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*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 …
6 a.m. was our departure from the Casa Retiros. To work backwards, that meant that breakfast began at 5:30, and wake up, 4:30. My earliest meetings, at home in the States, start at 10 am—that’s a stretch for me. My favorite time of day is morning, where I ease in—often with the same routine: skinny coffee and a book in my pajamas; an hour later, breakfast; then gather and prep for the day. I had no coffee with me, and …
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 …
Before I proceed further into the adventure, I want to show you (and share with you about) our guides for the week: Juan Carlos and Andres. Juan Carlos, our driver, and Andres, our translator/guide extraordinaire, were a team–like Batman and Robin, or Ozzie and Harriet–and they expertly walked our group through the week. Here are some visuals, so you can see them. I love this picture of Andres laughing. He laughed the whole week. Especially at dinner where the teens …
This past Wednesday I shared about Guatemala and the stories from my time there with campers at Little Friends for Peace’s Peace Camp in Mt. Rainier. For the week, there are between 40 and 50 campers; the campers include kids from Mt. Rainier, kids from Washington D.C., and kids whose families are part of TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition). I haven’t spoken much with anyone about Guatemala; when friends or family ask me, I often refer them here, or I say “I’m not …
