Monday got off to an early start. Did I mention John gets up early? He was gone by the time I woke up the first time. Our tents were right in front of the main bathrooms. I didn’t have a clock or watch so I just got up when it sounded like a reasonable number of people were already up, and I felt reasonable rested. On Monday, a lot of people were up early. I think I ended up getting up between 5am and 6am, closer to 5am.

I had slept pretty well. We had gotten ear plugs from the hotel the night before. Which was a good thing, since John snores pretty loud.

Despite it being hot in Mexico, the showers were cold. Very cold. It took my breath away the first couple of times I stuck my head under the water. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to get accustomed to the water.

Breakfast was at 7:30am, so I had plenty of time to kill. I still wasn’t in a great mood, so I decided to stay in the tent and read my bible.

Breakfast was forgettable. It was the standard “we’re cooking for a lot of people” type cafeteria fare. It wasn’t bad. And when you’re hungry, it tastes pretty good.

After breakfast was the ministry meetings. I was in the children’s ministry, so I went to that one. The coordinators introduced themselves, etc, etc. One of the things they were going to do is ask each team to present one of the lessons during the ministry meetings. So each team would have to present one of their lessons sometime during the week. I immediately knew I was going to be the one from our team to present. I didn’t really want to, so I didn’t volunteer, hoping someone else would step up. But Joy asked me if I would, and I said yes. Oh well.

On Monday, they flipped the schedule around a bit, so I think we had team meetings next. We were supposed to prepare the team for what we were going to be doing that day. We could also split into ministry groups and go over more stuff there. I actually don’t remember what we talked about during this time. I wasn’t really in a good mood. And as we would find out later, it didn’t really matter what we planned for Monday, ‘cause it wouldn’t go like we thought.

Next was the worship time. Not being in a good mood, I didn’t really participate. I didn’t feel that I meant the words in the worship songs. The speaker for the week was a man who had been a missionary to a remote tribe in Papa New Guinea. On this day, he just introduced himself and told a little about his ministry.

After worship, was lunch.

After lunch, we had bathroom duty. Not bad. It had been cleaned recently and we had plenty of people. So it didn’t take long.

After “special services” (what they called bathroom duty), we piled into the van and a SUV to drive out to the church we’d be working with. Apparently someone had decided we should all wear our YUGO shirts the first day. I’m not sure why, because if you’re trying to not freak the locals out, you probably shouldn’t have a bunch of gringos show up dressed the same way. Maybe its just me. Anyway, not only had no one told me this, no one had given me a YUGO shirt. Fortunately Melissa was kind enough to go find me a shirt, after someone told me I was supposed to be wearing one.

The pastors of our church actually came out to the YUGO campsite to lead us to the church. So we crammed everybody inside the van and drove out. The church is actually part of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. Right next to a building where a drug dealer works. I’m not sure if that’s the best location or the worst location.

The actual church building was below street level. You had to take wooden stairs down that a Picasso aficionado had designed. There was kind of a courtyard there at the bottom. The sanctuary was to your right, a so-called bathroom to your left, and bunk rooms in front of you. As you might imagine, it was very run down. There were cats and kittens everywhere. Also a couple of chickens. They cooked out in the courtyard.

We went into the sanctuary and met with one of the pastors. We went over what they had done to prepare for us, and what we planned on doing. They were coming up on their three year anniversary so they had already been passing out flyers for that. We prayed and decided that we should go out door to door inviting people to our women’s and children’s ministries. The sports ministry would just go over to a local park and start playing.

The women’s ministry must have got their stuff together quickly, because they left before us. Joy was going out inviting, but wanted someone to go with her. I decided I’d rather go out inviting than wait on kids to show up, so I volunteered to go with her. Unfortunately, the women’s ministry took all the translators with them. So the pastor paired Joy and I with a couple of the brothers from the church. Except they didn’t speak any English, just Spanish.

The inviting went pretty well considering. Mainly the brothers from the church did all the talking. I would just smile, maybe say “Hola”, and hand out a flyer. We did run across a few people who spoke English. One man was a Mormon. He refused a flyer, but he told me that he understood going door to door. Another man was giving me a hard time after he found out I didn’t speak any Spanish. He told me to go to school. We ended up stopping by the park that the sports ministry was playing at. They seemed to have a lot people there playing.

After inviting, we went back to the church and waiting for kids to show up. None did. At one point someone said “Hey Andy, there’s kittens outside.” I thought they said “Hey Andy there’s kids outside.” So I went outside looking for the kids. Elaine had a good laugh at my expense.

We had supper (sandwiches) and prepared for the evening service. Most Mexican churches are fairly conservative, so I was supposed to wear a collared shirt. Unfortunately, mine was long sleeves, and it was very hot in the church. I didn’t understand any of the songs (all in Spanish, and none were English translations). So I just clapped along the best I could. Noel gave his testimony. During this time, we noticed that some of the church kids had shown up. Kristy had the idea to take the kids to the back of the sanctuary and do crafts with them.

The crafts went well. The kids were well behaved, and seemed to enjoying making something. There was one little girl who didn’t like strangers though, and didn’t want to do anything. Her mom (I think) was there, but that didn’t seem to help. There were only about four or five kids and they were jammed around the table. I didn’t get all that involved because there wasn’t room, and because we had such a high teacher to kid ratio. So I just ended up picking out stickers for when the children finished their crafts.

After the service, we hung around for a while. Some people ended up talking with people in the congregation. We finally packed up and headed back to YUGO. When we got back, we unpacked, and went to the sharing service. I think Monday was the night we wrote down what we felt was holding us back, and taped it up on a van. Each day someone from the team would go down and remove a piece of the paper.

At the end of the day, I was feeling a lot better than when I started it. I think actually being at the church and attempting to do some ministry put me in a much better mood. It was more of a “ok, this is why I’m here” kind of thing.

I went to bed as early as possible. It wasn’t long after the sharing time was over.