Tuesday

July 29^th – Tuesday

                We woke up feeling much better! The day got off to a lazy start. We eventually went to morning devotions, I have to say this was one of the longest and it was my fault. I had decided to teach on spiritual gifts and I had a good half hour worth of stuff to share. Well add in the translator and the side conversations and I think we were at about two hours. This included a couple songs and everyone sharing a verse. It was pretty much lunch time when we finished up devotions.

                After lunch we started our rounds of normal heat avoiding activities. But there wasn’t anything good on TV that anyone wanted to watch and we didn’t feel like spending more time in our room. I went and sat under the tree with one group as they drank coke, burped and sang What Does the Fox Say. After a while I went and joined Arielle and her group which was sitting under a different tree discussing different Spanish words. The best we can figure the words mean to choke someone or to punch them. We discovered yesterday that some of the Spanish we are learning is slang and not in the dictionary.

                As this conversation progressed one thing led to another and the result was me up the tree with one of the girl’s flower burette (it used to be mine). And a couple of girls at the bottom of the tree with Arielle’s bobby pin. After about a half hour of negotiating we worked out the trade that Arielle and I had been brokering from the beginning. Ie they give back one of our precious few blonde bobbies and we would return the flower burette. After all this was sorted out they invited us over to their house and then kept telling us to nap. We were a little wary that we were going to lose our carefully guarded bobbies so we left. But as we were leaving some of the girls met us out front and ask if we wanted to go to the store, so we walked to the store.

                Later we were again sitting under the tree, a lot happens under the trees when it’s over a 100%, and I was trying to rebraid Arielle’s hair when someone tried to once again take the blonde bobbies. This led to them trying to tickle us which led to me wrestling with two of them while someone else fixed Arielle’s hair. The girls in question then tried to tell the older girls I was beating them up but no one bought it for a second since there was lots of witnesses that they kept jumping on me. It seems the girls were determined for us to use the new vocabulary they taught us.

                We then sought safer company with the young ladies and the ladies in the craft room. We all had a great time and many laughs. Although a lot of the time, for Arielle and I, it feels like that awkward laughter when everyone else gets the punch line of a joke you just don’t get. But some of it was Lilia was trying out two Japanese phrases that Arielle taught her.

                It started to rain so everyone came alive and we had a game of volleyball followed by dinner. While all the older people were playing Volleyball Arielle and the little children got into a mud fight. Later that evening we had some evening prayer, Arielle and I almost missed it again but we caught it this time!