Okay, so I spent last week in Nebaj...Saturday to Saturday...with a group from York, PA. What we did was we went around to 7 different aldeas or villages surrounding Nebaj and we tied rebar together to make columns and then we poured the concrete footers for each column...in all we set and poured footers for 47 columns during the week. On Sunday we worked for about 5 hrs at a church that was in a village which started out as a refugee camp during the 30 year Guatemalen civil war which just ended in 1996. So after our work we went back to our amazingly nice, clean hotel (Q100 or $12.50 per night) to clean up before returning for church service at 4PM. So we went down there for church and had an incredibly loud worship before two of the team members shared their testimonies and two others shared the job of delivering the sermon. So all that happened and then at the end (as would be the case after every day of work that followed the rest of the week)

Here is a street level view from our hotel we stayed at. THe other photo is of the first day of work...this is inside the church building for which we placed the columns that will allow the expansion of this building.

So after the sermon, which Mike McComb (who is one of the coolest guys I´ve ever met), who is a missionary here since 1993, translated into spanish, and sometimes even Ixil (the local Mayan language which is the first language of everyone in Nebaj), we had a time of prayer where we prayed for the church members and then they prayed for us. This whole thing was pretty incredible. When the pastor called on people to come up front for prayer who had a need for physical healing, probably 95% of the congregation came forward. This was a theme throughout the first few days of working and it helped confirm where I´m called, that is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where there are no other MDs and no knowledge of how to take care of one´s body. The vast majority of all the health problems were relatively simple fixes that you or I would never bat an eye at, but they are huge problems for the indigenous populations here. Anyways, it´s time for me to go eat lunch...I may post some more photos from the week in the mountains. See ya!