We spent about 10 days in the lagoon and decided to go for a 4 hour sail to Santiago, which is in the same bay and adjacent to the big city of Manzanillo. Had a nice time showing George around the area and checking up on what is new and what has disappeared. Each year I come down here there are businesses that have started and some that has closed. And new construction that is finished is the port of Manzanillo.....they have expanded their container port quite rapidly for Mexico. After going to the Saturday market(like a huge swap meet but with all new stuff/junk for sale, and doing all the stuff we wanted to do in the area, we set out for the Barra lagoon. Now we are settled in the flat and brown water lagoon for a week or two. Before we went to Santiago we had a video(Skype) chat between the school here and Gabriellas school in Rancho Cordova. The primeria escuela (elementary school) here in Colimilla has expanded to 48 students from 32 the year before. Do you know how much more food I had to fix? I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tuna fish sandwiches with potato chips and milk. The night before I made two batches of Tollhouse cookies. We split the kids up and took only the 4, 5, and 6th grade kids up to Yoanas house for the chat...that means I had to separate the lunches in the right amounts because I fed the entire school, which was the right thing to do. The kids were late again because they were waiting for me to walk down to the school and walk them back up the hill to Yoanas house. It finally got going and the kids loved their 'Gringo' lunch. Now for a story that has me thinking a lot....I had Yoanas mom and Yoana help me to choose who the donated clothes go to. Yoana heard about a 12 year old girl who's mom had died on 5 January and she and her to younger siblings went to live with grandma and grandpa. So we packed up the pickup truck with the clothes and Yoana and Maria(mom) in the back of the open pick-up and me and Enrique(dad) in the cab. We drove over to Jaluco which is a town outside of Barra de Navidad. We drove to a poor area of the town where the grandparents have a 20 by 30 foot concrete house on a pretty good size lot that has a lot of tropical trees and such. This twelve year old girl came out and we started a conversation about her circumstances. She told us her grandmother has only one leg and that she(the grandma) tries to take care of her grandfather who is really ill and not long for this earth. She has a little sister and brother who she tries to take care of because grandma and grandpa can't do much to help. She has an aunt that is working and just able to take care of herself, so there is no one else to help them. We gave her all the clothes and shoes we could and she took us to meet grandma. Grandma wheeled out in a wheelchair and I met her and saw the one good leg she had was curled at the ankle. The hard part was looking at this 12 yr. old girl and trying to process what her future would be. That little smile she has in the pic is the only smile she had the whole time there. She had no semblance of a typical 12 yr. old. You could see the instant maturity/adulthood she was thrust into on her face. I know you all see this kind of stuff on TV and your reading about it now, but you have no idea of what it is really like until you see it firsthand. Please keep this girl and her family in your prayers. Thank you Gabriella and your friends who gave clothes.