Times running out

The last week, or week and a half I guess, since the medical mission has been crazy busy and awesome. Theo and I have been working everyday to finish the playground. We also had a short day detour when we delivered the water filters we bought (thanks to very generous donations from back home) to Barrial.

I guess I'll start with the water filter day last Tuesday. We had bought 22 water filters for the aldea Barrial which is located about 30 minutes from Esquipulas high on a mountain. The water filters are simply 2 stacked 5 gallon buckets with two candle filters in the top bucket. Actually a really cool design because of how simple it is. We went up with Trifinio (a group we connected with) who had informed the village and set up a meeting at 2:30pm to distribute and assemble the water filters. When driving their, I was thinking to myself that this should be one of the more important events of my time down here, making a real difference and helping to improve the health of a community by providing access to clean drinking water, but it wasn't exactly so. It was a very nice event and the people were very grateful, but it wasn't what I expected. We knew it was an important job we were doing but we didn't have much connection to the community, having only visited once before to meet with the 3 community leaders. It turned out feeling like we were the rich white people giving out gifts to the poor Guatemalans, and that's not what we wanted. It would have been much more meaningful (for both parties) if we could have spent more time with them and gotten to know them a little. The lack of interaction made it seem very impersonal. It was neat however, knowing that this project was our idea, we sought out help and information, raised funds, and saw it through to completion and I still feel good about what we did but the way in which we did it could have been better.

Now the playground, that is just plain fun. As I said before, it has been great fun having something to do everyday. And not just the building part, but all involved in it. Becuase of the playground we have been walking around the city everyday to one of two hardware stores to pick up supplies (mostly screws and washers). In doing this, we have become friends with all of the hardware store employees and it is always fun going back in to pick up the next bit of supplies. One store in particular is always fun to go back to. There are about 5 young (in their mid 20's) female employees that work there and they love us. As soon as we walk in they all come over to say hi, smile, and ask how the project is going. They comment on our eyes, tell us to be careful in the sun, and ask us to come back soon. Needless to say we are helped right away, and usually by at least 3 of them. We are their favorite customers. In addition to getting to know some more people, walking around everyday has been fun just to get out into the city. I think, even though we've been here for 8 months, people are starting to recognize us. It is a good feeling when you can walk around town and wave to several people on the street. It makes you feel like you are at home, and not a tourist. Futher, we have gotten to know Andres (the Italian...aka mafioso...who is the director of the City of Joy) much better in the last couple of months and he is nothing short of crazy. It is always and interesting conversation with him. One day he came down to the playground to see how things were going and asked about the monkey bars we were building. He asked us if they were to kill kids...and how many kids could they kill. Oh, mucho, we said. So, from then on, the standing joke is that we are building the playground to kill kids, each structure more dangerous than the last. We just want to help him out by making more room for new kids to come to the City of Joy.

Within the last week, we have finished many structures, each with has the potential to kill many kids. First, we finished our tire pyramid which is a three sided pyramid with 6 tires on each side. Next we finished the swings (which took a little investigation on how we were going to attach them. Which is a great story in itself), including a horizontal tire swing (which will probably kill someone 50% of the time). Lastly, we made a tire tower, which consists of 8 tires attached to all 4 sides of an old phone pole.

And finally, last Friday, we finished everything in our "original" plans!!! We put in our sign and our park bench (also made our of tires and recycled wood). Then Andres came down to see it and he was super pleased. He was so happy with the bench that he immediately begged is to put in another one. Please please, one more, right her, please please, you're not done yet... just one more. It was such an awesome feeling. He wasn't just happy, and approved of the park we built, but he was so excited that he was begging for more. His excitement made us both feel incredible. SO, we are not done yet, we are going to try and round up 12 more tires (including two big bus tires for the bench) to build another bench, as well as another tire tower to connect to the existing one. We have plenty of time to do this (a week), however, we are going to have a volunteer painting day on wednesday morning so it'd be nice to have this all done by then....hah...unlikely, but we'll sure try.

So I have to apologize for not having any pictures of this right now. I accidently sent my camera charger home with my brother a month ago and my camera battery just ran out a week ago. Don't worry though, Theo did take some pictures, but it may take a few days to get them off of his camera. So I'll add pictures to this post in a few days.