the tail effects of the swine flu.

I want to express my thoughts on this swine flu. I really am confused at how and why the media can take whatever news it wants and blow it to this proportion. Over a week ago CNN was reporting that there were over 2000 cases of swine flu in Mexico when the world wide number is still below 1200 today.

I was in Mexico City when the hype was hitting and it was almost impossible not to get caught up in the fear. They were making announcements about the swine flu, passing out free masks, and giving surveys about the illness. The scary thing was that I had all the symptoms of the swine flu. I sat in the airport with a headache, fever, achy, stuffy nose, and a cough. Mentally I knew it was impossible that I had the swine flu but in the back of my head the pandemonium made me doubt it. For the next week I watched the news unfold as I continued to have all these symptoms but my doctor told me this was all a media hype.

I think we have to be very careful what we trust in, even the news. Now a week later the headlines have changed to a new fad. It went from Saudi Arabian pirates, to swine flu, to who knows what this week. We need to remember that the love of Christ casts out all fear but the media thrives on this fear so you will return to it time and time again. I'm not cursing the news but just saying that we need to be careful how we let it shape us.

a Change.

Monday I left Nicaragua and the orphanage and came to Mexico where I spent last summer. It was a decision made very quickly but I had a huge peace about making. It is very hard to express the whole story that led me to this place in a blog.

I was working with an orphanage that admittedly had problems in their organization and they are looking for people to spend years there to help fix the problems. There was also a demand to commit a lot of time there for the sake of the kids. A horrible fact of orphanages is that the kids are the only ones who can’t leave. I have seen how these boys have lived their lives with people continuing to come in and out every 6 months, 1 year, or possibly 3 years but they are always there.

For these two reasons, I was always debating if the orphanage was really a place that I wanted to pour out my heart for the next 5 years mainly for the sake of a consistency to the boys. As time passed I realized that this place was not that place for me.

I thought if I stayed 3 more months I would be faced with the same faltering decision if I was going to stay 6 more months or not and didn’t see a long term commitment in the future. More details to follow.

Back in Los Cedros.

I am back in los cedros with the boys and the crew. I spent my last weekend in Matagalpa hiking up to the top of this mountain over viewing Matagalpa. I learned a whole lot of spanish while i was in Matagalpa. I pretty much only spoke in english when i talked to my mom or translated anything for the school. This has proven to clearly be the best way to learn another language. I will definetly plug this school becuase i thought of it to be very professional. http://www.matagalpatours.com/

Now that I am back in Los Cedros, I am left to make some big decisions here in Los Cedros. If I am going to stay I want to stay for another long little while to continue to make a impact in the boys lifes. But I am not confident that I have a true role in this organization. I am working that out with the leadership these next few weeks. Please be praying that Lord will show me a direction to go and make it clear to me.
Thanks for listening.
KB

clebrating the resurrection with high school nicaraguan catholics.

The week before easter is a huge week for the Central American culture. No one works and they have many celebrations of the resurrection and the time leading to Easter. Yesterday I went with one of my friends I have met up here at matagalpa to a youth rally to celebrate the resurrection. There were close to 2000 high school aged kids that came to this one day conference at 7AM.

They had a few different speakers and a lot of music and at 3 PM we began to walk back down the mountain behind the cross to the local cathedral in the town. It was about 3 miles that they closed down one side of the highway for us to walk all the way to the steps of the cathedral where they had a closing ceremony and the bishop of the country spoke a word to the kids. It was a really interesting ceremony.

more stories from semana santa (holy week) to come...

Language school.

Today Finished my first week of language school. Nearly 5 days of nothing but spanish 24/7. I thought/did learn a lot of spanish in my first week. They taught me a lot of the little grammatical things that I never knew from only learning from talking and listening for 6 months.

I have two sessions of class a day. All instruction is given in spanish and normally we finish each session with about 30 min of practicing what i just learned. For the most part in a slow thought intesnive spanish I could carry a 30 min convo without to much trouble almost understanding all of it. Then today I went to work in a carpentry shop with some friends of the family i am staying with. After speaking spanish for four days with people who spoke a clear perfect spanish I was ready to speak in the workshop like a nicaraguan.

When I met the owner of the shop and he asked me the first question I thought it was whats your name but i wasn't dead sure. I spent the whole day struggling through understanding their spanish. Imagine this. It is best described like trying to understand another language in a loud workshop with dusk masks speaking the dirtiest "southern" spanish you can find. Needless to say it was a challenge...

Besides this things are going well....

language school...

Monday I started language school where I am talking and practicing spanish 100% of the day. I have a 1-on-1 teacher 5 hours a day and live with a family that only speaks spanish. I have learned a lot of spanish only practicing in Nicaragua but shcool is very helpful. I am learning that even though I know some things about some of the most complicated verbs in spanish, I still fail to know very simple things like if problems takes on a feminine or masculine pronoun...

Time will tell but I will be continuing to study in school for the next two weeks...

Out of date.

The last two weeks have been really eventful. I was going to language school for a few weeks when I got called up to the other orphanage to reinforce the roof before they could get solar panels installed. Me, Chris and two of the workers went up there for this past week to do the work before the solar panels got there.

I will be going to language school Monday for two weeks where I will be living with a family and fully immersed speaking only spanish all the time. I am excited to see where this will take me over the next little bit of time and and am considering extending that time depending on how much progress I make.

I have been spending more and more time with the 11 teenage boys lately. I have been trying to teach them different skills that they can use in the real world. Currently I am trying to teach them English. Here in Nicaragua if you speak english you have an almost automatic decent paying job working as a translator. I am currently looking for good ESL (english second language) teaching material. If anyone knows of some material that is very helpful please tell me about it.

Lastly something that has been a long time coming is Michael got his hearing aids this past saturday. It was really cool to get to see him to be able to fully hear for the first time in his 7 year life. I am uploading this video of him repeating the words that i say to him. Thank you so much if you gave me some money to help towards this cause.

For some reason I can't load a video now but will bring it soon.