This past week my small group (Team H2O) pretty much finished up the house we were building for Raphael and his son. Making cement is such an art! For one room it takes 6 wheelbarrow-fulls of sand, 4 wheelbarrows of gravel, 2 bags of "cemento" and auga (water). It's actually a pretty hefty job! The albanils (masons) mixed it once we brought them all the ingredients, and then we just carried buckets of this stuff into the house and the other albanil was smoothing it onto the ground to make the floor. Then they put a rust coloured finish on. it looked awesome!
Guatemalan time is hilarious. I still can't get over how totally ok it is to show up to something an hour and a half late and no one even bats an eye. Punctuality might take some getting used to once i return to BC though... haha!

On Friday night we had a little fiesta with the Habitat for Humanity people and some of the families who we were building for came. it was cool :) Neither our small group's fam nor our albanils could come, which is too bad, but it was good none the less. we had steak, which was awesome. Oh, and then an announcement was made that there'd be a Site 1 meeting on the roof after dinner. So we all got there and we started singing a worship song, which conveniently broke into "Happy Birthday" for me and Peter! It was SUCH a surprise. We got cake a firecrackers too. I loved it. :)

So after breakfast yesterday, we loaded our bags onto our insane buses to drive to Antigua. Honestly, there have been nights where I've gone to bed and just marvelled at the fact that I haven't seen a car accident or any injured pedestrians on the side of the road. there are NO road signs or traffic rules or anything! it's fun, but i've been brushed by trucks that have whizzed by on more than one occassion. it's actually quite the fun adventure to play "dodge the traffic" when you're walking on the sidewalk the whole time! hahaha! but back to yesterday... the buses came an hour late and we were off! Away from the ...erm... less than 5-star hotel experience we had just lived in. funny fact: they made us clean up all our things on friday so that they could exterminate the dorms before the students arrived. we came back from habitat, the place looked and smelled exactly the same. and there were still roaches and spiders. what can ya do, eh?

So after 3 hours we pulled in Antigua and I. AM. IN. LOVE. no joke, it is GORGEOUS here! Completely surrounded by volcanoes and trees, it's Parque Central lies admist the 500-year-old ancient ruins of the original Spanish architecture. Antigua is a 15 minute bus ride or 20 minute walk (shows the efficiency of the roads! haha!) from Jocotenango, which is the city we all live in and will be learning Spanish in. Joco is really pretty too. Everywhere there and here in Antigua has cobblestone streets, with fruit venders, and these teensy horses pulling massive carts. The locals dress in traditional, colourful garb, and are taking their crafts/produce to the market, or sit on the corners conversing. It's super cool. Antigua is much more touristy than any other city in Guatemala, so there's lots of europeans and most of the restaurants and cafes have english on their menus as well as spanish.

speaking of spanish... lol, no pun intended there, but i honestly CANNOT. i'm trying so hard and i find it hilarious! my family must think i'm a nutcase. I met them yesterday! My mom's name is Esperanza (super super cool name :)), my dad's name is Jaime (pronounced "High-me"), I have a 25 yr old bro named Alejandro and a 20 yr old sister Paula. Paula and "Alex" are learning English on the weekends in Guatemala City, so they spoke to me at dinner last night, but for the few hours before that I did my best to listen, learn, understand, and communicate with Jaime and Esperanza. I showed them my pictures (I think they think that the fact that Durango has 2 different coloured eyes means he's lucky, or worth more, or something). They loved the mountains and Christmas trees too. Dinners are late here... I ate at about 8:30, unpacked the rest of my stuff, read a bit, and went to bed around 10:30. Got up before 8:00 and asked if i could have a shower. So...i'm in the shower this morning and Esperanza yells in at me and i had to turn the shower off and she had to repeat herself like 13 times and still to this moment i'm not totally sure what i answered "Si!" to. The language thing is pretty complicated and funny. Ooooh, but they have a washing machine upstairs, so I don't have to lug my laundry around the city to a "lavanderia" to get it washed! yes! I'll pick up some of my own laundry soap though. What else? We start Spanish classes tomorrow! That's exciting. We get tested in the morning to see what level group we should be in. We are put in groups of 3 or 4 and then a teacher. Also we have service projects that we'll be doing during the afternoons this week (and the 6 to come also), so I'm not sure what I'll be doing for those, but i'm stoked for that also! Oh, I was told that we can't receive mail, so i have no post addy to give you guys. sorry about that! i do have a phone number... it's 7831-0229, but i'm not sure the country and area code for that. and the time difference is 2 hours ahead of BC. but no one is obligated to call of course :)
Next weekend, we're climbing a live volcano! It's called Pacaya. And the following weekend we're going to Monoricco, which is one of the world's top ten beaches ever. It's amazing!
Shoot, i got to go. I miss you guys incredibly. Please pray that I'd get over my cold and fall more in love with everything here. I do love it, but i don't LOVE love it. And I miss home. be so blessed.
Janelle

