Moving to Magdalena and Students International

 (composed by Katy)
After a crazy few days of travelling to and from Tikal, we finally arrived back at our host families' houses in Antigua around 6:45am. Most of the group immediately crashed, napping for a few hours. However, Chad and Laura hurried off to the start line of an annual 12k race held in Antigua. The rest of the group thought they were insane for wanting to run 7 or so miles after two nights of little sleep and an entire day of walking through the rainforest, climbing Mayan ruins. Regardless of this, Chad finished 7th (amongst hundreds) and Laura pushed through the tail end of her sickness and finished strong. After the race, we packed up and headed to our final destination and the place we will be working for the next three weeks:: Magdalena. Right as we got off the van in Magdalena, we were greeted by Matt (the SI leader of the Appropriate Technology site) and our host Families. The host families took us to our houses and we got moved in and situated before heading off to our orientation with SI. During this orientation we basically just went over the basic rules/expectations for our time here. Next, we broke out into teams and went to the site we will be specifically working at. This site, the community center, has been in the process of being built for the past 2 years and is finally almost finished. It is a great building equipped with workshoups, a kitchen, a big meeting room (for classes for the community) and a health clinic that is open MWF. After seeing where we will be working, we went back and had dinner, getting to know more about the other teams working here this week. Next we had a quick team meeting, kind of to check up and see how everyone was doing. Finally, we went back to our houses, exhausted, but ready for the week of work to come!