2nd day

Today is our 2nd day in Ensenada. We arrived yesterday and it was drizzling. We stopped at the Walmart in Rosarito. Its in this mega-mall plaza with Home Depot and a huge movie theatre that has all the latest movies just like back home (Transformers 2, etc.) but dubbed in Spanish. If you take away the Spanish, you wouldn't know we're in Mexico. The Walmart was huge. The main difference is the kind of produce they have and the unbelievable bakery. The pastries look SO good. Liya was the only one who bought something. I wish I did now. Right now, everyone is either doing skit training or VBS training. Our VBS coordinator is Dan Mats. Daniel and Alex round out the VBS team for today. I bet we are one of the only churches to have an all-guy VBS team. Awesomeness. The rest of the group is learning two skits - one is Wake Me Up (Evanescence song) and the other is Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2. Supposedly they are new this year which is pretty cool. We played games this morning. They were ok. We did an obstacle course and then played water balloon battleship.

The sessions have been pretty good. I like the speaker. His name is John Rey or Ray. He is not a pastor rather he does all kinds of social justice stuff. He is very down-to-earth. He's not very dynamic and he said he's not your prototypical youth speaker but something about him I really like. I see him as a man of action. He brought his wife and family with him. I'll see if I can find his bio on-line. Some people commented that there are much fewer teams than 2 years ago. Last time, there were like 200 people on the base. This year its just us and another team from Washington so its like 50 people here including staff. In our team time, I shared a passage last night about Gideon and how God turned 22,000 soldiers away from battling the Midianites because he did not want Israel to boast in their strength. God is doing the same thing with this group and the people here - we are few but we are going to do great things through Him and we cannot boast in our strength because of it.

The worship has been excellent. The worship leader is a guy named Axel. he's Mexican, his English is not very good, and he's hilarious. They taught us a song in Spanish and it was really good. The team is extremely talented. Four guitars and they sound really really good. The girl Katlyn has a beautiful voice.

I'm looking forward to the outreach time. I think we're going to be working with an orphanage, a disabled kids' ministry, and hopefully hooking up with the church from last time. Tonight, we're gonna have the sin bag service and some other special stuff. Please pray that God would move in our hearts to meet each one us personally, speak to us, and remove the obstacles that keep us from hearing His voice.