I'm an elf!!

My friend Jaime and I elfed ourselves today!!

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1117522456

It is pretty funny!!

Finish the Race!

I have begun the race to finish these last week and a half of school!! The weather is beautiful again today after two days of clouds. Normally this time of year is full of bright sun and cloudless skies. I look out my window each night hoping for those killer sunsets that I have seen in past weeks. Some days I see them, and other days are too cloudy. Regardless, I can’t complain about the view from my porches and roof. I hope that each of you could make it down to experience one with me some day soon!

We have just finished our first trimester of school and my students are doing great. Academically, I have no real concerns (unlike many of the other classes), so I am very pleased! My students love to be outside and I do too, so we get along great. We actually spent about an hour today reading and working in the grassy area by my room. Sometimes I think they work better in the fresh air.

These last two weeks have been much better than my difficult one. Brittany and Taylor are still recovering from their losses, but I know that the Lord will heal them in time. Kimberly is well out of the hospital and back to teaching after a week off for Christmas. Evan is still trucking! He is still in and out of Scottish Rite, but we are still praying and trusting in a full recovery!
Thanksgiving week was wonderful here! I spent Thursday at Nathan and Claudia Hardeman’s house. We had turkey, dressing, casseroles, pies, the works!! It was wonderful! We ate, laughed, talked about our friends and family in the US, and of course watched football!! On Friday, my roommate Rebeca and I visited Santa Teresita Thermal Pools in a town called Amatitlan about an hour from the house. The pools were heated very specifically and we had a package deal! We had a ½ hour massage, full day at the pools, and smoothie for Q105 (about $14!). It was incredible! We then returned home, ordered pizza, rented movies and were sitting down to a glass of wine when a friend called from school to get us to go dancing! The main catcher is that our water had been turned off for repairs, but off we went with our greasy selves!

Saturday and Sunday were uneventful and exactly what I needed. I watched some Christmas movies, played Sequence with Rebe, got the play by play on the football games via Beau and messanger, and napped on the couch! I am glad that I did not travel like the other teachers during this break. It was great just to take some Kelly time!

Now I am doing my best to make it through these next 5 ½ days!! Then it is time to “descansar” (relax)!! I hope that you are enjoying your holiday season and please listen to some Christmas music for me!!

Una Semana Dificil

What a hard week to be away from home. I have felt like so many thing have happened and all I have wanted to do is hug these lovely people pictured. Instead, I post their picture in hopes that you pray for each one of them with me. Brittany and Taylor Fletcher lost their puppy to a bleeding ulcer and Brittany's grandmother this week.


Kimberly Burns was in the hospital for a 25% collapsed lung. She has returned home and will recover, but this is still very hard news to receive over email.

Evan Smith (the little guy on the left) has been diagnosed with leukemia. I began babysitting for Ev, Mary Ford and Mark when Mark was just a few weeks old. Evan was not even two. Nolia and Brian (Evan's parents) became more than just parents that I babysat for, but close friends. Nolia always opened her home to me and all I had to do was hold a baby or read a children's story. Please pray for this family as they fight together. If you want to keep up with him please check out this website Evan Smith.

The view from my apartment!

Rebeca and her brothers, Joel and Pablo

Special People Teach Internationally

You have to be a “special person” to teach at an International School. You leave everything and everyone you know behind and move to an environment when they may not speak your language. It is obviously a completely different culture. Laws may not be the same. Social norms are not the same. It takes a special person! Here are some of these special people!

Mom's BLOG!

Mom sent this out as an email to some of her friends and I thought it was so great we should BLOG it! We had a blast and I can now post pictures!!

