Christina and Nicole’s 3 and 1 year picture’s

We took the work team to Antigua on Thursday and I thought it would be a good time to take Nicole’s 1 year picture and Christina’s 3 year picture. We walked around inside a big church that was built in the early 1700’s and then collapsed about 50 years later from a earthquake.

More lava pics.

After we went to see the lava more people wanted to go (I should start a tour group). So on Saturday I took my family and a friend here  at school. This time we went during the afternoon.  

Lava

After Pacaya erupted another crater formed at the base. We heard that lava was flowing so Nick and I went exploring to try to get some lava pics. We had seen in the paper that this new crater is in Los Pocitos so we went on Google maps and found this little village. We had never been over in those boondocks but we figured we would just go and ask. When we got close to the town it got real foggy but we kept going anyway and when we got to Los Pocitos we talked to a local and he offered to take us up to the lava. So he got in the car with us and we drove as far as we could and then we walked about 30 minutes up through a pasture to the crater. After we got to where it was erupting it finally cleared off and was very awesome. I never thought I would get this close to lava shooting about 100 ft in the air and a river of lava about 30 ft wide. Before the big eruption of Pacaya this pasture was just a normal pasture without lava flowing out of the ground and  all they had was a beautiful view of Pacaya.   

SINKHOLE! Well when you think it’s over something else happens. Saturday night this sinkhole occurred in Guatemala city. Nobody fell in but a three story house fell in. The hole is about 120 ft across at the widest point and about 100 ft deep. Nobody is allowed within 1 block of the sinkhole except people who live there but some guy seen me trying to take pictures and told me to follow him to the sinkhole. The police let me get within 30 ft of the hole but not close enough to look down.

View Full Album

VOLCANO ERUPTION! Yes we are all safe and sound after the eruption. On thursday night I thought I heard it raining so I went out on the porch and a Guatemalan said no it's not raining. Well I thought this guy was losing it because it sounded like rain or sleet and it was 70 degrees so it definitly was not sleet. So I put my flip-flops on and went out in the grass and he was right it wasn't raining but it was black sand. It didn't take us long to realize what was going on and were confused because we live 16 miles as the crow flies from the Volcano. The black sand was exactly that black sand, when I picked up a handful and rubbed it around my hands didn't get black. On friday morning we got up to check out the damage. After taking some pictures I decided to start cleaning up here at school. Soon another american started to help . In the pictures the one with the guy shoveling off the red patio is at school were we are curently staying and the picture with the red car in the carport is at our house. After we got done cleaning up the patio and parking area we packed up and headed for our house via the long way to get a closer look at the damage. The other pictures are from the bottom of the hill at Los Humitos and for those of you who don't know where this is it's a road we use fairly often with work teams. They got up to 2 inches of this stuff but it wasn't just sand , they also got fine stone and up to 1 inch stones.The sand and stones stop coming down thursday night and then it started to rain & rain & rain.... Almost everywere the rain was pretty clean but at Los Humitos they got a pretty heavy mud rain as you can see in the pictures. As far as I know only 1 person died from rocks hitting him.Well this is saturday night and it is still raining. We are getting a tropical storm right now that is supposed to dump 12-30 inches of rain. All in all it's pretty interesting right now because the last time this volcano erupted with this much force was 12 years ago even though it erupts pretty often. Oh yea did I forget to mention we had hiked up Pacaya about three weeks ago.

My daughter is finally reaching out and teaching others how to play Parcheesi!

This is what happens when you lose self control on a nice sunny day. I usually sit on the porch to to my homework and I look out over the courtyard watching these little Hummingbirds so I took a little break from home work and took some pictures here at school.