Kathy's Blog: May 2nd 2010 – The Week in Review

It was a full week. But that is nothing new.

The very first thing that happened was the birth of Otilia’s grand-baby. This was a wonderful start to the week.

And the rest of the week brought lots of activity.

We delivered 220 sacks of fertilizer to Virginia and 116 sacks of fertilizer to Corozal. Those deliveries were thanks to those communities’ partner churches of Dallas Center Presbyterian and Ankeny Presbyterian respectively.

I also got to see the progress of the construction of the new retaining wall in San Francisco. This wall will protect the church that sits on top of the hill. With the new wall, when the heavy rains come – as they do every year - the church will stay put! Landslides, both big and small are common here. Both the church and the new wall are thanks to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Des Moines.

The UCA (University of Central America) visited El Tablón Cerna: 28 students, their teacher and a technician who will live in Cerna for the next 8 or 10 months to train and help develop to self-sustainability, the new co-op that has been formed spent the morning working. 25 families will have a consistent income when this gets going. They will be raising hens – both layers and fryers. And down the line, they hope to add a honey project. The success of this project will be because of the efforts of the UCA, Heartland Presbyterian in Clive (Cerna’s partner church), The Pastoral House and most important: the people of Cerna who are the owners of the Co-op.

We hosted a gentleman representing the New York Rotary Clubs working with us in the Water Filter Project. We spent hours in meetings with both the Pastoral Team members as well as the San Miguel Rotary Club members. We visited a few homes in the communities that have filters, and participated in a celebration to honor the people in the communities who have been and will continue to be committed to working for the success of this project.

We also drove about an hour and a half to attend the 15th anniversary memorial event of the fallen martyrs of the civil war. Not just the famous ones, but all of them. There was a mass, music from a ‘revolutionary group,’ speakers, a horse tournament and lunch. This is a 3 day event. We only were able to attend a smallish portion. There were several other representatives of other institutions working in the municipality.

Saturday finally arrived full of rain and I was able to have another catch up day. I got my over 150 emails down to less than 20. Some just needed filing, many needed smallish responses, some only needed to be deleted. I did 2 community reports (a fertilizer and wall update), a couple smallish water filter reports, my 2 monthly Compañeros reports are now done and I was even able to begin work on an itinerary for one of our June delegations.

I do like a busy week.