Thursday, July 19, 2012
Today was certainly a strange feeling day as it's our final day of ministry in El Salvador. Tomorrow, we'll head up to La Libertad for a nice little vacation before flying home on Saturday. However fun news to report from today first. My group was assigned to start our morning at the construction site before heading to the orphanage in the afternoon. A funny story from the morning though. Milton was our driver for the day and instead of taking us to Biggest for a disappointing breakfast (like he was supposed to), he chose to take us to Pollo Campero instead for the most important meal of the day. I just have to say that the Pancake Fresa was absolutely awesome. Also, I loved seeing some tennis on the television in the restaurant as all I've seen all week has been soccer/futbol as far as sports go. It did make me a little homesick though and ready to play some fuzzy, yellow ball myself. ;) After ending our breakfast, we loaded up in the van and headed towards San Miguel to the construction site for a morning of work.
Today's work at the construction site was definitely tiring, but a little work does great things for the spirit (if not the body, *expertly flexing* LOL.). We started the day making more volcanos and mixing up concrete. We got to see the concrete going to use today as our team assisted in building walls. As I'm not really good with a trowel, I decided to keep myself to the physcial labor portion of the day. This resulted in two ridiculous workouts. First, Randy, Antonio (who runs the orphanage) and Jonathan (works for the orphanage as part of a drug rehab program) made three trips to town to buy cinder blocks. When they came back we had to form an assembly line to unload these blocks. 450 blocks later we were finally done with that task and I clearly felt the burn. After this, Harrison and I started working on knocking extra dirt off the side of a small cliff to use for filling in the base around the building. Harrison swinging the pick axe and me stabbing the earth with a large steel rod seemed to knock a lot of dirt loose for use by the workers. All week, I'd been hearing about the well that is being dug out down the mountain. I wanted to check it out for myself though before leaving today. After trekking down the path with Randy (for me a whole lot harder than coming up due to my clumsiness), we arrived at the well to watch the workers dig. One worker was down inside the well 75 yards deep digging and his amigo was up top. The digger would fill a five gallon bucket half full and then the amigo would pull the bucket up using a rope. Honestly, watching this task made me clearly appreciate how easy we have it in America with machinery to do these jobs for us and I was grateful that I wasn't the one spending my entire day stuck in a well.
After a hard morning of work, we returned to the orphange for one last lunch provided by Milena and the girls consisting of chicken and rice. After this, we kind of just relaxed for the afternoon and played with the girls some more. What was hilarious was sitting back and watching all of the members of our team who dozed off and fell asleep while sitting around. I think that people are starting to wear out and get tired on this trip. Later that afternoon, we took the girls to the park (El Parque) to play on the playground. While standing around talking with some of the guys while watching the girls (and after my first ever successful journey across the monkey bars), some of the kids started going to play in the large bounce houses near the playground. When they got there, they were told that it wasn't free. Brian Fox selflessly ripped out his wallet and paid for the girls to get their bounce on. :) I noticed that the man running the bounce house had responded in clear English ($5 for 5 minutes) when Brian asked how much, so took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Oskar "the Carney". After talking with Oskar, I decided to take the opportunity to share the Gospel with him using an extra bracelet from our time in the schools. I felt that he was receptive to the words that I was saying and that he had heard all of this before, but I don't know if it stuck or not. I will definitely be praying for him though. After giving him my bracelet and bidding him adieu, I rejoined our group and watching them play basketball with the kids. At supper time, we would head to Pizza Hut with the girls for a nice dinner. Before we would eat, we were treated to a great dance from them as a thank you for everything. Before we knew it, the night was over and we were saying goodbye to our friends. This was a ton harder this time to say goodbye as I don't know when I'll be back again. :'( Still I'm glad that I got the opportunity to come and visit!
Back at the hotel, we met for our final team meeting at Campo Real to discuss what we had learned this week and what God had done in our lives. I'm still trying to process everything for the week but know it's going to take a while to figure everything out. Also, Joe left us with a final question that we will need to answer tomorrow night at the beach, "I Have to Go Home, but I Don't Have to Go Back." Deep and philosophical, huh? It's been a great week and I can't wait for tomorrow to see what happens next. :)
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