its hard to believe this is my last few days, my last weekend, here in guatemala. my time here has gone so fast and i can't even believe all that has happened in my life these past months. the other day someone asked me to share with them my experience when i get home and as i began to think about what to share, i was slightly overwhelmed. how do you summarize 6 months of this? i'm sure i will figure it out. as for now, please be praying for my last few days here to be enjoyed and that i could have good final memories. also be praying for what God has for me next.

my past week has consisted of some interesting things. So a little over a week ago, volcano Pacaya decided to erupt and rain down ash all over the city. I don't even know where to begin to describe what has happened this past week. Ok so that happened on a thursday and it was really cool at first and fun to play in, but kinda hurt if you stood out in it while it was raining down. but it was pretty small. the largest we could find was like maybe the size of a marble and those weren't very common. It kinda reminded us all of black snow. we played in it a little and everything. wrote our names in the few inches of ash on the ground and just messed around. So then the next day, friday, we realized it really wasnt that cool. Yes it was like snow, but the wonderful thing about snow is that it melts and goes away on its own. so now you may be asking, well then how in the world do you get rid of inches of ash that are covering EVERYTHING!? well that is a very good question and yes it did cover absolutely everything, including roofs and well i dont know anything you can think of. well you must then use shovels and brooms and clean it. but what really stinks is that it is currently rainy season. so friday it rained off and on making the ash really heavy and difficult to move. So as some of you may know, saturday decided to add to the interestingness of life here in guatemala. Agatha, a tropical storm, decided to come and it rained the entire day. poured actually. it never stopped raining the entire day. So this caused much flooding and mudslides here in guatemala and many roads were closed and many homes were destroyed. but we werent affected by it really minus the fact that we got tons and tons of rain.

so then all schools were closed for the week because of all that had happened, which was good because we had quite a bit to clean. So monday started the cleaning process and we shoveled and swept ash all week. we would load it into our 2 trucks and our wheel barrels and unload them in this one area in a pile. it was quite difficult since the ash was still pretty wet, which made it very heavy. So yeah we worked super hard, and i dont think i've every done so much physical labor so much in one week, quite intense. we got on roofs to clean, which was hard. thursday i had to help clean the gutters of one of the roofs, which was super scary since we had to sit on the very edge of the roof to do that, but it had to be done. so that was my super interesting week of cleaning. I still don't feel like the ash is ever going to go away. its everywhere still. but it definitely looks a lot more normal than usual.

Life is finally getting to be normal again. :)

only 2 weeks left here. :(