Instituto De Jovenes Abril 2013 (Youth Institute April 2013)

I left for the city at 10:00 P.M. Friday night on a “Maya De Oro” bus. The night was horrible. I normally can’t sleep in a moving vehicle, much less when the driver is sleepy and weaving all over the road. Needless to say, the trip was spent mostly in fervent prayer.  :-Z

We got in to the bus station at around 5:30 A.M. (fairly good timing I’ve been told) and to the mission about half an hour later. They fed us breakfast there and then I spent about 3 hours on personal hygiene (aka: a shower and a few hours of beauty sleep).
Random:

I wasn't quite sure what was up with the shovel in the girls dorm at the mission.....come to find out it was going to the girls house in El Naranjo. (One of the many things that "..every girls house should have.")

 After I woke up I wandered around taking “OH-MY-WORD” pictures and with those “I-remember…” and “I-CAN’T- BELIEVE-I’M-ACTUALLY-HERE” feelings.
The "OH-MY-WORD" Pictures:  (I wonder how many people feel as nostalgic as I do when I see these pics....)

They still have this ugly tile in the library. LOL

I remember SWINGING on these!

The upstairs 'lounge'

I remember racing melisa up and down these stairs.

 Hmmm....thats new..

I REMEMBER THIS AS A CHURCH!!!

Did you know my name is on that map?

WOAH!!!!   I just went back in time!!!

the upstairs patio

the downstairs patio

I remember that bush when it was little!

The 4-wheeler that used to belong to the boss

While I was oozing my way around taking pictures there was a ministers meeting in process. ( It didn’t actually let out until after 2:00 P.M. but they took a break for lunch.) Also I got to watch some “Dezhan&Dorcas bonding time” (rather funny actually!)

Well we finally ate lunch and got our stuff in the vehicles and drove the half hour out to Sumpango Sacatepe’quez (Aka: the institute). I picked out my bunk(s) and piled my stuff on it(them). (since no one had claimed the bunk beside mine I decided that I could probably use it for my things while I slept on the other one)

 After that, I went outside to play some volley-ball before coming in for singing and the first topic.
The topics were REALLY good!   Jeff(Pablo) Yoder spoke about good and bad examples….it really made me think! Byron de la Rosa’s topic’s were on ‘The Power of the Resurrection’. But, as I am still learning Spanish, I wasn’t able to understand all of what he was saying, but what I did understand was…WOW! He said some things that I had never really thought of before….it was really neat. I also enjoyed the topics by Stephen Gingerich and Ross Good.


And the Volley-Ball! It was SO MUCH FUN! Even though I ‘m not very good at it I still really like to play it.

Through out the weekend I wanted to hang out with a "Safe crowd" therefore....the Kitchen:

Dishwashing volunteers (Yea, one of them is my cousin!) 

Jerlin (HERLEEN) hanging up fly paper

Thankfully the Showers were cold so it kept the lines moving. It was a bit creepy however, to go into the bathroom and hear the constant gasping noise coming from behind every shower curtain. :-D


The group that I was going to be leaving with was supposed to be out the door and in the van by 8:30 P.M. ….yeah, or not. The last service didn’t end until then.
Our group (consisting of three of the ‘El Naranjo’ girls and three ‘El Chal’ girls) quickly got our stuff into the van and we were on our way into the city at around 9:00. On the way in we saw something terribly (literally) interesting; In the opposite lane there way a little white car (probably a Toyota), facing the wrong way, with a red Ford F150 sitting on its hood… It looked like there were more vehicles involved in the accident but I wasn’t able to get a good look, so I ‘m not sure. Anyway, once we got to the bus station I was feeling a bit car-sick, so once we had our tickets paid for and were seated in the bus, I took ‘a pill’.  :-P  I was actually able to sleep on the way home! (Though I did wake up sometimes during the trip because the bus was swerving around somethin’ awful!) Sometime during the night (Actually, it was about 6 in the morning) I dreamed that someone asked me “Where is the best place to play golf?” Well I didn’t know there were any golf courses around El Chal; I went on sleeping. Who ever it was that I was dreaming about asked me again….I still didn’t know but I figured I should probably wake myself up in case somebody wanted an intelligent answer to the question. So I woke myself up and Tiana Kennedy and Julia asked me again “Where do you want to get off?” OH! SUCH ENLIGHTENMENT! So the bus stopped by our street and I left my companions of the weekend and walked home.

I walked in the door, piled my stuff in my bedroom and CRASHED on the couch. Slept for about 4 hours straight, then got up and *AHEM* “helped clean up the house.”


Random pics from the weekend:

The chapel.

Breakfast :) YUMMY!!!

Friday night we played a drawing game. TOO FUN!!!!!!

This was my teams paper LOL

.....Yeah we won! :-D

So that was my weekend: from 10:00 P.M. Thursday the 4th to about 10:30 A.M. on Monday the 8th in April of 2013!


Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar!