Wednesday, October 24th

Post date: Jan 1, 2011 4:06:40 AM

Well, it's been a few days since we've written so we thought we would get you all caught up on our craziness.

We found a park nearby and were able to play on part of it. It's under construction, so Saturday and Sunday were good because there were no workers. We hear that there's another one nearby, so maybe we'll find it soon. We mostly hung around on Saturday -- walked some, played in the park, etc. On Sunday we went to church. Jason's parent's church is affiliated with others around the country that support missions around the world They gave us a copy of the prayer handbook and we were able to contact some missionaries here in Bogota. The Fleming family invited us to their meeting and we gave it a try. It was pretty nice -- we understood the songs for the most part, but not much of the sermon. We had hoped that our Colombian children would go to Sunday School but they wanted to stay close to us. Sara and Caleb are the only two that went. Caleb's teacher spoke some English and Sara went with Christina Fleming, who translated for her.

On Monday, we started walking to another park to check it out, but found a McDonald's with an indoor playland that was closer. The kids had a great time there and had snacks too. It's very close to the hotel and we are glad to know that it's available. One of the families that is staying in the room beside us invited us to walk with them to an ice cream place that afternoon, so the kids were a bit spoiled that day. The family is from Minnesota (most of the American families here are from up North.) They wanted to go to church with us next week, but have decided to go to Santa Marta for 10 days, beginning on Saturday.

We had lunch yesterday with the Flemings -- the missionary couple from the church. We rode with Mr. Fleming to pick up the kids from school and he showed us around a little bit. It's a missionary school -- English is the primary language, though they have Spanish class every day. It was the strangest thing, but as he was introducing us to one of the teachers, the teacher got this strange look on his face and asked us a couple of unusual questions -- it turned out to be the same teacher that I had written to after seeing his journal online. I had asked if he still had contacts here in Bogota that might be able to help us locate a larger living space. He said that he had many contacts and was going back to Bogota in August. I hadn't written back to him because we couldn't decide if we wanted to try a different place. We had just been talking about needing to write him -- and then we ran into him!! Anyway -- he mentioned a couple of possibilities. We're trying to decide whether to look into either of them -- please pray for wisdom. One of the possibilities is the Wycliffe guest house -- they are gone, but it is still being run by TEAM. It usually costs $10/day/person. But the wife of the guy who runs it was at the school and said that he would be willing to work with us since we were a family. A kitchenette would be an option there. It's a small world!! The missionaries also know several families that Jason is familiar with.

We are trying to come up with a way to avoid All Saints Day/Halloween celebrations. The owner of the hotel will be dressed as a witch and they will probably have a big party at some point to celebrate. One way to avoid it would be to move to the guesthouse or somewhere else. We're not sure what to do at this point, though, we wouldn't move just to avoid it.