We left the hotel at 7:15 am, heading across the border to Mexico. Several men are fighting a flu bug, but didn’t want to miss this day, where we attended church and then set up and helped run a large festival at an orphanage. We came to the dome church where we had one of our building projects, and had our POWER devotions in an upper room at the church, where Pat shared from Matthew 28:19. He challenged us to go out and make one disciple every year, which if followed faithfully, will greatly multiply our faith in Jesus. Afterwards, we attended a church service with over 1,000 people, where we were asked to come to the front of the church. It was a very moving experience which brought tears to my eyes. We were served a great lunch at the church. The servers went out of their way to make us feel at home. All of them spoke good English, which is something I was not expecting. This church also had 3 of their members travel with us all week as part of our group. A couple of them did not speak English, but were a big help to our outreach.
After lingering at the church (they had a little gift shop/library), and taking a group picture, we loaded up the vans and headed out to an orphanage to set up and help run a free festival for about 800 kids and their parents. Several POWER guys told me that this would be a tiring day, but I did not experience that at all. Interacting with kids is always a joy for me, and the afternoon went by quickly. We all had tasks to do for the festival. Chuck and I ran a little ball drop, where the golf balls bounced around until they fell into slots at the bottom of the box, where we set out little prizes in each of the slots. One of the slots was empty, but if they got the ball into that slot, they won a baseball cap. This was the big prize, and kept a line of kids in front of us until the hats ran out. Other games were a basketball shoot, a soccer ball goal, a bowling ball game, a hockey game, a bean bag toss, a ring toss, and several other games. Almost 700 hotdogs were grilled and served up. It was a thoroughly enjoyable day, both for us and for the families that attended! We actually made it back across the border at a decent time today, had dinner at Fuddruckers, and came back to the hotel to prepare for our final full day of building projects.