If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed . Thanks for visiting! Some pictures to whet your appetite: The ladder being “fixed” The whole process, from start to finish. The process of moving the cement merits detailed exposition. The workers (and John) shoveled the cement into buckets that we had lined up (about 8 of them); these were the same buckets Ana and I had used to hurl water. I picked up a bucket, turned, handed it …
I have to take a moment to honor Ed Shirley, a friend who died suddenly today. Ed’s important to this blog because his story rubbed up against mine. We were cohorts at the Franciscan Federation Annual Conference several years ago; he and I had spoken on the phone several times prior to that. I asked/invited him to work with our Action Commissioners, as a member of an Action Circle in Austin, Texas. We hadn’t been able to meet in person before, as I …
*Disclaimer: This is MUCH longer than most of my other posts. It will take a while to read through. If you were to print it out, it would be about 2 pages double-spaced. I’m going to post part two separately. Almost three weeks after the fact, about to reconstruct the day of concrete and cement, I looked in my journal today to see what I’d noted, in the hopes that it might jog my memory of the day. What I …
6 a.m. was our departure from the Casa Retiros. To work backwards, that meant that breakfast began at 5:30, and wake up, 4:30. My earliest meetings, at home in the States, start at 10 am—that’s a stretch for me. My favorite time of day is morning, where I ease in—often with the same routine: skinny coffee and a book in my pajamas; an hour later, breakfast; then gather and prep for the day. I had no coffee with me, and …
To finish up our first day, let me tell you about our visit to Santa Clara and Paso a Paso . Santa Clara is the nursery that International Samaritan runs in cooperation with the city of Guatemala. There we met Sonia La Roche, a small but strong woman, who runs the nursery; she has worked at Santa Clara for years, since she met Fr. Vettesse. She shared with us that the people in the area told her she had to talk with “the crazy gringo …
