A collection of short stories

• The boys who were finishing electrical work at 25 de julio the other day treacherously crossed four lanes of traffic following a "friend" of someone there. They ran out to the middle, where she signaled them to stop and wait while all the cars whizzed by... When they finally reached Burger King, their lunch destination, Rich accidentally ordered two value meals. Of course, the employees were going to let him buy it until Jeff pointed out that it probably shouldn't cost him the equivalent of $14 to buy lunch there...
• Also at 25 de julio, Alvaro's ADORABLE daughter Laura took Monica and I to the restroom next door. While Monica and Laura were waiting on me and making small talk, Monica told Laura that her dad was a "very nice lady."
• Emily pointed to the chickens in someone's yard while we were walking the neighborhood passing out fliers for the kid's party and said, "pollos." In Spanish, there are separate words for cooked chicken that you eat, and for chickens that are alive. She decided it was probably the equivalent of pointing to pigs and calling them "bacons," and then laughed hysterically to herself.
• The origin of "quesquelmente": Jason came to Monica one evening and told her that he thought he had gotten a word from the Lord, but it was in Spanish. He didn't know what it meant, but he wrote it down and showed it to her. The word was "quesquelmente." Monica trtied to hold back her laughter and told him that she had never heard it before, but they could lok it up. The closest thing they could find in the dictionary was cheese. It has now become a running joke, and the meaning of the word varies in usage. For example, when Jason almost fell down the hill from the church into the rainforest to his death, he caught himself and said he was almost quequelmente'd.
• Monica taught Jason how to say, "Bad pirate, run, run!" because she was wearing a bandana and he wanted the kids to pretend she was a pirate. Instead of saying, "Pirata Mala, corre, corre!" he said, "Pata Mala, gorro gorro!" which means "Bad duck, hat hat!"
• Jeff has begun trying to speak Spanish. He has been putting together strings of words that mostly don't make sense, and continues to say, "tengo hombre," instead of "tengo hambre" when he's hungry.

This is just a sampling of the happenings on this trip. Hopefully there will be more to follow, but I need to go change now, unfortunately. In real news, we went to Manrique's small group last night, which is all high school and middle schoolers. Mitch and Chris got to lead worship, and I got to teach, which went really well. It was great, God was really there because at the end when I called people up for prayer in ministry time, so many kids came up. It was great to feel like God had used me for something like that.

Hasta luego~

Steph