Adulam and Texas Day

For our first semi-long weekend -a 4 day weekend due to some random Argentine holidays- I spent a couple days at Adulam and a couple days chillin in BA.

We went to Adulam for a day with the whole program last semester, and ever since then I had been meaning to go back but I never made it happen last semester so I made it a priority for this semester. I went with 3 others- Liz, Kevin B, and Nia. We took a taxi with the awesome, super friendly taxi cab driver Carlos, and arrived at about 10:30 on Saturday morning. We went expecting them to have some substantial work for us to do, but found that the thing they most needed was entertainment for the kids. We did a few hours of work raking leaves and cleaning up a lil park (the kids were adamant about helping, so we obliged  and it ended up taking about twice as long haha). The rest of the day consisted of a lot time spent playing with the kids, eating lunch, having an afternoon snack, and checking out another Adulam location.

I had no idea there were so many Adulam locations. There's the main one for families and orphaned kids, another for adolescents,  one for drug addicts, one for grandparents, and a couple others spread out across Argentina. We visited the drug addict one and got an in-depth look into their mission, how it worked, and what a normal day would look like. We saw their green house, their bakery, soccer field, bunk house, and metal recycling shop. The leader of that location was super friendly and super Christ-centered. It's people like him that inspire me to want to live a life of sacrifice.

Later that night we went to THE Adulam which was originally a church. We went on Saturday night which was the young people's service. It was so cool to be able to recognize songs in Spanish that we sing back in the States. At one point during the worship the power went out, but the band kept playing without missing a beat. It was a pretty cool moment when we got to worship in the pitch-blackness acoustic style. Afterwards we had hamburgers and headed home. It rained pretty hard that night and into the morning so the morning was a pretty chill time to sleep in and get some good reading done. Later in the day we had a lil "Carnival"party for the kids with stickers and silly string and bouncy balls. There wasn't a moment when we were with the kids were one wasn't hanging on my arms, back, legs, or neck. Those kids LOVE having us there. In the late afternoon we headed back home with Carlos

Monday was chill. Slept in, did CrossFit, read, and blogged. The next day Liz and I set out to make our own guacamole and salsa. After an extensive outing to Jumbo and Coto we were finally able to scrounge up all the needed ingredients. We layed everything out on the counter, cranked some country music, and went to work making our southern specialties. Both the guac and salsa turned out to be super bomb and we went to down devouring them. We had to restrain ourselves and saved some for the rest of the week. Having the taste, music, talk, and memories of home was such a great feeling.