santa maria, half marathon, and special olympics

I'm going to gloss over a lot - but here's some recent events and updates.

So, everything is still going with the Special Olympics. We met up with the director, talked things out, I've got everybody's forms, and have downloaded all the rules. We had our first couple practices and its awesome because one of the newer volunteers used to volunteer with the Special Olympics in the states and knows how to run practices and the rules we got to stick to. I'm so excited! We have about 15 kids who are going to participate and we separated them into two groups - the younger, really energetic kids, and the other older, calmer group. Its so great its happening!
Hopefully tomorrow will be our first training in an actual stadium and not at NPH. We're going to take a trip with a few of the kids and practice with the track and the lines and all that jazz. We've got transportation set - I just hope we crossed all our "t"s and dotted our "i"s to actually get there and practice!

I had a couple great weekends. A couple weeks ago Charlotte and I decided to take Friday off and head to Xela for a long weekend. Every once in a while, its so great to get away and get refreshed. We decided to climb Santa Maria, one of the 10 volcanoes that surrounds Xela. We left at 4am and arrived at the top at about 8. It was amazing. I struggled a bit the last half hour with all the altitude and steep climb, but making it to the top made it all worth it. We felt like we accomplished something (which my sore leg muscles attest to), and we got to really engage with nature. It was perfect.

Last weekend, a few volunteers ran a half marathon and a group of us went to cheer them on. As it was in the morning on Sunday and there's lots of stuff to do in the capital, we stayed the night on Saturday with a friend and her family. They were all extremely nice and wonderful. Saturday we took advantage of the fact that the Body Works exhibit was in Guatemala. It was really cool and really interesting. I liked the guy with all the nerves like a creature out of a tim burton movie. I think its amazing that even though the exhibit has traveled to so many of our countries, a good amount of us hadn't seen it yet. Then Sunday morning we all went to the race - about 9000 people running. The excitement was contagious and all the runners did great! (Charlotte under 2 hours whoa!!). Afterwards we all celebrated at IHOP which was wonderful and weird.

In my classes we're continuing coming up with a dance for our little play and making all the masks, props, and costumes. I hope it all goes well and I have a list of people to invite (it will be a smallish audience I think). But they are so cute. School will be ending in about a month and we have about 2 weeks of crazy independence activities amongst other things, so I hope we're able to finish everything in time.

Eeek - officially here in Guatemala for 8 months on Friday. Did that really just happen?
Anyway, its crazy hard to upload pictures - sorry about that. But I have some on facebook.
Hope you are all well!!