It rained all night.
And when all you hear is running water for 10 hours straight you really have to go pee… After a night of little sleep (and a lot of pee…and rain), we awoke bright and early to start our day. We ate a quick breakfast of rice, beans, and some fried pork belly. After breakfast we met the leader of the small, but spread out mountain community– his name is Juan Pablo. Our goal for the day was to give out the 30 water filters we had and to teach the community how to use them correctly. Juan Pablo was a champ. He only had to watch me put together a filter once before he was able to do it himself and explain it without error– I was very impressed.
We decide to start small and only hand deliver seven filters to families in the jungle (the rest we passed out a group seminar later in the evening). This not only saved us a bunch of time, it also saved a lot of work– you see, hiking through the jungle is no easy task.
Once we were done with our jungle adventure we went back to the school.
The girls broke out the face paint and bracelet making material. After about five minutes the 12 by 18 ft. school was stuffed with around 30 kids and parents. After a about 15 minutes of trying not to suffocate, the leaders decided it was time to start our water filter seminar so we could give the filters to the rest of the community. We also brought along de-worming meds and were able to give enough medicine for every family. The medicine would get rid of all of the worms and parasites already in the people and hopefully, with the proper use of the filters, the community will be parasite free for the next 10 years. Juan Pablo was very organized and had the names of each family written on a sheet of paper so we could check them off as they got a filter– this made everything go quick and smooth.
After we gave all of the filters out, we went up the hill to have a dinner of rice, beans, and fried pork– we were also able to provide enough food for the whole community to have dinner. Once we finished dinner we headed back down to the school.
Because of the thick fog in El Cielo we only had around 12 hours of light and the next 12 hours we’d be in dark. The sun went down around seven– which is far earlier than any of us wanted to go to bed– so we would spend about three hours just talking and doing devotion. Once the clock hit 10 we were ready for our last night in the mountains. It ended up raining more that night than the previous day and night combined– we got soaked.