Danny – Page 11 – dannypeck.net

Testimonies (again)

There have been a lot of things throughout training that have made me feel like Forrest Gump (“…so I went to the White House again, and I met the President again.”) I know I’ve written about Life Stories/Testimonies before, but I’m going to do so again.

For the last three years, Life Stories have been a big part of Quito Quest training. Some people make a distinction between a Life Story and a Testimony, but I think our vocabulary around here is more to keep from scaring the Methodists and Episcopalians. At any rate, every day during training, we have heard one or two life stories from the various summer staff and full-time missionaries. Today was my day to share.

Now (being Methodist), I didn’t even know I had a testimony until I was about 21 years old. And I’m still not particularly fond of sharing it. Especially when I have to go after somebody with the sob-inducing kind of story. I joke around sometimes that I wish I had done drugs or something so my testimony would be more exciting (not even remotely funny, I know, Mom).

One of the things I’ve realized over the course of the last four years, though, is how God works in every experience in our lives. I had a really good resource sent to me when I was preparing to tell my story at IT training two years ago¹, and it is really cool because of that being able to look back at some of the things I never realized at the time impacted my life and my ongoing journey of faith. It’s also cool to see the questions or comments I get later and see how even though I feel sometimes I don’t have much to say, it still allows me to impact people and for all of us to connect as we find out things about each other.

My friend Dana wrote a blog post about this very phenomenon last year. As she put it after a day of testimonies at a you event, “Through powerful testimonies we were able to better see God’s characteristics like His provision, faithfulness, tenacity, and love.”² Those words are much more eloquent than anything I can come up with with this much sleep-deprivation, but that’s how I’ve felt this week, even with my lingering apprehension up to my turn this morning. What we do here as missionaries is never about what we do, but it’s about what God does in and through us, and it has been a lot of fun finding out about some of those works I never would have known of otherwise.

¹Going back to look through related blog posts, I realized that it was exactly two years ago this morning that I was giving my testimony in Elgin, IL. It’s interesting to notice how my attitude and what I include in that story have changed between telling my story to Rich, Kelsey, and Ted, and telling it to a room full of Quito Quest staff today.

²I’m planning on getting her permission to use those words after the fact. It’ll be fine. She knows she loves me. And my bloggy-mcblog-o.

Smells Like Jungle

This week we (the summer hosts) have been training as a team, living in a hostal together and visiting the ministry sites where we will be working with teams. The last three days, that has meant an adventure to the oriente, or the jungle region of Ecuador. It’s been a really cool experience for me, especially because I’ve been to most of the places before.

Shandia is alwas fun, and I got to stay in the new hostal there for the first time, in adition to seeing old friends and going down thebbrand new zip line over the river. I also finally got to see the church in Puyo where my buddy Darío grew up. But the site that just blew my mind was La Casa de Fe.

In 2007 I went to CDF for the first time with the team from Christ Episcopal Church. We worked for just a couple of days playing with the kids and taking them to the park, and pulling rocks out of the water and cutting down grass at their new property. At the time, that property was just a patch of grass and a muddy swimming hole, and the director, Patti Sue Arnold, would point out to us the buildings that would some day exist. I just couldn’t imagine it.

Over the course of the last four years, I have returned to CDF in a variety of groups. I’ve seen the orphanage explode from 19 kids to over 60. I’ve seen gringos and Ecuadorians work on construction and programs there. But nothing could have prepared me to come across the dam and look up to see this bright green building poking out of the trees and realizing that this new building was fully functional after all this time.

I knew that they had moved from the old (tiny) site to the multi-use building on the new property. But knowing it in my head and seeing it with my eyes were two totally different things. As we walked around and saw the kids playing or learning with the tias and teachers, my mind was quite simply blown. I told Cameron this morning that I almost couldn’t reconcile the two images in my mind, the functioning orphanage in front of me and the unfinished, unpainted piles of cinderblocks where we camped out in a tent 19 months ago.

I know that the building is the least important thing about CDF. To see the love that the kids receive and all of the opportunities given to them because of Patti Sue is just amazing. But seeing a patch of grass turn into a home over the course of my time coming the Ecuador is just one of those visible reminders of the faithfulness of God and just how much of His work we can see when we stop and look.

