casi terminado

Almost finished...

Caroline and I are currently sitting in McDonald's using the McInternet...which is free! I would guess it sits about 250 people and has an outdoor McPatio and a large McGarden. McDonalds in McGuatemala (okay this one was a joke) is super popular and doesn't quite have the stigma that it has in the US.

We have 4 more days of Spanish lessons and then it's back to VA for 2 weeks. It's funny because our Spanish has improved dramatically but I think our English has gotten worse. As we learn Spanish, and are frequently translating, our English has to become as basic as our Spanish. It's funny to look back on my journal entries over the past few weeks because I start to see words like "en" and "yo" showing up. Before long I'm going to start calling myself Brian (for some reason it's impossible for Guatemalans to say Ryan, so I just go by Brian here).

We had the chance last week to visit several of the ministry sites SI has here in Guatemala. One site is located in a small pueblo called El Gorreon. This started as a camp for people who lost their home in a flood in the late 90s. It started with 70 families and the number has almost doubled. SI has several projects in the area and one that was particularly interesting to me. None of the homes have fresh running water, so, an SI site was set up to provide Slow-Sand filtration systems in each home. I took Water Purification as my GSCI 104 course at JMU and it's so fascinating to me how it works. You can pour contaminated water into a barrel filled with sand, and the water that comes out the bottom is pure enough for them to drink. They currently have these systems in 8 homes and their vision is to have one in every home in the pueblo. I attached some pictures from our trip there.

Praise God with us:

• Our Spanish has dramatically improved
• We've met some great people down here and have enjoyed great fellowship with other students at our school
• SI-Guatemala is about to receive 6 new full-time missionaries and they just started the base in their 4th country (Fiji) so it's a really exciting time of growth for the organization.
  

This boy lives in El Gorreon. He really wanted a picture with Caroline for some reason, and was also excited to show her his Pog collection.


This is the main drag of El Gorreon. They're working on digging out places for drainages pipes to go, currently there are none.


This is not a trash can. It's the water filtration system I spoke of earlier. Inside the blue container are 3 types of sand and a tube at the bottom is how they get their water. The cost for one of these is around $80 per home and SI is currently working on getting the funding to by one for every home.


This is a Chicken Coup built by SI summer Interns. The agrobusiness site provides a start-up chicken raising business for women in a small city called Magdalena.