Meeting the youth

I'm on a mission trip to Guatemala with the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, a Kansas City, Kan.,-based charitable organization founded in 1981 by a group of Catholic laypeople. Its focus is sponsoring children and young adults to get them school educations and job training.

I'll keep this one lighter than the last couple of posts. This post regards Tuesday night, where some sponsored children from the south of Guatemala made the trip to CFCA's Guatemalan headquarters in San Lucas Toliman, in the country's highlands, to show traditional dances and songs.

They stayed the night, and later Tuesday evening I got to play some basketball and soccer with them, thinking I was some kind of hotshot. The next morning they were teasing me a little bit, calling me Ronaldinho. Or maybe I'm just that good in soccer!

The national Guatemalan instrument is the Marimba, which is something of a xylophone. Earlier this week a group from La Salle Institute in Santa Maria Visitacion Solola performed on the instrument. The cones that give the instrument resonance were guords in early versions.

Finally, hopefully these sound files will attach. The first is the group playing the marimba.

The next one is children from San Lucas singing "De Colores." (sound quality is low)

Finally, a boy at the CFCA center in Santiago singing a song of praise.