Saturday, June 20, 2009

Hi, my name is Mike Jaderston and I am an incoming freshman to Sterling College. I do not know what I am going to study yet, but am excited to play tennis at Sterling. I moved from Gurnee, Illinois (really close to Chicago) to Sterling three years ago.

Today we only worked a half day as does everyone at the school. We mixed cement in a giant mixer and then dumped it into twelve gigantic holes all morning. This will be the foundation for the new classrooms. After the manual labor we got to play volleyball against one of the teams at the school. They are holding Olympic games every Saturday for the children and their parents. This particular Saturday they were holding a volleyball tournament. We had a lot of fun and laughed with the adult team we played against. Even though we were all two feet taller than anyone on the opposing team it was still a pretty fair match.

After lunch we walked to New Reque, a nearby slum village. We handed out candy bags that Katie Sparks assembled for us. We also attended a children’s Sunday school meeting in one of the “houses” in the village (“house”= 4 mud brick walls, a dirt floor the size of most American’s walk-in-closets, and a thatch roof). We watched as the kids sang songs, played games and learned a lesson about how to show love to your father for Father’s Day. Afterward we challenged a group of teenage Peruvians to a game of soccer. We lost 4 to 1. We thought we did pretty well considering Peruvians play nothing but soccer. As we left the village, many of its residents followed us out and were very grateful for us visiting them. One girl even begged Ashley to come up to her “house” at the north end of the village to take a picture with her Mother. Our presence alone really meant a lot to the village. We finished the day with candy bag sorting and devo’s. God does amazing things.

To finish off, I will tell some of my unfortunate mishaps speaking Spanish to the Peruvians. The first one came on day one, when I tried to say “the food was great” to the cooks. Without thinking I said that to them and gave the OK sign. Well, I actually got the Spanish part right, but soon learned from Terrence that the OK sign in Peru is not good. So basically, I told the cooks that the food was great while flicking them off. Oops. Another time, I was playing chess with several of the kids of the village. Their school has a chess club and invited me to play. As we were playing, I made two embarrassing mistakes. The first was saying the word stupid. I made a bad move and said jokingly, “Mi es estupido!” I was then told later that ‘stupid’ is a cuss word in the Peru. But then, I made an even worse mistake. I tried remembering the word ‘turn’ from school, and thought it was ‘toca’. So I was constantly saying, “Me toca,” or “Te toca”. The kids would laugh when I said this, so I thought I was just a funny guy to them. Well, it turns out that “Me toca” does not mean ‘my turn,’ it actually means ‘I touch myself”. So basically I cussed at the kids and told them that I touched myself the whole time I was playing chess. But, in the end, they didn’t seem to mind, as they gave me a computer chess game to play at home and invited me back to play the next day.

Well, got to get some sleep. Thanks for reading and praying.

God loves everybody.

Mike.