After One Week

So we've been here a whole week already--it's crazy how fast it had flown by but also how quickly I've gotten adjusted to being here. 

I feel like I haven't written in forever so this might be a long one for the sake of my own journaling. 

Since I last wrote, we've celebrated 4th of July and traveled to Lake Atitlan, as well as having some more Spanish classes and days at placement.

As far as my Spanish classes, I actually think I'm getting a little bit better...still nowhere near perfect but I should at least have motivation to keep practicing once I get home. After Spanish class we usually get a delicious coffee and study before placement.

I'm still absolutely loving my placement. I've been able to do speech therapy every day and am making a binder with memory/go fish games for artic and language to leave when I go. I've learned that you can do a LOT of speech therapy with just index cards and some markers/crayons! I've also been helping translate some things--for example all the books that are donated are in English...makes sense I guess but not super helpful if no one speaks English. So I spent some time last week translating DORA into Spanish-it was kind of a fun game of clues/charades for the words I didn't know...like "rocket boosters" ;-) it went something like this:

Me: "el vehiculo que va a la luna" -the vehicle that goes to the moon.

Saul*: "el cohete"-rocket

Me: "si y las partes abajo con fuego pshhh"

Saúl: "pulsores del cohete"

Check! :-)

*Saul is one of the teenagers in the reciclarte program( Oh i haven't even talked about that yet! Another time but its an awesome program!) who is always stylin', his nickname is Galleta-Cookie and he kind looks like Luigi :-)

Some pics of speech:

Ok now on to our weekend--we went to Lake Atitlan which is about 2 1/2 hours from here. Steve and I went with a girl named Devon who lives in our house with us-she's awesome and she has a younger brother as well so she fits in perfectly with us-we had a really great time!  Steve has some AWESOME pics on his camera. I got a couple on my phone to share (the first is a market and the second is an incredibly colorful cemetery-both in Chicastanango where we went today):

On saturday, we went to a nature preserve to hike for around an hour and a half and we saw very active spider monkeys and got to climb across like 7 rope bridges by a waterfall. It was so much fun! We also took a boat ride across the lake to two towns which was georgeous with all the volcanoes around the lake.

Ok time for me to head to sleep--I have a little but of a cold so hopefully I can sleep well tonight :-)

Besos!

Valerie