HOT HOT HOT!

Hola mis amigos y amigas!

Wow this is turning into an absolutely awesome experience (Joanna - you and Dish would LOVE doing something like this - seriously). We finally finished el escuela (the school) today - it has been a long hard 3 days of building, tiling, jibbing, plastering, sanding (man that was hard!!) and finally painting!!!!!!! I have a new found appreciation of plasterers...how the??? That is such a hard job to get right! Definitely an art to it thats for sure. Our plastering job left much to be desired which made for a very long and painful day today of sanding and sanding and sanding....until about 3pm! We have awesome guys who are supervising our site - they are from a team called Baja Ministeries (a christian organisation that have been building houses for the poor in this area for 20 years i think). We only have a few ladders on site so as good old kiwis do we used a bit of kiwi ingenuity (aka horiness) and built ladders out of left over wood.....i managed to spill my paint pan twice all over me and ladder - no problema tho....just made my ladder look horyer (is this a word?? lol). The community around us every now and then come and look at whats going on. Checking out us gringos covered in paint and dust, sweating hard out! The lady across the road gave us homemade iceblocks that she had made for us today - it was such an awesome relief from the heat. I think we clocked 46 degrees at the building site! It is so so HOT!!

Oh and for those of you harping on at me about finding my Carlos or Jorge over here??? I have totally fallen in love.....his name is David and he is an adorable 10 year old boy who lives next to our building site. He is just such a happy little boy and loves having us there. He has no brothers or sisters, lives with his Mum and Grandma and doesnt go to school so plays by himself all day. It made me so sad to see him alone like that yesterday so today i gave him a few pressies. A soccer ball and some pencils and paper and a spanish-english book. He was stoked. I got him in the school painting with us for a couple of hours today to so that was awesome. My new friend for life!

This morning I got to experience visiting a local orphanage that one of the pastors of Baja Ministeries has just found about 10 days ago. It was an emotional visit for me. The couple that run this orphanage are just so amazing and have totally dedicated their lives to these kids. They both dont work as they are full time looking after 7 orphans they have plus thier own 2 children and rely completely on their faith to get by day to day. This weekend they have been asked to take in another 7 children! A mother of 3 kids heard about them and is a drug addict and wants to get clean and so is going to give her children to Kathy and Manuel for a year and check into rehab....the stories we have been told are just so unreal......each orphan has their own sad little story. At the moment the 9 of them live in a tiny little house - 4 kids in one room and 5 in another......the differences in our lives compared to their simple existence is just hard to get my head around - how they can live like this and still be so so happy!! They are amazing. We gave them food today and a suitcase full of presents for the children - the looks on their faces were priceless. Will try to get photos up as soon as possible for you to see! I left the orphange in tears - just totally lost it saying goodbye to them - typical Carla styles ha ha.

Gotta fly, dinner time...i have so much to write, could go on forever!!