¡No Mas Cemento!

Today we finished the last chunk of concrete for the basketball court! I wasn´t as busy today as I was the other days because there was no surface prep to do for the next day this time. When I was occupied, it was mostly hand-mixing concrete, and hauling wheelbarrows, so I´m pretty well covered in concrete. Last night we had a little worship service and devotional, and we did the mime drama that we weren´t able to do previously at the market before. After a short message from the bible, we had a little meeting to give a little history of Manos de Amor, or Hands of Love. Dan and Karen Bunn, a couple working as dorm parents at what was then the Tambo MK school, had an idea for a soup kitchen for the children of Comarapa who were very much in need of such an establishment. Although they wanted to set up something to fill this need, they didn´t really have any kind of resources to do so, so it stayed a dream until when someone from Tambo needed to be taken to the hospital for an illness (can´t remember the exact details there), and they met a doctor there who had been wanting to do the same for a while as well. To make a long story short, they teamed together and formed Manos de Amor. It started out as a tent in the middle of town for a temporary location, then the government told them that they would give them a plot of land in order to build a facility for the soup kitchen. Unfortunately, the plot of land they were going to give them was near several pubs, and the law says that an establishment that sells alcohol can´t be within a certain area with an establishment that works with kids. So the locals went all up in arms to prevent Manos de Amor from building there, because they were afraid they would lose their pubs! Soon, Karen received a phone call informing her that since the official papers hadn´t been signed to transfer the land to them yet, they were going to build a soccer field there instead (which they still haven´t done, for the record). God is good at providing for his people though, and another plot of land was offered to them a little ways out of town by the government. This is the current location of Manos de Amor. The agreement with the governmet is that if they do what they say they are going to do with the land, which is the soup kitchen/orpahanage within 30 years, the land is theirs. They now have the main kitchen building, one dorm, and the basketball court. The plan is to build one more dorm so they have a girls dorm and a boys dorm, and finish the water tower. That´s what I can remember from the many points of view expressed from the different people involved. God has brought a-lot of people from a-lot of different places together to make this a reality. We found out that the road will be closed on saturday, so we will be heading back to Santa Cruz tomorrow to avoid missing our flights out of here, so it´s good that we finished the court today. The insect report today is: I found a spider under my pillow when I checked my bed last night. He´s smoosehd now. Not sure when I´ll be posting again, but my net time is up Tootles!