Shakin' up the family part 3

Yet again, there is too much to say about everything that’s happened in the past however long it’s been. I can’t even keep track of the time! Things have just been awesome! :)

Let’s start with Father’s day. On Father’s day, my close friend CX came down. She lives in the same city we do, but she still has to travel an hour to come see us. We had a good time together! :)

Besides Sundays and the days we went out to camps, I spent most of my time at the workshop with my dad. I was there every day for two weeks. I could usually find something to do even if it was small. I did computer stuff for my dad and ran PowerPoint presentations, and maybe screwed some water filter thingies in. haha. After two weeks, I got bored though. So recently, I haven’t been going.

On the eighteenth, I went to some areas again. We went to a more devastated place this time. It was so sad. Mostly driving down the roads, I saw how bad everything was. Everything was destroyed. I didn’t have a chance to really talk to anyone or stay in one place for long because we were traveling to different sites where our water system was to do some troubleshooting. Here’s a picture of dad working. At each site, I had to fill up water bottles so that we could do water sampling later. I also had to train someone how to do it. Maybe it seems that filling up water bottles isn’t that complicated, but it can be!! Haha. In the second pic, the guy in the green shirt was my water bottle filling student. hehe

Here is a picture of the volunteers that are with the machine. The guy on the far right was just a friend they met. It seems that everyone’s doing really well and the systems are lookin good too! :) At the end of the day, we went back to the bigger camp that we’d been to before. It was around supper time and the place was pretty alive. Some adorable kids came up to me and gave me a really really sweet and cute gift. Well after that, more kids came up to talk to me and I bent down to talk to them. I offered to give them English names because that would give us something to do. Well, they jumped all over that idea! When I stood up, I saw the HUGE crowd of people surrounding me. They were holding cameras up and everyone was trying to talk to me. The kids were screaming that it was their turn to be named. Then, everyone wanted signatures and pictures all at the same time. I felt like a celebrity. It was crazy!!!

Another fun thing about that day was that my friend xz came along. She’s one of the most amazing person I know. I thoroughly enjoyed her presence as well as all of the other refugees. :) She’s such a great girl.

Ok, so we were just all sitting in the jeep waiting on something and then we saw this lady. We could not figure out what was wrong with her. After awhile we saw her sitting in the driver’s seat of the same car with a crowd gathered around her. She looked like she was pretty zoned out. It was an interesting thing to see.

At one place, this lady was talking to us about what happened. The lady in this picture was covered by rubble for 24 hrs before she and the rest of her family finally crawled out. We heard many stories that day. They were all very sad or very touching. One lady came up to us and touched her heart and told us how thankful she was to us for coming to help them.

This little boy is just precious.

Not to be too selfish but I think my favorite part of the day had to be when we got back into the city. We went to a hotel to pick up EMILY!!!!! Emily had come with the Langstons and she was going to be staying with us. I love this girl and I was so blessed to have her come.
The next day, with Emily :), we went out again. I didn’t feel very good because I had a cold and I was super tired so I didn’t have much energy. I was worried it was going to be a horrible day but it was a GREAT day. WE had bought 50 notebooks and pens and candy to hand out to kids once we got there. These items were bought thanks to people back home. Thank you! We got to give those out to a bunch of kids and they seemed to be grateful.

Dad was working on the system so Emily and I decided to go walk down a road. You wouldn’t believe the devastation!! We walked past a house and three elderly people yelled hello at us. Emily and I proceeded down to their house. We talked with them for quite awhile. They were extremely nice and considerate. Even though everything was destroyed, they were just living life the way they had to. They got chairs and made us sit down and they told us stories about when the earthquake happened. In that village they lost over 80 kindergartners when a school collapsed. :( Once we finally left their house, we continued on down the road. We ran into three other people who were cleaning out rubble. We stopped and talked to them. They were talking to us and just carrying on like nothing really happened. I was really touched by this point and I told them how I thought they had such a great attitude in the midst of all their trouble. They were humble in their reaction to what I said, but they also said that they didn’t have such a great attitude all the time. He told me that there were so many people hurting. As we walked that road, we talked to more people and even talked to the old people again with xz.. After talking, Emily and xz and I were just playing around on some terraces when we bumped into a nice-looking, old man. We found out that he had lost his four year old granddaughter. XZ talked to him for a long time while Emily and I sat and waited. It was very good. :) It was a very, very good day.

Here are some pictures of just some of the damage that we saw...

Since Emily was here, I’ve been taking a nice break and I’ve enjoyed every second of it!! You’re never bored when you’re around Emily! She’s so friendly and awesome and fun and spontaneous and awesome!!!!! Since we moved here, I’ve been working with dad and going to camps so I haven’t really had a chance to check out the city. Emily and I got to do plenty of that while she was here and I had so much fun. We discovered this really cool park! It was fun because of the water and light show and it was just really nice out the time we went. Here are just a few of the pictures we took when we were there. :)

Just the other day she and I went down to see CX at her house. It was boring but very fun all at the same time. Haha.

Very sadly, Emily left today. :( I was very, very, VERY sad to see her go. She is planning a road trip to Texas when we get home so that’ll be awesome!!

I guess that’s all for now.

Love y’all!
Holli :)