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