What's New:

I´m very pleased to be typing this from our BRAND NEW OFFICE, full of sunlight, books, and the smell of fresh paint (maybe that´s what´s making me delirious...). Yes, it´s true. We have finally moved into our new community center! Volunteers stayed after lunch on Friday to help lug over boxes of books, tables, chairs, and the stove and refrigerator from the old school to our new location at 28 Avenida. This week we´re finishing up some work on the classrooms and by next week all the kiddos will be over here for Manos de Colores as well. 

This week marks the last that we´ll be working at the construction site of the new community center! Well, we think so, at least. J The construction hombres came over for lunch today, whipped up by Chef Pati, and went away stuffed. This weekend we´re going to haul our books, papers, computadoras, desks, chairs, you name it, over to the new location. Update your address books! As of March 8 we´ll be at 28 Avenida 0-64 interior, Zona 1, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

 

This week we said goodbye to our International Coordinator, Rachel Wakling, who has been with us since the beginning of November 2009. Rachel has done a fantastic job at El Nahual and her energy, sense of humor, and Project Management spreadsheets will be sorely missed. Thanks for all your hard work, all the good times, and the commitment to El Nahual, Rx!

 

Today is the last day of the evaluation! All the schools have done it, even the adults at the Saturday primary school. It’s been a week of colouring in, marking and inputing the results – Annah is sporting a nice callous on her right hand! Overall we will have evaluated over 300 students of differing ages. It will all be so worth it when we redo the evaluation after Unit 4 and find that everyone scores 100%!!

 

The Quetzaltenango public schools are back in session, and this week we´ve returned to our regularly scheduled programming along with a few new schools!