El Tenedor

For teacher appreciation day, my teacher and I went up to El Tenedor, which is a restaurant way up on a mountain. (www.casasantodomingo.com) We took the hotel's bus up to the top, ate, and then raced down on foot after we ate because my teacher needed to get back to school for her afternoon student. Oops! We didn't time our trip very well. The views from the restaurant were really amazing though. We could see all of Antigua and the surrounding pueblos.

 Our speedy hike down the mountain...

Más Práctica

Here is Elvira and Enrique, the wonderful family that I am staying with here in Antigua for the month. Elvira is a wonderful cook, and they only allow Spanish to be spoken during our three daily meals...so it's great to practice conversing with them!

 Here is a picture of one of the tables we use at my school, La Union. My teacher Verónica is so awesome. The four hours go so quickly each morning because I feel like we just talk (in Spanish, of course) the whole time. We get along very well and she is a very patient teacher.

 When I got lost on the way to school last week, I ended up asking a random lady for directions. She happened to be very nice and we exchanged email addresses with the intention of meeting up again when we both weren't in a hurry to get somewhere else. Her name is Lola and she was a teacher for many years. She now works for a local foundation in Antigua. We met up for tea at Cafe Condesa for a couple of hours and had a lovely (albeit, choppy) conversation in Spanish. (My Spanish, not hers)

Two current NPH volunteers came to Antigua to on Thursday to help me find my way out to the orphanage on the chicken busses (camionetas...old American school busses) here. It's only about 40 minutes door to door from Antigua to NPH. I really enjoyed seeing the orphanage, meeting some current volunteers, and meeting the children I will be working with. I was very pleasantly surprised to find my speech therapy office well-stocked with materials left behind by former volunteer SLPs. My time at NPH officially begins July 6th. I'm really looking forward to starting! 

I didn't bring my phone but this is a picture of what the busses look like here.

They line up VERY close together just outside of Antigua
and people yell out the destinations and you jump on.

NPH Guatemala

 Here are a few pictures of the big market here. They have the most random things...you can buy food, clothes, flowers, toys, toiletries, shoes, etc... It's just a ton of stands manned by different families all under a giant tin roof. It's very easy to get lost in there as the aisles seem to go on forever and ever. I'm loving learning about this culture with each day that goes by and feel blessed to be getting to know some amazing individuals!

EcoFiltro...and ND Connections

Today I had the awesome opportunity to tour the factory of a company/charity started by a Notre Dame alum, Philip Wilson. He decided at age 40 that he wanted to dedicate the next decade of his life to serving humanity, and boy is he doing that in a big way with his social project: EcoFiltro. (http://www.ecofiltro.org) He has figured out a way to finance an amazing charitable effort with only 30% of his customers paying for the innovative, sustainable filter. The filter itself is unbelievably simple in the way that it functions, and provides endless access to clean water for families who otherwise wouldn't have it. My Spanish teacher here in Guate said her family has EcoFiltro, and uses it for all of their cooking, washing and drinking. 90% of the water in Guatemala is contaminated, which means over a million people here drink water that is causing their bodies harm. Not only has water consumption gone up since the introduction of EcoFiltro, the number of waterborne illnesses has gone down. Sorry if I sound like an EcoFiltro commercial...I'm just so impressed by this ND grad's passion for serving humanity and his country. Here are several pictures from the factory. If you're interested in learning more about EcoFiltro and Philip Wilson, check out their website which has some informative videos and ways to help their cause.

The original mixture of Guatemalan clay and sawdust...kept at 6% humidity I think he said?

 They have an organic garden in the back there, where the food that the employees eat for lunch each day is grown. 

Mixing the clay/sawdust mix for exactly 6 minutes.

 Each filter is made by hand to ensure quality.

 The molded filters are placed in biodegradable bags where they dry for 7 days.

 Serial numbers are put on each filter to track where it goes.

 Mr. Wilson told the workers he would build them a soccer field if they maintained it.
 The employees play soccer from 4:30 to 6pm every day. They play area companies and are undefeated. Last week they beat the team of Police Officers from Antigua...badly.

 The kilns where the filters are fired for 9 hours. 

 Filters waiting for the next step...

 Filters being soaked...

This guy paints on the perfect amount of colloidal silver, 

which is the magic of the filtration system.

 Filters waiting for inspection. 

 The filters that did not pass inspection 

This means they didn't filter fast enough (2 liters per hour) or they filtered too fast (meaning they didn't filter out the gross stuff in the water)

All finished!

Mr. Wilson has people from lots of villages competing to create new designs to house the EcoFiltro. If they can show him that they can consistently produce a container with the correct specifications, he awards them a year contract and makes them available to all EcoFiltro customers for purchase. The brown containers to his left were attempts (not quite cylindrical). Further down on the right are some fancier designs that people have come up with. 

The original inventor of EcoFiltro, Fernando Mazariegos, is a scientist from Guatemala. Though he is in his eighties, he is still hard at work trying to come up with an even cheaper way to filter water. They are experimenting with just using one layer of the filter material on top of a bucket to filter water as well as the bigger filters do. 

Cross-section of the filters...

Mr. Wilson gave 500 pounds of clay to local Guatemalan artists and had them make sculptures that adorn the grounds of the factory. 

 There are even dorms at the factory for those employees that have particularly long commutes.

A view of the entire factory.

P.S. Appropriately, as I toured a water filtration factory....a pipe broke somewhere underground this morning. The entire city of Antigua is going on 12 hours without water. Today has been one big lesson in water being a luxury.

Friendly Faces

The sweet nanny of one of my former speech therapy clients in Dallas happens to be from Antigua. I have really enjoyed getting to know Estela as I saw her almost weekly for the past two years. She was so excited to learn that I would be spending a year very close to her family here in Guatemala and arranged for me to meet up with her mother, sister, and niece yesterday. Though my Spanish is still pretty awful, I thoroughly enjoyed spending a couple of hours with Estela's family. They literally live two blocks down the street from me here in Antigua, so I hope to see more of them throughout the next year! 

Daily sights

This is La Merced, the beautiful church where I have been attending mass daily at 5pm. This morning at 6:30, I went with my host mother (Elvira) to a special mass. Every Saturday is dedicated to the Virgin Mary here, so there were extra songs and prayers said before and after mass. It lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. 

Below is the fountain in the central square. I walk through this area every day since it's the safest route...there are many police officers walking around.

I am staying with a wonderful family here, but they live about as far away from my school as is possible in Antigua. The walk to school is about 20 to 25 minutes each day, so I've gotten to explore a lot (and gotten lost a lot as well ;). It's been good practice for me to ask strangers for directions in Spanish! Below is my daily route. The house is in the upper left corner, and the school is in the bottom right.