Finding Sunshine on a Rainy Day

Group 3 working hard on the second five rows of cinder blocks

by Mitchell Tracy and Debbie Shim
Today we continued our work on the house with another 5 levels of bricks. The progress was tough and sometimes it was hard to find time to complete all the different jobs. From cement mixing to brick’laying to spending time with the family, it seemed overwhelming at first. We were pulling together as a group and starting our final layer of bricks for the day when the skies opened up. There was a torrential downpour for about 30 minutes which to some would feel like an inconvenience, but I really saw it as one of the best parts of the day. The time we spent together cramped in a small metal shack with rainwater leaking in was great. We really had time to spend just hanging out with the family together as a whole, without having to worry about the completion of our work for the day.

Group 1 having fun hidding from the rain with Jenifer and Alejandra

Having the youngest girl, Alejandra, talk to me through the teddy bear we gave her and dance on the bed with her bright pink unicorn truly made all the tough cement mixing and sunburned ears worth it. The optimism and joy that the entire family has no matter the circumstances is truly inspiring. However, when we finished our work early and got to go home before everybody else, a hot shower seemed pretty nice too. After that, half of the group went to El Frijol Feliz (the happy bean) cooking school and my half went to Spanish school. We had one-on-one sessions for 1.5 hours. That was probably the most productive hour of Spanish class I have had all year! The simplicity of just talking in Spanish with a truly native speaker about anything for over an hour really helped me with understanding how to work around complicated phrases and really be able to communicate in Spanish. Then we ventured back to try the results of a couple hours of cooking school. To be honest, I was not expecting much at all and had kind of prepared to not have that much for dinner, but boy was I wrong. The chips and salsa was honestly some of the best I have ever had, and the rest was also tasty. I was really glad to experience a very cultural meal through the corn meal mash, for lack of a better word, wrapped in banana leaves that we had as an entree. Overall, this day was pretty awesome and let me experience the culture and lives of Guatemalans up close.

Debbie with Hector, one of the Guatemalan workers and the newest member of team 3

Group 3 also had a great moment of bonding with the family during the storm today. Our family’s four girls had been very shy up to this point, especially the youngest girl, Mariela. But when Taylor gave the girls coloring books and crayons, they lit up and all of a sudden they were lively.

Taylor and the girls working on the coloring books

We spent time with the girls in their home as they colored in their new books, and as their mother worked on her beautiful weaving that she said takes about 8 days to finish.

Olinda and daughter Sonia presenting their beautiful huipiles in front of house 2

The girls were all smiling so much, and Mariela even burst into song, making up the words and the tune as she went. Though we were feeling cold and down, we could all feel the warmth of their family and how truly thankful they were. After the storm, we went back to work and finished up cinderblock-ing. Then Group 3 had the nice little experience of not having a truck to take them back to the hotel. The other two groups had already left and we ended up waiting on the side of the road munching some energy bars for about 30 minutes until our truck with boss Oscar and Joe Collins, the FH2H founder, came to pick us up. Then, on the way back to the hotel, rain started to pour again, and we were a huddling, freezing, wet group trying to shelter under Sam’s poncho. All at once it was a combination of miserable cold and quality Group bonding time. After a rejuvenating shower, my half of the group went to a cooking class. We learned how to prepare very traditional cuisine: tamales, fresh salsa, and a plaintain dessert. The tamales were so much fun to make. The base of the tamales was a corn-meal mixture. We chopped up tomatoes, tiny green tomatoes called “mil tomates” (literally translated to “a thousand tomatoes”), an onion, and red bell peppers and boiled it for a while to make a rich, red salsa.

Wrapping the tamales in banana leaves with chef Gabi at cooking class

On a boiled banana leaf, we put a large scoop of the base, made a little crater in it with a spoon, filled the crater with the salsa and a piece of pork, covered the pork and salsa over with the base, added a pair of olives, a caper, and a fresh slice of red bell pepper on top, drizzled some more salsa on top, and then folded everything up in the banana leaf. Then we had to wrap that in a fresh banana leaf, tie it up with a sliced reed-type water plant, and steam the finished product. We all noticed that each tamale looked like a little gift. Dessert was pretty amazing. We boiled plantains, mashed them up, formed balls of them with our hands, and filled them with a special chocolate sauce. The chocolate we used was Guatemalan chocolate, which had a lot of granules of sugar that you could feel crunching in your mouth, and some cinnamon. The chocolate alone was delicious, but we melted it in a pan with some black beans (seems weird, but it, too, tasted great) and filled the plantain balls with that sauce. Then we fried the balls and they were very yummy. Dinner was welcomed by the entire, hungy Guat team. After dinner we returned to the hotel and are now just chilling with our fellow Guatos. All in all, a great day.

Danielle thoroughly enjoys the tedious job of putting cement between each of the cinder blocks

A hard day's work makes everyone smile in Guatemala

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