We had breakfast bright and early this morning and headed up the mountain in the truck taxis. When we arrived there was a light drizzle falling from the clouds but it dried up in an hour or so. Our team broke into a couple of groups to do different projects with the church. It’s always kind of funny…. And a big reason to be F. A. T…. but the “planned projects” always seem to change. Today for example we were asked to haul benches outside and to help wash them. Once one of the rooms was empty of benches we were asked to help prepare it for paint. These walls are concrete blocks that are skim coated with more concrete and preparing them consisted of sanding with sandpaper and sweeping them off (including the ceiling). The team members who helped with this were COVERED in dust. The next stage was painting. The people in Lote Tres for some reason believe that watered down paint is a good thing. They can take a gallon of latex paint and cover several rooms with it…. However it is really difficult to work with, it drips on the floors and the kids using the rollers! It also takes multiple coats of the paint to get decent coverage. The kids in our group did most of the painting and looked like they did!
Mark K and Sarah worked with some of the church members to continue building tables for their Compassion program. They made good progress and finished building 2 tables! They could not sand the tables because the group that had to sand the walls used all of the finer grit sandpaper. We will have to go to a hardware store before we go back to Lote Tres and buy more sandpaper.
Jim and Jo were able to go visit a dairy farm of one of the church members and talk with him and other community members about how to improve their agriculture and especially milk production. The maestro also finished all of the flooring in the church as well as the trim which means we will get to clean it on Thursday. It looks beautiful!
The team members who did a lot of the painting work ran VBS for the 50+Compassion kids. They did a good job with trying to corral the kids and move them between Bible story, crafts and games. There were lots of smiles on the children’s faces and soooo any hugs when we left the mountain today.
The team made a stop for ice cream and were treated to a demonstration on how they make the ice cream. We headed back to our hotel and EVERYONE headed for the showers…we were all feeling very dirty. Dinner was a style of fried rice found in Ecuador that includes cut up hot dogs. The team spent the rest of the evening relaxing, playing Uno Flip, preparing for our next day of ministry and placing our orders for flowers to bring home on Sunday.
Several team members did not feel well today so we do ask for your prayers to especially cover our health… Altitude issues, stomach issues, possible pink eye and dehydration (that led to a fever) are all being experienced by different team members.
