This week wasn't just a day at the beach...

Ok, so it did START with a day at the beach but the remainder of the week was filled with much music festival preparation and the festival itself!

On Sunday we loaded up early and headed out to Sipacate, a beautiful black sand beach only reachable by lancha.

We spent the day lounging around, boogie boarding, playing frisbee and volleyball, and soaking up the sun.

We made it back to Antigua just in time for a budget meal at a little illegal Japanese restaraunt that only serves 20 people every Sunday night. Once they have sold 20 tickets, they close up shop. The food is made 2 servings at a time so serving 12 people took a little time but the wait was worth it!
~
~
~
After a stress-relieving day at the beach, we jumped right back into music festival mode with a 2 hour long Monday morning meeting to assess our progress and get in the zone for the week. We met up with a man named Brooks who works for a men's magazine in the States and is willing to do some major publicity work for CasaSito, starting with an article on the festival!

As the Music Festival Volunteer Coordinator, my week was spattered with email after email trying to recruit volunteers to help with advertising. (This is more difficult that you would think considering we had 30ish volunteers on the email list but many had to work on other volunteer projects during the day.) Also in charge of advertising, much of the week involved lots and lots of walking around Antigua. My trusty sidekick, Lorenz, and I talked to employees at almost every store, travel agency, and hotel on the west side of Antigua. We let them know about the festival and asked to post 'afiches' and leave mini 'afiches' to pass out to their clients. "Somos de la organizacion CasaSito y tenemos un festival de muscia este fin de semana en Santiago Zamora...blah blah blah...podemos colocar este afiche aqui en la puerta?"

We were trying to offer for the travel agents to make a tour out of the music festival by organizing and charging for a shuttle since the festival was held about 25 minutes outside of Antigua. Most of them are too lazy to design any tours because the hundreds of travel agents in Antigua all share the same tours and packages. By the time the weekend came, we'd exhausted our supply of flyers 5 times over and had to keep copying more so the weekend volunteers would be able to recruit more people to get on the free shuttle out to Santiago Zamora.
~
~
~
On Thursday we got the volunteers together for a dinner/drinks at Kafka and went out for ladies night again at La Sala (which means I have officially attended every La Sala ladies night since I got here...also meaning I'm getting pretty good at this salsa thing...or not).
~
~
~
Lauren finally arrive on Friday afternoon after a loooong delay in Ft. Lauderdale. No time for settling in, we had to go say bye to Jill (a CasaSito English teacher) on her 21st birthday and her last night in Guatemala.
~
~
~
We put the volunteers to work all day Saturday blowing up 300 balloons, making posters, cutting up streamers, and picking up the endless amounts of trash along the road between San Antonio (where the chicken bus ends) and Santiago Zamora (where the festival was held).

Lauren and I took a group of students from GlobeMed at Loyola out to dinner on Friday night, recruited them to volunteer at the festival, and learned about their CasaSito project in Primavera Ixcan where they taught clinic staff how to properly sterilize equipment and the procedure rooms.
~
~
~
Sunday, the day of the festival, turned out to be a beautiful day (the audience got to use their umbrellas for shade rather than rain protection!).

With no major disasters and no rain at all, the happy visitors spent the day listening to children singing for first place which would land them a keyboard and Q5000, second place which raked in Q3000 and a guitar, or one of the three participation places which still got them Q1000 and a guitar. All of the groups also got a pink or army styled backpacks and a book of songs from the Yale Alumni Chorus (the sponsors of the event). The home team won the big prize and were quite thrilled at that.

After the children sang festival attendees got a preview of the Yale Alumni Chorus which would be performing a free concert again in Monday night.

Then there were three local bands: a marimba...the group with the most difficult equipment to move, Las Estrellas...only two of the three chicas could come but they really tried to get the audience moving with some salsa and poppy music, and Non Plus...the group of high school boys that...well, sounded like a group of high school boys.

Meanwhile, everyone had the opportunity to shop around at the organization booths which were advertising their work and selling jewelry, art, and other cositas for fundraising. The women of Santioguito had worked full force for weeks to produce textiles of every style and color for the festival.

Other families from around the community came together to keep everyone at the event happy by making and selling all kinds of food from fruit to local desserts to traditional tostadas and crazy corn (which comes loaded with a 3-day supply worth of salt, ketchup, mayo, and parmesean cheese to taste).

Other entertainment included 'gigantes' (stilt people), 'tambores' (drum and flute players to announce the festival), facepainting, and 'hula-hulas.' The 'gigantes' and 'tambores' were hired by the women of Santioguito (the womens' association that organized the festival) to make the festival 'official'. Our volunteers enjoyed spending the day painting CasaSito logos and rainbows on the faces of every child at the festival.

~
~
~
No slowing down now! The first two days of August set the precedent...this is guaranteed to be a busy month. With Lauren here, this week we're going to tour some of the CasaSito projects this week and start working on one, check out Animal AWARE (so we can send her home with a new furry friend), perhaps get some piercings. Next week, Honey will be here so the days will be packed with Tikal, Lago Atitlan, y mucho mas. The week after will be more project working and preparation for the EGL trip and, for the final week in August, we will be in Xela working on the radio center construction with EGL. Finally, in September, I will be able to breathe but that also means that all of the excitement that August is bound to bring will be over. In Spetember though, I will make a trip or three up to Samox San Lucas to move forward with Health in Action's relationship building and community assessment within the community!