Mexico Mission Trip, Day Five

From my journal

January 1, 2010

It's official: my first waking thought of the new year was "Sheesh kabobs, it's cold!"

Last night we had our New Year's party at 10 p.m. New year in my home time zone, at least. :) I was eating a Twix and rockin' out to Lecrae around a bonfire while my family was drinking root beer floats and watching the ball drop, but hey, it works. The party was awesome, too. There was a huge bonfire

and they gave us sparklers

and free sodas, and we were blasting Christian rap through the speakers and all of us dancing like crazy people.

(random hand, Martha, Katy)
(Kelsie, Kelsey)
They shot off fireworks too.

Then I went upstairs and crawled into "bed" - a mostly deflated air mattress by now, and a sleeping bag full of grit and sand - and it was actually warm for the first night I've been here. Then I woke up cold, though, so whatever!

Yeah, there's sand and grit everywhere - under my fingernails, on every clothing article I have, etc. I'm saving one outfit to wear on the plane home, so I don't scare the people next to me with the way I look, but almost everything else has been worn except any white socks. They aren't warm enough, so I just re-wear my fuzzy socks and toe socks!

Dude. Today was amazing. VBS was a bit smaller but more focused. A couple things went wrong, like a girl trying to tell a knock knock joke which of course didn't translate, and our mikes messed up, and there were flies everywhere

but overall, it went pretty well. I got to take one or two pictures, too.

(Alexandra, Alex, Claire, Sonya)

Lunch was yummy. PB&J again - I don't think I'll ever get sick of it. And we had these Mexican brand sandwich cookies which I, in true punny form, named "Floreos".

We found some clown stuff somewhere in a VBS bin and everyone was wearing it - the emcee for VBS, the goofballs on our team like Joe, and our team leaders.
The afternoon, though, was what was amazing. First I went house to house with some others, becasue the house we're building was full capacity of workers. We talked to three people: Ana, who lost her job in the States and was deported back to Mexico and had her eight kids taken away by Social Services and she wanted prayer because they were in the courts right now and she might get them back.

Another lady, I think named Elena, who wasn't sure if she was good enough for heaven; we explained that it was a relationship with God, not works, that got you there.

Third was the worst and the best. We walked up to a house which was kind of having a party for the new year, and two guys were very drunk. There was a mom, a dad, a teenage daughter, and the two drunk guys. We asked if they wanted any prayer and we ended up praying for the grandma, who was worried about how her son was messing up his life - one of the two who was drunk and smoking and had done drugs. The whole time they were being rude and nasty and hitting on us girls (there were about four of us in the group) but we prayed anyway, and the dad, mom, and daughter all came to Christ.

Here's the crazy part - our translator Sam later told us that the two guys had shotguns and had started to pick them up when we walked onto their property, but the mom had stopped them because she recognized a member of our team from LAST year's trip. God protected us in an amazing way.

The rest of the day was mostly fun. I played goalie in a game of 4-on-4 soccer with some local kids
who beat us 10-7.
And then I helped putty a room!

I met one of the project directors or something like that. His name's Paul.

(Luis, Paul, Tike)
I saw another beautiful sunset...I could definitely get used to these.

And today was Meeka's birthday, so we had cake! It was strawberry chocolate thought, which is like the easiest way to ruin a perfectly yummy chocolate cake!
(I ate it anyway.)