3/30/11

I find that when I wait until the very end of the day, I always end up getting pulled into great conversations and random moments of laughter and will find myself sitting with the labtop on my lap and only one sentence written. Usually my blog entries are written after everyone else finally retires to their rooms.

Today we went back to Altagracia to paint the school. Amber, Vicky and I started to pencil out the things we were going to paint and I started to paint the tree with one of our translators Rambo. It turned out really well and the children used hand prints to make the leaves of the trees and to make flowers. Caitlin translated the days of the week and months of the year and we also made them a food pyramid since we had seen one at all the other schools. It all looked really good when we were done. Especially for most of the members on our team saying they weren't artistic in painting.

A little after we started painting, I left with half of our team to do interviews. Derek and I were on the film/photo team. His camera puts my camera to shame. It was awesome to be able to use it. We interviewed two children at that school who were of Haitian decent and spoke mainly French Creole. They were both around the age of 5 and it was kind of difficult to get them to answer questions with a bunch of Americans sitting around. But when they got to show us their homes and family, their smiles came out.

After our lunch, we went back to the school and dropped off our paint team and went on to the next school to do more interviews. Holly wanted to interview her sponsor child and because he had a common first name, we weren't able to find him the first time we visited. This time we found out that he was with his grandmother. But we did get to see the kids end their day singing their national anthem while taking down the flag. We interviewed two more kids who were a little older. And it was interesting to be able to find out more about them and make some jokes.

After that we took a detour and went to see  Vicky's new sponsor children. While we were at one of the villages we found two girls who were twins and Vicky decided to sponsor them. By the time we got back to Casa Batesda we were exhausted! Still..... they were able to talk me into jumping into the pool.

Caitlin did a great job of leading devotions and gave us an activity to list 3 things we wanted to give 1. to ourselves, 2. to others, and 3. to God. It was interesting. Mine were as follows:
1. Myself - "Permission". I struggle a lot with feeling that who I am is wrong and I just want to give myself permission to be whatever God made me to be with out restraining or limiting myself.
2. Others - "Freedom" I want to give others the freedom to make their own decisions about my faith and God without me force feeding them my experience here, my mission, or my faith in general. I want to give them the ability to approach me with their questions as the Spirit leads them, and not in my time.
3. God - "Trust" I still try far too hard to control many aspects of my life and I want to give God control over those things and believe that he knows what's best for me better than I do.

"Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you." -- Psalm 9:10