A busy day!

Hola friends and family! This is Jordan and Lauren here to tell you about our long, but exciting day! We started our day early with breakfast with our host families. We met the rest of our group at the language school (casa xelaju) at 8 am. Our first trip was to the University Rafael Landivar where we met up with other students from the university and took a tour of their beautiful campus. We then went with them to an elementary school in the mountains. I don't know the name of the school, but I like to refer to it as the school in the clouds because we were so high in the mountains we were literally in the clouds! Here, we played with the kids in the school by coloring and playing with play-doh. We also brought them snacks and drinks. Because we couldn't communicate with the children very much, we got laughed at a lot. But they were so cute, we really didn't care. Their smiling faces and hugs made the long trek down the mountain to the school well worth it! (Our vans couldn't drive all the way to the school so we had to walk the rest of the way). I can't describe in words how happy I was when we were told that trucks were going to take us back up the mountain to where our vans were. And by trucks, I mean that we split into two groups and rode up the mountain in the backs of pick-up trucks. It was a very interesting experience! When we arrived back to the vans, all in one piece, we headed back to the university to have pizza. After saying goodbye to the university students, we visited the house of a midwife. We learned about her work with pregnant mothers and newborns. She talked about the importance of herbs during the birthing process to speed up contractions. She also has a sauna in her house in which the mother and her baby bathe together right after the birth. The sauna helps warm the baby, relax the muscles of the mother, and produce breast milk. After visiting the midwife, we had the opportunity to show off our soccer skills, or lack thereof for some of us, as we got to play with kids from an organization in Xela called Innerchange. We then had the pleasure to eat more pizza with the kids from Innerchange at their house. To finish our busy day, we went back to Casa Xelaju and watched a powerful documentary on a town called Santa Anita, which we will be visiting later this week. From this documentary, we learned that this town was formed after Guatmala's 36-year-long civil war. Many occcupants of this town were guerrilla fighters during the war, and after the war, they were able to buy land to start their own organic coffee farms. Overall, today was full of excitement, new and wonderful people, and pizza!