First things first: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY/ANDREW!!!!! That's right, today is Happy's 23rd birthday. And I won't see him until tonight at Jake & Amber's rehearsal dinner in Santa Clarita. So, send him an email or give him a call to say happy birthday!
Alright, now I can move on to the Bernal Update. Friday was an early morning breakfast with Raul & Christina and then we went with Raul in a cab to the school. We arrived sooner than everyone else since Raul had to get to work before we were supposed to meet the group that morning. It was a good opportunity for Happy & me to spend quality time with the Lord, which we did before everyone else showed up a bit later. The plan for Friday was about the same as Thursday. The some of our team went to the park to play with the kids while the rest of the team stayed at the school to work. I went to the park to play with the kindergarteners again and we had so much fun! One thing I found a little more challenging with the younger kids was communication. Five year olds are difficult enough to understand when you are speaking the same language! But, it was a good opportunity to practice what little Spanish I knew (and remembered while I was there). I did a LOT of "Como se dice...?" and pointing at objects. That means "How do you say....?" I told Daniel that I have a brother named Daniel who is 11 years old and he seemed to think that was cool. We spent the day walking around nearly the entire park, which was HUGE. We played on a playground for a while, swinging, carrying the kids across the monkeybars and cheering as they went down the slide. Then we walked around a large lake and ended up giving the boys (Friday only Daniel, Elias and Eliseo were there) piggyback rides for a large portion of that time. Joelle, Brian and I had the help of two women from the church. I'm still not completely sure who they were related to, but the boys listened to them well, which made things a LOT easier for us. We stayed at the park until lunch time and escaped into the cars just in time to miss the pouring rain. After lunch at the school, everyone got back to work on painting and cleaning. Our goal was to paint several rooms before the prayer meeting that night and by God's grace and some serious hustling, we were able to do that! The prayer meeting was a rich time of fellowship across a language barrier. The pastor asked people to share prayer requests and offered a few himself, but in between each request he would choose someone to stand up and pray at that moment for the request. He even asked a few from our group to pray out loud. Nathan and Bekah, from our team, shared their testimonies, we sang some songs in Spanish and then the whole team got up front and sang a couple songs in English. Afterwards we had a huge potluck dinner. Raul & Christina took the opportunity to use a translator to tell us how much they loved having us in their home and how we were loved and how much it was a blessing for their children to see a young married couple living for the Lord. I was nearly in tears when they shared all that with us. Christina seemed to have more of an outgoing personality and giggled a lot, but she had such a kind smile and was so sincere in all they shared with us. Raul was more of the quiet type, but he too had a kind smile that you could tell was one of love for his brothers & sisters in Christ. That night at their apartment we again attempted communication with our Spanish-English dictionaries (another late evening) before going to bed.
Saturday morning was like Friday, we got up early and said goodbye to Christina so we could take a cab with Raul to the school. We already felt incredibly blessed by them and so thankful that Andrew & I were able to stay together; but they went even further and gave us a key chain from when Mexico won the World Cup. It was actually a coin that Raul had fashioned into a key chain. We learned that he is a mechanic and does welding for cars (at least that's what we understood). They also gave us a picture frame, which he had made, held up by two figures made of car pistons. After hauling all our stuff down to the cab and shoving it in the trunk and back seat, we squeezed in and headed over to the school. We said goodbye to Raul, had breakfast, loaded up the bus and went to the marketplace for some shopping before our flight back to California. After about an hour of shopping we got back on the bus to brave the Mexico City traffic to the airport. Marcos & Aubrey, the couple who runs the school with the help of several others, gave us money for lunch at the airport and then we said goodbye to them too. They gave Andrew & me a little painting of Mexico as a thank you, which was very kind of them. Every time I see it I think of them now and am reminded to pray for their school. We got on the plane with only minor mishaps (one of the guys left his passport on the bus, but Marcos was able to call the bus driver, who graciously drove back with it). We arrived in LAX around 7 pm and after a debriefing at the church with the team, Andrew & I got home close to 9 pm.
Side note: We each got a salad from Jack-in-the-Box on our way home and both got food poisoning from it. That night Andrew was throwing up and I had a high fever. We stayed home from church on Sunday (we were pretty upset about that!) resting off the food poisoning. I went to work on Monday with a slight fever that went away completely about halfway through the day. Andrew stayed home, but also began feeling better around the same time as me. Tuesday we both went to work and then went back to LAX to fly to the Bay Area (near San Francisco, for those who aren't familiar with the California lingo) for the Gilmore Fourth of July reunion/celebration. It was a lot of fun, but I was starting to get a cold which got worse just as we got on our plane on Thursday from the Bay Area to Hawaii for our first anniversary trip. But that's all I'll say about Hawaii for now.
The final part of the Bernal series will be coming probably next week (since we'll hardly be home for the next four days). It was requested that I share some reflections on the week in Mexico, which I am very excited to do. Thank you for reading all about this and for all your prayers before and during the trip. We saw the Lord work in SO many ways and I'm looking forward to sharing more about that in my next post. Have a wonderful rest of the week and weekend!
