Christmas Vacation

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” - CS Lewis

Yeah, so I have a thing for CS Lewis. Perhaps it is because it is so easy to remember his words. Perhaps because he was a genius. It speaks to me now as I have been struggling with yet another round of illness and the Lord has indeed been shouting to me. He has also whispering in the fact that I saw my first sunset here the other day and the stars were out last night (both a result of the fact that the perpetual clouds are finally leaving). In any case, try not to hold my love of good old Jack against me :)

Christmas eve was wonderful here at the Santuario, complete with 10pm Mass and sleeping babies, a beautiful hand made nativity scene from the misioñeras and dancing in Padre´s house until 2am. For Christmas day we had Mass again and then time to recuperate for the gringo Christmas celebration that we had ourselves with a bonfire, s´mores (yes, we found marshmellows), wine and Christmas caroles, quite literally sung by the fire. After all of this, we went for an impromtu swim in the ocean at 1am, having to scale the wall since we neglected to bring our keys. Yep, it was a different kind of Christmas but nonetheless memorable.

These last few days we have had a few different events, including a Mass for all the elderly in the surrounding communities, but for the most part we have enjoyed a few days of vacation, with later wake up times and afternoons at the beach with the kids that are still here. One of our precious little ones, Angelica, who is 6 years old, about 3.5 feet tall and 40lbs soaking wet, absolutely loves the waves and will nearly drown herself trying to get out to where I am so that she can swim with me and hold onto my arms as the waves crash into her. I have never seen a kid smile so big with a face full of salt water but she absolutely loves it and her absolute trust in me is humbling. So, even when my arms are going to fall off from holding her up in the waves for the 1,000th time, just one look at her face and I keep going. In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to go right now...

Tomorrow we have a great big party, probably the second biggest of the year here, not only for New Year´s but also for the eve of the solemnity, Mary Mother of God. It´s pretty exciting as all the misioñeras who don´t live here on base will come in for the celebration and we have lots of visitors from Quito and Guayaquil who have come down as well. I have been put on the decoration committee and we are charged with decorating the boat aka the church which should be fun. I suppose it is about time to begin my reflections on the old year and my resolutions for the next, however I think my first resolution would be to keep my resolutions for more than two weeks, haha.

I hope that all my family and friends back home are enjoying a peaceful weekend and are prepared to ring in the new year. May the Lord bring blessings anew to us all and may 2008 bring more positive change to this world in which we live.

O Come O Come Emmanuel...

¨God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.¨ - CS Lewis

¡Feliz Navidad! Well, almost. It is hard to believe that tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so far it feels like it will pass just like any other day here, but I hope not. The week has indeed been filled with fun things for the children as many benefactors come out of the woodwork for the holidays. So far a few groups have come and distributed toys which is very exciting for them as they generally have very few. However, the children at Casas Familias were equally excited when Jim presented every child with new underwear and towels...try giving that to a child in the states for Christmas and you´re an idiot. But no, here these sweet babies were jumping up and down and carrying on, just to have something new of their very own, even if it was underwear and a towel with their name on it in sharpie. What a totally new perspective there is to be had, being so seperated from the Christmas rush. Granted, we have been supremely busy because many of the children were leaving for vacations and because of all of these toy giving events, but it is still different.

One of the cooler things this week was that a family from Guayaquil paid for 140 of our kids to participate in a day at a water park in Salinas, a huge tourist city about two hours away. All of our kids, the small to the big, got to go in bus to the water park, spend the afternoon there, eat a lunch of hamburgers (really cool thing here), and receive ice cream, cake and a bag of treats. It was great. For our kids, who pretty much never get to leave base, to be able to experience something as novel as a water park, wow. For a few hours that afternoon, I was with 140 totally different kids, their joy was so immense. Sometimes just to be a kid in a water park is such a necessary experience and I am thankful for that family´s generosity.

But again, all of these experiences, in the light of being with children who have so little material wise, has helped me seek further the root of Christmas, the babe in the crib, come to save the world in the humilty of flesh. Because here we don´t have the malls decorated for Christmas (at least not in this part of the peninsula), we don´t have the usual smells, sounds and lights of the time of year that usually help me ¨get in the spirit¨ and therefore I have had to seek that somewhere else. I am thankful for this experience, it has been difficult to be away from home but I am thankful for it nonetheless. I hope I can always remember the excitement those children had to receive the underwear and towels, things we don´t even consider as gifts but rather are givens in life, and always be able to receive everything in my life with that same joy and gratitude. I hope that I can accept the humble offering of a naked child in a barn, born without pretense or glitter, born to be my Savior but waiting in humility to be received, with the same joy as those children who have nothing because at the end of the day, I have nothing other than this gift of love.

A very Merry Christmas to all.

Little miracles and other things

¨Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ´God is with us´.¨ - Matt. 1:23

Amen, God is with us. The longer I live this mission life, the more I realize this. There are days when you think you just can´t do it anymore, that there is nothing you can do to make a difference in such chaos and need, and then something happens to remind you no, you are not forsaken, the Lord has come and He lives in each and every heart who have given Him a home and moreover, His mark is on every heart, even those who have yet to know Him. With the Lord so very present how can you ever completely lose hope?

