in the village square: Visit from Family and the mighty Red Ant

Those are not freckles!

This week started with surfing on Sunday after church with a bunch of people at Grand Pacifica's beach. Aleida gave me her king-size sheet in which we created a wonderful bit of shade! Upon leaving the beach after sunset, we were putting our boards on the van, and we were all getting bitten by some kind of insect on our feet! I thought they were mosquitoes except they were only on our feet... they were red fire ants. As a result my feel look like this...all week...God bless the makers of Hydrocortisone cream and Benedryl.

In the created shade

Wearing my wetsuit- saving my skin one surf at a time!

The other exciting part of this week was that I have a family member in Nicaragua! Dani, my cousin Shannon's daughter is here with Abbotsford Christian's team, staying at the Nehemiah Centre. I was able to tag along with them on Thursday as they went with the Centro de Faye School to an Ecological Musuem. The museum was sponsored by the Canadian government! So there was information about the dangers of deforestation, erosion, the need for recycling... which really are important issues in Nicaragua... the people just don't have the means, knowledge or desire to worry about them. We also saw a sweet video, all in Spanish, about sea turtles (la tortiga) in Nicaragua, with some pretty graphic pictures of them butchering them as well as having them on their backs (alive) until someone buys them to eat. (poor turtles)

One of the posters- most of the scientific words were really similar...made me feel like I could read Spanish.

Then we went to La Machina - a national park that had this great waterfall. We ate lunch there, and we sat in the water ... it was a little shallow for swimming. But it was great to sit in the water and hang out.