Buenos dias from Valencia, Venezuela

Well I have now been in Venezuela for 7 days and it has been another unforgettable experience. We arrived here as a team at about 7 am local time after more than 30 hours of travel. We then took a 3 hour bus ride to the city of Valencia. Venezuela is a very beautiful country, where green mountains can always be found in the background of your surroundings. You can see the view from my hotel room here. Getting adjusted to this culture/country has been a challenge, but not overwhelmingly so. When Venezuelans ask me what I think about their country I tell them two things: Your country is very pretty and you drive crazy. The food is definitely better than the Korean food we were fed at CM 2007, but I still prefer good old American cookin'. The Venezuelan-leg of our summer project began in chaos that we believe can only be the work of Satan. After having taken a day (Sunday) to rest, we began Monday with prayer and praise to prepare ourselves to go step on the campus of the University of Carabobo (Universidad de Carabobo) for the first time. As we finished this and were on our way out the door of our hotel for campus, one of our staff team members felt a bad pain in her stomach. Her name is Kate Jackson and after the staff team deliberated about what to do they decided that the majority of the staff would stay behind to take Kate to the hospital while the students and a few Venezuelan staff left for campus. That day the doctors at the hospital eventually concluded that Kate had acute appendicitis and needed to have her appendix removed as soon as possible. The doctors said that they would need the full cost of the surgery paid before they could operate and that this procedure would cost 12 million Bolivars (if you want you can ask me for the conversion to USD). Needless to say it was a lot of money to scramble and find without any notice. By God's amazing providence and goodness we were able to find a loaner from a church that we visited on Sunday to front the money! How amazing that strangers in this country who know the Lord personally would trust us so much to do this for us! Praise God. So Kate went through the surgery without complication (praise God again!) and is recovering fine, though she is still not back to full health. Meanwhile, while all this was going on the rest of our team and I departed for the university. We got on a "public" bus which apparently was going to take us to the university (I don't know any Spanish so I was following the Venezuelans). None of us, including the staff had been to this university yet so we were all going trusting God to get us there. We did arrive at the university and by talking to students we found the region of campus we were looking for. There we met with a friend who was doing ministry there through an English club. He took us to meet students at his English club. There we got to break up into small groups and talk about random things with these Venezuelan students who spoke pretty good English. I ended up in a group with 4 Venezuelan students and a few of my friends from our team. I was having trouble hearing the conversation because I was far from many of the group members at the end of our circle. But more students kept coming into the classroom and they began to sit next to me. So I decided to break off and started talking with these other Venezuelans. The conversation was fun and the group I was talking with kept growing, but after a little while we were struggling to find things to talk about. So I asked them if they would like to help me out with a survey we were using on campus. They said sure and so we went through it and at the end I asked them the last question: "If someone could explain how you could know God personally, would you like to have a discussion about that?" And sure enough they all said yes. So I got out bilingual Bible tracts that Crusade had provided us with and handed them out to everybody. By this time the group had grown to about 10 people. So I told them I would read through the booklet with them and if they had any questions they could ask me. So I read through it, stopping along the way with common questions that people have about sin and why Jesus had to die for our sins. What I thought was awesome about all this was that these students were not having trouble paying attention to me. They were all genuinely interested in what I had to say. I'll make the bold statement that this would never happen in a group this size in the United States. You'd be lucky to keep the attention of half the people. They hung in there with me and when we got to the end I asked them if they would like to make Jesus Christ their savior. In a group this size I could tell that they did not want to make the decision publicly, before the group. So I went through a prayer they could pray if they would like to make that decision later and I believe that they all walked away seriously considering to do so. I want to be clear that I am not giving this story to demonstrate that I am skilled in evangelism or for any other prideful kudos. I am giving this story humbly as an example of how God can use us anywhere anytime. So this basically concluded the first day on campus, and I can happily say that things have gotten progressively calmer since then without any other major health problems. I'll stop there for now, but I definitely hope to tell you all more about my time in Venezuela very soon.