ok, so my blog seems to be working again! hurrah! i´m here at an internet cafe in Mazatenango, which is the place we´re staying while we work with Habitat. today was slightly dull on the jobsite but exotic at the same time! we´re putting the plumbing in (yay, i´m a plumber just like my dad now!), and the way they do it is to give me and Peter a hammer and pick and ask us to chisel a 4 inch hole in the cement blocks in different sections of the walls. so we seriously did that all day long. ALL DAY LONG. that´s all the rest of my small group did too! we just switched on and off. my forearms are bulging beasts now, i swear.
Poor Geoff was sick and stayed at the dorms yesterday instead of coming to work. he was back today, but devoid of strength. Tabitha and Julia spent most of the morning exhausted and kept nodding off, so they headed back to the college at lunch to sleep and get better. Julia´s been hit hard with the bug. I´ve still got a cold, but it´s not too bad.
oh! so today we´re chiseling away at the wall when this old man comes hobbling by with his cart shouting ¨cocos! cocos!¨ so we went out and bought 2 whole coconuts, drank the milk, smashed them on the wall, and ate the innards. walking back to the bus i was all like ¨wow, that was awesome! i´m in an exotic country, building an exotic house, trying to speak an exotic language, and eating some exotic fruit. this is awesome!¨ and Pan goes, ¨Yeah, and now we´re all gonna be exotically sick from it.¨ it was hilarious.
we had these amazing chicken salad sandwiches for lunch (i think they are trying to give our stomachs a rest from the guatemalan beans, plantanes, and corn tortillas) and my friend, Pan, was like ¨Ew, i hate chicken gristle¨and i was like ¨Yeah, me too¨ and NONE of the others in our small group had even HEARD of the word gristle before. guess what they call it in Manitoba?? GURNURPLE. gurnurple. sick animal! well, i guess we´ve finally found a word that rhymes with purple. haha!
anyway, not much else to say. on Saturday i meet my family who i´ll be living with for pretty much the rest of the time we´re here. ahh! i hope they´re nice. with many little children. love you all! and i´m pray for you guys too. later!
Janelle (they call me ¨Hun-ay-uh¨ here. i love it.)

ok, so here´s the diddly i tried to post a few days ago that didn´t work. it might sound sort of repetetive :)
! things are great here... it was KILLER hot when we arrived, but then bused a couple hours into the mountains where it was FREEZING (cloudy and cold everyday) at a place called Camp Adulam. It was super pretty there. We,re together with site 2 (the other guatemalan groups), and they,re really cool. hmm, this email might be all over the map, so sorry about that! i,ll try to start again.

we got to CMU at 2pm and there was over a foot of snow. i loved it! but then the director came in and told us that the guatemalan airport was on strike and no one was allowed in or out of the country! but we hopped on the bus and did the 8 hour trek down to Minneapolis anyway. we watched Napoleon Dynamite (a classic with this group) and Touching the Void on the way down. i maybe got 30 mins of sleep on the bus. then i slept almost an hour at the airport. we were then informed that the airport in Guate had hired some Mexicans and was up and running. BUT our plane to Atlanta was delayed, so we almost missed our connecting flight! they held it for us though because there are 57 of us. 57 with zero sleep in the past 36 hours. ouch.

so back to camp adulam... we spent thursday to sunday at adulam, playing soccer and tag with the kids, and trying to stay warm (seriously, it was insane!) i helped lead worship on friday and we had a dude come in to teach us some cultural facts and safety.

sunday our us driver (dario) drove us to Mazatenango where we,re staying while working with Habitat for Humanity. we´re actually staying in college dorms while the kids are out for the winter! college dorms that completely shattered my dreams of international school (except i might still want to go to England and live in a castle school... but that´s another story). but seriously, we live with mosquitos, cockroches, bed bugs, scorpions, lizzards, and toads. it,s an adventure!

