Another Beautiful Morning in Santiago!

I can't believe it's already Wednesday! This week has been flying by way too fast.  We've had so many amazing experiences, and even though the work is hard our spirits are high and we are loving the experience.  We wouldn't trade the cold showers, long walks up the hill to the Seminary, the picking and shoveling as we dig trenches - the experience has been incredible.

Last night we got back to the Seminary just before 5pm and quickly changed into some shorts and headed waited outside for our Dominican friends to signal us it was time to play basketball.  5 minutes later they were at the bottom of the hill motioning us down.  10 of us went down to play with about 8 of the Dominicans.  As I was walking towards the basketball court, a little boy maybe 5 years old saw me coming and recognized me from yesterday.  He started running towards me at a mad dash and jumped up and hugged me around the neck and started cheering.  What an incredible feeling it was knowing they remembered us!

They assigned us into 2 teams, this time we started with 8 of us "Americanos" on the court.  After 2 minutes, the Dominican that was organizing the game tapped me on the shoulder and motioned to swap some people out, so 2 Dominicans and the other 2 of us Americans swapped into the game.  We played for just over an hour, swapping people in and out every 5 minutes or so.  As Robin said in an earlier post, it's incredible to see how we can communicate so well even though most of us don't speak the language.

None of us had brought a watch or phone with us so I asked Tom how to say "what is the time" in Spanish and he and I went to ask one of the boys that had a watch on.  After another 15 minutes we headed back up the hill to the Seminary, after making arrangements to return today after work for a quick game before we go to church.

We got back to the Seminary to discover the missionary preparing our dinner was running late so we all had time for showers and relaxing for a little before a dinner of pulled pork, coleslaw, corn salad and fresh pineapple.

This morning we arrived at the work site and Bill, the primary supervising missionary for the work site, told us we were half-way done with the trenching so we should be able to complete that before we leave!  Its amazing to see the progress we've made so far and gives me a second wind knowing we're half way there.