Last Week of Ministry Sites

Wow!  I can't believe that I am now finished with ministry sites.  The time has flown by.

The last week of ministry sites was really good.  On Tuesday Nic had some things to do, so Emily and I went with Nivia to Monroy, the school here in Magdalena to help with the Mother's Day Celebration/mini-fair.  It was a fun afternoon which included Bingo, getting put in jail and waiting for Becky to track down Nivia to bail us out!  One of the games at the school was if you were wearing the color that was called out, the kids could drag you into jail.  In order to get out you had to pay 1 Quetzal.  Emily and I both ended up in jail together, and neither one of us had money.  We had to wait for Nivia to come and rescue us!

The rest of the week with Nic went pretty well.  We created a survey because there is going to be a sewing class at the community center, and Nic wants to know who's interested and what levels they are at.  The challenging part about this is that no one wants to tell you they're not interested, so because of the culture everyone says they are interested in it.  There were some people who we could really tell weren't interested at all, and we tried our best to get them to say no they weren't interested.  That never happened though.

On Thursday we went on a site tour, so we were able to see all of the different sites.  I had been to most of them before; however, it was still fun to visit them all.

Friday was one of my favorite days of the week.  Although it was really hard to say good-bye to all the women that I have made relationships with during my six weeks at ministry sites, I was able to visit the family of a little girl, Evelin, who I will be sponsoring when I return home.  After working in El Gorrion, I decided that I wanted to sponsor one of the kids there.  I was talking with Nivia about it this week, and we looked through the kids who weren't sponsored.  Evelin had recently lost her sponsor, so I decided to sponsor her.  It was a really great experience meeting her family, too much for this blog post, so I will try to write another one about that soon.

Friday night we also had the banquet with all of the staff from SI.  It was a great night just to all be together one last time before we leave.  The highlight of the night was Jose's video of our semester.  It is so wonderful!  He gave all of us a copy of it, so if anyone is interested in seeing what we did this semester in video, ask to see it when I get home!

Another not so exciting part of this week was econ class.  We had class everyday from 2:30-5:30, and we also had to give two presentations.  Class wasn't quite as painful as I anticipated which was good, and now it's done which is even better.

This has been a really great last week here, and the weekend so far has been just as good.  Again, that's too much for this post so I'll try to write another one on that soon.  I'll also try to post pictures soon!

Tomorrow we leave Magdalena for Guatemala City where we will be staying at a semenary school there for three days of debriefing before heading back to the States.