Laughing and Crying

Part of the culture of Youth World is transition. There are always people coming and going, but lately it seems like there’s just a lot of going. Quito Quest officially ended yesterday afternoon. The last of the summer teams has been gone since last week, and our summer hosts started disappearing yesterday. Even knowing the calendar dates and all of their flight schedules doesn’t really help that to sink in, though, especially with the range of emotions and activities that have taken place over the last 48 hours.

Saturday evening, after a day of games, debriefing, encouragement, and a brief frightening moment when we thought we had nowhere to sleep, we went to the famous (for good reason) hot pools in Papallacta, Ecuador. For three hours, we just got to relax and hang out in a way that just doesn’t happen very often in the craziness that is Quito Quest, and in stark contrast to the hectic schedule after we returned to Quito. We had just over two hours to prepare for our Youth World Picnic with all of our in-country staff (a strangely low number right now) and groups from some of our partner ministry sites.

I planned on making a dessert for the picnic, but on the way I to pick up some ingredients, I ran into Juan Miguel, Jose Luis, Alejandro and Alejandro, four of the guys from Casa G. One of the things that I’ve learned here is that you don’t just wave to someone you know from across the street as you continue along your merry way. You stop and talk to them, no matter where you’re going, what you’re doing, or how late you are. Especially the Casa G boys. They were trying to get into the girls’ house, but apparently nobody was home. Fortunately, nobody in the entire building was home either, because instead of giving up and going home, they were just hanging around buzzing every doorbell at the gate and hollering at the building. I stopped and hung out with them for a while, and discovered they thought the picnic was an hour earlier than it actually was. They were bored and starving, so I took them to McDonald’s. For those of you who don’t know these guys, you can’t imagine just how scary and hilarious that statement should be.

Rene Bryans told me one time how many funny looks she gets driving the guys around. People stop and stare as if to say “Why does that gringa have 10 black boys with her, yelling and hanging out of her SUV?” I’m at least around the same age as some of the guys, and I’m a guy, but still, being a gringo with a pretty feo accent, we did get some strange glances. Nevertheless, it was pretty great to hang out with the guys, most of whom I haven’t seen much of this summer since teams started showing up. We talked about guitars and language and how things are different here than in the U.S. Alejandro M. sang Miley Cyrus songs and asked me how to say phrases in English (a couple of which I refused to tell him for fear he’d say them to some unsuspecting teenage girl on a team). It also always impresses me that these guys are completely ridiculous 90% of the time, but will jump at any opportunity to share their faith with the people around them, and I love listening to these guys pray¹.

Juan Miguel, Alejandro, and I eventually headed back up the hill to hang out at my house and help watch the girls finish making their dessert their before heading up to set up and welcome people at the Picnic, which Quito Quest was hosting. It was really fun to hang out and say hi to everyone as they showed up: the Short-Term department staff that I know really well, the El Refugio interns that I’ve maybe spent a total 20 minutes with all summer, friends from Carmen Bajo and Emaús. It was also incredibly weird knowing that as much as this was a celebration of everything that God has accomplished in and through all these people this summer, it was also a good-bye to many of them, including me.

I’ve said a lot of times this week that I’m really tired of despedidas², and this new round would already have done me in if I hadn’t had to talk. We said farewell to the El Refugio interns, most of whom are heading out at the end of the month, and then to Quito Quest summer staff, who for the most part only had hours left in the country. Then it was my turn, and my brain wasn’t functioning well enough for me to even express my plans and prayer requests in English, so I have no idea how Cameron managed to make in coherent as she translated to Spanish. We broke up and prayed in groups for the QQ staff afterward, and then the party was over. All of my friends from ministry sites came over and hugged and talked to me before they left, and I managed to stay emotionally shut off, fake smiling and laughing until Queña from Carmen Bajo came and gave me a hug. She whispered her good-bye and a prayer in my ear, and something about that made me realize “Wow… this is done…” And even though I knew it already, it really sunk in right then that I wouldn’t be seeing any of this crew for a while. I was really glad that I did get a chance to talk and say goodbye to her and Rosa and Rocio and Rueben and Esperanza and everyone else, but I’m choked up even writing this just thinking about the past year almost that I’ve gotten to spend with them (and knowing that I’ll say my real goodbyes at Emaús this Wednesday and Sunday as well).

