Joanna- 5/5/2014

It's currently about 3pm Guatemalan time. The eight of us are at the Maximo Nivel office working on this blog. To sum up the past 36 hours...

My trip began bright and early Sunday morning at 4am. I woke up, grabbed my packed bags, and was out the door 30 minutes later. Our flight took off a couple minutes before 7am and lasted about 2.5 hours.We had a connecting flight in Atlanta, and 3 hours later we arrived in Guatemala City. Our first order of business after finding the Maximo Nivel driver was to head to the Maximo Nivel office and have our welcome orientations. As we ate banana bread and fruit with cheese and crackers, we listened to our guides, Victor and Kate, discuss our project for the week. We chose the construction project, in which we're helping to build a library and classroom for students in a particular community. After orientation, we headed back to our home stay and unpacked before dinner. Dinner consisted of sandwiches and soup and coffee. After dinner we headed out to check out the night life and returned for a good night's sleep before our first day of volunteering.

Today, we headed to the construction site at 8am after breakfast, which consisted of omlettes and fruit and bread. We were briefed at the construction site about the project and the community members contributions to the project. We learned about how the older members of the surrounding community organized themselves in order to help build and provide resources for the school children to further their education in the comunity. We also learned about how the older school children were able to help our in the projects as well. Many of the children enjoyed the projects because they served as an outlet to release some stress from their home situations and enjoy the company of one another.

Our group split up into two team to help lay brickes and mix cement to make concrete for the brick laying, along with a couple of other volunteers. It was a lot of work but I felt like I learned a lot about the building process. We volunteered from about 9am to noon, with a small "sopa" break in between. I'm really happy with the project. We have a great team supporting us though the process, and it's easy to tell that they enjoy the work that they are doing. After lunch we headed to the bank to enchange money and go out for lunch. The rest of our afternoon and evening are pretty open other than dinner at 7pm. We're hoping to have the chance to explore a little later.