Mission: El Salvador

Time is flying and we are not looking forward to Monday at all.  Again, we started the day off with construction at the church.  We finished laying concrete on the courtyard yesterday, so today we moved on to something new.  There’s a section of the church where there is scraps of material, sand, gravel, and wood stacked layer after layer but there was also trash all over the place in this area.  Our job was to gather up all the trash and also a few piles of sand they had piled back there.  We’re not exaggerating when we say it seemed like the entire church was filled with dust from shoveling the piles of sand into buckets and then hauling them up to a garbage truck on the street.  After the trash was finished and a few baseball size spiders were killed underneath it all, some began digging a ditch for drainage along the side of the church while others were involved in demolition.  They want us to demolish one corner of the church next to the street to allow another entrance to be there.  We will be finishing up the drain and doing more demolition tomorrow, our last day of construction ..

After lunch, we headed to the beach! We took two buses full of the team and some of the Salvadorian helpers from VBS and went to a beach house about an hour away from the church.  The entire team was looking forward to this day and didn’t really know what to expect because we were told the beaches were black.  When we arrived, we headed around the back and saw only water…. and rocks.  It was not your typical beach but it was beautiful none the less.  There was no sand where we were and the waves were extremely high.  Some of us were scared to get in the water because we didn’t know the best way to get in.. There were huge waves crashing into the rocks and pushing much of the smaller pebbles back up at us.  Some decided to leap in but didn’t stay for too long because walking on the rocks and some of them hitting our legs were just too painful and awkward to walk on.  There was also a pool at this house so a lot of the team and the Salvadorians swam and played games in there.  We stayed a few hours and it was very neat to be able to be in a different atmosphere with the members of the church.  After the hour drive home, we are now sitting here waiting for Carlton to finish our dinner so we can feed our faces, fellowship some, and hit the sack for our next day where we will be doing more construction and then heading to Exodo Orphanage!