I was glad to have a few minutes to pull myself together after that, but then we headed over to Christy’s house to spend some final official Quito Quest time together and get our traditional QQ team photo, which turns out to be super-cool this year: Jose Manuel³ from Carmen Bajo made all of the picture frames for us (and if there’s one footnote out of this you want to read, it’s that one). Definitely a cool touch. There were some really funny moments, especially Rachel’s downhill string of comments starting when she took until 3/4 of the way through passing them out to realize that all the gifts were the same. We watched a couple of episodes of Friends (the oddly super-popular TV show in Ecuador) and hung out with each other until the chiva arrived.⁴

A chiva is an Ecuadorian party bus that you can rent, and which drives all over the city and plays music at decibel levels that would warrant a citation for disturbing the peace in the US. We piled in, and although there were seconds where you would think “how bipolar I’ve been today…”, we had an absolute blast singing, dancing, blowing whistles, drinking canelazo⁴, and generally being total high-profile gringos for our last ridiculous night together.

When we finally made it home, we were totally exhausted, which didn’t stop some of us from staying up several more hours, watching movies and talking, until one by one the guys had all crashed. This morning when I woke up, three more of my friends were already on airplanes heading home, and the rest of today has been a smaller-scale version of the same thing: shopping, hanging out, laughing, talking, hugging, and airport runs. I’ve gotten to talk to some friends who are in the States and in the jungle, and tried to figure out what I’m supposed to be feeling as I enjoy the little time I have left with each of my friends here and mourn each of their departures.

The culture that we’ve developed here necessitates all these despedidas. And again, I’m really really ridiculously tired of them. But, like the friend I jokingly hollered at least night to “pick an emotion!”, I’m thankful for the opportunity to celebrate each one of the friendships that I’ve gained here, and I’m thankful for each of those people having been and continuing to be a part of and an impact on my life.

¹Especially with Spanglish phrases like “Thanks for Danny, porque tuvimos full hambre.”
²Despedida is a Spanish word for “goodbye” or “farewell” or “goodbye/farewell party”. It’s a tradition at Youth World to do a despedida for anyone at the end of their time with our team, to celebrate them, to hear a little bit about what’s next, and to pray for that person.
³Jose Manuel is an awesome friend and a part of the community in Carmen Bajo. He has been confined to a wheelchair for a number of years now, and has to do all his work from home. He is an incredibly gifted carpenter, and makes beautiful and intricate wooden doors, among other things. I was really glad to know that our frames had his personal touch and that Quito Quest was able to support his work. Ours also have the distinction of being the first picture frames he has ever built.
⁴I stuck with the non-alcoholic version.

This post originally published at www.dannypeck.net

Tolerance, the First Amendment, and Islam

I really try to keep my blog from being political in any way. But there are some things that just piss me off. One of them is Newt Gingrich.

Today, Gingrich became the latest in a line of politicians to denounce a proposed Mosque to be built near the World Trade Center site¹. For some reason, it offends these guys that a Mosque will be that close to a place that was destroyed by terrorists who happen to (theoretically) share the same religion, and even then, it only offends them because they’re afraid of something different. Now I know this is stretching my point a little bit, but does anyone care how close the closest Catholic church is to the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City? Timothy McVeigh always claimed to have held onto the “core beliefs” of Catholicism². It’s ridiculous and idiotic how much people fear and hate people who are simply different, and it’s pathetic that we let the politicians who represent us express that idiocy out loud.

As quoted on nydailynews.com, the former Speaker of the House said “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.”¹ I’m just wondering what a cultural center and house of worship is doing to destroy our civilization. Ever heard of the First Amendment, Newt? It seems to me like freedom of religion is a pretty big part of our civilization.

New York state Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino even said he would use imminent domain to stop the building from going up. Now, come on! Imminent domain is a scary enough concept without being used to blatantly stop someone from expressing their religion.

About.com has compiled a list of at least 59 victims of the September 11^th attacks who were Muslims³. One man, Salman Hamdani, was an EMT whose remains were discovered next to his medical bag. This guy went into this situation trying to save other people’s lives. 59 out of 2976 is nearly 2% of all victims of the attack, which is pretty representative of the US as a whole. The upper estimate of the number of Muslims in America is about 2.2% of the population⁴. Muslims suffered losses on September 11^th just like the rest of the country. Why should they be disallowed to worship in a particular place because of something a group of extremists did?
I’ll leave you with my thoughts on a Sarah Palin quote in the same article, obtained from her Twitter account: “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts,” she wrote. “Pls reject it in interest of healing.”¹

How about in the “interest of healing,” we stop hating people by association?

