Interns!!

So, all of the interns are here at last! The last four of them finally arrived today, and we are having a great time so far. Already, God has done some pretty cool stuff through them. They're all just amazing young men and women of God and I've been really impressed with their initiative and positive attitudes. What a great group!

Yesterday we spent a whole day out on Stone Island. Ana (one of the interns) gave an excellent teaching on Ruth to the women's Bible study, Stephen lead worship in Spanish, Amber and Taylor played with tons of kids and really helped a lot, we all got to go on house visits and pray for families in need, one woman got her back healed.... It was altogether an amazing (and exhausting!) day.

We also finished up with the doctor team on tuesday. That was an incredible experience getting to work with them. I feel like I learned so much and I know it was a huge blessing to lots of needy people. There was a couple in particular that I'll never forget. They had come in for various health issues and apparently had never really been to a doctor before. The man who brought them told us a little bit about their living situation. They live near the garbage dump, work in the dump, have no electricity or clean drinking water. So, needless to say they had all sorts of health problems. It was so good that we had the doctors there to take care of them. The interesting thing was that the man that brought them was also quite poor and needed lots of help with a herniated disk that had been causing him lots of pain. He had us pray for him and while we were praying, he was just weeping and crying out to Jesus. It was hard to see him struggling like that and also inspiring to see that even though he was in lots of pain and poor, he took the time to care for some other people less fortunate than him.

I also got to go on a house visit with the doctor to a woman who had been experiencing severe headaches, vision problems, physical weakness, inability to walk, etc. for a year. Her family came to bring us to her. When we got there, the woman was laying in the bed and her eyes were kind of wandering all over not able to focus on us. They had taken her to get some cat scans done, but didn't have enough money to get them interpreted by a doctor. When the doctor looked at them, he saw that she had a lesion in her brain that was causing all the ailments. He was able to prescribe pain medications and also advise the family that she could be treated if the tumor was removed. We also spent some time praying for her. It was so heartbreaking knowing that she may not have very long and also thinking about how the family must be feeling knowing this and also seeing how desperately they had come to find us. I was deeply moved and still just feel a huge burden to pray for that family. I wish there was more that I could do for them.

To end on a lighter note, we had a fairly funny circumstance happen to us on the way home from the doctor's clinic that day. The way we took home had a military check point in it that we had to go through. The car we were driving was a 1973 Satellite that is painted bright yellow with "La Vina" written all over it and it has a loud muffler... It's a piece of work, but it sill runs! Anyway, when we pulled up, I think we must have looked suspicious in this beat up car, so they made us pull over to the search station to get the car searced for drugs or something. When we pulled up, the guys from the car in front of us all bursted into laughter at the sight of us... Which only made us laugh. It didn't help that we were tired from the long hot sweaty day, so we just couldn't seem to stop laughing even while the soldiers were searching the vehicle. The more we thought about how serious we should be acting around the soldiers and then how silly the situation looked, the more we laughed. We even got the soldiers to laugh a bit! When we had been cleared and left the station, all of the laughter we had been squelching just came bursting forth and we couldn't stop laughing for about 15 minutes afterwards. I think that was probably one of my best memories in Mexico so far!

On Monday when I went to pick up 2 of the interns from the airport, I got searched again at a different (temporary) search station. I started thinking maybe they were after me!!! And then within two days, I locked my keys in the car three times. I tell ya, I think I'm losing my mind :).

Well, that's all for tonight. I'm sleepy!