Blue Thunder

Today is a rainy day… a very welcomed rainy day. We haven’t seen the rain in some time now and it’s been very hot.

We are just a week into the semester program and we’re having a great time. There are 16 students (14 gals and 2 guys) from 4 different colleges. Since their arrival last Wednesday, Josh and I had all day orientation with them Thursday and Friday and then we moved them all into their host homes Saturday morning. Everything has been going so well, we’ve been really enjoying getting to know them. Monday evening we had 2 girls over for dinner and then last night (Tuesday) we had the whole group over for Bible study. We are using the gazebo that’s in our yard as the study area – it’s so fun and everyone loves it.

Tonight we have staff Bible study and right now we are going through a series called “The Truth Project”. It’s a really awesome study where for 12 weeks we develop a biblical Christian worldview. We watch a video for 50 minutes and then break up into small groups for further discussion. Josh leads one of the small groups – I’m so proud of him!

Friday night we are going out with the semester team for pizza after Spanish class as a way to celebrate “survival of the first week!” Then on Saturday we are taking them on an excursion where we will creek through the river to get to one of the communities we work in called Los Higos. A woman that we know from that community is going to cook a huge lunch for us at the river – it’s going to be GREAT!

So… a funny story:
Yesterday I was driving in “Blue Thunder” (my favorite base truck… I named her) to pick up our students for Spanish class. As I was headed up the hill (just around the corner from the base) the hood of the truck flew open! It was so crazy... I couldn’t see anything! The rearview mirror on the right wasn’t at a good angle for me to see, and the hood was in my face, and there was a guardrail on the right hand side. So I had to drive the truck a bit further to get beyond the guardrail so that I could pull off the road. Once I stopped I got out to close the hood, but the latch was bent about an inch from where it should have been, so no luck there. My precious Blue Thunder suffers from old age, so even when I closed the hood, it still sat about 2 inches from where it should have been, due to this problem, I couldn’t continue to drive it safely to pick up the students. So I very slowly made the trip back to base (about ¼ mile) staying in first gear the whole way… it was a very sad drive home.