One of the big events of the week was a visit by Dr. Gordon Christensen, the founder of the LDS Dental Academy. He is a world famous lecturer and he came with a group of dentists to present lectures at a Dental Conference in Guatemala. They visited the clinic in the morning before the Conference. President Clark came out to the Clinic to welcome them and we had a very enjoyable visit. Paul had worked for a couple of months to try to set up a meeting and visit and get some free tickets for dental students at a couple of dental schools here so it was a nice event for the clinic. We hope they will tell other dentists who will want to come down to volunteer. They were all very pleasant, interesting people. Dr. Dale Linton, Dr. Karl Koerner, President Clark, Dr. Scott Healey, Dr. George Bailey, Paul, and Dr. Gordon Christensen.

The first exciting news this week was that the Senior Missionaries are going to get cars to drive. We will pay a monthly fee to the Central Office based on miles and other factors. We paid too much for our car to begin with and have been spending money on repairs constantly since we got here. We will sell it now and try to recoup at least some of our loss. The first three months we were here we had it in the garage for repairs 10 times. We payed more than it was worth obviously so we won't recoup very much. However, something is better than nothing. We are happy to drive a car someone else will fix. This is Jorge showing us all the keys to the new cars. Unfortunately, the Tobler's car isn't ready yet so they are driving our new car until theirs is ready some time next week. Yikes! He has never driven in Guatemala yet. We had some wonderful volunteers this week. It was so fun to get to know them. It was Bruce Richardson who is a periodontist and his wife Jean, a hygienist, and their daughter, Brittany who was a wonderful assistant and a very quick learner. All fun fantastic people. It was a very good week and we got a lot accomplished despite the fact that we had some no shows and quite a few that came late. Even though Dr. Richardson was a periodontist, he turned out to be multi-talented and could do a little bit of everything and he pitched right in, pulling teeth, restoring, evaluating, and he even did a gingival graft . We visited the big sink hole in Guatemala that was 300 hundred feet deep and about 300 feet across. There was an LDS chapel right by it. They had to crawl under the fence to get pictures. You can see the stairway to one of the apartment buildings right on the edge that didn't fall in the hole.

Notice the stairway into this apartment with some of their clothes hanging out of the bottom. They must feel very fortunate not to be down the hole.

Here are the Richardsons in front of the chapel with the sink hole to the side with other curiousity seekers looking through the fence at the sink hole.

It was great to have volunteers and fill up some of those empty chairs. We love it!

We had a farewell dinner for the Tilleys (Secruity) and the Graff's (PEF). We will be so sad to have them leave. We sang a song to the Tilleys to the Tune of Rock around the Clock and to the Graff's to the Tune of The Day Dawn Is Breaking. It was fun.
Paul and Brother Graff. He is the one who washed our car off when it had volcano ash all over it.

Some of the boys from Tio Juan