Team from Albuquerque

Well I know it has been a long time since we last put anything up here ( many of you have reminded me of this) but we have been very busy as of late. So sit down and prepare yourself for a fairly hearty and probably long update. Well since it has been so long since we did update, and since my (Eulogio) memory is so horrible, I'll start with the most recent and thus the most clear thing in my mind to have happened, and then hopefully as that jogs my memory I will be able to fill in all of the other gaps that we have left gapping wide over the past several weeks. So first of all we had a team here for a little over a week at the beginning of this month. The team was here from Albuquerque with the primary intention of helping out with the building construction. This was the first team for both Leah and I since our moving down here, and it turned out to be quite the blessing and laden with little miracles. First of all the team came down here at exactly the same time that we had stopped construction on both buildings because we had run out of funds. So we were able to continue construction on the children's church building. This was wonderful since the children's church building was at a rather precarious stage of its construction. The walls were fairly high but the floors had not been filled with dirt, and this means that the walls could have fallen in on themselves given enough rain (something that already happened about a month ago). The team was able to move a ton of dirt in to fill the floors (the amount of dirt alone that they moved would have taken us weeks to move by ourselves), but not only that, since they were starting work at like 6 every day, and not quitting till dinner time, they were also able to continue building up the walls to a height that now all of the walls can be tied together with corner columns – meaning save for a hurricane they should not fall in any more. The team also built up a diversion/retaining wall to help with our rushing water issue. It was a tremendous blessing to have all of these guys here helping out with such pressing construction matters, at such a perfect time. But I can't imagine that we should have expected any less from the Lord bringing things together in such a perfect manner. In addition to this the Lord was also very good to us and the team in that they were even able to work. Up until their arrival, we had been sending messages to them telling them to bring jackets and rain gear, in preparation for our “winter” weather. We had been having fairly cold days here with almost nonstop rain. However from the day that we picked up the team in San Pedro to the day that we dropped them off, it only sprinkled once for about 10 minutes one evening. The entire time that the team was here we had warm clear sunny days, something that we hadn't had for weeks. Every day here for the past month has been cloudy almost without exception. The team had told us that they had been praying for good weather for their trip, and the Lord delivered. Thank God for answered prayer! It is however unfortunate that they had to leave because the exact day they left we went right back to our winter. We have had one sunny day since they left and the rest have been quite cold and very rainy. In fact yesterday it rained all day and night and now we are right back to the same old level of mud that we were at before the team came and dried it all up. Ok I realize now that this is getting long so I am gonna cut the other stuff off for another posting and or update. But lastly I must say that amidst all of those little miracles that the Lord did there was also one more, my dad came with them! He actually left The United States! To most of you that doesn't mean a lot, but in a nut shell my dad is not a big traveller for whatever reason. He even said when he got here that it was a mini miracle that he came because it is against his normal inclinations. Anyways that all said The Lord was incredibly good to us and to the team, I know that we were not only blessed but they were as well. And so were the people of Pena Blanca - not only did they help with the building but were able to go out and minister to several very poor families in the area sharing with them the Love of Christ through food clothes and most important of all prayer and the gospel.

Ernesto and Ted lay some block
A little worship and fellowship at the Cowan Cabana
Leah does some dirty work





A group shot of both our Gringo team and the Catracho building crew