What a day. It started out simple enough, a few meetings in the morning at the clinic, with my miraculous powers fixing the problematic TV for the waiting room...problem that the signal does not stay on "video." Ok, so I turn on the TV, press video...no problem. Just like taking your car to the mechanic. Oh, that reminds me...Roberto came this morning to pick which Ford was worse to start the repair process. He picked the white one...which could be the fuel pump, the injectors, or some other unknown gremlin. Time will tell.

Before I left for the meetings, I got a call...one of the containers had been broken into at some point during the weekend. Ugh, nothing quite like that feeling to start your day. We got there and this is what was found...the container with the old clothes had been, as put to me in Spanish....sacked. They took an indeterminate amount of time to break the locks (this is the one container without a puck lock on it...yet.) using a straight bar. How do we know what they used? Well, they left it behind. As Oscar, ever the optimist puts it...we ended up gaining instead of losing. Although they seemed to destroy every box and throw everything around, it does not appear they took anything, and if they did, it was not much. Although the gates are closed at night, with part of the fence still open...we still have issues (not to mention I am still finding make shift soccer goals on the concrete) and as we close off more, those that are still making their way onto the property are less and less of the sort that are just there to hang out. The Church continues to make progress on their portion where we have been helping them...closer, but still a ways to go.

So then came the wait and preparation for unloading the latest clothing container. Since we have been so long without one...it was easy to prepare the containers for the new stuff since I had to move...just about nothing, just some old fabric remnants sent a few months ago that we still have. That was good and bad of course. We are planning on this container to have to last us for a hopefully worst case scenario of two months...not so good news for the pastors, but hopefully it will at least keep them with some clothes for the whole time.

Here you can see Jonathan helping (Celeo also helped) to get everything up, as well as the lovely overcast day we had...overcast with no rain is good for getting sweaty work done. All told we had 14 guys help us and they worked pretty much non stop.


Unloading and transporting from the bus stop where the

container was stopped took almost 2 1/2 hours by the time we were all finished. So that meant no lunch. And since we finally had clothes and I had the pickup, I got to take the first batch to Jose Luis (at about 2:30.) While there waiting, I saw some lichas for sale. Now I know I have posted a long time ago about lichas, but I could not resist to include a picture of the ugly outside that belies the beautiful and sweet taste on the inside. It could be that I was hungry, tired, and thirsty...but those lichas tasted so sweet, had so much juice...great stuff. Definitely the best I have had. Cost if you are interested was not the cheapest deal that can be had, but 10 Lps for 20 Lichas....which works out to less than $.03 each one.