Summer of Thanksgiving

My mom has been "swelling my kumquats" to put out another blog entry, so here it is. Seriously, though, I love my Mom, and she is a huge help to me: among other things she receives my mail in the States and follows up on everything I can't do from here. Last week she convinced the state of Ohio that I paid taxes in Arizona and so don't owe any to them. Thanks, Mom! I love you!

While in Brazil in November I found out how few missionaries have supportive parents. There is a lot of heartache out there. This year I was blessed to have both my Mom and my Dad visit me! I posted earlier about my Mom's October visit. In December my Dad and his wife Beverly came for three weeks and they took me down south to see the incredible sites (see more photos on Facebook).

We also got to spend Christmas together, what a joy to have family visiting during the holidays!

The past few weeks I have been doing office work -- part of the reason I didn't feel as motivated to blog, since it doesn't sound all that exciting! I took the below picture of my workspace today. I was working from the kitchen on my quarterly report, and you can see my mate gourd on the left from earlier plus my cup of tereré on the right (as it got hotter I switched to the cool drink).

Despite people's best intentions to continue with trainings and site visits throughout the summer I've noticed that things really slow down here in January and February. So what am I doing besides quarterly reports? My organization declares a day of prayer for CHE programs throughout the world and I translated the prayer guide into Spanish. It had to be corrected of course, since among other things I can't seem to get straight the use of the prepositions por and para. Let me know if you want a copy!