Spring Break and a couple other crazy stories

Hello! The spring break team left eeearly this morning - I stayed up last night with them playing games and then going to the airport at 4am, so I slept today from 6am to 2pm. It was such a great week! It was lots of fun getting to hang out with Whit and talk to him a lot and have him see my life here. It was also just a fun week packed with lots of different activities including a couple big things that I had never gotten to do before (including touring Palafitos, which is a poor village where the houses are little shacks built on stilts over the water). God did so many great things this week too! We had such a high percentage of people that we talked to accept Christ, and tons of people came back to the activities that we invited them to - including some of the ones who accepted Christ! It was so encouraging because you can never tell if someone really believes in the Gospel when they pray the prayer, but when they follow up by coming to events, it shows that they really meant it and want to start growing in their faith! Also, a couple of girls who had started getting involved spent a lot of time talking to Allie (the only girl on the SB team), so I think it was great for them to get even more connected by sharing a lot with her. I had such a busy week and now I have a million thoughts to process! I am really excited though because I have two more months here to finish up what God is doing in my life this year, and then I will be on to many more exciting things! :)

Okay, now for the couple of random stories:

Remember all that craziness that happened in Curacao? Well that wasn't everything. While I was writing that last post, Kaitlin and Crystal were supposed to be driving Chelsea to a place to go salsa dancing and dropping her off there. After quite some time, which I attributed to them getting lost, they came back....but Chelsea was still with them. I figured that they had just gotten so lost that they gave up on finding the place. What actually happened was that our rental car was running out of gas, so they tried to get gas at a gas station, but there was no gas! Curacao was having a gas strike. They had gas, but they refused to pump it. So my friends ended up leaving the rental car parked somewhere and sketchily finding a taxi to take them home. So Chelsea's salsa excursion failed, and the next morning we had to call the rental car company to pick up the car and a taxi to pick us up. So many challenges! I felt bad for Chelsea though, because everything she wanted to do failed (including windsurfing, because it was a cloudy day on an ugly lake instead of the beautiful ocean, and her instructor was not helpful at all).

Another little crazy story is that one day Andrew was driving the Onishi's car to take groups of people home from a party during spring break, and he got pulled over - and found without a license (and the Onishis were missing an inspection sticker or something). We were nervous for awhile because we didn't know what would happen to him or how he would get out of it. He ended up calling a friend who is a very smooth-talker and good at getting what he wants. He also called one of Keith's friends who has connections with the police so they were able to let Andrew go no problem (sketch though in my opinion). They still impounded the Onishis car, but at least Andrew didn't have to go to Venezuelan jail!