Day 2 thoughts and ramblings

Yesterday turned into the day of filming people arrive to Rancho Alamo Bonito, and to just take in the arrival experience with the new group of missionaries. When the first bus came, the staff lined up outside the bus door and made a human tunnel for them to go through, where we clapped and high-fived them all. As each successive bus came throughout the day, the missionaries who had already arrived would join that tunnel to make it longer and longer. By the time the sixth bus had arrived, you can imagine how long the tunnel was! Besides that, it was a very leisurely day. We helped out with various registration duties for everyone, and kept busy uploading pics and video for the station website…that is, until the internet crashed at around 2pm. From then on, we had no internet, and data output grinded to a stop. Luckily, we have some Verizon wireless cards that we could use for emergencies. So, we fired one up, connected a few computers to it, one for email/status updates, and one to upload some pictures. Video would take way too long (hours vs. minutes) on these things, so we decided to hold off on that and just focus on the picture updates for now. I was able to hop on a few times and talk with Belinda, only to find out that our poor dog Sprinkles is very very sick. So on top of B having to be a single mother for five days, she and my mom have to take care of a very sick little puppy. At least they care for her and will give her what she needs. I think part of it is she misses daddy and her insides don’t know what to do. Just kidding!



This morning, with my air mattress not as full, combined with some minor-but-enough-to-wake-me back pain, woke me up just before 5am. I’m not sure if I said this in my audio post or not, but with the amount of people here and needing to take showers, if you don’t get one in at a certain time, you’re taking an ice shower basically. Now, this wouldn’t be bad if you’re coming back from working that day, where it’s been hot and you’ve sweated, but this is early AM and it’s chilly-willy right now. So, I decided to get up for a shower and pray that enough staff hadn’t gotten up yet and used the hot water. I think I used the last of it in my four minute shower because it started to get cool really soon after I started, but hey, at least I started out warm. That woke me up enough that I’m just going to stay up for the day. Figured I’d write this blog post, update some pics/video on the web, and get in some Bible reading. I started reading Acts while I’m here, since that’s basically what it’s about…getting out there and being the church…spreading God’s love.



Today we will be shooting the missionaries going through the training they will need to learn how to talk to these people, maybe some do/do not do type of things, how they will be building the homes, how they will be doing VBS for the children down here, as well as other duties that are planned for them. After that, the KSBJ staff plan to head and do site visits of where homes were built last week and where we plan to build this week. Today seems to be the first real day where we’ll be hitting the ground running fast. If breakfast was anything like yesterday, we should be good to go! They have a bunch of cereal and fruit for breakfast, and the cereal I chose yesterday was just your normal Raisin Bran with milk. While that may not sound like anything special, both the cereal and milk were sweeter than the US brand and therefore was AMAZING in flavor! The milk here is out of this world! Since we’re staying on a dairy farm and all, there has to be standards, right?! HA! Either way, I’ll cut this off for now. Hope you’re all doing well.



God bless,

E