Well, I missed all of Saturday, as I came down with a nasty sore throat, and stayed at the hotel in McAllen all day. The rest of the group did a construction project in the morning, then helped with the festival at Alianza Church in the afternoon. The festival is one of my favorite things to do, so I was not happy. Instead, I walked half a mile to a pharmacy, bought some Nyquil, walked back to the hotel, and crashed for 7 hours in the hotel room. One good thing that happened was I had lunch with Bob Smith, who also was staying at the hotel due to symptoms from a dog bite the day before he left California.
Today I was feeling a little better. I also discovered that a bunch of other guys had come down with a bug. So today, we piled into the vans, drove across the border, and went to Bruce & Paula Hepburn’s place for devotions. They had laid concrete on the outside area under the canopy, and built solid wooden benches, which we shared with a another group from Illinois for worship songs and a message from Dave Barnes. Bruce has now built 200 houses in the colonia, and ran piped water the entire length (5 miles). We brought a bunch of boxes of Bibles for him to pass out in his ministry.
Then it was on to Alianza Church, where they had prepared lunch for us, and had a translator sitting at each table for us. They were all from their youth group, and spoke very good English. Afterwards, we went to their large dome sanctuary to participate in their regular worship service. We all did our best to sing along with them in Spanish, and several of our members gave testimonies, then our own Pat Schmelling gave the message. It was a very powerful and moving service.
The border crossing back to the USA took 45 minutes today. After that it was a 5 hour drive back to San Antonio to the hotel there, where we arrived at 10:30 pm.
Doug