Dear Friends and Family,
It has now been about two weeks since leaving the states. It feels longer. Not out of boredom or resentment but almost the opposite. It feels like a long time because I have learned and adjusted to so much in that short amount of time. There were a lot of things that surprised me when coming here. I didn’t know much about El Salvador before coming here, but I was shocked to find myself living deep within a city. I would compare driving here to New York, with less traffic but stranger laws. Other than that graffiti seems to be a national art form. On the darker side, it is hard to see so many houses made entirely of a frame and some metal roofing used as roof walls and a door. I’ve never seen what they look like on the inside because we aren’t allowed to go anywhere aside from inside church grounds and highly Americanized malls and the like but I can imagine how badly the rains would have effected 50% of the housing in San Salvador.
The first week of our stay here was during a “national catastrophe” AKA rain. It rained for the entire first week of our stay, and while it was only raining really hard for a few select moments, it was apparently the most rain this place has had since 1960. Just under four thousand people were evacuated. That is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around because that amount of rain is normal where I come--in fact, it would be normal for rain like that to last a month. But schools were closed, entire areas flooded and even our own team had to evacuate because of possible land slides. Luckily nothing happened to Pastor Carlos’ house (the one at which we are staying), but the possibility was still there. The roads were so bad that first week that we weren’t even able to go to San Martin until a few days ago. San Martin is where the orphanage is, which we call “La Casa” or “La Casa de Los Niños“.
But the rain stopped a few days ago and we were able to spend the last three days going out to San Martin. The boys there are really sweet, and they really do love to beat us at soccer. We were out working in the field the other day just cleaning up a small but very overgrown waterway and a few of the boys spent their day off just helping and spending time with us.
There are a lot of things we would appreciate prayer for, but I’ll mention just a few. Help and diligence in learning Spanish. We are all at different levels of speaking at this point but we all definitely have room for improvement, and it is very hard to find time to do our assigned homework much less find the time to really get deep into studying it.
Safety is a big one. We’ve found ants that bite and can make a whole arm numb to two different types of scorpions and very large spiders in our house alone. These won’t endanger our lives at all but unfortunately the diseases that the local flies and mosquitoes carry can. Also the driving is dangerous and the fact that we’re all gringos. I know we are all in God’s will and so anything that happens He’s got covered, but just be praying for caution and common sense on our part.
Many of us still need funding for Potter’s Field and that is going to be very hard to do overseas with how busy we are.
And on a personal note, something is wrong with my computer. It’s only been working about half the time and it will be very difficult to stay in contact with you should it die completely--not to mention make it very difficult to post my blogs.
Thank you for your support and prayer. If you know anyone else who might like this newsletter please email me back or tell them to, it is really easy to add more people on to my list.
God Bless,
~Kayla Harrington
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