¹Source: New York Daily News article Newt Gingrich comes out against planned Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero.
²Source: Timothy McVeigh.
³Source: Muslim Victims of September 11th Attack.
⁴Calculated by Danny based on the Muslim population statistic from this article and the total population statistic from this one.

Still here

Some of you might have noticed last week that my website completely went down for about 48 hours. To oversimplify things, it was a miscommunication between myself and my hosting provider. Everything’s back online now, but a side effect has been that for some reason I still can’t access my server (my site, my e-mail, anything) from home. I’m still trying to figure that one out, and if anybody’s got any (intelligent) input, I’ll be glad to accept it.

For now though, I’ll just have to bring all my writing down here to the office to post it. As a brief update in the meantime, though, I’m finishing up two articles for the YW mailing list, been hanging out a lot with Casa G the last couple days (adventures to be posted, I assure you) and am preparing for by far the biggest excitement lately, Megan is coming to visit for about a week, starting tonight. Stay tuned.

Glimpse into and Unexpected Evening

Just so you know that I didn’t drop off the face of the earth, I had a slight problem with my site last week. It’s technically fixed now, but a side effect has been that I still can’t access my WordPress software from home, so everything I’ve written lately is sitting in a file folder waiting to be posted.

So if I can’t write from home, where am I at the moment? I’m so glad you asked. I’m at Emily’s house with her, Chad, and the boys from Casa G eating ice cream and brownies. You’d think that sounds like a pretty normal night, unless you know the guys and how entertaining it is just to have them around. There are random English phrases being yelled like “I’m gonna punch you in the face.” Earlier, Mike was playing guitar and singing while Alejando just stared at him like “What are you thinking?” Emily was worried about having too much ice cream, and we’ll just say it’s basically gone.

Spring Intern Retreat

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve gotten to be a lazy blogger lately. The benefit to y’all is that you get to see lots of pictures.

Here we all are in front of canoes we took down the Napo River. I hope I never get over the beauty of Ecuador, but there are some moments where I realize how much certain things have gotten to be normal life for me. As I looked out over the river, I thought to myself, “This looks a lot like the Pasquotank.” Then I snapped back and remembered I was surrounded by all this crazy jungle foliage and palm trees and thought “Yeah… not really.” We all look oddly red in this picture, but nobody’s sunburned.

On Tuesday, we planned to fly into Tiweno from the MAF field in Shell. Turns out it rained literally all day, so we spent some time doing a couple work projects around the hanger. Matt is holding a heavy-duty hair dryer to warm up the wall while Joanna strips the paint and Lauren is sweeping up.

The people from Tiweno show us a traditional-style Huaorani dance and sang a couple of songs for us. Chet was the first of the gringos to get dragged into it, but we were all in the circle by the time it was finished.

This post originally published at www.dannypeck.net

More Photos from Carmen Bajo

Normally I arrive at Carmen Bajo and unlock the door to my classroom to find it pristine, unchanged from the last time I taught. Laura and I are the only ones with keys, and for the most part we leave each others’ stuff alone, and nobody else goes in there when one of us isn’t around. I didn’t really remember how we’d left it last week though. While the team was on the ground, and since I had a key on me all the time (as opposed to the room downstairs, for which we have to hunt down the key every ten minutes), we used the art room as a storage room for all the craft supplies, guitars, cameras, and various other gringo junk. Assuming that I’d need to sort out some leftover ministry supplies, I came early today. Despite expecting to do a little work, my reaction when I opened the door was “Where the heck am I gonna have class?!” The photo below is en media res because I forgot to take a totally “before” picture.

Again, I’d already been cleaning and sorting and rearranging for 45 minutes before I bothered to take a picture. There were several more very large suitcases full of stuff when I started.

Jackpot! These mostly went upstairs to the women in the kitchen. Mostly.

Jostin and Josué jam on some ukuleles (under very careful supervision). My two favorite parts were that they were both holding them backwards, and they were totally singing along to the awful noise that was emanating from the tiny instruments.

