Hiking Pacaya

July 31, 2015
Today we woke up at about 7:30.  I then took the coldest shower of my life, and we had breakfast shortly after.  We walked again to God's Child, and learned that we would be serving vegetables to the mothers of the kids in the project.  God's Child is not an orphanage, it is a school where underprivileged kids can go to get an education.  The mothers were all so very happy and it was so much fun to be able to bless them in this way.  One woman's face just lit up in the biggest toothless grin ever when veggies were put into her basket.  One time my younger brother who is 11 was pulling up a basket of green leaves to get ready to serve, and the man in charge told him not to serve it because it was considered to be garbage so he put it back down and grabbed a new basket.  However, there was one lady who asked if she could have the "garbage" so the head man told us to give it to her.  She walked away looking happy as could be, but it made me so sad to think that she would have to ask for the garbage in order to feed her kids.  I could not even imagine what it could be like.  After we finished serving vegetables, we decided that we wanted to hike one of the nearby volcanos called Pacaya, and so we found a store that would guide you to the top.  It was about an hour and a half car ride there and about a two hour hike to the top.  We rented a horse for Samara.  We then had to fill out some sort of permission slip because it was a national park. That being done we started our climb up to the top.  There were a few spots with good view along the way.

However it was nothing compared to what the top looked like.

We then hiked down to the crater which was filled 100m deep with black lava rock.  We then found a vent and roasted marshmallows over it.  That was my first time having a lava marshmallow.  We then hiked back down and drove back to Antigua, where we had hamburgers for dinner.