day 138

We were all excited to get back to Las Flores for a full day of work Thursday. There was one problem though....it was POURING.

Like end-of-the-world-cats-and-dogs-the-sun-is-never-coming-out-again pouring.

Which sucked for like, 4 minutes... but then once we realized there was no way to avoid getting wet, we all just embraced it and kept on working. Until we realized that the only thing worse than being wet was being wet and cold. That made things a little, tiny bit miserable. After a while though it was sort of just a big joke, and in the end we wound up getting a lot of work done! We made enough cement to make columns in the walls of one of the classrooms and kept laying cement blocks to form the walls themselves.

At one point Katlyn and I stopped working and brought out some of the crafts we had brought for the kids. Kate brought this awesome spin art machine which was a big hit, and I brought a ton of colored strings to make friendship bracelets with. I had this vision of all of the kids sitting around making bracelets and loving every minute of it, but none of that happened as soon as the kids realized that I would just make the bracelets for them. They just picked colors and I made about 7,042 bracelets by the end of the day (I'm not gonna lie though, it was a nice break from the rain!) I left the string there for them to keep and they were super happy :)

We made a pit stop on the way back to the hotel at a supermarket, where I made my best purchase of the entire trip:

Think that's an exaggeration? You try putting 4 girls and all of their sweaty, gross work clothes from the past 4 days into a small, moist hotel room and see what kind of smell you get. They claimed there was laundry at the hotel but it was outrageously expensive and you had to give your bag of clothes to the front desk and you'd get it back after 24 hours. Sounds overpriced and sketchy if you ask me. The lysol spray worked just fine :)

(at least until I could get home and wash all of my clothes with Clorox!)

That night we all watched a movie called Sin Nombre. It was sort of two interwoven stories - one about a girl trying to make her way across the Mexican border into the US, and one about gangs and gang violence. It was a great movie - kind of disturbing but very eye-opening. Here's the trailer if you're interested!