Hi everyone,
Hope you are all well and wrapped up warm - we´ve heard about how chilly it has been!
Now that we’re really stuck in to working at El Castillo it has dawned on us how little time we have left here (just over three months) and we really want to be of as much use as possible. The last few weeks have been really busy.
Street Team
There is no day process at the moment since the girls have finished and so we have been working full time with the street team. Part of this has been helping to get some of the girls from the last day process into a school. This was quite a tough process as schools are not obliged to take on students, especially ones like our girls who have not studied before at all and one of which was to enter year 1 at the age of 10. Also to be accepted in a school you have to provide everything you need for school – everything – including toilet paper, cleaning materials and a board marker for the teacher, not to mention the school uniforms. Amazingly Matt’s church in Bristol gave us a generous offering the same week and so we were able to offer help with buying the uniforms. The girls are going to be starting school this week!
Culture bite: Guatemalan’s eat green mangos. Mangos that are very small and unripe and taste bitter, normally served with a wedge of another bitter fruit which is a cross-between a lime and a mandarin.
Matt:
I have been working with a group of children with an aim towards starting the day process with them. This has been good to do because we spend more time with them doing different things and try to teach them a bit about the bible. One of these children is a boy that lives right next to a bus terminal and a large market area. The family of 6 (plus one more on the way) live in one room and all spend their days selling sweets or bags of fruit like the aforementioned mangos. Carlos found it hard to trust El Castillo at first but now we´re really excited as he has just begun the day process and seems happy and confident.
We’ve also been back to the refuge to look after Betsaida while some of the other workers have a break and have been carrying on with normal street work too. We really feel part of the team now and the children know us now too which is great.
Aside from work things; a couple of weeks ago we went to Chiquimula (“cheeky-moolah” - we both take pleasure in saying the name). We went for the weekend with Jomarra and Isaak. Isaak was leading a university meeting on the Saturday and they invited us to come with them to see a different part of the country. It’s located in the south west corner, near to the borders of El Salvador and Honduras. Whilst there we saw traditional dancing and hundreds of people queuing to see a statue of ‘The Black Christ’, which is the most popular pilgrimage in Central America. The next day we climbed Volcan Ipala which is famous for having a lake at its summit. The view was pretty cool and well worth the hike.
Other news:
The Latin Link newbies have arrived! Emma, Gemma and Joe have arrived in Guatemala to begin their placements in Guatemala. We had previously met Joe and Emma at our training in England but Gemma had her training just before coming out because she’s from Australia!
They arrived in time for the Latin Link conference for Central America. Every year, all the people working with Latin Link in Central America convene for a week and do all the boring meeting-things that people do. However, there was also a time for sharing with each other about what we do which was really good, and we really enjoyed spending time with the rest of the “team”. What’s more, Gemma and Emma are going to be working with El Castillo also, although they’re going to language school first so we may only be working with them for a few weeks before we come back!
Finally our roles at El Castillo have now slightly changed. Jo is going to be full time with the street team and matt will carry on doing half a week with street team and half with the day process. We’re also both going to be staying at the refuge every Friday night so that Maria who works there can go to university, so we’re going to be even busier busy bees.
We are very thankful for all our Christmas cards which we think have all arrived at last and were wwonderful to recieve so thank you. We are also thankful that our Spanish has been improving, although we only realise this when we look back (which has been easier to do since the arrival of the newbies!). Conversations are now a lot easier and speaking comes more freely, although we still have days when words just seem to come out backwards or as a mixture of Spanish and English.
Wishing you happy and warmer days
Love
Jo and Matt xxx
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