it´s hilarious, i literally walk down the street and all the Guatemalans just stare at me, or laugh and say Alta! (means tall). everyone is SOOO tiny! it´s hilarious :)

my small group is building a house for this man named Raphael and his 11 year old son. Raffy stops by the site daily to chat with us (i,m learning a bit of spanish... mostly just vocab to do with construction! haha!) and he´s brought us chocobananos (halved frozen bananas covered in chocolate!), Pepsi, papaya, and real cocoa plants/fruit and chocolate. h,s super nice! and our albanil (mason) is awesome too. ew, speaking of chocolate, even though it originated down here, it´s NOT GOOD at ALL. it´s so wierd! maybe i´ll bring some back to show you all :)

tomorrow we´re heading to a hotel and market in Panajachel! excited! apparently it,s awesome for shopping. the nights have been super hot here in Maza, so i´ve had a couple nights were i jump into my bathing suit, jump into the shower (it´s always nice and cold) and gone to bed wet. it works! anyway, things are really good.. a lot of people have gotten sick (stomach, bowels, etc), but i,ve been good! except i caught a cold from Xena. but otherwise things rock. i wish i had more time to tell you all the insanely crazy cool things i´ve been seeing. miss you all! how can i pray? be so blessed!
Janelle
Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets. Amos 3:7

Hey! ok, so i tried to blog yesterday and it wasn´t working. so i´ll try again! i only have like 5 minutes on here though (we get 15 mins free internet at the hotel here in Panajachel, but i used 10 of those on msn :)). We arrived in Panajachel at noon today and settled our site into the Grand Hotel. It´s a very touristy place, and since then all i´ve done is grab lunch and wander around, trying to put on my best bargaining face. it´s crazy, the people will follow you RIGHT into a restaurant while you are eating lunch and they will NOT leave! it´s crazy! I bought a few things, and will probably grab a couple more tomorrow. they have all the same stuff in Antigua (starting Saturday we´ll be in Jocotenango which is like 20 mins from Antigua) but this is the cheapest place to shop apparently. I sent out a mass email yesterday to a bunch of people, but it only sent it to like 30 addresses, so i´m sure most of you didn´t receive it. pretty much things are going alright. there´s been tons of spiritual attack going on with our group. SO many are ridiculously sick or just feeling homesick and not tops. i´m sure that´s normal for a new place and culture though, but i can tell it´s really wearing on the group.
Habitat for Humanity is awesome! the people are pretty slack down here. breakkie is at 7 am, and so on monday we all are up and at the doors for our meal at 6:57. and we were fed around 7:40. so now i don´t even set my alarm until 2 mins to 7. and on the job site there are times when our albanils (masons) have nothing for us to do, so we just sort of sit there, but then other times when we´re digging trenches for pipes in the blazing sun. it´s HOT in Mazatenango (the place where we´re living and building). it was WAY cooler, almost freezing, at Camp Adulam where we were for teh first couple days. here in Pana it´s in the middle of them two. i like.
we´re building our house for a single father and his 11 year old son. the house walls were already up when we started, so we might finish mid week next week and move on to help another small group.
my spanish is coming along a little bit. i love trying to learn it! some of us went to see a movie last night. i saw National Treasure. it was in English with SPanish subtitles.i thought it´d be the other way around... wierd!ç
hmm.. what else? we leave Pana tomorrow after dinner and head back to the college dorms where we´re staying. along with the cochroches, lizards, toads, spiders, bed bugs, mosquitos, and scorpions. all my dreams of going to university in a foreign land have flown out the window. except maybe for england. school in a castle! anyways, it´s time for me to go. i love you all and miss you tons! i´ll try to get you an addy for where i´ll be living (starting saturday) asap. you guys rock so much. how can i pray? email me or reply to my bloggidy-blog-blog. hasta luega.
Janelle

"That which was from the beginning, which I have heard, which I have seen with my eyes, which I have looked at and my hands have touched--this I proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; I have seen it! And testify to it! And I proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. I proclaim it to you what I have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with me. And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ."
1 John 1:1-3

Therefore...

"Friends! Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things."
Philippians 4:8

And so...

"I take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ."
2 Corinthians 10:5

What have I to say or write? It's been nearly 6 weeks since I've blogged! IS it lack of inspiration? Or IS it really half-hearted motivation? Maybe it's just being bloody distracted. My mind has been sooo everywhere and not God-focussed. Hollow, haggard eyes. Convenient amnesia. Persistently a stubborn apathetic.
WELL NOT ANY FREAKING MORE.
That's it! I've had it. I'm done with sitting on my rat's tail doing diddly. Fill me, Jesus! I'm so empty and shallow and eerie... I miss feeling full of the Spirit. Instead what I have feasted on? Movies, entertainment, gossip, fabricated life. That's what it is! Things seem so surreal and awkward because they're not real! They're not the fulfilling of my deepest, most desperate cries. Only Jesus does... He's like protein! a good, essential filler. mmmm, protein. But yeah, and i've been complaining lots recently too. I'm gonna stop groaning and just bloody LIVE! Ready? Set! Three, two, one... GO!
.......and she's off.......