Hi everyone! As many of you know, we went to Guatemala to visit Kelly this weekend! It was great to see her and experience a very small part of her life there. We had Chamber of Commerce weather with sunny blue skies and perfect temperatures. Kelly says we brought the good weather as they have just finished a very long rainy season and she's ready to put her umbrellaaway for a while! On Thursday we were able to visit the school where sheteaches. It is a private American school - that means it's all taught inEnglish - and is very nice - with its own Jr. Olympic size swimming pool andnumerous soccer fields. The school is K-12 grade with a university adjacentto it - 55 acres in all. About 80% of the kids that go there are the wealthy Guatemalans and the rest are other nationalities. She lives about a 10 minute walk from the school and walks there every day. We spent Thursday night in her apartment which has amazing views of the city and three volcanoes and had dinner with one of her roommates. We also went to the home of the Guatemalan family that she is very close to and another young American family who runs the Young Life Christian group. They were all so warm and hospitable and we feel so much better knowing that she has people she can turn to if she needs something. Early Friday morning we began our trip to Lake Atitlan and the village of Panajachel about 90 miles away. We made it in less than 3 hours which is very good considering the conditions of the roads. Kelly was just able to purchase a car there - it's quite an ordeal - and I hope she's saving some money for new shocks and numerous wheel alignments for her 1999 Opel Astra! She has mastered the art ofGuatemalan driving. Rules? There are no rules! No one ever stops at stop signs - you just look and go. Sometimes red lights mean stop -sometimes they don't! But everyone's horn works, don't worry!!! At one point, she and Bobby just pulled in their side mirrors and trucked on through so close to two parked trucks I was sure we were going to scrape the side of her car!Once we got to Panajachel it is was well worth the drive - an unbelievably beautiful crater lake surrounded by active volcanoes. We walked around the village and then went to our hotel. The Hotel Atitlan is just magnificent and we all could have easily spent more than one night there! We met another American couple and the five of us rented a boat for an hour onSaturday AM and went on our own tour of the lake. Many villages and hotels there are only accessible by water so that was neat to see. Later that morning we left to spend Saturday night in Antigua, the old capital ofGuatemala. We checked into the Hotel Santo Domingo, a Colonial monastery that was turned into a hotel in 1989. It has 97 rooms built around theruins of a convent. We walked the whole city of Antigua - visiting thecathedral, central park and the market areas. Kelly had spent a week inAntigua with a family this summer attending Spanish school so she really knew her way around there too. She is quite the Spanish speaker now and wascomplimented numerous times by the Guatemalans on her ability! Saturdaynight we walked Antigua again and at dinner met a couple from Colorado in the process of adopting a baby girl, Isabella. They told us this was their third trip to Guate and they had hoped to bring her home this time but there was something wrong with the paperwork - again - and they didn't know when they'd get back home. They've rented an apartment in Antigua and have the baby with them now - she'd been living with foster parents. They're hoping to be home before Thanksgiving or Christmas but have not been given any timeframe. Kelly said the government there is making it harder and harder to adopt Guatemalan children. In fact, she told me not to take any pictures of people - especially children - unless she asked them if it was alright -they get very upset and think you're trying to sell their children over theinternet. We had two families on the flight home Sunday afternoon with baby girls. I hope it works out for Isabella soon.

It was a wonderful trip and Kelly took us to all the right places! The country is the richest as well as the poorest in all of Central America andwe saw just a very small portion of both, although the poverty level is muchmore apparent. It's a bit disconcerting to see military with machine gunsbut knowing that your daughter is living on a gated street in a gated building with nine apartments and its own private guard is of some comfort. She feels comfortable down there with her command of the language and she knows when and where to go places. Even though the environment is so different from what we're used to I can truly say I never felt concerned about our safety any more than I would walking around downtown Atlanta at night.

And everyone was very friendly to us - even the policeman at theroadblock who stopped us to make sure the car wasn't stolen!! I guess maybe an Opel Astra is a hot vehicle there!!

Kelly will be home for a week at Christmas and we're looking forward to having her here! Bobby and I have already decided to go back down there sometime in the spring for another visit. Here are a few pictures of the trip. One is Kelly with her car in front of her apartment, Kelly relaxingin the hot tub at Hotel Atitlan and three Bulldawgs on the streets of Guatemala on a Saturday during football season!!

Love to all,Kathy and Bobby (and Kelly)