Day of preparation

It's a holiday in Belize today, but the FPC team endured high heat and humidity and then celebrated a day of accomplishment. Anne, Caleb, Ashley, and Ellie got a great start on making nine tables for the Armenia preschool. They measured pieces of wood, and Abraham on the Jaguar Creek staff cut the wood with a power saw. The FPC team sanded all the cut pieces. Tomorrow they will learn how to build a table. By Thursday they will have built nine tables for preschool kids in Armenia, and they will have a new capability to add to their skill set. They are building relationships with each other and younger kids. For example, Caleb played soccer with two young Belizean girls. The multigenerational FPCers eat and pray together. We all cooled off together in Jaguar Creek--the real creek, not the lodge and collection of cabins, three of which are our temporary homes. The medical team--Dale, Teresa, Mary, and Carolyn--traveled with Tono to the village of Armenia, where Dale picked up a package of medical supplies she had sent. Then Mary drove the van in the opposite direction to St. Margaret. On the way we crossed Caves Branch River and noticed women washing clothes in the stream polluted with animal waste and pesticides. We saw an orange plantation, probably owned by an American company. Also grown in the jungle area are lemon, grapefruit, tangerine, mango, and papaya trees. We saw the part of the Maya Mountains that resemble a Sleeping Giant. At St. Margaret we noted that the water tank that the FPC team had installed was hooked up to the gutter to collect rainwater and that the school's second story was almost complete. We picked up Miss Lillie (Lilian Galdelmanus), who knows the community well as a member of the PTA and cook for the school. She took us to the building that is designed to be a clinic. The clinic has a waiting room with benches, a blood draw chair, and an exam table in three different rooms. We will work there Wednesday. In the afternoon the medical team counted pills and practiced drawing a drop of blood from each other. No, we're not blood sisters yet. Dale was teaching us how to take blood glucose measurements.