Message from North Africa

This was written a week ago (better late than never!):

hello!!
We are now in the city where we will spend the remainder of our trip time at. We actually arrived Sunday night, but it has been very busy since then! We left our first location on Thursday night and traveled around the country. Our original plan was to leave Thursday morning, but our father had a different plan for us. Wednesday night we were playing soccer with some of the neighbor kids on a concrete field. Emily fell and fractured her wrist. She went to the emergency room that night then back to the hospital than e following morning. After quite a few hours of trying to figure insurance out she went in planning to pay it upfront with the insurance saying they would reimburse her. There were a lot more issues with trying to get into the doctor, but eventually she got there, and when she was done they told her it was free. That was a definitely a blessing. So we took a bus and arrived at our hotel late thursday night. Friday we spent some much needed time relaxing. On Saturday we got to explore the market. I think the highlight of saturday though for all of us was time we spent in the home of a family there. Bryan was giving us the tour, and he stayed with this family for two weeks while he was going to a language school. The people here are so nice! She gave us tea and bread, and they didnt have much, but it was amazing. Most of sunday we traveled, in a taxi. We had 7 of us if you include the driver in a taxi for five hours, but it wasnt too bad. We settled in, had some dinner and slept. We had to get up early to get out to the building site. Here we are helping rebuild houses from an earthquake. The girls whitewashed and the guys got to dig in rock. Us girls all got to work in skirts too, so that was interesting, but we made it work. I think the hardest part for all of us is the language barrier. Many of the women will invite us girls into their homes, so we sit with them, and smile, because we cant really talk to them. Of course today we got a little lesson, learned how to say mouth and nose and stuff like that, its hard though. Its so neat to be able to spend time with these people. Those still without houses live in tents, tarps over whatever they can find, but they make it work, its amazing, they are so creative. Its hard though, because we cant help everyone, there arent enough resources, and all the government will do is build four walls, but the walls arent really finished, and a roof over less than half of it, then they are done. The work this organization is doing here is amazing, and we are all so excited to be able to be a part of it.
Sapphire, Keli, John, Emily and Derik