Tuesday, July 21, 2009

We made it to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and were able to connect with Sherri Allen and toured the USO facilities where she works. It is a very impressive operation. It was one of their lightest 3-4 days annually, simply due to scheduling, which was nice for us to not crowd in and she was able to give us a first rate tour. We saw the book reading rooms where they video soldiers reading children's books and they create a DVD and ship them to the family they are leaving behind to go and serve our country.

This wouldn't be a mission trip without difficulty. Our gate to leave Dallas-Fort Worth airport got changed and our four hour layover got extended to a seven hour layover. We settled in at the airport ... home away from home. But we did make it in to Mexico City and Roland Smith and Brian Nevens met us there and our driver Antonio helped us load up luggage and we travelled to our new casa in Texcoco.

Bright and early Monday morning, we headed off to begin our first day of vacation Bible school. We divided up into two groups to canvas the local area with flyers and many of the Spanish speaking Bain and Chica children did very well. We also had the local helpers with us, who all speak fluent Spanish, which was a big help.

Our first day we had between 75-80 kids. The Bains were smart enough to not put on sunscreen, as the temperature wasn't all that bad. However, being over 6,000 feet altitude and sun, after all being sun, did a number on accelerating our tans. A little aloe later, all is well. ;) About 20 kids rose their hands to accept Christ and spent some time with Obed and Stephanie, our Spanish speaking local missionaries who are doing the primary teaching our first week of VBS, while the rest of the kids joined in for craft time. At this sharing time, Obed and Sephanie used the Evangelism Cube (e-cube) to share the Gospel. Praise God! The weather is very nice in the mornings during VBS, perhaps around 80 or so, then by late afternoon it flipped on a dime to provide rain and hail. Very brief, and done. They say that is typical.

Tuesday our numbers grew to 112 kids. Many mom's stayed, opposed to dropping of their kids and leaaving, and participate in the teaching time, crafts, and hang around. Today, Carl brought our huge e-cube. Obed and Stephanie have already been using the e-cube, so they were very familiar with it. However, they usually only have one small e-cube when they've done VBS in the past, so having multiple cubes, as well as the huge one to present to the kids, went over very well. Many more kids raised their hands to break off to learn more about Christ again today.

Everyone had a little more energy and had recovered from the plane ride, little sleep, and Monday morning VBS. Needless to say, we slept well Monday night. Our internet access is a short drive away from our casa to Roland and Joanne Smith's, and Carl and Mark will attempt to make more entries as often as is reasonable.

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