I spent the majority of Friday-Wednesday with the group of students from the University of St. Thomas. The group was 11 people in total, 10 students with one faculty advisor. There was one freshman, who is actually Mr. Spika's (a teacher at CDH) daughter. The rest of the group was a pretty even mix of sophomores juniors and seniors. I had a fantastic time hanging out with them. Friday afternoon I knocked on the door of the apartment connected to the church in which they were staying, and walked into a room with 11 Americans in a city where I've only seen three others in my time here. They all looked at me wondering who the heck I was, and I kind of soaked in for a second seeing so many people who speak English and have similar backgrounds to me. All of them were instantly welcoming and easy to get along with. We soon discovered that I know Rachel's dad from CDH, Becca is from Iowa and used to go to Okoboji in the summer, Colin and Joe play football for UST and are teammates with Harry Pitera who I was just in Honduras with, Maria went to Totino-Grace and knows the one person I know who went there, Yin-Yin is from Seattle and lots of her high school friends go to UW, the wonderful small world realizations kept on coming.
Friday night we went to the Plaza de Navidad and ate cake, wandered and endured the stares of all the Venezuelans, and just generally had a good time. For the next few days we went on various adventures throughout the city, sometimes with Father Greg and sometimes not. A few times he asked me to take them to the mall or to Cachamay park by myself, since he knew I knew how to get there, etc. Being a leader of sorts felt a little weird but since I do know my way around and most of their spanish wasn't great it made sense. One of my favorite things that we did was originally supposed to be a fishing expedition. It turned out to be more of a climb huge rocks, stand on top of waterfalls, dive off of small cliffs, enjoy life kind of morning. I don't have any pictures of it, but Maria, one of the students, had her camera so when she puts some on facebook I'll post them on here. It really was a sweet spot. They had done more service before I got here, but one morning we did do some work. Some of us painted the chapel in Campo Rojo, the rest of the group was working around the yard of the chapel in La Laguna. We played baseball in the church's courtyard with the kids who live around there, watched the United States vs. Venezuela soccer game on tv (the US won), took a trip to Ciudad Bolivar, and ate some great food. As a group they had reflection every night, I was able to be there for two of them which was really cool. Each person brought something different to the group. They aren't all in the same major, and aren't all interested in the same things. I am very glad to have had the chance to hang out with them all for the few days I was, and I'm looking forward to getting together with them once I'm back in Minnesota.
I'll put up a few of the pictures that I took, but I didn't have my camera with me much so I'll put up more once I get their pictures.
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