Now that our late nights have a gap of free time (watch Leno? Tontería), I can practice more Spanish:

Vierta el hormigón aquí.
Pour the concrete here.

Este es la ventana.
This is the window.

Brad Pitt y Angelina Jolie se separan definitivamente.
Even worldwide there’s TMI about celebrities.

Let’s add to the review from previous lessons:
Me llamo _____.
My name is _____ .

Tengo un martillo y clavos.
I have a hammer and nails.

¿Mi barba es muy buena, sí?
My beard rocks.

¿El X-wing rota puede consigo un paseo?
My X-wing broke down. Could I get a ride?

First things first: Go check out Justin’s blog. He’s one of the team leaders we worked with this weekend. He writes about his experiences with Casas por Cristo and obsessively documents the day’s events.

Yeah, we got along.

His site is justinandjuliemissions.blogspot.com. It’ll be funny when he sees the trackback to his blog.

“Booyor? I don’t remember any Booyor signing a medical release form.”

I’m the guy that didn’t need a ladder, Justin.

What I love about Casas (okay, so I love a lot of things about Casas) is that we partner with the churches in the area. Our team builds and then goes back home. It’s important to connect the family with a body of believers in the area for more support. The pastor’s sister showed up and prayed with us at the site (the pastor was at a church service…on a Sunday…imagine that). She read from Psalm 127 (the link is in English):

1 Si Dios no construye la casa,
de nada sirve que se esfuercen
los constructores.
Si Dios no vigila la ciudad,
de nada sirve que se desvelen
los vigilantes.
2 De nada sirve que ustedes
se levanten muy temprano,
ni que se acuesten muy tarde,
ni que trabajen muy duro
para ganarse el pan;
cuando Dios quiere a alguien,
le da un sueño tranquilo.
3 Los hijos que tenemos
son un regalo de Dios.
Los hijos que nos nacen
son nuestra recompensa.
4 Los hijos que nos nacen
cuando aún somos jóvenes,
hacen que nos sintamos seguros,
como guerreros bien armados.
5 Quien tiene muchos hijos,
bien puede decir
que Dios lo ha bendecido.
No tendrá de qué avergonzarse
cuando se defienda en público
delante de sus enemigos.

and I think it summarizes my feelings for this build. I really connected with the kids and I think it’s the kids of the people we build for that will have a tangible reminder that God provides for them.

The build became a community event as people from the area jumped right into our stucco workflow. Many came out to pray for and bless the family.

I chatted with Lupe, Alberto, Brian, and Itzel (the cute little two year-old) about what they liked about iglesia and who Jesucristo is. We also played quite a bit of futbol and made dibujos depicting my zapatos grandes. Day 2 involved the kids from our team starting to mingle with the family. I feel like we really provided some hope for these kids.

Each time I travel internationally I am reminded that my wife needs to have the government office of Ambassador to Everywhere. There would be a decrease in wars and an increase in dancing.
She did tell Maria that she would like to drink a photo (earning some weird stares), but acted as our extremely attractive translator.
(While I type this she’s bandaging my sliced finger. This woman’s impressive.)(Mom, don’t freak out. My finger just bled a lot. I guess that doesn’t help. Well, know that my hands work well enough to do this whole bloggh-thing that I do.)(Jeremy, I haven’t tried playing bass yet. I’ll use my Wolverine-like powers to regenerate…No, that’s right. I chose his giant facial hair, not the self-healing. Dangit!)

left to right: my hot wife in the NAU jacket, next to her is Maria, next to her is Maria, the little guy is Brian, then Norma, then Itzel

Venom (a teen from Concrete Pathways, not the Spider-man parasite) had fun trying to figure out what I was saying to the kids. She speaks Latin. I asked her how to say “square” (thinking it would spur my memory of the Spanish equivalent) but she admitted that the only vocab she knew involved words like “aqueduct” and “portcullis”. (Cuadrado is “square” in Spanish, by the way.)

