Day 8 - Rest

After a long, hot week of hard work and focus on the kids, the team at Dulce Refugio blessed us with an afternoon to decompress from the intensity of our time here.

We piled into the vans and drove about two hours to Guanajuato, a historic town with strong European influences nestled in a valley between the mountains. We ate lunch, learned a bit about the town, and then walked down 275 steps to the town below.

We had about four hours to explore the town before piling back into the vans and heading back to Aguascalientes for dinner.

The highlight of the evening, though, was the opportunity to hear the life story of Marcella, the founder and director of Dulce Refugio. Her life has been filled with pain and hardship, but it's amazing how God has used her pain to bless so many children.

Marcy shared with us for over an hour, and then we celebrated our new friendships with dancing and singing around a bonfire.

Guanajuato Market

Guanajuato

Day 7 - Family Recreation Day

Dulce Refugio was blessed with an offer of significantly discounted tickets to a local waterpark, so today we were able to bring the kids for a rare treat.

The shallow pool was filled with small slides and fountains that offered a great spot for the smaller kids to play. We also found a deeper pool with a volleyball net and plenty of room to horse around for the older kids. The park also had two big waterslides and a zipline.

As we did at the park earlier this week, each of us paired up with two kids to supervise and play with, and we all hit the water. The kids played around for about an hour, then we took a break for lunch before returning to the water until about 4:00.

The kids were all exhausted from a day in the sun, and I'm sure they all slept soundly! We all chowed down a quick, delicious dinner, and then piled into the vans for the hour-long ride to watch the Dulce Refugio soccer team play in a nearby town.

We arrived in time for the boys to warm up, and as the lights came on, "our" kids took the field. They played their hearts out! One of our guys (Jeremy) filled out the team and even got in an awesome shot that made the other team's goalkeeper work hard! Even though our boys lost, their smiles shone across the field each time we shouted out for them.

Sitting there cheering these kids on, I realized how amazing it is for us to be able to participate and support them. These are kids who don't have a big cheering section. Their moms and dads aren't at every event with a video camera and team gear. They don't have community boosters who sell Nelson's Chicken to buy them all matching uniforms. But what they do have is worth sooooo much to them; they have a small band of committed adults who have *chosen* to give their lives to loving them and providing a home that their families of origin can't. And they have teams like us who partner with Dulce Refugio to come back year after year and support the leaders and construction team in their vision to help these kids that the rest of the world has left behind. We are proud to be part of the extended family for them!

We consider ourselves blessed to be a part of the physical work as well as the emotional and spiritual support for these kids! And it's through such simple actions like watching a soccer game that we learn how blessed we truly are!

Day 6 - The Final Workday

With each day that passes, we find ourselves dragging into the breakfast room a little more slowly and a little more banged up. I can think of nothing more tempting than a breakfast of Advil and coffee.

Busy scheule today! We planned another short concrete pour to get a couple more beams completed. We also had several projects underway that needed to be wrapped up, including the grates for the windows on the girls' dorm, and the trenches for the new irrigation system for the soccer field.

Another project we've been working on is reinforcing the drawers in each of the kids' bathrooms. About 16 months ago, sturdy, floor-to-ceiling wall units were constructed in each bathroom. The units provide each of the six children in that suite with three large drawer and three cubbies--to hold everything they own.

One cubbie is at the bottom and holds shoes and such, the three drawers hold clothes and other personal items. The first cubbie over the drawers are really where the kids show their personalities. Much like an American kid decorates her room, these are filled with pinups of Justin Bieber (really...just can't get away from that kid!!) or fancy cars. The problem, though, is that the bottom of this cubbie is about 4.5 feet off the floor and they are at least 30 inches deep.

Now any of you who have children know that they do not start out very tall. And while it seems that they grow very quickly based on the number of trips to buy longer pants, they do not grow quickly enough to reach this cubbie without assistance. Being the resourceful little kids that they are, they quickly discovered that drawers make convenient steps! But they also discovered that drawers that weren't built to double as steps quickly break when they are only held together with staples.

So we spent a couple days this week rebuilding the broken drawers and reinforcing all the rest of them, pulling each drawer out, removing the front, screwing and gluing support blocks in the corners, and then reinstalling the front, and putting them back. Oh, and removing the kid's stuff and the managing to put it back exactly how we found it. And today, we finished.

During our stay here, we've also gotten to know Marcella, the director of Dulce Refugio. Marcy has devoted her life to providing a home and showing Christ's love to the forgotten children of Aguascalientes. Marcy gets up every morning at 3 AM, chases kids all day long and collapses into bed when the last child is asleep...Marcy has a hard job and she loves it! She also is devoted to taking great care of the teams that come down to serve, proving amazing home-cooked meals for us all week.

To provide her a refuge inside the refuge she has built, the construction project team has designed a one-bedroom apartment for her in one of the central buildings (between the dorm and the cafeteria). Everyone here has grown to love and appreciate all Marcy has done, and in Extreme Home Makeover style (except a lot smaller and a lot slower, so, well, maybe not so much like EHM outside of providing a beautiful home for a well-deserving soul), Marcy's apartment is coming together.

This week, a couple of our guys have stepped up to the challenge of constructing closet organizers for her. Now this is not a "run to Lowe's and get a closet-tamer system and throw it together in an afternoon." Oh, no, my friends, this is 4x8 sheets of melamine and 1x10 pine boards, ripped, planes, and joined by hand into trim. But the men are gifted with creative use of power tools, and it's coming along.

This afternoon, the youth visited a house church in a poor neighborhood, where they set up a couple of tarps over the sidewalk for shade and invited the neighborhood kids and families...about 30 kids and 15 adults showed up! The youth shared their stories, performed a skit about the Good Samaritan, and then played with the kids and handed out coloring books and crayons. It was great to see so many people in the community, and for the youth to get to experience firsthand what "need" really looks like.

We thank the Lord that we finished our scheduled work-week with no major injuries and with no outstanding illness! With temperatures nearing 100 each day and being about a mile closer to the sun than most people (well, at least a mile closer than we are used to), the thinner air and hotter sun often takes its toll on visiting teams. We are blessed that all twenty-one of us are whole and well!!!

Tomorrow.....off to the waterpark with all the kids!

Closet Organizers

How many men does it take to build a shoe-rack?? ;-)

Reinforcing Drawers