Thursday...

Sorry for the late post! The internet was acting up again last night...here are some new blogs to make up for it...I also want to say a serious thank you to E.J. for finishing Thursday's blog and completely taking on Friday's blog. I am pretty sick...head congestion, sore throat, misery kind of thing and she saved my life last night by letting me sleep!!!

I forgot to tell you something we did on Wednesday, and it was a really cool thing too! I felt like I blogged forever last night and then as soon as I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I remembered that we went to a place called “the junk cross”.  It was a large cross in the middle of a hillside that was made entirely of used car parts. It was beautiful and we met the kids from Casa de Esperanza there and had a devotional time with them at sunset. It was beautiful.

 

Now, on to Thursday:

 

Thursday we woke up bright and early again and had another devotional on the rock, then we loaded food bags on to the bus, along with tools, and headed to our buildsite. We had two sites in the same community; the dump community. Not inside the dump, but right outside of it. Some people went to pick up our new friend, Brian. Brian is a young man we met when we went to the dump. He speaks English as well as you or I and has a pretty heart wrenching story of how he came to be in the dump.  It’s a very long story to tell on here, but please ask one of us when we get home because you will surely be touched as were by it. We definitely wanted to get to know him better after meeting him and working with him in the dump, and we thought the best way to do so was to invite him to a worksite to help us and fellowship with us throughout the day. Once we were all at the site, we started demolition on the houses we were replacing. The first was for a man who is a single father, raising a little baby girl. His wife left one and never came back. This is very rare to find a father raising a daughter here. It is far more likely for the father to turn the child over to an orphanage, or to abandon them and let someone else turn them over. The other house was for a family with several children who lived in a house made of cardboard pieces, some wood as a frame, and billboard signs for siding. The wood for the second house had to be carried up a really steep hill, and proved to be yet another challenge for the team building skills! However, we worked very well together once again. I’m so proud of everyone! The houses were finished in one day and we had enough time to have a Bible study at the first house with all of the neighbors, it was meant to encourage them in their faith, but once again we found that we were the ones being ministered to.

During the day, some of the group split and visited a special needs orphanage. We were only there for a short while, but we had so much fun with the kids. Some of them were in wheel chairs, so we pushed them around and played with them. We brought bubbles for them and that was a big hit. A youth group from Nashville showed up and were also helping us have an impact on the kids. Then we went back to the worksite and helped finished up the last house.

After we finished the two houses a group of boys took brian out to burger king, while the rest of us went back to the mission house to eat dinner.  Then we had the choice of either going to play soccer at the university, or going to Le Creperia and eating Belga’s.  A belga is a crepe with white chocolate and strawberries. They were so delicious. The people who went to play soccer took brian with them.  They lost him for a while though because there was a waterfall near by and he wanted to take a shower.  When they were finished they gave him money for a cab so he could get to his aunt’s house.  We were all stuffed and tired when we got back to the mission house so we hit the hay pretty hard. 

Jill is not feeling good at all and is going to bed, so I(E.J.) will be writing Today’s blog.   She has done a wonderful job on this blog. I can only hope that I can write up to her standards.