Monday, March 10, 2014

We start building today!

Lack of consistent wifi has caused our blog updates to lag behind.  Our apologies!  Here's a quick rundown of what we've done the past day and a half. 

Sunday Morning

Drew and Jim did a great job leading the caravan last night from Amarillo (which is not pronounced Armadillo like many of us did last night) and we all pulled in around 1:30a. local time.  Nick was ready and waiting for us with a stack of room keys and a smile on his face.  The students were great about grabbing their stuff and packing in tight in each room. 
We all slept hard last night– even the rooms where guys were snoring. After a solid 3-4 hours of sleep and showers, all of us felt better and ready to tackle the day.  Nick even included breakfast into our greatly reduced room rates.  All of the students were great about getting up and going to their scheduled breakfast shift and then packing up their rooms. We spent some time cleaning out the vans ad repacking everything to try and maximize the room that we have. 

Then, we moved the vans to the back of the parking lot and did church together.  Mitch talked about the four guys in Mark 2 that lowered their friend who was a paralytic into where Jesus was in a house and encouraged all of us to be those friends for people this week.  Even if it takes us longer to do something, if we can bring someone else closer to Jesus, then it was worth it.  We spent some time in communion and quiet time, took a group picture and loaded up.  Sunday is a slightly slower paced day.  It’s only around 3-4 hours from Roswell to El Paso and we don’t have to do a mad rush to make it to Sams Club this year, so we had a little more time to wander around Roswell and then grab lunch.  

After ensuring that everyone who has a history of car-sickness had Dramamine, we loaded up and headed out for El Paso.  It’s a windy road through the mountains into Texas and it can be hard on some stomachs.  So far we’re an hour into the drive and we’ve only had one emergency bathroom stop. We’re doing well!

Sunday Night

As I’m writing this, it’s about midnight here (2a.m. Michigan time) and we’re supposed to be up and moving at 5:30a to get our day started.  There are forecasted windstorms on Tuesday and Wednesday that will make building difficult, so we need to get as much done tomorrow as possible.  Please be praying that the forecast is wrong!  We know that it happens on a daily basis in Michigan, we need it to happen here as well.

The trip from Roswell to El Paso was very easy.  No one got sick in the mountains and the scenery was gorgeous for pictures (unfortunately, the dirty van windows didn’t really help with that.  We have lots of great pictures of the fingerprints on the windows with some scenery behind.) We did see the “Rio Grande” again this year, which is the mirage that newbies on the trip almost always think is either a river or the ocean.  We managed to get one person to believe us this year, but I laughed too hard and gave it away.  Whoops.

We went to Jason’s Deli here in El Paso for dinner where we met Andrew, Jason and Andy who will be three of our site leaders from Casas.  We will also be building with Seth, but we haven’t had the chance to meet him yet.  We’ve been really impressed with Jason’s Deli both times we’ve gone there this trip.  The food is excellent, the service is great (not many other places can feed 66 people individual orders in under an hour!) and there’s free ice cream.  It honestly doesn’t get much better than that!

After dinner, we came to Park Hills Church where we’ll stay tonight and again on Thursday night.   There’s another smaller group staying here as well – we might have slightly intimidated them when we all came in.  The church fits all of us really well and it gives us one more night of sleep tonight before we cross the border in the morning.  We did our annual run to Wal-Mart and the students did great!  We got everything we needed quickly, they were ready to go and everything was going fine until a computer malfunction resulted in us waiting at the register for almost an hour to pay.  Once we finally got it to work, this massive stream of students that had filled the front of the store filed out to the parking lot and the assistant manager started cheering.  It wasn’t until after we loaded everything and everyone but staff loaded into the vans, only to realize that we forgot the ice.  (Enter unanimous loud groans from every staff member and a mad run back to the ice cooler).

We got back to the church where everyone pitched in to unload the vans and set up their beds.  We’re all exhausted and ready for some sleep.  We cross the border in just a few hours!

Monday Morning

Hola!  It’s dark and early this morning but we’re all up and ready to work!  Everyone got moving this morning at 5:30 and by 6:15, we were on the road.  We’re grabbing breakfast now and then headed to the Casas headquarters to meet our site leaders and then we’ll be headed to Juarez! 

The next three days will be full of building and serving in any way that we can.  We’re very excited because we wound up raising an additional $1,028 to spend on gifts for our four families!  Cassie, Kelly and Emily spent the Wal-Mart run last night picking out dishes, silverware, towels, welcome mats, brooms, pots and pans, etc for the families and we’ll add small appliances once we cross into Mexico.  THANK YOU to everyone who supported us and the extra gifts!  These will be a huge blessing to the families!


We will not have internet access until sometime on Thursday, so there won’t be any blog updates until then.  But, we’ll be able to upload pictures and tell the stories of the week by then.  Please keep us in your prayers as we serve. 

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like you are all having a very productive time! Blessing to all! (friend of Cassie M)

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  2. Praying for you all from Biscoe, NC! May God work through you powerfully to build his kingdom here on earth! -Kjersti

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