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| Well, our digital camera was stolen, but we managed to take a few
Polaroids of students at the four separate work sites in north-west Guatemala and then had
them scanned onto a disk and beamed up onto this Web site. (If necessity is the
mother of invention, then she must spend a fair bit of her time in Central America.)
Most of the Polaroids were given out to families and children as gifts... many of
whom have never seen a picture of themselves. But then the photographer would pretty
much have to run for his life as crowds of children and mothers with even more
children would appear seemingly from cracks in the walls wanting additional
pictures. I won't include any photographs of our close living situation... lets just say it is sparse and students do not need to wander far to find each other. However, students take this in stride and thoroughly enjoy their experience. Habitat for Humanity has many active chapters in Guatemala, and these particular sites are hosting us as their very first visiting team. They have been waiting a long time for this kind of participation and therefore are treating student teams like gold --- feeding them well, washing their clothes and even renting a TV and VCR one evening because they assumed that being North American we would be missing it. On the weekend they piled us into a large vehicle and took us down to a swimming pool near the Pacific coast. |
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| Jenny, shown here up to her elbows in concrete, displays a birthday smile. |
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| Houses in Guatemala are built with cement block, re-enforcing
steel and concrete - mixed by hand on the ground. (Ask a student and
risk being cornered as they go into detail on the process.) And always there were children.
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