Sidewalkdriver, for the record, can draw the best caballos ever. She grew up sketching horses. It makes sense, then, why my horses always look like alien beasts – that’s what I grew up drawing. I didn’t know how to say “robot” or “Star Destroyer” (didn’t draw those – did butterflies/mariposas and coches instead), but the kids sure loved my impersonation of Bumblebee from Transformers. (They had a broken version of the toy but had no clue what it was.)

“Los manos dicen pew pew pew.”

They also liked the fact that this big guy didn’t know what a grape was (they had to remind me that the word was “uvas”). Try explaining fruit snacks that our team packed. The kids didn’t know what a peach was.

Who I was most impressed with is my oldest daughter. She was right there with me speaking as much Spanish as she knew. Even though it was “Buenos dias” and “No bueno”, it still was enough to make some friends. She also worked very hard:

at shoveling, filling buckets, and then cleaning buckets. I’m a very proud father.

She was a little tired at the end of the day. Thankfully I didn’t get interrogated at the border like I did yesterday. My daughter helped the U.S. border agent figure out that she belonged to me. You try being confined in a tiny space with guys with attack dogs asking you when your daughter’s birthday is and we’ll see how nervous you get.

On the topic of dogs, Ron is one of the bravest stucco savants I know. The family’s guard dog could probably take his hand off but Ron wanted a picture of Whiskey el Perro’s really cool eyes (one normal, one evil). What’s funnier is Ron’s fondest memory of me. He hadn’t seen me for a while, walks up to me, and the first thing out of his mouth is, “You’re that guy that broke up the pack of wild dogs.” I’m glad I could be remembered for some contribution. (Ron, that was years ago!)

Here’s the store where my wife negotiated for cheap soft drinks.

This is how dusty the whole area is. I get to go back to the hotel and shower. The family lives in the dust. Every single thing that they have is covered in it. You can imagine the difference between a house made of grocery store pallets versus a house made of concrete and stucco when a dust storm hits.

I still don’t know what was going on with the crutches, but I thought they looked cool.


Casas por Cristo: Faith Foundation 2010

I bet you’re wondering why we asked on Twitter for the atomic number of oxygen. I told my oldest to look out into the distance and picture a hydrogen atom. She asked me to talk more. I told my wife I had to capitalize on that opportunity. Not many people ask me to talk more.

The natural flow of conversation led to molecular bonding and I was having her picture water molecules made up of hydrogen and oxygen. I couldn’t remember whether carbon had six protons or if it was oxygen. Oxygen has eight protons, for the record. Thanks for the flood of responses. My daughter avoided car sickness and learned the Bohr atomic model mixed with some Heisenberg Uncertainty – to balance things out, of course.

While traveling you see many things like, oh, I don’t know, bison.

Sometimes you just have to suppress your grammar gene, with such signs as ‘Git yers!’ advertising a store’s wares. And did anyone else have high expectations of The Thing based on their cool billboards? As a kid I’d get excited and Grandpa H would tell me to calm down. Even worse, he’d say it was a rip-off and that he wouldn’t stop.

The Thing…was it a snow alien from the arctic? A fantastic superhero with rocky skin?

Nope. Gas station with lots of turquoise jewelry.

So when I saw this sign (not at The Thing but another of its ilk) tonight:

I knew that there had to be more to the story, perhaps a local worker who was frustrated with someone else from the community. I would have investigated further, but my family’s conversations with gas station workers previously had not been positive.

It’s like the passive-aggressive wi fi networks that are starting to pop up, networks named things like “caitlin stop using our internet”.

We made it to the hotel. There are certain high school students who will be upset that the mall no longer has the arcade. It has been replaced by a hat shop. I didn’t get a chance to see if it even was a decent millinery.

Check back tomorrow for photos of the build.

And to my Star Wars guys: When Sean plays my character tomorrow night, remind him that I’m crazy. I want only eccentricities from my venerable Force hermit – none of this “team player” stuff.

And make him rhyme.