Marge was here!!

Margaret was here this week!! I met her in Panajachel and let me tell you, Lake Atitlan is even prettier than I expected. We spent our days relaxing, eating great food (including 3 tacos for $1.50), and shopping around. We met lots of interesting people at night. I won’t bore you with the details of all of our “friends,” but I will share some advice- Don´t go dancing in a ¨special place¨ with anyone you meet, and don´t agree to sing ¨House of the Rising Sun¨ with Raul, who calls himself ¨the wolf.¨ Oh, fun times! It was so awesome to see someone from home here in Guatemala!

I ended up taking 6 busses to get home. Actually, it was 3 chicken busses (the former US school busses that have been retired to 3rd world countries where there are less safety standards), 2 micro-busses, and a pickup truck, that I actually got to sit in the front of. So Saturday was a wonderful day full of Guatemalan public transportation. Why 6 buses you ask? This was in part because I went an hour out of my way to eat lunch at Subway- totally necessary in my opinion! But another of the busses could have been averted if a weird man hadn’t sat next to me on the Xela bus and scared me so bad I got off the bus and changed in a random town. Everything ended up fine. I guess the one plus of the situation was that I got a free bus ride because the crazy man told me that God told him to pay for me, which means I saved 15Q!! When I finally got home, Agustin, who is 4, came running to the door and gave me a huge hug. The excited look on his face reminded me of how happy my dog is to see me when I get home, too (I mean that in a really nice way because I LOVE my dog!). It was priceless!


....Church lately has been interesting as usual. Last Monday we had another service where just my family showed up. Dina preached and she was sitting about 2 feet away from me, so it was like getting a personal sermon right in my face, and in Spanish to top it off. I’m gonna go on ahead and say I was a little uncomfortable, but I really like the Monday services because we pray and sing for most of it, which is really nice.

The best church experience I’ve had lately happened yesterday. I went to Sunday school prepared to teach, but Dina ended up wanting to, so we used our Jeremiah coloring books again (we’ve been reading and coloring a few pages each week and we each have our own copy). So today we did pages 12-17, which probably only covers about 4 verses of the bible and consists of a total of about 10 sentences. But Dina managed to stretch out the lesson for 2 hours and Jeremiah suddenly became “the kind of guy who is polite to his teachers and shakes their hand and says goodmorning everyday.” He also “doesn’t sniff glue like those kids I see at the field across from our house every night, and he would always stand up against fighting on the playground.” Obviously Dina can read way further into Jeremiah than I can because I didn’t realize these topics were in the bible. Haha she is hilarious and I have to give her points for always saying whatever SHE wants to say, no matter how relevant or true it might be.

Well, I start teaching tomorrow so wish me luck! Tomorrow will be an exciting day of explaining computer rules, but Wednesday should be much more exciting, as I´m gonna play lots of games with the kids in English class! In only 1 week it will be my bday and I´m going back to the lake, so at least if things go bad, at least I have something to be really excited about! Miss you all!