The 4th of July

Today was the fourth of July and yet again we have a wonderful group :)

Today was awesome because we spent the day at one of my favorite missions that we partner with!  We were at Betesda.  I can't remember if I have mentioned this one before but it is a rehabilitation center for men over the age of 18.  The majority of them are under the age of 25, although there are some that are older.  It is a rehabilitation center but it isn't just for drugs.  All of the participants at some point in time in their life have made a bad decision.  Because of that decision that they made they we sentenced to time in jail.  Israel (the man who runs the facility) hears about the guys and meets with them and if he sees potential and truly thinks that they would benefit from his facility he petitions for them to come to Betesda.  They live and work at this place.  In order to raise money for everything they make cakes and other pastries and sell them!  They are DELICIOUS!  I just love it.

The guys don't have many opportunities to see their families so they really enjoy having YouthWorks bring groups to meet with them.  It is difficult because the majority of them don't speak a lot of English and the majority of the YouthWorks participants don't speak a lot of Spanish.  It is amazing however, to see how relationships build between people who can't verbally communicate.  One of their favorite pass times is to play basketball with the students that come.  They are ridiculously good at basketball!  I love to watch and I even play sometimes.  I just love it.

So today, my group was there all morning and we played basketball and I explained (in Spanish - ps I'm pretty awesome I'm not gonna lie :P) how to play KEMPS to one of the guys and a group of us played KEMPS.  It was pretty fun.  He would ask some questions though and I didn't know what he said and that was embarrassing.   Lol.  I am getting so much better (mejorando - bettering) at Spanish!  I am loving it!  I am getting more confident at being able to hold a decent conversation.  I'm still not good by ANY means of the word but I am getting there.  I surprise myself sometimes.  I think that a big part of it is that I am finally getting used to the accent that Puerto Ricans have, so that helps a lot.  I can't believe that we just have a little under 5 weeks left.  It seems like we just got here.  I love it here.

After lunch we met up with the rest of the students and went to an awesome swimming hole in the river and went swimming.  It was disappointing because there were some awesome rocks that we really wanted to jump off of... but it is YouthWorks policy that you can't do anything potentially dangerous like that.  Lame sauce.  But we still had an amazing time!  I think that the kids did too :)

After this, we went back to Betesda and had a little cook out and ate hot dogs and hamburgers and played games and talked and just had an amazing time.  I love this ministry and everything that it does!  I am so happy that I was able to be placed there.  I'm not going there tomorrow but I will hopefully return on Wednesday haha :)

Miss and love you all!