Big week

So, we've got a big week coming up. First of all, it's my last week of school!!! whoohooo!!! which means that we pretty much just celebrate all week...on Tuesday they are taking all of the teachers out to eat at a nice Argentinian steakhouse, Wednesday have are having a going away party for my kindergarten class (they are moving up to the "big school" next year!) and that will be at the country club...i mean it's a tough job sometimes but someone has to do it =) Then, Thursday, my kids will be having their graduation ceremony...it's a pretty big deal and takes a lot of practice because they have to sing the Salvadorean national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, recite Psalm 23 in english, one kid will give about a 7 minute speech, and they will sing and dance to the Veggie Tales version of "I Am a Promise". Pretty impressive for a bunch of 6 and 7 year olds.
Another big thing this week is that i will be playing in my first concert with my jazz quintet on wednesday! im pretty nervous about it, was hoping to have a few more weeks of practice before we played. we will be playing in La Luna, a cafe/house of art and music. As you can tell, we are gonna be pretty busy this week (and we are expected houseguests this week!) but we will try to get up pictures and videos from graduation and my concert asap.
Have a good week!

Meet Pastor Jose Luis and his wife Sylvia, and their kids: Elizabeth, Jose Luis Jr, Sylvia Jr, Estefani, Naum, Gerson Daniel (named after my brother), and little Ashley (guess who she is named after?)...thats right, 7 kids between the ages of 1 and 12, and the parents are in their early 30's. Whew! My brother met them when he lived here, and they became good friends. Now, they are living in a little mountain community right outside of town, and our churches work together a lot. THey are such an amazing family of faith...the kind that sits down at the table to give thanks to God even when there is no food to give thanks for. And when the parents start to doubt, even their 4 year old son encourages them to keep praying because he has faith that God will provide. You would imagine that their house would be a zoo, with all of those kids living in a two bedroom house, but no...they are the best behaved kids i've ever met. We went to visit them this week to do some planning..this summer a mission group is coming down from Quaker Gap (the church I grew up in) and we will be working in Jose Luis's community, doing service projects and VBS. I wanted you all to meet them via the Blog because they are so special to us, and an awesome example of a family truly committed to serving God, despite the sacrifices that come with that.

In other news, it is extremely hot here this week...like the kind of days that you take 3 cold showers and you still just cant cool off. But in good news, we bought our plane tickets this week to go to the states!!!! God really pulled a miracle on us...we ended up getting the tickets almost at half price because of an error on the Delta webpage. We'll be home on June 15th, just in time to have lunch with Dad for father's day! we will be in NC until July 7th, so we hope to see you!

Feliz Dia de la Madre!!

In honor of mother's day, I wanted to share this incredible video with yall, featuring two of the best mommies ever!
Caution: this video includes live footage of my parent's doing the previously mentioned "butter churn"....but what's worse is that they are passing it along to the next generation, Brooke's innocent baby Aaron. Check out Aaron getting his first lesson (it's OK Aaron...I would cry too...)





We love you Mom, even when you're churnin' butter!! Happy Mother's Day!!!

Yet another shameless attempt to get you to come visit El Salvador...

So, how many of you remember Scuba Steve from the Adam Sandler movie "Big Daddy"?

Hehe don't be fooled...it's not really Scuba Steve...it's Elvis all geared up to go swimming in the lake this past weekend! So, if you come to El Salvador, we promise to take you to Lake Coatepeque (say that 5 time fast!)...it's a lake inside of a volcano. There's a little hippie hostal there where we like to go to relax, swim, kayak, pretend like we're catching fish, etc. It's a really funny hostal because supposedly they offer spanish classes, Mayan pottery classes, guitar and marimba classes, scuba lessons, but no one ever seems motivated enough to do anything but just lay around and read in the sun. We went this weekend with Kenya, Elvis's younger sister, and his mom (pictured below!) As some of you have guessed, yes, one purpose of this blog is to entice you to come visit us =) Is it working yet??

Happy Labor Day!

Yesterday in El Salvador was Labor Day. What does that mean for us? No work and no class!!!! whooohoo!!! The great thing about it being a holiday on Thursday is that they went ahead and gave us Friday off, too. Four day weekend! A couple of weeks ago, we started a women's prayer group here at the house. It's been great...last week we had 14 girls and 2 babies! (This is awesome since there are only 15 girls in the whole church...we are so outnumbered by the guys!) So this week we decided to have a breakfast since no one had to work. We had a feast- beans (yes, we eat beans for breakfast here), plantains, avocado, cheese, cream, bread, fruit salad, etc etc! We took leftover panes con frijoles to the boys, who were a block away, playing soccer all morning. Have you ever seen a documentary on shark feeding frenzies on the Discovery channel? Well yeah, it was pretty much like that.

Another great thing about yesterday is that our friends Laura and Kory, and 2 of their kids, Ben and Josh, came in yesterday afternoon! They are missionaries in Guatemala, and I have stayed at their house so much in the past that it is really fun to finally have them here in our house! They are here for a conference and will be with us all weekend (I'll hopefully get a picture up of them soon!). We have a lot of fun because even though they are Americans, they definitely are not southerners. So we joke around a lot about funny things that I say, and this weekend I'm going to introduce them to homemade" 'minner cheese"... for those of you that are not fluent in redneck, that's "pimiento cheese." This is my absolute favorite food I think, I mean it just tastes like home. The recipe is a secret family recipe, but I'm going to share it because it's just not right to keep something this delicious a secret:

- One small box of Velveeta cheese

-1 jar of pimientos, drained

-2 tbls. of vinegar

-2 tbls. of sugar

-2 tbls. of mayonnaise

Grate the cheese and mash in all the other stuff with your hands.

In other news, last night I had my first rehearsal in a jazz quintet! Well they used to be a quartet, and they play in hotels, restaurants, etc, but now that they invited me, we are a quintet- flute (that's me!), trombone, piano, bass, drums. It was so much fun! I was so impressed with their skills. We practiced in a sound proof room that was about 4 ft x 4 ft so that was interesting. We are playing some classic jazz songs from Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, etc and some bossa nova (which I love!) like Girl From Ipanema. I think it will be a lot of fun, and a challenge, and hopefully can make a little extra money too.