Yepocapa

Today we got to take a road trip; I love road trips, even if there is no talking because in my head I know we are traveling and going somewhere exciting and on the way back I know that I’ve had fun at the place and had a good day. Our trip to Yepocapa was one of our shorter road trips, only taking three hours. We started going through the cobblestone streets of San Pedro and the next town over. Some people were complaining about how bumpy the cobblestone was, but Juan Carlos told us to stop complaining; the cobblestone was nothing compared to the poor infrastructure in the mountains. We came out onto a main paved road, and people were happy again. The car was quiet because of the paved road, and how smoothly we were going, which bugged the back seats (Jasmin and Shawn). So they started singing and others started to join in; we sang everything we knew. It started with all the greatest Christian worship songs, then it moved into Disney music after about an hour into the road trip, and then country, rock, rap, and musicals. It distracted us from the rocky roads that we moved onto, but it didn’t distract us from the lush green rainforest that we were traveling through. The roads weren’t as bad as the “shortcut” I have taken to Monteverde, Costa Rica; but the roads were still very bad. The couple of kilometers that were paved had huge potholes that almost completely stopped the car. We have to slow down to a halt because if we took the potholes any quicker than five kilometers per hour, we would have lost our bumpers and suspension. We stopped a few times for picture perfect opportunities: the volcano exploding, the valley with the volcano on the other side, and other picturesque occasions. On the non pothole paved part of road, there were rocks and dirt, and the dust it produced kept our windows closed for half the trip there. I still enjoyed the trip, seeing parts unknown and God’s beautiful creation. We arrived and went to the school that was there. Apparently a storm made a tree fall through the tin roof and the school was unusable, but what I saw the roof was still on. We then went up the hill to the school that Pacific Academy has been funding for five years already. Barely anything has changed since Kristen (grade 12 PA student) went up almost a year ago. PA has been giving money consistently and commitingly for five years, and hasn’t seen much production the past couple of years. It is suspicious and they are concerned thinking if they should still support this school. In Canada it took under a year to build a high school in the country. I give Guatemala some leeway, but five years is too long, when they are no where near done. I should have been up and running for a few years already. Apparently this half done school was supposed to open on Monday to 150 incoming students with no bathrooms or equipment; interesting. Maybe the contractors thought other stuff was more important, or maybe the building was more than they expected. If PA stops funding it, the school will be left as it is and the project will be dropped because the Guatemalans aren’t able to fund it: decision time. Some kids were up at the school, so we got a chance to play with them. I took out my football and we started to play catch. It was their first time ever playing football, and I must say they are pretty good. Soon enough we went down to Yepocapa’s central park. It was just as striking as all the other ones I’ve been to, with a flowing fountain in the center in it, with a mustard yellow church to the side of it. There we had our lunch. After our lunch, the kids came and wanted to play more football, so I did. We got kicked out of the park, so we decided to play on the streets. A couple of the kids also gave me a quick tour up and down the main street of Yepocapa. It was a cool place to visit because Yepocapa is a town flourishing with color, people, and economy, even in the midst of a volcano and being so isolated from every other town.