one hot shower, por favor

Advance warning--the following post contains limited punctuation because I am still using a Spanish keyboard with mysterious symbols on the keys where punctuation marks ought to be.

Tonight is our last night in Nicaragua and it has been a wonderful week. As I write this I am sitting in Amigos office at just before 7 PM on Saturday night. Most of the group has already left for home in the USA, and its just Morley, Carol, Juan the security guard and me here in the house at the moment. The medical team that arrived last night has walked to a local cantina for dinner, and Lisa and Doug are with the remaining group climbing a volcano about an hour away.

What a week. We have been absolutely filthy and bone tired every day but we ve loved every minute of it. Lisa and I painted a big exuberant mural on the side of the recently built medical clinic, and Lisa and Carol taught some art classes.

Morley and Doug planted several hundred fruit trees--literally--and shoveled tons of Selecto to create the foundation for new school classrooms. By the way, Selecto is a combination of lava rock and sand thats incredibly heavy and unwieldy to shovel but it compacts beautifully and makes a great foundation which can stand up to earthquakes. Please pretend there were parenthesis around that last sentence. I would have put them there if I could have found them on the keyboard. We shoveled, painted, moved things from Here to There, and cleaned out a farm shed. If its heavy, weve carried it or shoveled it.

The Amigos staff down here did two really sweet, special things for us this week. On Tuesday night--the first group dinner after Carol arrived from England--they threw a 60th birthday party for Morley, complete with a cake and a pinata. Morley swinging at the pintata was hilarious. I made home movies which I will gladly show you. Pretend there were parenthesis around that sentence too. Thanks.

The other thing they did was to devote one day to celebrating our upcoming marriage. The morning devotional was all about love, then they formed a circle around us and prayed for our marriage to be successful. The whole thing was so beautiful and touching and made both of us a little damp eyed and mushy.

That evening after we got home from working at the village, the Amigos group arranged for all 15 of us to go to dinner at a local restaurant. As a special treat they had arranged for Morley and me to be driven there in a real actual car which was a nice change of pace from riding around in the back of a pick up truck all week. The rest of the group walked to the restaurant to meet us and we literally drank every bottle of wine the restaurant had--all four bottles--and ate every single steak in the place--all five of them. The food was delicious, the company was excellent, and they ended the evening by giving us a wedding card that each of them had signed. What a night that was--we will never, ever forget it.

Tonight we pack up and leave for the airport in Managua at 4 AM so I need to get going and start packing my nasty clothes and get ready to go home. I'll tell you more stories about our adventures after I get home and get my hands on a keyboard that speaks English.