Boots on the Ground

Hola from Santa Marta, Colombia! We had a wild trip down here - it was filled with delays, missed connections and re-routes due to freezing rain in VA last weekend. Nonetheless, we made it here safely and our first week in Santa Marta has been incredible. We began this adventure knowing it would be a tremendous learning experience but if this first week is any indication of things to come, I'm not sure if we ever could have imagined how much we'll learn throughout this year. Some notables of our first week:

1. Ordering lunch in Spanish...and having no clue what would come out of the kitchen. The food here has been very good - lots of chicken, rice, plantains, salad and potatoes.

2. Salsa dancing lesson - everyone knew "los Americanos" we're first-timers but we had a blast.

3. Touring the school with our field director and school founder, Bob Moyer - we live about 30 yards (we're clearly still working on re-learning the metric system) from the church and school. We had a good meeting with the English Department this week - school starts on Monday at 6:00am!

4. Learning how to deal with liquids in bags...everything from milk to yogurt to water is sold in bags - any ideas for what to do with a half-full, open BAG of milk?

5. Meeting our teammates - the Roddys, the Zajiceks and Sam Tse have all been incredible hosts and have welcomed us with open arms. We feel we taken care of and are honored to join them here!

Cold showers, riding the local bus, using clothes lines, eating avocado flavored ice cream, joining a gym and grocery shopping in Spanish have all contributed to making this week one of our most memorable. We are doing well and clearly see the Lord blessing us in many different ways for stepping out in faith and coming to Colombia.

Salsa!

We are new to the blogging/skype world but we are getting better and want to connect with as many of you as possible - if you're on Skype, please add "boandcarriecarrington" to your contacts!

Buenas!
B&C