Hello!

Hey everyone, I´m here! I feel like i´ve been here forever, but it´s only been three days. We´ve done so much and been so busy. This place is awesome. I really love it here, although i do miss certain things about home. Like being able to walk down the street without twenty cars honking at you and having people constantly staring. Or being able to flush toilet paper down the toilet. Or being able to use the sink faucet to brush your teeth. Or not being constantly smelly. It´s all good though. I really like the people that I´m here with. We all seem to get along great.

Thursday we got to explore Chimaltenango. We had a little scavenger hunt through the city for a couple of hours. It´s definitely different than I pictured. The roads here are seriously insane. Pedestrians never have the right of way, so you really have to time when you cross the road and just run for it. It´s a little scary getting into the main streets because we have to cross the Pan American highway which is always pretty busy. It smells like exhaust ALL the time. Or smoke. The city just has a lot more commotion than I expected. We can´t seem to figure out people do all day, becuase it just seems like they are either wandering the streets or selling things. Oh well. They´re extremely nice people, minus the creepers. There´s not too too many of those though.

Yesterday was definitely one of the coolest days. In the morning we woke up to the Satan truck, as usual. Funny side story: there´s a ton of cars here with megaphones on top that will just blast advertisements through the streets as they drive down. One of our favorites is the Satan truck. It kind of sounds like a dying cow. It´s advertising for this place called ¨Zetegas¨or something, but over the megaphone it sounds like ¨Satanas,¨ which is Satan in spanish so we call it the Satan truck. It drives around in the morning and at night all the time when we´re trying to sleep. I think our name is quite fitting. Anyway, after getting woken up we went and got breakfast at the Paneria and got fruit at the market. Then a man named Eladio we plan to work with picked us up in his pickup to take us to a small village close by called Cerro Alto. The ride there was super fun, we all just piled in the back and tried to make ourselves comfortable while driving over gravel roads with the biggest potholes I´ve ever seen. Cerro Alto is beautiful. It´s on this mountian and from his house you could see two of the main volcanoes in Guatemala. Anyway, we talked with him about potential projects we can do with the surrounding villages and they all sound soo cool. He is such an awesome guy. He basically has devoted his life to serving his community and all without a profit. He´s been trying to get a team together to help him with some of his ideas so he´s super happy we´re here. While we were leaving this huge group of little girls that were coming home from school just swarmed us. They were so adorable! I wish I could speak to them better, but the nice thing about kids is that they are just happy if you say hello and smile to them.

After Eladio´s we went and got lunch and then made our way to the Guatemalan Children´s Project, an orphanage HELP has worked with before. It´s run by a man named Guillarmo, who is a 25-year-old return missionary. He is also one of the most awesome people I think I´ve ever met. He used to volunteer a lot at orphanages in Guatemala. One day the one he was working for got shut down by the government because they were doing illegal adoptions, and seven of the children he really loved got sent out to a bunch of different ones all around Guatemala. He wanted to take care of them, so he spent 7 months trying to locate all of them. He couldn´t legally take care of them unless he had his own orphanage, so he started the Guatemalan Children´s Project. He focuses a lot on reuniting families, because most of the children´s families are still alive. Ít´s been running for 3 years, and so far I think he´s had 52 kids go through, 32 of which have been reunited with their families. He´s super awesome, and he´s dating a girl from Calgary! I´m excited to meet her, but she´s out of town this week so it will have to wait.

Anyway, that night Guillarmo took us dancing in Antigua! At first I was nervous about dancing with a bunch of Guatemalans, but then I remembered that I´ve got shakes, ha ha! No, but it was super fun! This guy that owns the internet cafe we´re in, Lencho, almost came with us. He´s so awesome! He went to school in Chicago so he speaks really good english, which is nice. But anyway, dancing was a blast and now I can say I´ve been to a Guatemalan club!

So yeah, that´s pretty much what I´ve been up to. I think the hardest thing for me right now is not being able to speak the language, although I´ve been doing a lot better with understanding people. It´s just frustrating because I want to be able to connect with these people and communicate with them, but because I don´t speak their language I can´t ever really show my personality. I probably know the least spanish of everyone in the group. Everyone´s really great though and they always translate for me and make sure I know what´s going on. I plan on studying spanish at night time, so hopefully I´ll get a lot better! I think I will, because I´ve already gotten better. Anyway, I´m going to head out. I hope everyone´s doing well!