Day 47 in Itagui

Saturday didn´t spare me a second of rest. I met Daniel at the Poblado Metro Station in the morning. We were planning on meeting the rest of the team for service, but no one else showed up to the station. So we worked our way to the Santa Fe shopping mall, preaching to any foriegners we ran into along the way. On the way, we stopped at "McDonalds". I put it in quotation marks because the only thing it has in common with the Mcdonalds back home is the name. Believe it or not, McDonalds is a luxury here. Leather couches and chairs everywhere, a bakery, waitresses, high prices, good service, clean. It basicly goes against everything I ever knew about McDonalds, I was in shock.

Once we left McDonald´s, we found the other half of the team, Andres, a local  who has a african accent when he speaks english, and Jonathan Whatley, a black brother from California in his mid-20s who is one of the main ones that takes charge of the group. We witnessed through the streets while touching on topics like, how to renew your visa, and how to adapt to the colombian culture. Jonathan definitly knows what he´s doing, and after 4 years here, he seems to have adapted to colombian life. He works for a company that does private english lessons that only hires foriegners. The 4 of us stopped for lunch at a cozy little cuban place, that made us all forget we were in the middle of the big city.

At about 3 we all went our separate ways, and I headed back to Itagui to go camera hunting. I found a 12 mp Sony cybershot for 150 mil pesos , which is like 80 bucks. Im getting pretty bad at converting from pesos to dollars. After a while you stop thinking in dollars completely. Anyways, the camera was alright, not as good as the one I had, but it serves its purpose. Im still going to look into repairing the other one.

At 5 Rodolfo Alvadan picked me up from my house on his way back from work so I could join them for family study. He said that he lived in a ok area, that even sports cars go in there sometimes. But once we got in the neighborhood, lets just say there werent any sports cars. He said the only problem with the area is that that local gangs struggle for control over the communities. They even knock on doors to collect a "security fee" every week. I asked Rodolfo what would happen if someone didnt pay up and he said "Sometimes they send a young kid to kill you, but everyone ussualy pays, so no worries". Once at Alvadan´s we gave his daughter bible study for an hour. Then we had dinner while they asked me questions about life back home. And then we did family study. Despite they´re economical hardships, they´re a lovely super close family. The father makes a wonderful effort to raise his daughter right despite all the shady influences in thier nieghborhood. It was a lovely day full of a activity, so I decided to use today to just rest and recover.

                    -D.V.