*Imported from blogspot

Welcome all to the blog once again! We have a few updates…

Sarah was offered a chance to do a workshop on Domestic Violence for the women’s group that meets monthly at the Catholic Church at our town… here are some photos:

Power and control wheel for Sarah’s Violence Prevention charla with the women’s group at the Catholic church in town.

The women making their posters of different aspects of how violence affects the community.

The women’s group! (background: Jesus)

Bonus: Our English class

Our weekly English class. We had them run a race to match colors from Spanish to English.

Sarah teaching the colors.

Mat teaching some grammar.

That’s it for now! Have a great weekend and try to stay warm in February.

*Imported from blogspot

We have continued working in our rural community with a couple of charlas this month. We gave the last one on Sunday and it was crazy! This drunk showed up and was speaking some wild mix of Spanish, Ki’ch’e, and English. The leader of the community, Roberto, was pissed but he couldn’t really do anything about him. Due to this, we were afraid that the message was lost. Luckily, Roberto is amazing and will review what we covered. Mat met up with Roberto later in the week and he told Mat that they are really happy about the work we are doing. And while there are troubles with language at times, we make our charlas short and simple (plus we are constantly repeating EVERYTHING) so they are getting a lot out of the presentations. And we are a form of entertainment for them as we provide lots of laughter since we are always making asses out of ourselves and are continually talking about poop. There are so many days when Mat and I feel so much hate for our program so it felt damn good to have someone tell us we are doing good work.We are hoping the doctor will help us get to working in 2 more communities with adults. But he is of the “there’s no rush” mentality so even though we are constantly bugging him it could be a while before we get going. In the meantime, when school starts in the next two weeks, we are going to start giving our health charlas in 4-6 schools (2-3 per week). We also give English classes to about 30 people (from ages 12 to mid-40s) on Tuesdays and Fridays. We tried to avoid doing English classes for as long as possible but so many have asked us to give them that we finally gave in. We had our first one last week and it went really well. Actually it was very fun! Plus we have been able to meet some new, good people.

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