times they are a changin'

The apartment Laura-Catherine and I eat, sleep and shower in is in the garage of the cathedral/office building. Our office is an elevator ride away, the rock climbing gym is next door and the Sunday service is just up the stairs. The oven we use is just next door in the social hall. In our deluxe apartment we do have a cute little two burner stove, with an ‘oven’ attached to the bottom which is currently not functioning (you can see in the photo to the right). This actually works out to be manageable using the oven next door due to the fact that even if our oven did work, it is not quite large enough for my baking endeavors and there is not quite enough space for a 'real' oven in our little closet of a kitchen.

We recently traded in our over sized 10 person table for a nice little 4 seater and are in the process of finding a toilet seat that fits the commode. This past weekend we went to Home Center picked out two pleasant complimentary shades of sage green and a nice blue green accent for the stark white walls. Once the paint colors were mixed, we realized that some things in life should not be taken seriously, as we came back with a nice watered down mint green color, a festive bold/brighter green and 'blue/green' which turned out to be a bright green with a tint of blue. Smile, yes smile and think happy thoughts, wonder where they got the paint codes and hope the walls will look semi-decent.

On other updates in the world of Colombian mission: last week a parent of one of our children talked with Laura-Catherine about not wanting her children playing in the street due to the danger of the passing traffic. So when break time came around the next day we tried playing in the dead end just around the corner. The children were pretty upset and we received loads of complaints such as: the hill is steeper so the ball will run away, there is more of a danger of windows being hit by the soccer ball and the area is much smaller so playing options are limited.

Ok, brain storming time, we put on our thinking caps just as Padre Jose walked into the room and quickly discovered the empty hill of a lot next to the church is available for use. Perfect! He took us to the lot and we discussed long and short-term possibilities; beginning this Tuesday with the clean-up part of the project, getting rid of the grass, weeds and other hazardous articles. Then comes the digging, shoveling and hauling of dirt to level out the base of the hill to develop a soccer field and garden. Our hope original hope was for the children to help us with this project, in between the English classes which would get them out of the street, still be able to play while enjoying and inventing in the production of this dream. Well, one minor detail dampened our hopes: there 3 week summer break starts on Monday, BUT do not fear it wasn't completely snuffed, because after presenting the idea to the kids and trying to save our bleeding eardrums from their screams of joy they agreed to come help during their break!!