Today was our orientation! Ellie (our project coordinator) met us in the Plaza Central of Antigua this morning to go over some safety tips and outline our schedule at Common Hope...I provided a quick background on Common Hope (in my own words) at the bottom of this post.

After we talked in the Plaza Central, we headed to a town right outside Antigua (the name is escaping me right now, but I'll post it when I remember). There are a lot of kids that are affiliated with Common Hope in the town we visited, so we got a chance to see the school and a the household of a lovely woman, Maria. The town is only a five minute drive from Antigua, but it looks like a whole different world. Antigua is filled with colorful buildings inhabited by wealthy Guatemalans (or tourists...), boutiques selling handmade textiles and antiques, and incredible restaurants...most of which have prices marked in US dollars. In this town, the school building badly needed a coat of paint, the houses were made of scrap metal, and the streets were littered with trash.

Yesterday in Antigua

Today at Maria's house 

 These were Maria's guard dogs...surprisingly, the smallest pup in the back was the feistiest!

A little background on Common Hope...
Common Hope was started 27 years ago by a couple from Minnesota. They came down on a mission trip in order to help the families affected by the Guatemalan Civil War (which spanned a course of 36 years and ended fairly recently in 1996). After many bumps in the road, Common Hope was born with the mission of providing education, healthcare, and housing to families in order to break the cycle of poverty. The program works to improve the lives of families by affiliating children with the program. Once a child is affiliated, the family receives a lot of benefits from Common Hope; the option to work sweat hours for a house, free health care, social work visits, and school supplies (which we handed out to children and their families yesterday). There are contingencies to being affiliated, though...the affiliated children must pass their classes in order for their families to reap the benefits that Common Hope provides. Common Hope gets almost all of their funds from individual donations, and is top-rated charity since over 83% of the funds go straight to the families. It seems like much of the success of the program is due to the fact that Common Hope is (now) completely run by Guatemalans, rather than Americans. The part of Common Hope that is the most special to my family and me is opportunity to sponsor a child and his or her family. My family has sponsored Sergio for the past two years after we met him on our first visit to Guatemala in March, 2011.

Sergio and my little brother Jack in March, 2011

There are a large number of children affiliated with Common Hope that still need sponsors! We will be doing profiles on some of the children we meet to provide you guys with more information on these children and their families that have so much potential and just need a boost. For more information on Common Hope, check out their website here: www.commonhope.org.
Tomorrow we begin construction on a house similar to those built by Habitat for Humanity. Once it is completed, the house will be transported and presented to an affiliated family that has put in anywhere from 160 - 400 sweat hours to earn it.

We will definitely need our rest since we are working nine-hour days. Everyone is asleep except for me...time for bed!


P.S. We opted to walk back to our house from the Common Hope main sight (which is called "El Proyecto") and I snapped this photo of Hana, Brian, and Lindsay! You can see part of a volcano in the background.

--Caroline