Guatemala---Day Three

Saturday was our day to be tourists. We headed for Antigua, the ancient capital of Guatemala, which is less than an hour's drive from the big city. We definitely climbed some mountain roads to get there! One member of our group, Susan Young, wanted to visit a city where a special type of woven fabric is made, so we varied our route slightly in order to visit San Antonio. At the top of the hill overlooking the city, there is a beautiful little terraced garden area which afforded us some lovely views of the valley below. We could also barely see the outline of an active volcano very high up in the distant clouds.



Here's our mission team: Tom Smart, Susan Young, me, Paul Young, Robyn, Laurel Williamson (left to right).

We shopped at San Antonio, then backtracked to Antigua, where we shopped a little more. Robyn got a really cool easy-chair style hammock for the porch at her new apartment, and we picked up a few small souvenirs as gifts for family members. Then we had lunch at Mono Loco (Funky Monkey) before heading back to Guatemala City. Our afternoon was spent with the older girls again; this time, we went to the bowling alley for an hour of bumper bowling (trust me, without the bumpers, we would have had TRULY pitiful scores!). The interesting thing to me was that all of the graphics captions and instructions on the score screens were in English!






After wearing ourselves out bowling, we went back to the Buckner offices, where we cooked dinner with the girls. This was a fun activity that involved everybody---the girls tried to teach us how to make tortillas, with fairly consistently poor results, but a fun time was had by all. You could definitely tell who the experts were!



We all took turns holding the babies (Daniel and Leslie) in between cooking duties. All of the girls pitched in with cooking and serving and cleaning up. By the time we were done, it was late, so we took the girls home and returned to our hotel. Here's a prayer request---because of the location of the girls' home, it is necessary to have 24-hour security, so every time we took them back to their house, we were met by guards on the sidewalk outside the front door. The use of the house is being donated by a friend of Buckner, but they would prefer to be able to move it to a safer neighborhood. They'll need funding and an available house in order to do it, though, so we're praying with them that God will open the appropriate doors.