5:00 lead-in!

Hola!

Wow, it seems like it's been a pretty busy weekend at home! I'm glad everyone survived the dirt biking adventure, and thanks for all the updates.

Well, I have a later lead in today, so I've been able to get a lot done. I started this afternoon by taking an online Spanish Placement exam for Ecuador. It went okay, but it was pretty hard and I lost 20 minutes out of the hour because I couldn't get the quiz to work. Oh, well, I'm just glad I got it submitted!

This past week was pretty cool. I had a really fun group from Conneticut and in addition to building houses, they sponsered an outreach for the community. They gave the pastors in the community money to plan and host an event, and they organized a carnival-like thing with games and a sermon. There were so many kids and families! The second picture is a quick snapshot of the event. I helped run the "sponge fishing game" where the kids used a fishing pole with a Velcro ball on the end to try and "catch" sponges floating in a kiddie pool. Each sponge was marked with a star, an "X," an "O" or nothing. A star earned the kid 3 tickets, an X 2 tickets, an O 1 ticket, and nothing no tickets. I never realized how popular that game could be, but we were mobbed with kids! I quickly learned how to tell the kids to make a line in Spanish, but it didn't help too much:-) I had a really fun time, but I was sick of sponges and covered in water by the time the game was over!

This weekend we also helped out at a Vaction Bible School at the church Fe y Amor, the church of Luis, the man that Knox built a house for last December. It was really fun to see the family again, especially Leslie, a girl my age. One of our jobs was to get each kid's information, though I accidently kept asking each kid, "Do you have happiness?" (Tienes alegrias?) instead of "Do you have allergies?" (Tienes alergias?) But in the end, I got the answers.

This morning we left pretty early to get to the States because we didn't want to get stuck in the border line. We had time to go to IHop, and a group had donated money to us the week before, so we had an extremely tasty brunch! The first picture is from IHop this morning. I'm sitting with Melanie, Kamar, Stacey, and Emily. We're all wearing the shirts that we wear each Sunday to lead groups in. We look kinda goofy crossing the border with our matching outfits, but so far they haven't pulled us into secondary in the U.S.

Well, that's about all here. I'm told that my group this coming week is a bunch of Russians from California so I'm pretty excited to possibly learn some Russian phrases. Haha, I'll proabably won't learn anything useful, but what's the fun in useful stuff?

I miss and love everyone as always!