Screws hold a house together...

Hi, I just wanted to tell you what I have been doing here in San Vicente and San Antonio Caminos.  Also I would like to say a special thank you to my school in Calgary (Escuela Canyon Meadows) for collecting juice boxes.  With the money earned from this recycling we bought lots and lots of screws.

  We had enough screws to build two houses.  The first house we built was for a lady named Christina and her husband Carlos.  They used to live in a small shed attached to Christina’s mom’s house.  The second family was Isabel and Juan.  They have seven kids, five live with them right now.  The houses look like this.

I like to put the screws into the door because it`s fun to use the drills.  Sometimes I don`t get the screw in on the first try, but usually by the second try.  It takes about one whole day to build a house.  The first step is to dig really big holes for the posts of the house to go in.  Then we put the house together.  When the house is built, we buy gravel, cement, and bricks to build the floor and finish the house.

Another house we built last week with my Uncle and Auntie was for a family with a kid named Fernando.  He cannot walk because he got sick when he was little.  We are going to buy him a wheel chair and we already got him a goat, because his parents couldn`t afford to buy him milk.  His mom is named Flor and his sister`s name is Kimberly.  His dad and his dad`s friends helped us build the house.  Here is a picture of Fernando. 

I have a nice school with a couple of new friends.  Every Thursday we go to a soccer court (called “la cancha”) and we play soccer because this is our gym day.  There are four boys and three girls in my class.  My friends are named Rudy and Kevin.  We like to play a game called Tazo.  To play you each have a chip and you try to flip the other person`s chip the number of times that you said you would do it.  My teacher is named Profesora Marina.  She is really nice.  She doesn`t speak any English, but I am teaching her.

There are two really good ice cream shops near our house.  One of them is named Sarita and the other one is named Boston.  I like both of them.  My favourite thing to get is soda with ice cream.  I especially like orange soda and orange ice cream.  There are some different foods here and two of my favourites are called Pupusas and Tamales.  In the tamales there are chicken and potatoes and in the pupusas there are beans and cheese.

In San Antonio there are lots of animals like dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and cows.  We really like to play with the baby dogs because they are very cute.  There is lots of room to play and run around.  It`s fun to ride around in the back of the truck.  Right now it is very dusty in San Antonio, but the rainy season is coming soon.  Then everything will be mucky.  Most of the moms there wash their clothes by hand in the river.

In San Vicente there is a really tall clock tower that we have climbed up three times already.  From the clock tower you can see just about everything, but I can`t quite see all the way to Canada.  Here there is a big garbage truck that goes by our house every day.  They take the garbage that we leave out for them.  Some people put their garbage in the sewer.  Then the rain washes it away.  I think that this is sort of gross because it washes it all into the ocean.  But I still really like San Vicente because the people are really friendly.

Kade