Monday, February 18, 2008

I awoke this morning to the wonderful smell of bacon frying! I was pleasantly surprised to find pancakes on the griddle as well! Yummm....

Doug Ditto gave a great devotion this morning and then we were off to Magdalena for another day's work. Paul served as our tour guide on our way to Magdalena giving us lots of trivia and pointing out landmarks on the way. The most useless bit of trivia is knowing that the Happy Meal for which McDonald's is famous originated in Guatemala!

Our plan this morning was to begin tiling the church floor, finishing painting and to have Bible School in Magdalena. We had all signed up for what we wanted to do the night before. I planned to help with tile and Paul was going with Mitch to give shots to various pigs, horses and cows, deworm some animals and castrate a bull. FUN! Paul was able to complete his task. I had my knee pads strapped on for tiling --- however, as with any mission trip - you have to be flexible. At 9:30 a.m. we were told that we needed to be at the El Giron School at 10:30 for Bible School! We were not prepared for this! When we arrived at El Giron, we were greeted by 75 children! El Giron is a refugee camp. They feed the children one hot meal each day. There are approximately 100 children and they feed them all using two propane burners - amazing!

the children were very sweet. As usual, they were very impressed with our digital cameras. They loved Kensley as well and she was practically being smothered by them. The worst part was that you could see nits in the childrens' hair from lice - UGH! I think all of us who were there felt the need to scratch. Hopefully none of us will end up with bugs in our hair! I need to scratch my head just thinking about it!

Coming back from El Giron school, Paula took me, mom and Lea to an artist by the name of Carlos. His work is amazing. He is self-taught as is his wife. I purchased one print from him plus six small circular ones - those we will give as gifts. From Carlos' house, we climbed a steep hill back to the church at Magdalena. Everyone was finishing their lunch and we were out of PB&J!

To my surprise, we also had Bible school at Magdalena that afternoon. I don't know how many children were there - but they were wild for the most part. The language barrier is so frustrating.

After Bible School I finally got to help with the tile. The tile was heavy and I couldn't move the boxes however I was able to give the tiles one by one to the guys as they were laying them. Everyone was quiet on the bus from Magdalena to the Ministry Center. We were all very tired.

Dinner was a Guatemala dish of Hellachas. Basically, it is similar to our beef stew. It had shredded beef and potatos in a thin soupy tomato base. It was served over white rice. The rice had corn, green beens, lima beans and carrots in it. It was a pretty good meal. I was starving so anything would have tasted good that night!

My mom gave the devotion. It was good and involved many people from our group. She talked about the 5 purposes for which we were created.