The First (work) Day

This experience so far has been amazing, but not as amazing as today. Today we spent the whole day at the school, Nuevos Amigos. We primed a room that my dad is making a computer lab. Tommorrow we will paint the bottom half of the room dark blue and the top half light. Somehow the building we are staying in, Extreme Response, has two groups from the states down in Ecuador right now, each consisting of about thirty juniors in highschool. One group is from Canada, one from Detriot. We are working with the group from Canada at Nuevos Amigos. They are extremely nice which really helps and its nice to hear some English every once in a while.

After painting we had Vacation Bible School with 196 kids from around the area. The neighborhood is very different from were we are staying. The roads are dirt w/ a broken glass coating. There are puppies all over. They are all muts but all look really cool, but we can't touch them. While we had our vacation bible school, two little boys, chasing each other. They were headed straight for me. The smallest boy grabbed my hand and acted like I was this wall between him and the other boy. The boy soon figured out that I was bigger than the big boy, and hugged me and screamed. The teacher came running out and got the other boy and just like that, it was over.

But by far the best part of the day was during the game time at VBS. Once again,a little boy came up to me and uttered a sentence in Spanish, pointing at his coloring book. He was flipping through and I noticed his hands. Between his thumb and his pointer finger was bloody and bruised. On his right hand was a cut at least a quarter inch deep. At that, I looked up at his face and I had seen him before, working in the neighborhood's junkyard. He was in terrible condition. I could almost feel God's hand reaching out to me and saying this is were you are meant to be. He flipped to a page with Daniel and the lions den. He screamed and ran up to the lady on stage and pointed to the picture. In Spanish, she told him to go color it and he did.


Matt