Festival of Barriletes and a week in Antigua

Hi friends!  I'm feeling much better!  Thank you so much for your prayers. 

There are many people here that I'm loving getting to know better, but one who is close to my heart is one of the teenagers who goes to the church.  She is so precious and has so much pain in her heart from a broken past with an abusive and dysfunctional family.  She is incredibly smart and talented and works so hard, but can't see her own talents and value, not because of what she is able to do or how hard she works or the grades she gets, but simply because she is made in the image of God.  As a mental health professional and social worker, I can tell she's battling depression, but given the cultural context it's much more complicated, so helping this teenager work through this and open up and trust me has been very difficult.  It's an awesome relationship though and I love her very much.  Please keep her in your prayers. 

This week, I decided to take a week and go to Antigua for an intensive week of Spanish language study.  I started yesterday and will go back "home" on Friday.  However, yesterday was also Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a national holiday.  On this national holiday, there is a huge festival of kites in Sumpango, about a 45 minute drive from Antigua.  The Spanish word for "kites" is "barriletes" which I think sounds so much cooler than kites.  So a group from the school was going to the kite festival for an outing yesterday and I went along after studying for a couple hours.  The kites were so amazing!  They were ginormous, some as big as four stories tall, and made of tissue paper!!  It was unbelievable.  The biggest ones couldn't fly, but some of the medium sized ones could, which was awesome.  It's a big competition for most creative, ability to fly, size, etc., and then when they try to make them fly, the crowd is all around them, and one of them almost crashed on top us!!  It was wild.  I'll try to post pictures tomorrow.  You'll have to see this to believe it. 

My week here in Antigua has been really good so far, and I'm enjoying getting away a little bit to relax.  The city is beautiful, and the shopping is amazing!  :)  I even ate pumpkin pie today!  It was delish.