Guatemala!

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 The hubby and I just returned from a week in Guatemala with all of these amazing girls.

How many teenage girls do you know that would willingly spend a week of their summer working their buns off in Guatemala?!? Not only did they go and work but they earned the money to pay for their plane tickets AND raised money to help pay for the stoves we were installing in the homes.

We went to help chaperone and to help WORK!

We were literally hiking through the jungle every day to get to the homes where we were installing stoves. Corn stalks so high that we would have never found our way without guides.

A Mayan family at one of the homes where we installed a stove and water filter.

This is how they cook prior to us installing the new stove....an open fire in their home. Soot icicles hang from the ceiling and it's just filthy from all the smoke. Kids sometimes fall into the fires and get burned. They are also much more likely to have respiratory problems and it takes A LOT of wood to keep the fires going all day....expensive and time consuming.

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A typical bed was a frame with a board to sleep on. No mattress or anything soft at all. Just a blanket to put over them. A few families had the luxury of a concrete floor but most just had a dirt floor.

There's my man working hard. He was a work horse! I'm so glad I didn't marry a girly man!

 The new stoves being installed use 75% less wood and cooks very efficiently. More importantly, we put a flu in that vents all the smoke OUTSIDE!! No more soot covered walls and lungs.

The cockroaches don't like having their home disturbed. It was a good thing it was dark and I couldn't see very well the hundreds of cockroaches scurrying about. 

 The distortion in this picture is from the soot floating in the air as we were shoveling out all the ash from their indoor fire. I could hardly even breath. Tailor and I kept trading off so we could go outside and breath in a little fresh air in between shovels full of soot. 

A family with their newly installed stove and a flu to vent the smoke outside! Yipee!

 We hiked through lots of mud in the jungle. It was awesome!

This cute little boy when he saw me working in the rain, came and held an umbrella over my head while I worked. The children were so incredibly cute and sweet!

My awesome Father-in-Law came on the trip as well. He's a lot of fun and an incredibly hard worker. He taught my hubby everything he knows!

When the work was finished, we would play with the children.

This is a picture of them playing tag around Papa. He sat in the middle of the room while the kids ran in circles around him. It was pretty cute!

My sweet Mother-in-Law watched our kids while we were gone. She said they weren't very good about doing the dishes.  Sigh. Welcome to my dirty dish world! 

In spite of them not liking to do dishes, they're good-hearted girls!! They had a pancake breakfast before we left to earn money to sponsor a family in Guatemala. We had about 80 people show up and they ended up earning enough to sponsor nearly THREE families. We were so grateful for everyone's generosity and I was really proud of the girls and all their hard work. I hope we can take them to Guatemala someday to experience what we did.

More info. about the awesome charitable foundation we worked with....

www.mayarelief.com