Thursday, July 24 - Our work begins...

Up at 7 am with the sounds of Burnet Park Zoo...some yelping noise in the backyard (found out it was a puppy!), the roosters crowing, and the pigs eating next door...speaking of which, they joined us in the house before breakfast - just walked right in the back door! Chica opened the front door, and shooed them back next door, where they belonged.

Breakfast was coffee (half a cup, black, but sweet); fried plantains, cheese and rolls. Chica ate with us - you can see in this picture, that the windows just have louvers on them - no screens, which explains the need for the mosquito netting at night. She always set a beautiful table for us, with a nice tablecloth; you can see I always had my Spanish/English dictionary close by! After breakfast, we headed to church at 7:30 AM.

From there, we walked to the school to get our instruction on what our projects would be.

Some people painted in the school...

Penny and I cleaned some of the school toys, with some helpers...

Frank, Charlie and Pat put together the bookshelves that the parish had sent down, and set up the two basketball hoops, one of which was put to immediate use!



Lunch...break at noon; Chica came to get us. She served us rice, beans and sweet sliced plantains. Back to school at 1:30 to finish up the projects.

	The students of the school were watching, and wanted the pictures off the box (behind these girls)...
so Frank used his knife to cut the pictures out for them.

We finished our projects around 4 pm, and went by school van to a nearby church (don't remember the name, perhaps one of the other people can put it in the comment for this post) for mass. Marissa and Mary played their flutes; we were welcomed with hugs. There was a huge rainstorm during mass, didn't seem to phase anyone but us visitors...
Were dropped back in the village park; Katie brought out her bubbles, which the kids enjoyed...
Pat took some pictures, which the kids were anxious to see...
Chica came to bring us back about 7:30 pm, which was good, as we had no idea how to get home from the park! Dinner was a chocolate drink (she showed us the cacao tree at lunch, on the way back to school), some sort of fried orange sausage, and mashed plantains. We went to bed shortly thereafter; we really can't communicate with Chica except for a few hand signals. There was no power again.