MARCH 8th:

Today is our first day of volunteer work. We left at Antigua at 8:00 AM and drove in two vans (and our eight suitcases) to San Miguel Duenas. It was about a fifteen minute drive. Even though it was so close, Antigua is very different from San Miguel. It is not cobble stone and it is very, very poor. Most of the buildings are stucco with barbed wire fences covering them. Most houses are built out of bamboo.

San Miguel!

Teresa (the founder of Open Windows Foundation) gave us a tour of the village. First we went to the Fire Hall. It was tiny! We all slid down the fireman's pole though. Riche was so scared! But we finally convinced her to come down. Shane, Riley and Miles climbed back up to pole. Show offs. It's funny because on some houses you will see North American references like a poster of High School Musical or Shrek. We went do the City Hall next. The government is really corrupt. Teresa says that they encourage all children to go to school, but they turn a blind eye when they need money for school supplies. This prevents them from being able to have enough for everybody. Small children go to school in the morning while their parents and older siblings work. Then they come to the library (which is the Open Windows building) or take a siesta while the teenagers go to school. Teresa told us about her niece's husband that was murdered YESTERDAY. He had debt that he couldn't pay so he was shot. It was disturbing. They are having the funeral tomorrow.

OG! Top: Mary, Teresa, Riley, Shane, Miles,

Zander and Mrs. Simpson.

Bottom: Torry, Lyndsey, Ali, Sara and Riche.

We stopped at a "house" that four families lived in. It was so dirty. The father was making bread that he could sell. All of the families sleep in one room with two mattresses. They have a lime and an apple tree. They wash all their clothes by hand and hang them to dry. They had rabbits, a dog and chickens. Their sinks were filthy and they didn't have any electricity. They had a washermachine and mircrowave that didn't work, but they had them for show. The oldest son had to work night and day to pay for his little sister's education. It made me cry.. That was definitely the moment that everybody has been talking about -- that minute that changes your life, that minute that makes you feel so bad and feel so grateful for what you have. (I'll post pictures soon..) It was unbelievable. Poverty now has a face and a name and it makes it that much more real. Next we went to a private school where all of the students were considered "upper class". It was recess time and it was pandemonium! All of the kids would ambush you for pictures! They all wore red school uniforms and ate lots of junk food. They would laugh at how tall Shane was! They were all so friendly. They would ask me questions in Spanish and I would have NO idea what they meant. After this, we went back to the Open Windows building and starting fixing up desks. We have to take them all apart, put them back together with new wood and then later we will paint them. We ate lunch here and now it's our break before we will get back to work. We met Ed a nineteen year old from Alabama. He is spending his gap year staying in San Miguel and working here at Open Windows. We also met Laura who is in the Peace Corps she works here with the children too. Her Spanish is unreal.

Shane and Miles at Open Windows.

The Desks: Before

We worked on desks more today and prepped them to replace the old wood for new wood and then paint them. 

Riche and I working!

 

Our first completed desk!

At 4 PM the kids could play because school and homework time was over. We read them stories (in Spanish) and asked them basic questions like how old are you, how many brothers and sisters do you have? etc etc. Some of the eleven and twelve year olds could not read.. :( We coloured with them. Ah, they were so cute. I met three kids I liked in particular -- Delmay, Franklin and Daniel. Daniel was so good at art! The girls really liked my nose ring, but did not like my rook piercing at all! They openly laugh at our bad pronunciation too. Some of us played soccer in the Open Windows Foundation courtyard and I played games with the girls. I had to do the KitKat bar hand shake/game with so many girls! We played games that were kind of like Ring Around the Rosie and other elementary school games, but in Spanish. It was so, so much fun. At 5 PM, all the kids go home for dinner.

We walked down to another house where two girls and their mother and their father lived. Their dad was an alcoholic and didn't support them. The mother's father died suddenly and he had not written a will yet. So the government took hold of the property. The family can still live there, but the house needs to be able to be taken down if or when the government says so. This means it is made out of bamboo with a tarp as a roof. It gets really windy and rains, and there "backyard" (a dirt path with chickens and laundry hanging up to dry) will get wiped out. I think the saddest part that got to me was that the older daughter is handicapped. They don't even know what mental illness she has and her family cannot afford a wheelchair so she sits in the room that is their house in the dark everyday. I think that was hard for me because last year I TA-ed in the Resource Room at Sa-Hali. Here, the government does not provide funding for her to go to school in a special classroom with an aid. When OG gets home we are going to start a fundraiser to build her a house and provide her with a wheelchair. We also went out for dinner in San Miguel's ONLY restaurant. It was Mexican/Guatemalan food. After that we went back to Open Windows and partipated in a youth group that happens every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It was International Women's Day so we learnt about famous women around the world (Hillary Clinton, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller etc..) We played some "ice breaker" games as well. We left at 9 PM and we went on the roof. It was clouded over tonight. We haven't been able to see the moon yet.