Celebrations and Fond Farewells

It was a joyful but long day today. Short post here as it is midnight and we have an early departure tomorrow morning. We are all ready to get home to our families and friends but were sad to be leaving the Getsemani community and all of the friends we have made over the past week. We worked on our homes this morning, had a dedication celebration in the community, said long farewells to our families that we worked with this week, and headed into Ahuachapan to view the sand and flower paintings in the streets for Good Friday. (See a video of a farewell from the children - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYXnRHhxCcY ) Later in the evening we went to the wonderful small town of Ataco for more street murals and a great farewell dinner with the teams from California/Colorado, California Lutheran University, and the Habitat staff. It was a great culmination to a wonderful week that we will share more about tomorrow in a couple of final posts with our thoughts on this experience.
Tom
p.s. Well we thought we were going to bed. As soon as we posted this we heard a beautiful Good Friday procession coming from the town square. Rich and I and Carlos "the Man" from the Casa Blanca went outside and followed the procession through town for a half hour. It was amazing that hundreds of families with children were out in the town at that hour of the night. See a video at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi5SxpXm2yQ