Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday:
We started a new build today for Saul and Nancy.  They have two children, Bethsaida and Jesus, who enjoyed doing crafts with our kids and students.  The kids made bracelets and necklaces, and Nancy set up a matchbox car race track in her kitchen for Alex.  He had so much fun and was one sweaty boy!
It is getting much hotter here, and our team worked fast and got the floor and walls mostly built before lunch.  After lunch, we were able to spend most of our time sitting and visiting with the family under the tarp they had stretched out for shade.  Nancy shared her photos with us, which were helpful as we talked together about her life without a shared language!  They are a family of believers who travel an hour and a half to their church to worship.  They have been praying for a church to be established in their neighborhood.  Aaron and a some of our guys walked a few blocks to check on our other work site, and came back with the wonderful news that two women there (neighbors) had decided to follow Christ!  We drove Nancy down there to meet her new sisters in Christ.

We left the site to head to the showers (YEAH!YEHAH!YEAH!!!) and gathered together again after that to eat at Tacos Rene.  We had a wonderful joyful fun meal together, complete with a bit of dance party at the end, encouraged by the guys who worked there who kept playing the same song over and over again. :-)

The "Family Van" (rental van Faith #4) has been having a bit of trouble with "reduced engine power."  Driving in Tijuana is an experience in itself.  Stop signs are a suggestion, speed bumps are serious, enormous potholes are the norm, the majority of the roads we drive on to get to our sites are dirt roads and very bumpy, and everything is up and down steep hills or ramps.  I was doing pretty well until Wednesday afternoon on our way back from the site when my engine light came on and this "reduced angine power" signal.  It meant it!  The next hill I encountered my van slowly crept up as we prayed to make it to a spot I could pull over.  We did, and from there drove up the rest of the hill in first gear at a snail's pace!  It's been on and off since then- we haven't figured out what the problem is, but sometimes it works great and other times not!  Last night on our way back from tacos, the warning lights came on again.  I sailed along okay on level ground, but I could barely crawl up the hills to camp with it floored in first gear!  We were seriously going about 2 miles per hour, waitng for the van to die at any moment.  We barely got to a parking spot and were making arrangements to drop down to three vans for Thursday, but of course, today it was completely fine!

Thursday:
We finished the house today at Nancy's.  She is going to use it as a work room and hopefully teach craft classes out of it as well.  She was so very sweet and taught the kids how to make crepe paper crafts today, which we learned briefly in Guatemala but didn't have the chance to try ourselves.  At the end of the day, she gifted each of the kids with an item she had made- they are really incredible and quite time consuming.  As this is her source of income, I know that she gave them great treasures.  Five more people in the neighborhood accepted Christ today- I think Nancy may see a church there before she thought she would!

Despite Aaron's best attempts to get the van to "break down" again today (we were close to a site where a mechanic from our group was working), it functioned just fine all day.  He left it idling in the 103 degree weather (yeah, it was HOT today!), zoomed over bumps and up hills, drove it around forever, and it behaved just perfectly. :-)

As we were leaving our work site today, the clouds moved in a gifted us with a few welcomne drops of rain.  They felt so good!  We are all so hot and sweaty, but our team is really great.  They work well together, are kind and gracious, and a total pleasure to sweat with. :-)

The kids are still loving hanging out with the students.  the biggest "problem" we're having now is that our little ones are starting to think that they are "big kids" and feeling pretty put out when they have to go to bed early or not do everything the students are doing.  I keep reminding them that their time will come!

We have one more day of work here.  Tommorow we will go out to the neighborhood we were in on Monday and Tuesday and our three teams with complete three different projects there: rebuild three roofs and build a bano (bathroom).  Our three teams have been building in the same neighborhoods for our builds this week and it's been great to be so close.  While we are each at our own site with our own experiences, there is a real sense of community as we are in the same neighborhood.