Que he hecho?

Wow, a lot has happened since my last post.

First, a quick summary of the weekend. We went to this place, did some stuff and came back.

Next:

But for serious, not a lot of exciting things happened during our time at the vacation house. We spent time planning a bit and relaxing a lot. I did get to try several different typical Colombian dishes over the course of the trip. One interesting one is called Sancocho. It is a soup which consists of a flavorful thin broth containing a huge chunk of potato, a huge chunk of plantain, a huge chunk of yucca root, and a huge chunk of beef. I will leave it to you to figure out how much of it you think I ate. The weekend was also a good time to get to begin to accustom myself to not being able to understand what was going on around me. Really though, it is hard work listening! I cannot understand things the way I can in English, I have to focus hard and I still only catch on to the gist of what is going on at times. Tan pobre yo! Anyway, on to what happened today...


Every Monday the OR staff (all 4 of them) meet to discuss how the last week went and make plans for the current one. That was this morning at 8 AM. I began to get a feel for the groups they work with on a regular basis. Right now they have three regulars: one group of students, one group of teachers and one group of pregnant girls and unwed mothers. This afternoon 3 of the other OR staff and I went to a school here in the city. We were scheduled to do a one-time workshop with a small group of their students. We had 16 from the 7th-9th grades. The ideas we brought them were focused on purity and dealing with sexual temptations as creatures created by God for a purpose. We got to use some experiential learning type activities and I was given the privilege of entertaining the students with my Spanish skills by giving the main message we had to share. We got to break up into male/female groups afterward to discuss temptations and responses to them in more detail. Thankfully, Fransisco took over at this point and did most of the facilitation of the small group conversation. I would have been like a white (very white), bike ridin' (very fast), chicken sellin'(My Pleasure!), home teached (very splendificultly), gringo kid out of water if I had tried to do that part. Wait...

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Maybe I should just have said a fish out of water...

Anyway, I was surprised at how quickly some of the guys opened up and talked about the things they are going through. It was very encouraging and they seemed sincere in their desire to live pure lives. My main concern is that they need someone to keep them on track and lead them on a continual basis. However, we may have a chance to figure out a way for that to happen, since before we left, we were asked to come back next week. They lined up two or three mornings for us to go have similar conversations with other groups of youth at the school. Please pray for the students at this school, there are around 400 of them. It is one of the few free schools here, as even most public schooling costs at least a small amount. That means these children are from very poor and often broken homes. Our hope is to be able to influence the whole school by taking groups of 12-15 students from each classroom (of 40 students) to go through this workshop. Please pray that we will be able to set up a method for continued influence, that any who want to may have a system of support to help them make good choices for their lives. Please also pray that the students who we are able to talk with will feel confident and share these ideas with their classmates.

During our travel to the school I got to ride on the main bus system here, the Transmillenial. It is the backbone of the immense bus transportation here in the city. As many of you no doubt know, buses down here are very different from the nonexistent ones in the U.S. The main difference is that they exist. I think there are more public transport buses in this one city than in all of the U.S. There are hundreds or more local ones; Then if you go to the edge of the city, there are scores more bound for various outlying cities or villages. I would guess that about 10% of the vehicles on the road are buses, making up a much greater percentage of actual travelers. Another 60% or so are cars, and the remaining 30% are motorcycles and bicycles. I am just making up all these numbers, so don't quote me or anything, but seriously, there are a lot of buses and two wheeled vehicles here. I do think my percentages are pretty accurate. Well, more local traffic news later, officer Don is now off duty.



This is a pretty typical motorcycle for around here. They usually have somewhere in the are of 100-125 cc engines. For anyone who needs a comparison, a 500 cc engine is kind of small in the states.









Signing out__
In Truth
Stephen