We had quite the adventure today. We've been wanting to get out and do some work in the community here for quite some time and we're still hoping to make community service / helping the poor part of our ministry here. So we were very excited when given the opportunity to go visit a school out in the outlying mountains of El Salvador, outside of a small town called Victoria. We didn't know exactly what we'd be doing but knew it had something to do with giving out school supplies to kids.

Well, this turned into a crazy adventure, as I've already mentioned. We had to meet at our director's cousin's church at 6am to meet to caravan out to the school. We got up and were actually all in pretty good spirits for this exciting opportunity to serve and get our hands dirty out in the countryside. After having a great Salvadorean breakfast made free for us at a restaurant owned by some friends of the people we went with, we set out to school trailing behind our Salvadorean friends hauling a truckload full of boxes with backpacks and school supplies.

The roads were intense and I was seriously doubting our Kia microbus even had a prayer. But we made it to the school and it was so fun seeing the kids so excited about getting a backpack and supplies. It was also funny to see them totally in wonder of seeing white people, which they had probably never seen in person before. Their teachers had them form lines, smallest to biggest to go through and get backpacks and they took what was given without ever complaining even some were much better than others. They were just so overjoyed by this free gift. Makes me think of something God did for us.... hmmm....

So as we were getting done, our leader tells us we have to leave quick because we still have a couple schools to hit up. Turned out they had plans to take us to 4 schools that day, which we did finally accomplish, ending somewhere around 4:30. But every kid at every school ended up with a backpack. We probably ended up passing out around 300 mochilas.

But this adventure was not complete without one of the van's in our caravan running out of gas, for which we tried syphoning some out of our van. This was unsuccessful but left one of our guides with the taste of gasoline in his mouth -- you have to suck the gas out through a hose -- eeek. And finally the day ended with us getting a flat tire while driving on the highway home. But miracoulously -- totally something set up by God -- we rolled to a stop right in front of a little tire repair shop. 30 minutes and 8 bucks later and we were back in business! It was a fun day.