ramblings

as I stress about stupid things like not being caught up on Lost and what job I'll have when I get back to the states - all things that I'm looking to the world to fulfill, or can so easily rely on myself and the plans that I don't even have... wanting to know my future or simply have control of my life -I'm blatantly aware of my weaknesses, and strongly reminded of what I read in Kings today. In chapter 9 God pretty much threatens to destroy Israel if they don't follow his commandments - His own people! It struck me that just as God didn't need the Israelites, He doesn't need them... God doesn't NEED me.
BUT, I need God. I need him more than anything this world could ever have to offer...and I was challenged to ask myself if my life reflected that truth - do I live my life in a way that reveals I am desperately dependent upon the God of creation? Or do I still try to do it on my own. And do I really take sin in my life seriously? I think I've come to a point where sin is natural. It's such a part of who I am; it's expected. And it makes me like everyone else. The humans around me sin, so I will too... my view of holiness has totally been distorted! But - God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, I praise Him for that. And I praise Him that He's revealing the junk in my heart.
And ever encouraging verse made it's way onto my journal pages this afternoon: "my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:0
anywho... that didn't come out how I'd imagined. I hope it makes sense. This is a pretty late rambling. I was reminiscing earlier about Costa Rica though and decided to post more pictures. The best ones are on F.book. But here's a couple more from the National Park we visited one day.

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backpacks and blessings

Last Tuesday our team of 9 (Chepe was in the states - he just got back this morning super early) had the opportunity to serve a small rural community in the barios of El Salvador, Victoria. Layo's uncle, Adonai, is involved in organizing community service events with various members from his church and asked our team if we would be willing to join them for a day of handing out 'mochillas' - backpacks - filled with school supplies to kids at 4 different schools. Our team has been wanting to participate in some kind of community outreach, so we jumped at the chance to serve and see a different part of the country.

Our day started at about 5:30am when we met a small group of adults at a nearby church in Escalon and started the looong trek to Victoria. The city is in the boonies and took us about 2 hours to get to. The group treated us to a tipico Salvadoranian breakfast (eggs, bread, beans, fried platanos con crema, queso fresca, y chocolate). With enough food in us to get us through 2 days of work, we headed to the first school where a younger guy with a tiny red backpack and waterbottle perfomed a short skit that captivated the kids and even scored some laughs... It was a bit hard to hear and all in Spanish, so I can't give an accurate description, but it seemed a better fit than any skit we were thinking of doing.

Okay - back up a step - Adonai called Kristen the night before and asked if we could come up with some kind of skit for the kids to do tomorrow... we had all dispersed for the night and so told him we'd figure something out...probably in the car. So we talked about ideas and came to the conclusion that the easiest one for us to do would be one Kristen thought of... only problem was, all she remembered was there was a chair that said "no tocar" in it. (don't touch). But after we saw this guy do his thing with the kids, we figured we were golden and not going to need to throw something together.

wrong. of course. so myself and brandon had the performance of our lives with a chair, a cardboard sign that said "no tocar" and Brandon toting a "Jesucristo" nametag. I mean, I'm not one to boast, but I thought it was a pretty compelling performance. Sadly, the kids just did not know what to do with us. Or the skit. Guess skits aren't the Salvadoranian way, but we tried our best given a ten minute warning and lots of confused faces.

The best part of course was being with the kids. I don't know how those little guys capture your heart so quickly and just make you want to spend your whole day just loving on them...We didn't stay long at each school as all of them were pretty far from each other, but Brandon and I did get to teach some english on the fly at one classroom. That was after one of the cars ran out of gas and we went on ahead down a dry riverbed.. Brandon is great with winging it, and I'm always willing to go with the flow - so we ended up jumping and waving flags and running around together. Poor kids probably thought we were insane.

Victoria is a pretty impoverished city. A lack of natural resources makes for some dry land and very little opportunity to make a living. The kids were quite malnourished and our hearts broke when 5 year old sized frames told us they were 9. Nevertheless, they were beautiful and smiles broke out right and left as we handed out the backpacks. We're hoping to stay in touch with Adonai to get involved in other community service activities, and possibly invite students from Matias to any future events.

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Costa Rica!!

We're back from our amazing vacation in Costa Rica! (and we've already had 2 planning/devo meetings... so we're jumping right in!) Overall the week was amazing and such a blessing to our team. It was great to spend unplanned time together at the beach soaking up the sun and just enjoying the relaxing atmosphere.

For those of you who are wondering what the vacation was all about - let me explain a little. Half way through the year, every STINT team goes to a 'Midyear' where they travel abroad to meet up with other STINT teams to get rejuvenated, work through problems, and gain renewed vision for the second half of the year. Midyear consists of 2 parts: 1 week of conference type trainings/workshops/meetings/speakers/etc. and 1 week of vacationing around the midyear area to see some sights. Because our team is the first to break STINT ground in El Salvador (and there is no established conference in Central America) we were left with the task of figuring it all out on our own. We've connected with a staff couple from SLO who are coming to do the "conference" part with us the second/third week in February, which left us with one week's vacation time and a quickly approaching new school year. After much research, talk, voting, and budgeting, we ended up finding a last minute deal on plane tickets to Costa Rica and discounted bungalows on Hermosa beach. The rest is pretty much history.

