Continuing journey

Well my idea here was to show you the colorful desks in the classroom (of 300 in 10 classrooms) that we painted this winter, and the adorable bookshelves we hired a local carpenter to construct, and then filled with books and books.

and of course it would be wonderful to introduce you to this carpenter - as round as he is tall, with a sort of pointed head, and the most welcoming smile you can imagine.

But I can't get Kodak Easy Share to share these photographs easily, here. So instead we have two views from my favorite restaurant on the lake - La Puerta - run by two great friends, Blake and Santos (cook extraordinare.) The one on the left looks across the lake at Panajachel. The one on the right looks past the foot of Volcan San Pedro, toward Toliman. The barco in the front is wooden; what the local fishermen take out onto the lake every morning.

Beautiful - this lake is BEAUTIFUL, moody, ever-changing - but they aren't my beautiful yellow red and blue desks for the little kids, to cheer up their rather dingy classrooms.

Que lastima.

I would also love to share the photos from my latest trip to new parts of Guate (for me) - to Nebaj and some small villages above there, where it was very cold, but where we walked for hours in the countryside past tumbling streams, children herding goats and sheep, men and children on horseback on this dirt road, to stay in a small hostel overnight, eat with a neighboring family, and return to Nebaj the next day. Then to plummet down the side of the mountain (a worse fear for me than even the boats on the lake on a windy day) to go to Tactic, where we rode for 3 hours to visit the farm of a friend from San Marcos, where he is going to be reforesting with teak and rubber.

But until I can get Kodak to behave itself. these photos will have to do.

More adventures

Most of my adventures are pretty sedate, at this point. With the Pedagogia Basica folks (see letsbeready.org) I worked in Antigua for a year-and-a-half; now I've been working with the originator of PB here at the lake for about 8 months.

The "adventure" part of this is what began in Antigua: just allowing myself to be let where Life (or God, to use the name I give it) wants me to go. Lo and behold, I'm in San Pedro, not Antigua; made contact with the wonderful director of the San Pablo school, and now am sponsoring a 4th grade classroom and have been providing materials for all of the preschool and first grade classrooms, and their beleagured teachers, who previously had been providing most school materials out of their small salaries. This with a lot of help from friends and family back in the U.S.

Some photos of the work we've done (hiring local painters to paint 300 desks to make the classrooms a little more cheerful, hiring a local carpenter to make bookracks and filling them with books, buying locally-made petates for the preschool class to sit on for circle time, buying lots and lots of scissors, crayons, paper, construction paper, paints, etc.) My favorite is the easel in the preschool classroom: the first time these children have ever painted!