Tuesday, August 18, 2009

What a Start!

After a very long day of traveling, which actually went by without a hitch, we arrived in Bogota on a Wednesday evening only to leave the following morning. We attended one of three annual retreats that we will have each year. This one was in the beautiful coffee region in a city called Armenia.
We stayed in a nice, but simple farm/resort from Thur to Sun afternoon. It was an intense time for many reasons: we were exhausted from our travels, the entire retreat was in Spanish, which required extreme concentration and the use of translators, it was fairly hot (thankfully there was a pool), and four of us were sick. Andy and Abby actually spent one of the nights vomiting.
At the same time we had the opportunity to get to know the rest of the Colombia team which is somewhere between 20 and 30 people.






We visited the town of Salentro, where they have the tallest palm trees in the world. This was somewhat bizarre, as they were on top of the mountains. We ate fresh trout (head picture is for you, Ben). We also did some horseback riding into the mountains and played in a waterfall in the rainforest.
Although the start of our time was much more challenging than we would have liked, it has proven that we can survive quite a bit.












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