Thursday, August 7th

Fun day today! We started off with more home visits in the morning. Continuing to invite families to our festival on Saturday. Today both groups sang Jesus Loves Me in Spanish to the families! Singing is very uplifting to the families and helps to encourage the family as an entire team.

Next, we went and picked up the kids from the orphanage for the zoo!! We picked them up in a "chicken bus". These buses drive crazily around the city carrying up to two times max capacity. The kids were so excited and all had cute matching shirts on (which also made it hard to keep track of them!). We got Domino's pizza at the zoo which was a very special meal for them. Each of us were paired with two or three kids to hang out with at the zoo. This gave us (and the kids) someone to get to know a little better than when in the large group. A Popsicle snack wrapped up a nice day with los animales! Pollo Campero (basically KFC) was on the dinner menu. The kids actually got to go to the restaurant which was special. They had soda (they usually only drink water or juice without sugar) and got to play on the play place after dinner. We gifted each child a glow-in-the-dark cross as a keepsake! It is miraculous to see how gracious they are of the things they are given. Even through handing the gifts out at the restaurant and after they played, all the kids still had their crosses tight in their hands or pockets.

Dana's birthday party at Betty's wrapped up the day! It included firecrackers (before the cake so us Americans don't throw the cake) and yummy cake. Tomorrow is a day of rest for us.

Buenos noches!