What an influence the Canadians were. Unprovoked, the colegio boys chose to play real field (patio) Hockey instead of Wii Boxing. WHAT?!

Josué

Below are a couple of pictures of Josué. Josué (Joshua in Spanish, not to be confused with the name José/Joseph) is a 4-year-old boy who is part of the preschool program at Carmen Bajo. Back in September when Laura took me to Carmen Bajo for the first time in over a year to show me how to get out there using public transportation, Josué was pouting and crying the entire afternoon. Laura smiled a huge, genuine smile as soon as she saw him, called his name and held out her arms. Josué crossed his and turned around, running to the other end of the comedor and Laura just laughed. She turned around and told me that Josué was one of her favorite kids, and that he could be both sweet or mad. When he’s sweet, he’s really sweet. And when he’s mad, he’s really mad.

That was a Tuesday. I went back to Carmen Bajo the following Friday. And the next. And the next. Josué was variously pouting, frowning, crying, and screaming each of those days. I thought Laura was crazy, and I wondered how anyone could ever put up with this terrible little kid. But finally, after four weeks, I walked up the stairs to lunch one day, and there was Josué playing Foosball nicely with a couple of other little boys, laughing and smiling.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. But the more time I’ve spent at Carmen Bajo, the more I realize that Josué is a really sweet little boy. He needs a lot of coaching to get there some days. And some days he doesn’t get there at all. But now, even on those days when he doesn’t get there, I can still see this great little kid underneath the frowns and tears.

In February, I was hosting the Grace Community Church team that helped take the Pre-Kinder and Kinder classes to the zoo one morning. Each of us “adults” (I still laugh at that term being applied to me, no matter how long the kids at my home church have been calling me “Mr. Danny”) took three kids. Except in the case of supervising Josué. By the end of our time there, we’d given him to the craziest, most energetic member of the team, and the other two kids originally in that adult’s care had been siphoned off to others. For the most part, Josué was doing what he was supposed to. Until the bus ride back to the Compassion Project. Fabian and Grace’s youngest daughter Raquel was sitting in the front seat with another 4-year-old-ish little boy. Josué wanted either to be in Raquel’s lap instead, or just to have the front seat. I’m not sure exactly what set him off, but he flipped out. I’ve seen some temper tantrums in my time, but nothing, and I mean nothing anywhere even approaching this one. He was flailing all over the place and beating the other little boy with both his fists. Raquel just huddled over her charge. I had the luck to be the next closest person over the age of 5, so I grabbed Josué and pulled him away, holding him in a bear-hug that I intended to both show my love for him and function as a straitjacket.

I tried to calm him down over and over as he cried and screamed and flailed, sometimes somewhat escaping before I’d pull him back into my arms. I must have asked him two dozen times to “Digame con tus palabras lo que quires.” I was doing everything, including conjugating my verbs for “usted,” to treat him like a person and not a problem. But he simply wouldn’t calm down, and I finally (literally) passed him to Grace, who held him the same way I did and just smiled. I mean grinned at this kid. She never spoke a word, and after about 45 minutes, the waterworks and most of the sound effects had calmed down. (Grace made quite an impression on the team through this, too).

Then one day last week the VBS group from the Pueblos Unidos team did Fruit-Loop necklaces for their craft. As the kids were coming out of their classroom to go upstairs for lunch, I saw Josué standing and smiling on the sidewalk. I swooped over and picked him up and swung him in the air, and he immediately screamed at me to put him down. Wondering what about that had changed his attitude so quickly, I did just that. I was stunned. He’d been smiling, and I’ve done this a hundred times, never getting that reaction. So rather than just thinking “Oh, that’s just Josué,” as I would have several months ago, I asked him what his deal was. “Tengo cereales in my bolsillo,” he said: I have cereal in my pocket. And that he did. He pulled out a heaping handful of Fruit Loops he’d stashed in his pocket during craft time. Now that’s Josué, I thought. Then we went upstairs to lunch, and Josué pulled out the rest of the cereal from his pocket. Handful after handful. I couldn’t believe a 4-year-old’s pockets were so big. He set them all on the table, and a couple of the kids around him looked at them longingly (as if they didn’t all have strings of them around their necks). When one of the kids asked if he could have one, and reached for a single Fruit Loop at the same time, Josué snatched them all away and clutched them to his chest, sticking out his bottom lip. I leaned over, from the tiny seat next to him that I was doing my best not to break (it wouldn’t have been the first time I’ve crushed preschool-sized furniture) and told him “Tienes mucho. Queremos compartir,” (You have a bunch. We want to share). I didn’t expect that to remotely work. But it did. He pushed one Fruit Loop to each of the 4 kids around him. Not the most generous reaction I’ve ever seen, considering that he had half-a-box-worth of cereal in front of him, but I took it. With a little more prodding, he actually doled out about 75% of the Fruit Loops to the other kids at the table.

