Tico Tuesday, August 31st

It's Tuesday again!
This past Saturday I had the opportunity to serve in the ghetto o La Carpio once more. The youth of CCI will be serving there the last Saturday of the month for the next few months. We bring food for breakfast and lunch and do various games with the kids, have a Bible lesson (this time we acted out and taught about the Good Samaritan), play futbol and overall just have a rollickin' good time. This time I stayed in the kitchen helping serve up some 70 plates of gallo pinto (traditional breakfast food) and 150+ hot dogs for lunch. Praise God for the work He is doing in La Carpio! But please do join me in prayer for the ministry of Renuevos. There are a lot of tough challenges that have to be faced there every day. More pictures can be found on my blog!
Love,
Carrie


We got to la Carpio on Saturday morning around 8 and started off with some activities to help the team from CCI bond with the volunteers that serve in la Carpio. Then we divided up into our teams for the day- some with the younger boys, some with the adolescents, and a few of us in the kitchen. Well, we were supposed to have gallo pinto for breakfast, but we didn't know much more than that. So, we opened the fridge and found a big arrocera (bowl from a rice cooker) that was not very full of rice. And we found a container with some black beans, but there was NO WAY we could ever stretch them out to serve the 70ish boys we were expecting. We decided we would have to pray hard for the rice and beans to multiply, but God took care of things right away: somebody walked in with a huge olla (a pot so big it was kinda like a laundry basin) full of hot gallo pinto. Praise the Lord! I kind of thought that was the plan all along, but we were running a bit late/short on time, so the whole thing was quite an adventure. It all worked out though. We even had leftover pinto, which came in really handy, because we just barely had enough hot dogs for lunch! So those of us from CCI chowed down on that.
I didn't get to see much of the games, but it sounded like they went well. And I did get to see part of a futbol game. That was pretty hilarious. The guys from Carpio definitely put our guys from CCI to shame!
I did get to participate in the drama we did of the Good Samaritan. I was one of the robbers. It's really hard to pretend to hit somebody. I'm used to punching the air (tae bo) or actually hitting (like I did to my brothers when I was little and am not especially proud of). Poor Andres did get a little bruised when he fell on the cement, but he's ok. And the drama was a success-I think it was good, and very relevant for the kids. La Carpio is a TOUGH place with a lot of violence and such.
More about Carpio next month, or sooner if something else exciting happens. They really do need a lot of prayer because one of the directors/guys with a lot of leadership quit the other week and left a big hole that is tough to fill. But God can do it!