Our first day

We had just arrived in San Salvador only about an hour before. We were sitting, singing worship songs in our broken down bus…the second bus to break down in less than 24 hours. The reactions to our situation from the people around me made me smile. We decided to be cheerful in our tiredness…to be positive, even though we’re hot and we haven’t really gotten a lot of sleep. As we sat singing, I couldn’t help but reflect on the night before…at Chevron, waiting for cars to come pick us up. Our first bus had broken down, and we were stranded, needing to get to the airport and the manager of the Denny’s right next to the gas station came over and offered us use of their big room so that we wouldn’t have to sit outside in the cold. All of us were so grateful, it was so cold…and there was food that we could eat. God provided enough cars to get all of us to the airport, and we made it to the gate with 10 minutes to spare. When we arrived at the airport, we quickly got off the plane and went to get our passports stamped and to find our luggage. We went outside and found the people with Festival of Life who had set up our schedule and housing. We got on our bus, which was like the real “ghetto” bus that you hear about in stories and see in movies. It was awesome. Everyone was excited to get to the house and just sleep. Then, on the way to our house, the bus transmission died completely, with a big bang. There was a complete hush for like a minute. We couldn’t believe our second bus broke down. That’s when we started singing. Rachel was like, get out the guitar and lets sing worship songs. So, Travis got out the guitar and we sang Everlasting Love at the top of our lungs. We finally got picked up by our third bus and taken to the house. By then we knew that the Christmas outreach we were going to be involved in had been canceled for us and we were going to be going to a “soccer field” to do a drama and a couple testimonies. It wasn’t much of a soccer field, but it was a great time. We did one drama and Adam and Autumn did their testimony with a translator. Chris Flores got up and translated for Adam and one of the men, Erik, from the Festival of Life group translated for Autumn. It was very powerful for us, even if it was hard for the Salvadorans to understand completely what was going on. We learned a lot with the whole having no time to prepare for anything. We didn’t have a chance to get nervous, and we ended up doing balloons and playing with the children. It was so much fun and a great day.