flors y visitas de casa

Early Thursday morning, around 6:30 we were woken up to a breakfast of cornflakes cereal. The group had taken a turn for the worse since many of us started to get a scratchy throat. But overall our group was performing, and had gotten over the worst of the storming. We loaded into the big white vans and set off for La Limonada.

We arrived at the third school, and immediately the kids were ecstatic to meet us. The lessons went much better then the lessons on Monday since we had planned out exactly what we were going to teach the night before. Ian Dennison and I (Sarah Donovan) got up before the class and started quizzing kids on parts of the flower. The kids were quick to know which part was which, but were much slower to catch onto all of our names. We then hid parts of the flower around the other classroom and challenged the kids to find all the missing parts. They went crazy with energy and excitement to find all the missing pieces; so energetic that Lisa had to say “despacito” which means slow in Spanish.

After the class had finished the group had a nice lunch break and we enjoyed our peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches on the enclosed roof. It was fascinating to look over La Limonada from the roof and see the new school sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of the slum. Filled to the brim with lunch we then set out for our house visits. The first house we visited the women had moved to La Limonada about three months ago from Nicaragua. She had left her four sons in Nicaragua with their grandfather so she could come to Guatemala in hopes of finding a job to sustain her family. She has still found no job, but she knows a man that can maybe get her a job selling hotdogs. It is very eye opening to see what people go through just to support their families. The second house visit was one where the family’s second floor had been burned straight off from the lighting the previous day. There was just open sky, nothing remaining. The girl had told us that she was in Cosmetology School, and that all her makeup is gone and she cannot attend school for a while. We gave our prayers to the family in hopes that they would recover from this tragedy and have money to repair the damage on their house.

The walk back to the school was heavy; really understanding how people had been affected by everyday occurrences was scary. The afternoon classes were great, and made some amazing connections with the kids. Then at 4:30 p.m. we took the vans back to the Safe house.