God is Great, God is Good

One of my jobs on the trip was to take my photo printer so we could give each child his/her own pictures. Well, this was a hit! I was so glad Alicia brought this up during one of our conference calls. The children, especially the teenagers, wanted LOTS of pictures to keep. Kim #2 had some photo albums that the first team did not use so we let the kids at Cocos have these. Some of them wanted to fill every single page and I tried to print as many as possible. Wendi, our fearless team leader, kept giving me a time update about our departure so I could finish. I say all of this so you can understand this picture I took. The day at Villa's I was set up at one of the kitchen tables with the photo printer. I was lucky enough to be close enough to take this picture of the little girls as they were about to eat lunch. I glanced up and on their own they bowed their heads and were saying the blessing!! Isn't God great and isn't God good?

Tias at Villa's

The "tias" are the caretakers of the children in the orphanage. It is so obvious that they love each child! I have so much respect and admiration for what these women do every day. And boy can they cook!!!! We were spoiled on the days they fed us lunch. Speaking of food, we were at Villa's on what was apparently delivery day for the food. I wish I had taken a picture of what was on the table. There was so much fresh fruit and cabbage and watermelon and things I didn't know the name of but it looked so good and healthy. And the table was piled with all of this! I watched one tia fix the fresh fruit juice for the day. She took fresh pineapple, sliced it up with some other fruit, and put it in the blender. Then she poured it into something like a five-gallon bucket while straining it through cheese cloth or something similar. She kept doing this and added the water and sugar. It tasted unbelievable!!

Our Awesome Chino!!!

We had the most awesome tour guide/interpreter while we were on our trip. In an earlier blog, I talked about Chino's sweet spirit and what a blessing he was to the special needs children. Here are some pictures of him with the teenagers from Cocos. They all LOVED him.

Learning to Swim

Kim #1 was teaching Jenniffer how to swim across the pool on top of the water. She is such a precious child with a beautiful smile. Like so many of the others, the story of how she and her sisters ended up at Villa's is so very sad.