Greetings. This is Danny Fast.
I spent the past two weeks in a little town called Rio Hondo, in the department (equal to our provinces) of Zacapa. And when most of you were freezing cold and trapped in your houses because of the snow, we were sweating our butts off in 40-degree weather. Literally, in the shade, on the hottest days in the middle of the afternoon, it was 38 degrees Celsius. In the sun it got up to 47. We didn't really do much work those days. At least I didn't. If I just walked in the shade I sweated like mad. But forget the temperature. We stayed in a really sketchy hotel called the Hotel Maria Luisa. The shower leaked and the sink leaked, and we had to sleep in cots. But hey, it was a place to stay. Oh yeah, and each of our small groups helped build a house with Habitat for Humanity. We helped bring cinder blocks to the house and filled some of the cracks with cement and moved sand and just did general manual labour stuff a lot of the time. The days were hot and there were a lot of bugs, but we survived.
The Saturday we were there, actually, the guys from Habitat entered our group into a basketball tournament with some locals. We all thought that we would win since we're taller than everyone else there. But alas, we got second place. We actually only lost by 2 points, but winning isn't everything. I wasn't personally on the team, but I had a sweet time watching and cheering our friends on. I've noticed I've used the word "but" a lot in the past few sentences. I will, from now on, never use it again in this email.
Man, there are a lot of gringos here in Antigua. About one third of everyone i see on the street is not Guatemalan. In Zacapa, we were the only gringos. And oh yeah, there was this sweet river just a 15 minute walk from our hotel that we could go swimming in whenever we wanted. It was beautiful. And that Saturday also, we went on this adventure hike thing. It was really cool. Whenever we're in the mountains at all it reminds me of Lord of the Rings. Now i really want to read those books. The whole hike took a while. We had to trek through rivers and that's where I got a sunburn. Yeah, it was sweet. We stopped at this river and had lunch there and then hiked for like another few hours along a dirt road around the mountain and saw cacti and stuff. THEN, we had to cross this ultra-sketch bridge. It was like something out of Indiana Jones, man. We had to crouch down or else it would get really tippy and we had to go one at a time. It was pretty exciting. Then, on the other side of the river, we followed this huge leaky pipe that leads to a dam sort of thing. It was lots of fun.
So anyways, we have Spanish classes for the next 3 weeks and next weekend we're going to Monterrico. It's supposed to be a sweet place there, really hot with beaches and such. So long everyone, God bless.
Danny Fast
Also, Wednesday was Danny's Birthday!!! So wish him a happy birthday! If you want to send him an email but don't have his (or Beans email for that matter) just ask me for it!
Happy Birthday Danny from all your friends at SSMBY!!!!!!
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