Tuesday in Santa Elena, Belize

Day 2 Santa Elena

So I am not going to write a whole lot about Tuesday because we spent the entire day working on the Santa Elena books at the hotel because construction was happening at the library location. We worked outside the first half of the day and then moved into the room the second half to finish up in some much-needed AC to keep us going.

We finished all the books with lots of help from a number of volunteers!

Wednesday we had a half day at the school and accomplished quite a bit in that amount of time!  We took a load of books with us and some energy.  Our shelves were completed on Tuesday while we worked on books and the rest of our furniture had been delivered but to a classroom downstairs.  So Don and I (mostly Don) had to move it all upstairs to the library, and this was a HOT day! But we got all moved in and then started painting.  We had to get all the inner shelves painted before we left.  Due to the open air nature of the school and the humidity of the country oil paint is a must, but oil paint drys so very slowly.  So we had to get the shelves the books would be on done with plenty of time to dry before shelving.  We also started working on the murals on the sides of the shelves and the kids LOVED watching the process.  As you can probably tell, this morning was a whirlwind of big accomplishments for the soon to be library.

One of the parents even showed up wanting to help and stayed late to finish painting one of the shelves… amazing.

And one of the coolest part of the day…

The kids started sneaking in and reading while we were painting!

If I am not mistaken these photos were taken during their recess.

The table and chairs are the mahogany furniture that was built locally and purchased by the Meredith College Service Project for the library.  Then something really cool happened.  One of the volunteers with Meredith saw the furniture and was so excited about how things were unfolding she decided that she wanted to donate a second table with chairs.  So a HUGE thank you to Pam and Lyn Aubrecht for such an amazing donation!  You will see photos of both tables in the finished library photos!