Lots and Lots of Children in Esmeraldas

I'm going to start with dinner, since there seems to be some sort of theme with this group and food. The pastor and his counterparts here in Esmeraldes have been SO kind to us. I've only been in Ecuador 4 days (editor's note: Amanda arrived one week later than the rest of the team) and have eaten all home-cooked meals; the food that Mami Jacinta cooks for us has been so wonderful. We are so thankful for Pastor Luis and his family for allowing us to work here.My dinner was very entertaining. When Daniel Fox, the baby of the team, gets tired he laughs, A LOT. He's trying valiantly to learn good Spanish phrases and is constantly scribbling sentences in his phrase book. I reached for his dessert, he quickly moved his plate and started flipping through pages .... pause.... "Es Mio!!" He's learning... slowly but surely. We're all learning more Spanish, but I'm starting to not be able to speak either Spanish or English because I mix them up. :-)Daniel, Suzanna and Andrea are in my school group. Each morning we go in and teach classes. Today's class was on Joy. It's interesting how all of the messages in devotions have been on trusting God, joy in whatever circumstances, the fact that God is in control. Those are exactly the messages that we need to hear as we have had so many kids and limited translation abilities. The kids will just stand there and look at you, maybe ask for your autograph or email. They are super sweet.Tonight we trooped back to the church to continue working with the kids there. Since the day before had been something short of utter chaos with 60-75 kids in EACH class room we were prepared for an ocean of kids tonight. God had mercy on us and we had about the same as yesterday, approximately 400. The team is doing well, we are definitely being stretched in many different ways. I'm learning more and more how little Spanish I speak. We tweaked the kids program a little from yesterday and had 6 groups for the kids to rotate through instead of 5. This alleviated the massive groups just a little bit, but the average group size was still around 60 kids.Suzanna and I are game team two and we have a really nice young man named Junior helping us. He speaks a little English and we speak a little Spanish and between all of that we somehow managed to talk about dependability and teach the kids "North, South, Central"... I've started following John's philosophy that the game team is made to run off kids' energy. I remember sitting at the back of the crowd of kids in large group listening to the constant hum of the kids' voices and was so thankful for this opportunity to touch the lives of God's beautiful children.Amanda Forman, for the teamKids at the school where we are teaching each morning.We are so grateful for Justo joining us this week and helping out with his translation abilities.Playing with the kids who arrived early for the kids' program.We were running low on bandannas yesterday so we spent some time this afternoon cutting a bunch of them in half. Then we sent Tim running all over town to find more fabric in ANY color we didn't already have. Somewhere he found 6 yds of pink stuff that we promptly cut up and tied on the kids.Our enormous large group.