Happy Birthday Jose Angel

Jose Angel's birthday was last Sunday, but I still wanted to get his pictures up. We got to take him out to lunchat TGI Friday's after church, and it's pretty safe to say he enjoyed his meal. He cleaned his plate, then finished off his dessert pretty quickly in addition to half of his friend's dessert.

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NLCH is a good place to spend a birthday. We were woken up at 6 by a string of firecrackers outside our window, but we've been here long enough now to understand that it's done in love, so I liked it and went right back to sleep. I got sung to by all of the kids today, a good birthday cake and cupcakes to share with them, and lots of good hugs.

I don't have the words...

I've been trying to get this up for a while, and here it is, finally... A couple of weeks ago, Domino's Pizza put on an event in the central park to raise money for NLCH. It's a great thing they do- setting up tables and selling pizza and giving a charity part of the profit. This year, they sought us out and offered us to be the beneficiaries of this year's event.

Part of the event was that they had concerts by different local artists. Some of them seemed to be pretty popular around here- others were, well... a little lacking in fan support. You'll notice in the video below that this guy had three fans for this falsetto-rap-raggae performance, two little girls and a dancing piece of rice. By the end of the song, he had the piece of rice.

We'll get a post on here soon...

We have been very busy with a team from Calvary Community Church. We'll get some more info up on the blog soon...

Discipleship Groups

For the past five weeks, Daniel and I have had discipleship groups of older teens on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. These groups have become a highlight of the week for us. On Wednesdays, we have six teens and on Thursdays seven teens and young adults. The groups are held in our apartment and I am able to cook dinner for them which has been fun. It is so nice just to be able to sit back in a relaxed atmosphere and enjoy the kids as we eat dinner together, laugh, and share what God is doing in our lives.

We are going through the book "Experiencing God" with them. A lot of the time, I have no idea what they are sharing but do not want to continually ask them to repeat themselves. Therefore, I often find myself nodding along in agreement, pretending that I understand, even though I have no idea what is being said. That is probably a very bad idea -- who knows what I am agreeing with?!

We are constantly amazed by these kids. Above is a picture of our Thursday night group washing all of the dishes. They do this every week and we have never asked them to help out. One of the Wednesday night girls comes early to help me prepare the meal, even though I never asked her to do that.

Sports Channels

When it comes down to it I realize the insignificance of this, but it still had me frustrated this past week:

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am a pretty big sports fan. I have my favorite college teams, and favorite teams in each professional sport. I love the New York Yankees, I love the Dallas Cowboys, and I really, really love the San Antonio Spurs. I guess partly because I know basketball better than the other sports, but as much as I like my favorite teams in other sports, the Spurs top them all. This isn't anything new- I was a Spurs fan since David Robinson came along- long before any of the championships.

So you can imagine how excited I was as they made their run through the playoffs this year and made it to the finals. So far, we have done pretty well with being able to see the major sports events on TV, with the only drawback normally being that the commentary is in Spanish. We got to watch the Super Bowl, Kara got to watch her Cardinals win the World Series, and I also got to see most of the NCAA Tournament. Also considering that many of the NBA playoff games had been broadcast here, I assumed that I would have no trouble being able to watch my beloved Spurs in the finals.

I was severely disappointed to find out that whoever is in charge of ESPN and Fox Sports in Latin America thought that it would be better to show other things (like lots of soccer, of course) instead of the Finals games. For example- here is what the three channels who have broadcast the other major games had on last night when the Spurs won the championship:

• Under 21 Soccer: Czech Republic vs. Serbia
• Mexican League Baseball: Quintana Roo Tigers vs. Monterrey Sultans
• Boxing (Don't know who)

It took me until game 4 to find out that I could at least listen to the games online. So as the Spurs won last night, I was standing in our living room in front of the computer screen, not being able to see any of it, but doing my best to enjoy the moment.

I guess I had better either get used to this, or start rooting for the Czechs or Serbians.

Rebeca's 12th Birthday

We inherited a very fun responsibility while Kendon and Wendy are away -- the job of taking each child out to eat on his/her birthday. They are allowed to invite one guest and to choose the restaurant. Yesterday was Rebeca's birthday. She chose Burger King and invited her younger brother Sammy to accompany her.

We had a fun time celebrating with them and I thought I would share a few of the pictures with you.

At dinner that night, we carried on Kendon & Wendy's tradition of making the child's favorite kind of cake (luckily two of the interns took on this task; Rebeca chose an odd combination of pound cake with animal crackers), singing and giving her a present. I was pretty nervous about singing in Spanish and had to check to make sure that I knew the words before I left the kitchen with the cake.