Field Day Mexican Style and RETREAT!

Monday was yet another reason for Mexcians not to go to work. It was Revolution Day. Actually Thursday was the real holiday, but everyone celebrates on Monday. Basically it’s a big sports day, similar to the US field day and no one works or goes to school. Don’t ask me why because I have no idea. Basically what we did was split the whole house into 12 different teams that each had a mixture of kids from Kinder all the way up to 8th graders. We them competed in various competitions. Some made sense and some were just amusing. One competition was to put two giant marshmallows in your mouth and make animals noises and have everyone guess. I’m not sure how that has anything to do with sports, but the kids liked it. We then had more obvious sport oriented things like crawling on your stomach in the mud military style under wires and potato sack races. I spent the whole day muddy, covered in flour and egg, and wet as we passed through all the activites and the kids got to have their fun with us encargados. We topped off the day with a tug-o-war competition and my team won. We played over this 4 foot deep mud pit and don’t worry, I went in eventually when us volunteers got dominated by the directors.

So, as you know this past weekend I went on my first LifeTeen retreat as a CORE member. Granted, this was all in Spanish and I conducted my very own small group in Spanish as well- but I think it went really well. The kids seemed to really take to it after they got over the initial “pena” (embarrassment in Spanish). It was a really great opportunity to get to know the older kids in the house. The theme was Alpha and Omega which if you don’t know means beginning and end. So we went through all the major holidays of the Catholic church and basically turned the session room into Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and then Ordinary Time. The Christmas part got me all excited for Christmas. We decorated a mini tree and had Christmas music and all. It was a real test of many things for me including Spanish, but I really enjoyed it and I'm pretty sure that I would like to become part of a CORE team in LifeTeen when I return to the states. I'm thinking I could do an even better job in English.

I"m working on the new blog so that you can all see photos. This should be done in the next couple days. Also those of you who have Facebook- I just posted a album mostly of volunteer shenanigans that you can check out. I'm hoping to have a new one up soon, but bear with me as the internet problems and lack of time makes it difficult.

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