After a very relaxing weekend of doing nothing in Antigua...(reading, wandering round shops, buying a painting, watching a film and eating a yummy bagel at the bagel barn), we started our final week of house building. We have about 8 more volunteers so to make sure all the groups were even Ian I had to change groups. We were a bit disappointed as this means we won't be working with Maddy for the final week, and we had a really good wee team! However, it's great t...

We finished our 2nd house today, and what a day it was! In the morning we were told that we were going to paint houses elsewhere in the village but that we would be back for 2pm to finish our house and see the family. As the hours rolled by we came to realise that we were going to painting 12 houses and weren't going to arrive back to the main site until 5pm! It took 8 hrs to paint all the houses, which was very frustrating since we wanted to be with the family f...

Today we climbed Volcan Pacaya (With other volunteers Maddy, Doug, Kate, Simon and Shana). When we arrived at the car park at the bottom we were swamped by children selling sticks and guys trying to hire horses. It was like a scene out of a zombie movie, the bus was surrounded and some of the kids even clung onto the side of the bus as it was reversing!! Once we had fought our way through the kids and horses we made our way up the volcano with our guide who look...

We just finished our 2nd week of house building and for some reason it has been a tough week, we have all been feeling really tired. Perhaps it is the slight lack of food we are getting. It is great to have breakfast, lunch and dinner cooking for us but we need to stock up on provisions for ourselves. Put it this way, one of our lunches was cold boiled vegetables from the night before (two potatos, a carrot, corn and a weird green vegetable that we still don´t k...

We have just finished our 1st weekend exploring Antigua. The 1st task was to print off some of the photos we had take of the families to give to them...this should have been a simple task but took us all morning!! Via internet cafe, buying blank CD´s, computer not being able to burn CD´s, having to resize and email all images to ourself to put on different computer to burn and finally taking to a Kodak shop...trust me this took a long time! Once we had all our...