Story of the week is this. One of our dear little crazy boys decided last Tuesday night that he was Superman and wanted to try to fly. So he climbed up on the roof of a building but before he could jump, the roof collapsed beneath him and he fell 20 feet onto a flight of cement stairs and rolled down the stairs. And stood up and walked away with only 5 stitches in his head. Mariya, our great nurse, and Jim, resident dad, took him to the city, 2 hours away, for a x-rays and a CAT scan but he has no skull fracture or any other broken bones. After 5 days of being kept resting, he is back in school and back in action. Incredible. The misioneras say that every child here has 10 guardian angels because little miracles like this happen all the time, and while I don´t know the specifics, clearly the Lord is looking after our children in some way because there is no other explaination. Fernando should not have walked away from a fall like that with nothing more than a cut. But the Lord has been blessing the work here for the last 30 years and so an incident like this just joins the ranks of all the other little miracles that these women have seen. Wow.

In other news, I am working on a new project to gather enough information to arrange the legal paperwork we need but we lack. It is tough but exciting and I am learning a lot. In a lot of ways, it is the proper follow up for all the organizing that I have been doing. I am also being called now when new cases present themselves to base and have been doing the intakes on my own. Scary but really cool that the Lord is helping me with my language skills and that I can finally offer some real services to this base that has already given me so much.

Finally, happy Advent. Last week, to surprise Mariya, I decorated our hallway with some Christmas decor and now it feels a lot more like Christmas, even if it is 80 degrees, haha. This is my favorite time of year, a time for family and a time to remember the humble humanity of Christ and the profound gift that His life, not just His death on the cross, is to all of us. May you all be blessed this Advent season with the feeling of love that comes from having all of your loved ones around you and the gift of the Child Jesus, born to us in a humble barn some 2,000 years ago yet ever so present today.

World´s shortest post

Hi friends. Don´t have it in me to really post today but I wanted to say that all is well here, we had a good time in Tena and got some things arranged for the March mission, went to a bullfight in Quito (crazy but interesting) and made it back in time for the consecration of two new misioneras (incredibly beautiful). I have been sick but am getting better, prayers on that end would be great. While in Quito we did put up more pics, check out the usual link www.lavidaloca.shutterfly.com and just click past the old ones to see the newbies.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful Advent and I promise more for next time, same time, same place, life on the flip side...

My Heart Will Go On

So last night, in celebration of the quinceñera, our dear little Gaby, Mariya and I did an impromtu lip sync to Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On - Theme from Titanic. And yes, it was hilarious. Our Gaby is such a funny character and few things really make her smile but she really likes this song and so we presented in front of the whole base at her 15th birthday celebration. MOL lipsync has nothing on us and all of my Stella sisters would have been proud, it was a great evening.

The lipsync was a perfect ending to a rather random week. This week was filled with surprises and funny things, where to begin. First, my collegue Narcissa finally returned from Quito and we sat down with my list of questions and I showed her the fruits of my organizing labors. I learned that the social worker who had previously been in charge of the kids on base and had been on home leave is not coming back. The good news is we have permission to hire a new social worker to replace her. Our hope is that we will be able to hire someone to take Narcissa´s case load in the city and she will be able to work on base with me. Please pray that the Lord sends us some capable and joyful hands and soon, as well that all the office politics are worked out. Really, until Narcissa, or Nacho as we call her, can work on base with me, the cases here will remain sorely in need of attention and I will not be able to do much else to help as I as of yet do not know all the cases and cannot do home visits on my own. I did however make my first decision as a social worker on base the other night (Nacho is back in Quito for another conference and so they were stuck with me) and it was a really hard one and I think it was the right one. We´ll see!

Also this week, I resumed working with my group of young people, this time to do an artistic presentation on HIV/AIDS. Needless to say, working with this group is a quick path to sainthood but I was thankful for my LifeTeen/SENT training as I wrote the drama that they presented. The cool part of it was that I was able to convince them that we should promote abstinence and monagamy, especially in the context of healthy families. This is cool because down here they heavily promote condom use as a HIV prevention which is bogus. Condoms have been shown to be INEFFECTIVE as a prevention for HIV transmission due to the small size of the virus and even on the condom boxes it says this. Sure, there is more protection than if you didn´t have anything but I feel it is irresponsible even on a non-moral level to tell people to use condoms to prevent HIV, it makes it sound like it is foolproof and it is so not. Not to mention, this group of young people is representing our Catholic organization. I was excited because, even though they hardly practiced the skit I wrote and it could have been done so much better, we still got the message out of abstinence, monagamy and family in the midst of a festival that was presenting very different ideas. Praise God for the small things. I hope despite our limitations the Lord was able to use the skit to get the message to someone.

This next week we are off to Tena to make contacts and arrangements for FUS March medical mission. I am excited about this as it is on the edge of the Amazon and a part of Ecuador I have yet to see (and I get to wear my boots!). Please keep us in your prayers as we travel and also for the safe return and efficient work of my collegue Narcissa as she travels back from Quito today and I hope to spend some time with her in the office tomorrow. Much love to everyone at home, catch you again next week with news from the flip side...