This is getting long, but I’ll give you one more example before I make my point. Whenever we have a team at Carmen Bajo, the first thing we do in the morning is roughly an hour of devotions with the team and everyone from CB. We arrived one morning, and I scanned the room for the kids I know, one of them being Josué. He was standing in the middle of the room with a cup of Sprite (or something clear and fizzy) and not looking happy. He wasn’t crying or screaming, but he was a little down in the dumps. With a totally different reaction than I’d have had 5 months ago, I set my sites right on him. I figured there were two ways his day could go from here, and I knew which way I didn’t want it to go (and which way I didn’t want to listen to it go). And aside from that, I do just really love the kid. So while all the other gringos steered clear, I walked right up and asked him if he wanted to hang out with me for devotion. I truly have no idea how that came out of my mouth in Spanish, and in Spanish that a 4-year-old would understand, no less. But whatever I said, he looked up at me and immediately bobbed his little head “yes.” I took him by the hand and led him to a chair at the far side of the room, where I sat and plopped him in my lap. He finished his Sprite and continued to play with the cup. He hardly said a word, and he only got squirmy once, standing up and trying to pull me to come with him somewhere. It was in the middle of someone’s testimony, so I tried to get him to sit back down, but as soon as they finished, I decided it was less disruptive if I just stood up and went with him. Turns out after all the soda, the poor kid just needed to go to the bathroom. It would have been nice if he’d just said “Me voy al baño,” and I wouldn’t have delayed the poor little guy, but I guess he forgave me pretty quick, because he came right back upstairs with me and stayed on my lap until I had to go down the hill with a construction group a while later.

So now we finally get around to it. Josué reminds me of me. Not because I was ever anywhere near the obnoxious little stinker than he can be. And yet because I am. I’m selfish and my feet are “swift to run into mischief.” I can only imagine that from the vantage point of God, I look like the flailing, screaming, child that Josué can be, refusing to be calm or rational or to think outside of himself (myself). And yet He sees through all that to the person He created me to be. The person who knows better, and just needs a little prodding in the right direction. He sits me in His lap and holds on to me, comforting me in my distress, and even in those times when I struggle with all my might to get away, to ignore Him, to head to somewhere that He can see I don’t need to be. That’s what we all need, to be held onto, cared for, even in our ignorance and sin. My love for Josué has made me thankful that God has love enough for that, love enough for me.

A Day and a Year

Saturday afternoon the team and Carmen Bajo hosted a youth event at the Nazarene Seminary here in Quito, where the group was staying. Tons of people from different churches came, and several from partner ministries and from Youth World. When Cameron showed up around lunchtime, she told me “I feel like it’s been a day and a year since the last time I saw you.”

You totally lose your sense of time when you are hosting a team. I actually turned to Christy in the bus on the way home last night and said “Is it still Sunday?” It was several seconds before she answered, giving me the Jack Sparrow stare as she thought about the question. Running with a team means that your days are incredibly long, both because they are action-packed and because you really are awake for an ungodly amount of time. But then you drop off 35 people at the airport and hug and cry and smile and think “Wasn’t I just here picking them up?”

So here I am, back to work before 9am the day after a team. And there they go, headed back to Canada to lives that I hope will be greatly affected by a week and a half in Ecuador. I would say that for the 70ish people directly involved in this whole operation, we’re probably all a little stunned it’s over. For the last eleven days we’ve walked up hills that would be illegal in North America, painted, lugged bricks, and mixed concrete. And it’s amazing what you learn about people as you work alongside them. But we’ve also given out shoes and cooked food and shared testimonies and put on presentations and VBS and worshiped together in church services and just by living life. It’s amazing what you learn from people when you plug into each others’ existence. I hope this is not the last time I see the Pueblos Unidos team, but if it is, it won’t be the last time I think of them.