This communiqué is from Bella Vista fresh from our last day in Otoxha. Four months of living in the village is over and a new future awaits. We haven’t posted in quite awhile, we’ve been busy!!! And now I can finally reflect a little.
Just this last week Andra and I organized a marathon/open day in the village. A marathon is a football(soccer) tournament and the open day is sort of a mini carnival for the community. The point of the marathon/open day was to raise money for St. Marks RC Primary School upcoming school year. It was a great success, 10 teams showed up to play. Along with St. Marks we were able to find many partnerships to make this an all around great day for the community. The Honorable Eden Martinez came for a short bit and supported the marathon with money and uniforms for the Otoxha football team. We were able to get a donation of toothbrushes from the Ministry of Health to give out to the children. Red Cross came to give out information and materials along with our own. Humana donated a bunch of clothes to the women and children, as well as fixing the latrine before the open day so visitors had a comfortable place to do their business. We had a successful raffle of chicken wire and other prizes, including a punchboard and piñata. We had various other games organized such as volleyball and sack races. It was an amazing day and we were both really proud of ourselves for organizing the event, in total we raised BZ$2880 or US$1440 for the school. The principal and PTA were really happy with the results and were already planning school trips for the kidos.
It was sad to finally leave but we also were ready. We held a little goodbye party and gave the children in Kids Club graduation certificates and had a nice 30 minutes of constant pictures being taken in a machine gun fashion with all the families. Now were really excited to organize our thoughts on the accomplishments and mistakes of the last four months so we can aid future Poverty Fighters in their solidarity work with communities. But now Colorado is in our hearts and minds, but keep on checking for new posts they should be coming in more rapidly these next few weeks!!!
Andra
Wow. We are in our final, final stretch. This morning Brian and I left our village and headed down to Bella Vista with our back packs packed. I can’t believe it! As we walked up the road in Bella Vista towards the Humana office we were remembering the first time we made the trek with our backpacks on when we first arrived here 4 months ago. Now we are wrapping up, preparing our final presentations and getting ready to make the journey home. The last week after our open day marathon was a bit of a whirlwind of emotions. It actually seemed like it took forever. We started to say our goodbyes to people and started mentally preparing to leave (as well as a lot of packing and cleaning!) which really put us into a state of limbo- half in Otoxha and half already home. There were moments where I felt so sad to be leaving and was reminiscing about all of the people I got to know and the river and beautiful environment and unique living situations and then there were other moments where I was day dreaming about seeing my family, reaching home and what it would be like to see my precious nieces and nephews, about what lies in our futures.. I got so far into this feeling that I really felt like I was already home. This has been such an incredible experience, one that has really offered some enlightenment in many important areas. There is much more time and reflection needed in order to fully conclude on all that I have gotten out of my time here. For now I just want to share my excitement- we did it! There were times in the middle where it felt like such a long time, with no end in sight and now that we are finishing up it feels like it wasn’t that long ago that we came to this same office, nervous and anxious with anticipation as we had our welcome meeting and awaited our arrival to our new villages. Now we have adapted to a completely different life then we are used to, had so many new experiences, and have grown so much. Of course this is something I am so grateful to have done and something I will never forget and at the same time it is time to go home. Tahocaray and Shequay Otoxha! (Kekchi for: Thank you and Goodbye!)
No comments:
Post a Comment