Lauren was finally able to surf her heart out while Bean and I rented boards to see if we were prodigals. Alas, we are not. But we still had a ton of fun trying to look the part. We did a lot of reading a BBQing (kabobs were my fav!)...hangin by the pool and watching sunsets. Sunday we were able to visit Manuel Antonio National Park, which is basicallly a sweet rainforest that has short trails to some coved beaches. There were tons of cute little monos (monkeys) hanging out right at the base of the beaches. Other than those, we saw a sloth, a very not wild deer, a couple iguanas, and, well basically a million crabs. I actually got pinched by one. Not cool. And I scraped by foot on some coral while we were snorkeling. Bloody scratch + sea water is not a good mix. All in all though, it was a beautiful day and nice to get to see another area of the country. And can I just say, for ten white people, I was thoroughly impressed at how little sunburns there were! Yay for saying "no" to skin cancer.

Alright, well, I'll stop making everyone jealous with this vacation in January talk. Here are a couple pictures from the trip. I posted more on Facebook and should upload the rest to Flickr soon!

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pictures galore

I realized way too long ago that I have tons of pictures. And most people probably aren't going to check them out at Flickr - which is totally fine. I personally don't love Flickr. You have to scroll through pictures slowly one-by-one and can't easily download them in their original sizes... but none of that really matters. I decided I'll try to post pictures more regularly on here. I've got plenty to spare - and that way you can hopefully better understand my life and the people in it! Okay. So first off - meet Gaby (above). She's probably the cutest thing to hit this country since her sweet Panamanian mom. Her family is good family friends of Eli, one of our beloved students from Evangelica. Eli is our lifeline here. She's always inviting us to fun events and introducing us to her friends.. taking us new places. And little Gaby is kind of like her extended family. We all spent a day together in Costa Del Sol a while ago... this is her playing with remnants of somebody's lunch :)

And this (above and below) is Costa Del Sol. It's the one beach we've been to that's been the most like Southern California beaches, in my opinion. Lots of white sand... and lots of houses. Here they don't really have public beach access. Of course much of the beaches are public, but you can't really just hang out on the sand without a place to house your things. You generally have to eat at a restaurant or rent a house. This day - they got a house. It was wonderful!!

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some adventures

me, dan, and greg at a coffee garden in Juayua

a view of lake coatepeque from the hotel/restaurant we ate lunch at

we have arrived!

Lago de Coatepeque - it's a lake inside of a huge volcano crater

Family and Dan at La Libertad Beach where the whole team spent a day in the sun

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Bienvenidos 2009!

Feliz Navidad y Prospero Ano Nuevo a todos!!! I hope you all had a blessed and joyful holiday season with friends and family. It's been a whirlwind month...months? Really? 2009? We're all in the "I still write 2008 on all my papers" mode.. I'm sure you are too.

December was quite the month of extravaganzas. Families, boyfriends and friends flew in one after another to celebrate the holidays with us - Salvadorian style. We spent a week with Kristen's friend Ryan before the families came for Christmas, taking him to most of the local sights and a beach house at Costa del Sol - thanks to our friends from UTEC. A few families flew in Christmas Eve and we had a fantastic lasagna and eggplant Parmesan dinner, watched "Elf", and rang in the 25th with more fire works than the 4th of July on crack. Literally - it's out of control. They're legal basically everywhere here. We live at the base of a volcano, so around midnight we all climbed on the roof and watched El Salvador light up. It was quite a sight to behold. Probably one of my favorite memories...New Years gave us a similar experience - though I'd venture to say that the celebration lasted about an hour longer.

My parents and brother flew in the morning of the 25th and stayed until the 31st. My boyfriend, Dan, also came down to spend the holidays with us. We spent a day at the beach (thank you beautiful Salvadorian weather), adventured out to Lago de Coatepeque where we had lunch at a restaurant on stilts (literally), road tripped to Juayua and a coffee garden in the mountains, ate lunch on the side of a volcano, and of course, hit up the local malls and Pupusaria. All in all, it was a blast. I loved seeing my family and was relieved that it felt like I was on vacation.

Chepe had quite the time with his family - healing from a surgery that resulted from kidney stones. Poor guy. He's doing well now, just trying to take it easy until he leaves to go back to the states on the 19th for an additional surgery. I'm sure he'll eat his fair share of in-n-out and come back stronger than ever. He would totally appreciate your prayers though!

Now that families have been gone for about a week, we've all been slowly adjusting back to normal life and getting ready for the new school year in a couple weeks. Most of our days are spent learning Spanish, having prayer and planning meetings, brainstorming outreach ideas, and planning midyear. Midyear is generally a week long conference for the team followed by a week long mini-vacation. Since we're the first STINT team in El Salvador, we get to plan our own midyear. Believe us, it's not as great as it sounds. Our budget is obviously limited, and we're on a time crunch. By the grace of God - we're going to board a plane to Costa Rica this coming Wednesday the 14th. Needless to say we're all pretty stoked to spend a week in the sun bonding as a team before the work piles on for the next 6 months. We get back the 20th and will have about a week before school starts. Sometime in February a staff couple will come spend a week with us to do some training and preparation for part 2 of the year.

So - that's the low down on what's been going on these past weeks. Now that you're more or less caught up, I'll be sure to update you soon with musings on how I'M doing and what the Lord has been teaching me. For now, HAPPY 2009! Love and miss you all!! And thank you for your thoughts and prayers during the season <3

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