A Zippy Surprise

What an amazing day!

I´m feeling a little guilty - we´re having a lot of fun! Our team has formed an instant tight bond where we share everything from bowel movements to food concerns to favourite music. Hey, when you share a hole to pee in, modesty goes out the window real quick!

Anyway, after a half day of work moving more bricks and bending more rebar, we took the afternoon off and toured a coffee plantation. This cooperative employs 1200 people year round. The building infrastructure is minimal, but the number of plants is grand - we can only imagine how many people and how many hours it must take to pick all those beautiful coffee beans. At this plantation they grow high altitude, Bourbon and Courto (?) coffee beans that are a mix of sun and shade beans. They dry the beans but send them out to be roasted.

The property also included a tree reserve made up of tall North American pines, Guatemalan bamboo, and other trees. The biggest surprise of all were the four Zip lines that were part of the forest. Imagine me zipping over the tops of coffee plants, water ponds and bush. What a thrill. I know my son Aidan would love it. The finale of the tour was a taste of coffee back at the main office. Simply amazing and certainly an unexpected treat.

The weather continues to be a little rainy at nights and early morning but warms up to hover around 20 degrees. The evenings require a sweater.

Now, for all you Canadians - how would you explain the difference between the use of Hey and eh? We had a lengthy discussion on this topic with our Habitat Guatemala volunteers who happen to be American. Go ahead try and come up with an explanation and examples of each.

Today´s build also included a very special ceremony. We are about half way up and decided that we should burry some Canadian toonies in the building for good luck. So, we pulled out some Canadian coins. Our Guatemalan builders were very interested in seeing our coins and the strange animals on them. We never could figure out how to say beaver, but the charades were pretty impressive. Finally, we put one twoonie on each side of the entranceway. This way, a piece of us will always remain with these families in Guatemala.

Wouldn´t you say that´s a great day - building a home for a deserving family, creating lifetime friendships and trying something new and exciting for the first time?