It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

No, it's not snowing here but, just like in the states, as soon as Halloween was over, Christmas decorations starated to appear. Metro (the grocery store near our house) has a growing display of crafty decorations. Two things are funny about that to me: first, some of the decorations have English words like "Merry Christmas" or "Seasons Greetings" on them, which is odd to me since most of the people here wouldn't be able to read them. Second, lots of the deocations have snowmen or some other snow related thing on them, which, again strikes me as odd because lots of people here have never seen snow (a thought which boggles my mind as well, especially when I think about the feet of snow I shoveled off my driveway last winter).

So, what's been going on in my life lately that has kept me busy enough to not write in almost two weeks? Not much different than usual. I've just turned into a computer slacker the last few weeks. But, no fears, I'm going to catch up a bit tonight.

The hard thing about writing, sometimes, is that after being here for almost 13 weeks, there aren't a lot of new things happening anymore. We still go to Casa Job on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Still have Spanish tutoring on Tuesday and Thursday. Still have meetings, go to the street, etc, as usual. Being in ministry, being a "missionary" could definately start to feel like any other job if people lost focus on why they are doing what they are doing.

You're probably wondering just what I've been up to lately. Well, last week I spent quite a bit of time painting that new apartment of Mia and Jennifer (two of the women on staff here). I was the official edger, and, if I must say so myself, I did a darn good job of it. They picked some crazy colors: dark purple, bright orange, and neon green, just to name a few. It was a good time, and the apartment looks great!

We've also had some funny moments as the "Casa de Carmen" this past week (Carmen is the older woman we live with, so that's what we fondly call her house). Last night, Jill and I were getting ready for bed when she called me into the bathroom too look at the teeny tiny plant that was growing behind the cold water knob of the bathroom sink...yes, a real, live plant growing in the bathroom...nice.

Speaking of knobs, last Saturday night we had a pretty funny thingn happen. We had spent the evening together as a team grilling hamburgers and sitting around our makeshift campfire on the patio of Craig's apartment. (Small side note: in case your wondering about how my team is getting along, things are great. Before we went to Bolivia, we were all getting along great, but since returning, I feel like even stronger bonds have been built. I can honestly say that I am really going to miss Monica, Jill, Aaron, and Mark when I leave here in five weeks. That's another hard thing about this trip...making great friends that I won't get to see very much when we go our seperate ways from here....such is life, i suppose, changing whether I like it or not). Anway, back to my story. We girls got back to our place at 12:30 am. Monica went into the kitchen to fill a tea kettle to boil some water to drink in the morning. Suddenly we hear her call to us, "Uh, girls, I have a little problem here." We go into the kitchen to find her standing with the hot water know in her hand and the facuet running....not good. We've been really excited that they've been leaving the water on at night now, but this was one night where having it off would've been in our favor.

Try as we might, we could not get the water turned off. Eventually we woke up Carmen, she chastised us for having the hot water on in the kitchen, and then called her son who lives upstairs. He has to come down and completely shut off thehot water in the apartment until the morning...funny evening

Other fun things of the last week: on Tuesday we all went swimming at Generacion (the home for youth that we visit every week)....with all of our clothes on! Jill got pulled in by the kids, so then the rest of us decided to join her. I really should use the term "swimming pool" more loosely because it didn't have any filtration or chemical system, so it was really pretty gross. I tried not to think about it as I played around. The kids were having a fun time, so I figured that was all that mattered. We looked pretty funny when we got out. A bunch of wet gringos in regular clothes...good times in Peru!

Random thought abou the recent presidential election: It's amazing to me how interested the people here were in who won our presidential election. I was asked about it by the woman at the corner store (where we buy all our water and snacks, about a block down the street from our apartment) and at the copy store. They knew more about what was going on that I did. It was a reminder to me of how much the world watches the United States and what we do and the great responsibility we have in the world.

Well, it's almost midnight here, and I feel like I'm out of things to say for the time being. Hopefully I'll have time to write a bit more this weekend. As always, love and miss you all bunches. See you in five weeks!