Work And Play!

Hola Familia!

This is Karla. We´re so excited to be here in Chile!

Last night, a few of us went on a trip to Valparaiso, the nearby city. We were escorted by Pastor Santiago and his son Joshua. We were so suprised to find it to be such a big city. Many of the buildings we saw were very old and looked to have a European influence. Randy especially loved looking at the architecture. Pastor Santiago explained that before the Panama Canal was built there were many more tourists and trade that occured in the port city, which of course makes sense, but many of us hadn´t really thought about it before!

Today has been a busy day on the job site. This morning was spent mainly mixing and pouring concrete for the building foundation. A few of us also worked on some additional excavation of the prior building site. We´ve also got a bit of a project at the back of the site where much of the materials from the prior building were shoved out of the way. We´re getting rid of unusable materials and organizing potentially reusable materials. Everyone is working very hard! The mornings have been pretty cool and the afternoons are warm, but not too hot, at least for me! There have been fires somewhere nearby the past couple days and we´ve woken up to smokey morning air that seems to clear out around noon.

Dan and I are staying with Pastor Santiago and his wonderful wife Mabel (along with Ross, Jan, Marina and Shannon). They have a beautiful home with room for all of us! Mabel has been very hospitable and is working so hard to feed and take care of all of us. The house is on the same property as the church buildings, so we just walk out the back door to the job site. The two of us are doing great and enjoying spending time with the team and the Chilean people that we´ve met. Dan likes to pretend that he speaks Spanish and we´re typically able to communicate okay with our broken Spanish and several translators nearby.

Shannon is still not feeling well. She is feeling a bit better today and is up and around. She was our photographer and videographer this morning so we´ll have some pictures and video to share with everyone! She would appreciate your continued prayers for healing.

On a side note: Shannon´s name is a bit hard for our Chilean friends to pronounce, so Dan picked a nickname for her that would be easier for them - el gato, or the cat! That´s been pretty fun for us, but I´m not sure how she feels about it.

Tonight is a prayer meeting at the church where Marina is planning to share her testimony and we look forward to spending more time with the folks that we´ve come here to love on.

Love to all,
Karla