Another week...

Everything has gone about like normal this past week. Jason got two more English classes added to his schedule because the former English teacher went on vacation and has not come back…The garden is beginning to sprout up new plants and we have finally finished transplanting over 400 tomato plants that we have. We finished the week of prayer on Friday and had communion on Saturday. We learned that the goal of true education should be 1)redemptive, 2)teach the student to think and do, and 3)eternal. This has made me reevaluate every class that I teach to make sure I am pointing the students closer to God and not just teaching math and science. One thing that I noticed that was neat about communion here is that for a week before we participated in communion the religious leader here was telling the students you need to make things right with anyone you might have a problem with. They were encouraging the students that communion is like a mini-baptism, a recommitment to God and we need to make sure everything is in order in our life first. Previously communion has been an arrive at church and oh wow today is communion experience. I like how they take it very seriously here and want people to be ready. More than half of the students participated. For church we heard all about heaven and it was so exciting. You just wanted to leave this crummy earth and be there with Jesus so bad! Another thing I noticed in church was what the students pray about. When they ask for blessings for others or their families it is often related to food, like provide for the food that they need this week. Such simple needs compared to our often complex requests. The fourth year students are really a great group of kids. There are some great leaders in that class, especially spiritually. One student, Frans, gave a worship on Friday night that was very well thought out about the rich young ruler who followed the commandments but did not want to sell his things, give to the poor and follow Christ. The story is found in Mark 10:17-31. Frans asked the students to raise their hands if they knew or had ever known a rich person, very few raised their hands. Most of the villages are very poor without any “rich” people in them. They would probably think every American was rich. One interesting point Frans made about the story that I had never realized was that when Jesus answered his question, “what do I need to do to be saved” He told him to follow the commandments. The rich young ruler said he had and he named 6 of them, but if you notice they are the last 6 commandments of the 10 commandments in Exodus 20 all of which involve loving and respecting others, but the ones he was lacking were the first 4 about loving God. He was lacking the personal saving relationship with God. Another example of a really special 4th year student is Max who has been helping Jason learn to read music. The other day I was coming up from washing our clothes and I was carrying the little tub of clothes across the field to our house. Max saw me from a distance and dropped his things and ran over to me to help me carry the clothes the rest of the way to the house. Javier is another really neat kid who comes from a boy’s home. He is a 2nd year student who is very smart and very helpful. One night they were using the marker board from my classroom to do an illustration during worship and he realized that I had already prepared the board with homework and some warm-up problems for the next day. He was quick to go and make sure that the person presenting was not going to erase that and see if he should go get another board so as not to mess up my work. Not all the kids are like these that I have talked about; we learned this week that there is an issue with prejudice amongst the lowlanders and the highlanders. Hopefully with their time here they will learn to look past the exterior to the heart like God looks at us. We started family worships this week. We meet twice a week with our “family.” We have two “older children” who are single staff members and then the rest of our 9 kids are students. We meet at our house and sing songs, pray and study together. It will be a neat outreach for us to be able to lead. We have cooked some pasta and vegetable meals this week. It was so nice to have fresh vegetables for the two days that the vegetables lasted.  The pancakes we tried to make did not turn out so good. There are birds here but you do not really see them very much. We know there are birds though because you here them at night and in the morning. They are very loud and make very unusual sounds. One bird makes a high-pitched squeal that lasts for at least 30 seconds each time. It almost makes you want to cover your ears. Another bird sounds just like an alarm clock beeping….so much so that one morning I got up to turn my alarm clock off and get ready for the day when finally Jason asked me what I was doing and I realized my alarm clock was not supposed to go off for another 10 minutes. It was the silly bird that I thought was my alarm clock. On our way into and out of town we have to pass through immigration. It is a place where the vehicles have to stop and talk to the immigration and sometimes, depending on the person and there mood they will come on board and check whose on, which means they will quiz us for paperwork. We only have a copy of our short term visa and passport, which technically has expired now, but it is so hard to get a year visa here that it takes months. So the officials give us a hard time and we have to plead that we are working on our visas in Santa Cruz. There is one particular woman who works there who likes to give any American an especially hard time and has been known to pull people off the bus and not let them continue to the school until they can show more paperwork. We have interacted with this lady once, but luckily another staff member was with us and helped us get out of it. Well one day we were headed back just the two of us on the bus and as we stopped at immigration we realized that last time Jason was the only one who went to town and that my visa was not with us. We started praying immediately as I began to search in our bag for the paperwork. As we were searching we saw the immigration police getting on the bus. I found the paperwork that we thought was only Jason’s visa and it turned out to be mine as well! Praise God, because he asked to see our paperwork and after giving us a little bit of a hard time he just walked away. As we were driving away a few kilometers later we saw more police on the side of the road pulling people over. They will sometimes do this to do a drug check, but will always ask for our paperwork while they are on board. But as we passed by we realized they were occupied with another car and we were going to be able to pass by without any problems. It may have been an inconvenience for the driver of the other car but it saved us from having to try and prove once again that we were legal and hopefully not get pulled off the bus. What we learned from this experience is that our “problems” may be the answer to somebody else’s prayer like that car was for us. So don’t get upset when it seems God is not listening; He might just be answering somebody else’s prayer.