

        -Hudson and the MPI-G team