Sign up to get blog posts by email
*Disclaimer: This is MUCH longer than most of my other posts. It will take a while to read through. If you were to print it out, it would be about 2 pages double-spaced. I’m going to post part two separately. Almost three weeks after the fact, about to reconstruct the day of concrete and cement, I looked in my journal today to see what I’d noted, in the hopes that it might jog my memory of the day. What I …
To finish up our first day, let me tell you about our visit to Santa Clara and Paso a Paso . Santa Clara is the nursery that International Samaritan runs in cooperation with the city of Guatemala. There we met Sonia La Roche, a small but strong woman, who runs the nursery; she has worked at Santa Clara for years, since she met Fr. Vettesse. She shared with us that the people in the area told her she had to talk with “the crazy gringo …
Here are some excerpts of impressions from my journal (mostly about things you’ve already read about here) “There’s Jorge–My friend from St. Francis Coll, who sat next to me at the assembly and loved looking at the pics as I them them on my camera. He’s very talented: he played recorder, offered a greeting/welcome to us, and he played drums for another act.” “The generosity: these people live hospitality, abundance, welcoming. The light in eyes–and yet also, in some, the …
Somersaults , music, and hula hoops later, our group of 14 set out into the neighborhood, to visit several homes. Our route led down a narrow lane; accompanied by several children from the Coll, numerous mangy dogs, and our police escort, we followed our Pied Piper, Andres. Most noticeable was the smell– which I had last noticed in Nicaragua– of burning trash. It permeates everything and eventually is unremarkable, but that first walk, I thought, “Oh! I remember this.” Once past the smell, I …
… That’s what our arrival at St. Francis Coll was all about on our first day. As we entered the facility we were given small handmade placards that said “Guatemala” and had a small doll on them. We sat alongside the walls of the inner courtyard and waited, warily, to see what came next. Andres informed us that an assembly would occur shortly and that we should sit tight. The bell rang. Chaos began as children poured from classrooms and …
