School Starts Tomorrow!!

We are back in town...as Monday seems to be the day we will come. Coming to town is not terribly fun though, because you first have to walk a mile to the road from the school. Then you catch a bus that takes about half an hour to get to town. From there you take a motorcycle taxi to the market. You walk everywhere from there. The town is covered with street shops selling all sorts of clothes, shoes, produce, and household necessities. The streets are covered with motorcycles and it is hot and dusty. The people are all nice. We use the internet and get some fresh fruit and today I, Carrie, will be getting some school supplies and making photocopies of the textbooks since we only have one. When we finish with our errands we go and hang out at an airplane hangar until Ruan and Tara and the food for the school are ready to return. Then we ride on the back of a pick-up truck the 30 minutes back to town and when we get there our bottoms are sore and we are covered in dust!! Your ears, your hair, your nose, everything is full of dust. Then your cold shower feels wonderful! Tomorrow classes start. Students have been coming back for the last couple of days. I have two math and two science classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Jason has english class on Friday. Now will come the crash course on speaking the spanish language. Jason got sick again on Friday from who knows what, but is recovering and was up and about on Sunday. He is having a hard time getting used to the food here. Breakfast is the meal that is most different than we are used to, because it would be like a lunch for Americans. Today we had spaghetti and tomato and onion salad. Lunch always consists of rice and a bean mixture of some sort and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. Last night dinner was potato burritos. Each morning we have worship together as a school and each evening. They love to sing here before every worship and church we sing atleast 5 to 10 songs. We sing hymns and we sing every verse! The garden has been producing lots of cucumbers and we had a special treat of lettuce from the garden last week and were able to eat sandwiches. While working in the garden I try to ask the students math questions that relate to our gardening. That is the idea of the school that the teachers work with the students and continue their education while working...a great idea!! It is fun, but I began to realize more important than their math knowledge is their knowledge of God, so I have changed my priorities, first I think about a spiritual lesson we can learn from the garden, which there are many and then the math lessons. This last week we transplanted watermelons. We started off with a large area of hard ground covered in weeds, stumps, roots, etc. We first had to dig up the ground, by hand, no helpful machines. Then we prepared a circle plot for each plant. Then we planted them and watered them. In the future we will fertilize, prune as needed, pull weeds and hopefully recieve fruit. We do alot to help the plants, but I realized that the watermelon still begins as a seed and no matter how much tender loving care we give them they only grow because God makes them grow. I began to think about our commission to spread the gospel to the world. We can share our faith, we can invite people to church, we can pray with them and study the Bible, but it is only through the Holy Spirit working in their lives that they will come to have a personal relationship with Jesus. So we should not get discouraged when we do not see the fruit of our labor, because we might just be the ones preparing the ground or giving the fertilizer. One day hopefully they will produce fruit and follow Jesus. At noon everything around here shuts down for about two hours. This week they celebrate their independence day and on Friday we will be going to Yata to march in a parade. Thursday we might be going to a park to spend a fun day, but it will depend on if we get our truck fixed before then. An update from Daniella, the girl who I shared her story a couple weeks ago. She went home for a week and when I asked her how it went, she sad bad. I asked why she said her mom had just left and was not there the whole time, so she was left with her father. But Praise God when I asked her how that went, she said good. He did not abuse her and even though she was nervous she asked to go to church on Saturday and he said that was fine. She went with her grandmother. I have had the opportunity to talk with several of the girls which I enjoy, but I have been forewarned that they often do not tell the truth. Maybe once I build more of a relationship with them they will tell true stories. These kids are learning great things at this school, but they have a hard life to return to with many temptations, so keep them in your prayers.