Thursday 1February

We began Thursday with our annual update to the St. Luke's wall panel. Audrey had an eager helper as she painted new names and touched up some existing ones.

She also touched up the heading for the In Memoriam section before adding the name of our friend Camille Marlowe to the list of past team members.

Here's the St. Luke's part of our week 1 team in front of the newly updated panel.

Don and Jeannine were recruited for our team by Holy Cross board members Richard and Cindy Shaffer. Here are the four of them in front of our St. Luke's panel. One of the projects for the week 2 will be to add panels for the other churches that have sent members to Belize with our team.

Bob and Wendy C. returned to Standard VI on Thursday for some more work on percents and fractions, but they recruited some additional help. Two young women from Maryland are taking a gap year between high school and college, and they are spending part of that year volunteering at Holy Cross. Their actual assignment is helping with an after school football [soccer] program for the older kids. But when they stopped by Standard VI for a "stay in school and work hard" talk, we signed them up to help with the math lesson. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

While Bob and Wendy C, worked on math, Audrey volunteered in the literacy center. The work is one-on-one and highly systematic.

Thursday is chapel day at Holy Cross, which means three consecutive sessions for the "itty bitties," the younger kids, and the older kids. Chapel starts with a reading ...

... and some prayers ...

... but the high point was Don's retelling of the Jonah story. After opening with a song about being swallowed by a boa constrictor, Don used a cucumber as a stand-in for Jonah's storm-tossed boat.

After hearing Jonah's message, the people of Ninevah repented and wore sack cloth.

Needless to say, the kids loved Don's version of the story.

Also on Thursday, the preschool had a career day where the kids dressed up in costumes for their chosen careers. 

A highlight of career day was this little girl, whose chosen career was to be a Holy Cross teacher.

After school, we moved on to celebrating Audrey's 25th birthday at Palapa Bar. From the bar, we could see a kite surfer and a parasailer - our team chose not to partake in either activity.

Other nautical stuff was visible from the bar as well.

Inside, Wendy C. introduced the bar to an American innovation: flights of liquor samples - in this case, rum. Unfortunately, the bartender forgot to identify which rum was which in the 12-slot tray. So even if we liked one, there was no way to order a full serving of it. The waiter did identify the one rum that was significantly stronger than the others. Nevertheless, several of us choked on it when we tried as small a sample as we could manage.

Here's our waiter Marcel at Audrey's celebration - he was fabulous.

We got a cake for the celebration from Ruby's bakery. It was far more than we could eat (although we tried!), so we left the remainder for the staff at Palapa.