surprises and beauty

Sunday we went to Sacrament meeting in a town called El Estor, Harold pointed next to me and there was a small black dog just standing next to me, and then it laid down there for the meeting - I was surprised for sure!  We went up to Senahu and found a lovely little house last weekend where we will be moving the first week of January, until then we will be staying in a hotel there - for about $8. a night.  The mission office has a microwave we will be able to use and one of the members has a hot plate they are going to loan us.  There is a family living in the house we will be getting right now, but they are moving into another home. They are going to be putting in a ceiling and painting it before we move in, right now it just has a tin roof, so the ceiling will help a lot. It has a nice bathroom, so that is a huge plus.  We will be able to rent all of our furniture from the church - which means we will have a stove, refrigerator and a washer and dryer, plus furniture - including new beds.  Outside the door of the house are banana trees and in the distance you can see a huge mountain.  Right down the hill is a market about 3 times a week with all kinds of stuff.

The people in Senahu were amazing, some of the roads getting there though are dirt, rough and potholed.  Took us about 7-8 hours.  I started practicing my Q'eqchi and the people would help me after I tried saying something and they finished giggling.   We went and visited a school there where they are trying to build on two rooms.  The elementary schools there have an average of about 50 students per teacher - can't imagine trying to teach with that! There is another elementary school under construction that we hope will be finished by the time school starts, it also plans on extremely high attendence. 
On Saturday we also went to a District conference in a different part of our area called Chulac.  Before the meeting we walked over to some members that live next to the church and they picked us some fresh mandarins from one of the trees in their yard.  Mandarins grow all over up by Chulac, but again crazy bad roads going up the mountain to get there.  After the meeting while waiting for the Mission President to finish his stuff I played with some of the little girls. I taught them how to play red light, green light - they had a little hard time realizing the concept, since most likely none of them had ever seen a stop light.
We came back into the city to make final arrangements and will be leaving here for Senahu on Thursday morning early.  There is so much up there to be done, so the problem will be narrowing it down to make sure we are most affective.  We will hopefully have a vehicle also by mid-January, but until then most everything we will be starting with is in walking distance.  Otherwise we get to try taking a tuk-tuk, kind of like a little 3-wheel taxi.  Should be fun!