Long weeks, short breaks and a little deja vu.

It's Saturday morning, July 2 at 10:05am Pacific time. I am exhausted.

This week we were in Camalu with Northeast, a church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had spent the first three weeks of my summer with groups from Alabama, so it was kind of a culture/language shock being with some northerners! Nothing wrong with it, just a lot different about it.

I have a special place in my heart for Cincinnatians anyway, since my Dad's side family lives there. But I also was excited about this group because it was full of Matt (my friend and boss)'s family. His mom, dad, aunt, uncle and cousin all came to work in Camalu, and work they did.

This group consisted of 19 people, about half of them being youth groupers and the other half adults. They really brought their A-game in the food category, specifically desserts. Mrs. Sue was the baker for the week, and running a baking business on the side in her normal life, she spoiled us like no other group has. She baked chocolate chip cookies, shortbread cookies and no-bake cookies all from scratch, yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing, white cupcakes with homemade buttercream icing, and a cake on the last night. It was incredible.

The ladies on the trip spent most of their week visiting members' homes and cleaning them, as a service to the hardworking women in the church. This group did a lot of carpentry work as well. At the end of the week, they had built (from nothing) a double bed and twin bed (and bough mattresses for both), two huge kitchen shelves/counters, a smaller shelf, two kids tables (for the nursery/classrooms) with 8 chairs, and they stained every piece of furniture to make it look even better.

Juan Jose and Flor, and their kids Samuel, Dencel and Kassandra, currently live in a house on the church property, but they've recently begun construction on their new house across the street. The house they're in now suffered a lot of damage from the floods last February, and they're going to build this new house with more precautions in case flood waters come again. Matt's dad, Clint, and some of the teen boys worked with the Mexican teens and adults to lay the foundation for the new house. It didn't look much different from the beginning of the week to the end of the week, because most of the work was underground. But those men worked hard for 7 or 8 hours each day and did a lot of precision work.

The group started their VBS classes Sunday night, and was in Camalu through Friday morning, one day longer than most groups. I translated the kids class each night, and also Monday-Thursday mornings from 10-12.  Jason, Matt's uncle, did a kids class every night and every morning, for a total of 9 classes. I can't imagine how much work went into preparing that many classes, but the kids loved them! They learned about the fruits of the spirit, studying one each class.

Morning VBS consisted of studying the fruit of the spirit, doing some activities that reinforced the lesson, some kind of craft and then games! Jason and his wife Laura have been going to Impact, a youth rally at Lipscomb University each summer, for a long time. So they brought some of the famous games from Morning Impact all the way down to Mexico. We played sink or float, world's largest paper-rock-scissors game, and the Blender of Fear (formerly known as Impact-o-matic), where you blend a bunch of food together and have a chugging contest.

When you spend lots of time with people in foreign countries, you learn a lot about them. This week, I learned that Matt Moore has the weakest stomach of anyone I've ever met. He was helping to announce the game one day, and when he congratulated the winner (as you can see in the video above), he caught a whiff of the food-made-drink concoction and almost lost it right there in the church building. Luckily he made it outside before he blew chunks. The Blender of Fear was a success, in that the kids loved to compete and that we only had two children get physically sick at the mere smell of it. Well, two children and a field director.

When Baja Missions groups work in Camalu, they stay at the hotel called La Cueva del Pirata, or the Pirate's Cave. I was told by my more experienced translator friend Sara that this hotel wasn't luxurious, but it was cozy. It sits up on a hill, right beside the Pacific Ocean. The views are breathtaking, and I hiked down to the ocean one morning for this view.

Pacific, as seen in Camalu.

Cozy. I can do cozy! Especially after staying at La Palma for two weeks, scoring bed bugs each week. Well, apparently cozy means arriving to find dead rats or body parts of dead rats in your room and killing a nest of black widows before going to sleep. Luckily neither of those were in my room. But a few mornings in, I woke up, put my contacts in and went to go to the bathroom only to find a live frog in our toilet, having arrived their through the pipes. It wasn't green, more like a white/pink color. Pretty gross looking if you ask me. After it hopped up on the toilet seat and hopped around on the wall, Spiderman-style, Siobhan captured it and set it free (PLEASE check the video on Facebook. It's epic). We only encountered one more frog that week, but after talking to the maid, it seemed as though she caught one in our bathroom at least once a day. She suggested that we set a trap for them. Yes, with all the materials we brought to set frog traps.

Oh yeah. Just chilling on the handle.

It should also be noted that the Mexicans challenged the Americans to a soccer game on the beach Sunday afternoon, and the Americans won. The Mexicans got their feelings hurt and blamed the terrain, so they challenged the Americans to another game on a concrete slab that serves as a soccer field and basketball court in town. The Americans won again. So for the finals of the world cup soccer tournament between Cincinnati and Camalu, they played Thursday night at the church. And guess who won? Oh yea, the Americans. Emotions ran high, fans were loud and obnoxious (me probably being the loudest and most obnoxious), and the competition was fierce. But let it be known that American reigns. 

Overall the week was long and exhausting, translating twice as many kids classes and getting in on sanding, staining and concrete work when I could. But the group worked really hard and it was so fun working with them, working for the people they love so much.

So because our week was long, that means our break between groups is short. I'll be headed to meet the next group here in just a few hours. And the deja vu part... I'm headed back to Camalu for another week! Hopefully I won't have as many stories to tell you about the critters we found in our room or fished out of our toilet. I won't have internet again this week, so I'll talk to all of you in about a week!