It is so good to be here in the town of Victoria, our home base!
We arrived this afternoon to be greeted by Pablito and Rosita and, to our great delight, all the families we’ll be building houses for! This is a new initiative to have all the families here at the very beginning before any of the building happens and it just felt right. We all sat down together and did formal and fun introductions with each person there. Our awesome translators, Marcella and Yancey, did a great job dispite all the laughing at how some our names had to change to make them pronounceable – Abel is now pronounced a-BELL, Colin will be Colleen and Paul will be Pablo…
It was also great to show up and find that Pablito’s church has a new sign hung above the door “Transforma Cabanas”. Our Novacom Team immediately noticed this and smiled as we recently changed our name to Novacom Building Partners with the slogan Transforming Construction. We love our new slogan because we believe that allowing ourselves to be transformed by the people we serve and work for will allow our work and all we do be transformed for the better too. So great to see Pablito’s and Rosita’s service doing the same.
After getting unpacked we grabbed some dinner at the local restaurant that takes care of us every year. We all ate our fill of pupusas and then headed up to the magical fields at the highest point of the town. This view never gets old. Besides the beauty of the view there was an even greater beauty when a-BELL crossed paths the the little boy he meet two years ago. a-BELL shared with us that it was connecting with this boy that first really warmed his heart to El Salvador on his first trip here.
We stood around with the locals taking in the sunset as some of us even threw the frisbee around.
Now we rest and get ready for our first day of building. Wish us well as we venture into the steep hills of the surrounding villages. We’ll be hiking, lifting and digging with our lilly white soft office-worker bodies in the 30° heat. Hopefully at least one of us survives to tell you about our first day tomorrow evening… Nighty night!
