The Batey

After a short nap last night, we are excited to be back to work :).

Today, we are blessing a little church in Sabana large de Boya, about 20 minutes outside of the town of Monte Plata.  This is a church plant of Templo Biblico (the church that we are mainly here to serve.)  There are about 10 families that call this church home.  We are thrilled to be able to paint the facilities and minister to these precious saints today.

Our adventure starts with the 28 of us piling into our 2 vans and 1 truck (the 3rd van that was reserved wasn't available at the airport, so we are making it work with the truck!), cross the raging river (well, never raging, but sometimes really high!  Right now it is fairly low.), and traveling down pot-hole filled dirt roads.  We are most definitely in a third world country, especially in this poverty stricken little town (batey) that we are at today.  The batey is an area that the poorest of the poor (mainly Haitian immigrants) live, typically in the rural outskirts of town.

As some of us paint this little church, the rest of us are playing with the dozens of kids that are swarming around.  There are at least 60 kids that are just following us around!  In an organized chaos, we are singing songs, playing games, and doing crafts with them.  Most of these kids are not from the church.  We are thankful to be able to love on them through our actions and attention... not so much words, since most of us don't speak Spanish or Creole ;-).

Just a quick glimpse of the mass amount of kids... you would think we were famous or something :)

We will be finishing up here in about an hour.  Will head back to camp for some Speechless practice time and then over to Templo Biblico (church) for Youth Night.

Please continue to pray for endurance.  We are all being stretched and pushed.  May we look more like Christ through this process!


*** We have not had good internet connection to post pictures.  We are taking them though.  Will share images when we are able to get them up! ***