Struggles

Sometimes it's easier to give than others. For instance, when you're being stolen from, it's hard to have a giving heart. As we mentioned here last week, our truck was broken into in town. We knew that Matt's iPod had been stolen. But as we were packing for Canilla on Saturday morning, our emergency box seemed a little light. Apparently, when we lost the iPod, we also lost our toolbox, our spotlight, our scrubs, our inverter, our air compressor, and some assorted other things in there. All told, we probably lost $600-$700 worth of stuff.





Then, we went out to our outside storage room to replace the tools in the truck with the ones Matt's dad brought down in November and found that we had been robbed there, too. While we were gone in December, someone broke into our courtyard and stole all of the tools Matt's dad brought. The new drill, all the bits, all the tools, everything. It was a gift, so we don't know what the price was, but we're guessing we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1000 in the last little bit.





We've walked away from everything we know in the United States to come serve. And to think that what we're giving isn't enough for some people - that they feel the right to take even more - is pretty angering. It makes it very hard to have a servant's heart.





We have an idea who broke into the house, but without proof and with a police force that's ambivalent, at best, there's very little we can do. We will, of course, do a better job of locking things up. A razor wire fence simply doesn't look like enough. It's likely that they came over our roof from the front. Now we'll have to go up on the roof tomorrow and see what kind of damage they caused up there. (Our roof isn't really made for people who aren't being careful to walk on.)





So that's that.





We did have two clinics this weekend, which probably served as the best possible chance to "get back on the horse" and serve whether we felt like it or not. Both went very well. We had some fun times with the Fickers, as usual (of course, "the Fickers" also include Katie and Craig).





Duane, Aaron, David, and Martin will probably leave the US early this week with several semi trucks and drive through Mexico to arrive here about a week later. Duane obviously won't be flying their new donated plane back. It'll probably get sold to help pay for repairs to the one still sitting in the Ixcan, where it crashed about two months ago.





On the very good news front, we were invited to go see a work day in progress at the school that New Beginnings Resources is helping to build in San Pedro. (New Beginnings Resources is one of the groups that supports and works with Agape In Action.) Pastor Eliseo organized a work crew from his congregation to clean up around the grounds of the school. His congregation is mostly women and children - many of the area men do not attend church , but at least allow their spouses to.

Now to the pictures. The first picture is of the work area in front of the school. The second is a closer view of some folks cleaning and dragging stuff to the burn piles.

The third picture is of a man digging a trench (manually, of course) for the plumbing for the future bathrooms. And the fourth is a shot across the work area of the soon-to-be headmaster and his wife coming to check on the progress.