Day 2

Around Back2Back, Saturdays are known as the longest and toughest day of the week.  Today was a little bit of an exception, or so I’ve heard from the rest of the staff and interns.  We began by cleaning the campus.  For me this included a multitude of things including scrubbing toilets, rinsing sinks, cleaning shower floors, sorting donated items, and lugging around huge tubs filled with recently donated tennis shoes.  We have teams from 4 different churches here this week, all of whom arrived at 1pm.  After the group got settled in and we toted all of their luggage into the main building, Lugar de Misericordia (LDM or Place of Mercy), two of the children’s homes arrived on campus.  El Retiro Juvenil (ERJ) and Betesda were here to swim and have a cookout with the teams and staff.  The interns spent most of the time lifeguarding, mixing Tang into 5 gallon coolers, setting up chairs, or carrying food down to the big palapa.  A palapa (puh-lop-uh) is basically a giant canopy that is made from logs and the roof is made of dried palm leaves.  We have two of them, the big palapa and the little palapa.  

I’m absolutely loving the people that I have surrounding me.  We’ve only been here 2 days, but it feels like it’s been 2 months.  The interns all hung out inside the Guckenberger’s house tonight and played a few different games and laughed for about 2 straight hours.  I am so thrilled to be surrounded by people who are awesome and that have something in common with me.  There have been many long conversations about topics ranging from if it’s a good or bad idea to play soccer in the pouring rain on concrete all the way to ancestral influence that are still very much present in our lives.

Got a few pics of the mountains today and will try to upload a few.  Tomorrow I am off to LTP, a new children’s home that is in need of a bit more repair work before it is move in ready.