Rest from Labor

I can´t believe we´ve been here 10 whole days. It´s almost time to go home, and I feel like I just got here.

As Jim mentioned, we finished off the painting yesterday. When we got to the house in the morning, the sky looked like it wanted to rain. I knew that this would be our last day painting, our last chance to finish the roof. As I climbed up the ladder, I was praying that God would hold back the rain, just long enough to paint the roof and let it dry. I kept praying while I was up there, and I didn´t feel a drop. I didn´t see any rain at all until about when we were leaving, about two hours after the roof was finished. Then the rain really cut loose; we got nicely drenched on our way to the car. The house looks good now, inside and out; I´m proud of what we accomplished there.

This morning, we spent some time with some of the students at Portantorchas who are learning English. We were asked to just talk with them casually, give them a chance to have a conversation. I really enjoyed it; my Spanish is better than I thought it would be, and I found it easy to figure out miscommunications and explain them. I would enjoy doing this for several more days, but that´s not on the plan.

Towards the end of our language lessons, the sky cut loose again and started raining. It´s been raining steadily for the last 5 hours, and not the wimpy California rain that I´m used to. This is real rain, rain that´s serious about soaking the ground and trying to wash every building out to the ocean. Occasional flashes of lightning, rolling thunder that echoes from one end of the sky to the other ... I love this kind of storm. I took a walk in it just for fun. The ducks looked like they were having as much fun as I was.

At this point, we´re done with our scheduled work. We head out to the beach tomorrow, to take a couple of well-earned rest days. The place we´re going is about 4 hours away, and we wont be back to Portantorchas until Sunday. Hopefully we´ll find an internet cafe or something so we can blog some more. Until then ...