Summer fun

This summer has been FULL of volunteers. We have had an absolute BLAST, but man, are we exhausted! We started June with a team from Chattanooga who set the bar very high! They were a group of 16 university students and adult leaders who win the prize for most flexible. They were delayed in getting here by a storm in Miami, then arrived and waited on their luggage for 2 more days. That means they spent FOUR days without their stuff but it didn't slow them down one little bit. They hit the ground running and didn't stop until they got back to the States! They danced their booties off every morning with high school students, surveyed university students in the afternoons, and had youth parties in the evenings. Not one minute was wasted and we were sure the summer was off to a good start!
Here are some of the guys from Team Chattanooga showing some Spanish teens what "football" means in Tennessee! It was all fun and games until someone (poor Martha) got knocked in the head by a kid who had never held an American football before tried to "go long".
Here are the adult ladies of Team Chatt serving up some yummy hot dogs, chips, and drinks. You can't expect kids to come around with no food can you?
Team Chattanooga left and forgot to take Natasha with them. Teeheehee. She says that is the way I made it sound to everyone. In reality, we arranged it all long before the team came. She wanted to spend a few weeks helping us out this summer and getting an inside look at the M life. Despite this picture of her being nice to birds (you know my fears), we had a good time and she worked hard with the other two teams who followed Team Chatt. We could not have done it without her and our other intern, Boomer.
In case you hadn't heard, Spain won the WORLD CUP!!!!! ¡¡Viva España!! Boomer (intern extraordinaire who arrived in mid-May) was flying out of Madrid while our team was at a meeting in Madrid. It just so happened that we all got to be there to experience the final game. It was mass-chaos and Boomer was right in the middle of it all! He bought this campeones (champions) banner less than 10 minutes after the game ended and went out into traffic to wave it around. Other than Jo-berg, I am sure there was no better place to be for that final game. The parties went on for days!

Now, on to IWC. Just a few days after Team Chatt left, International World Changers leadership team arrived to prepare for the 32 participants who were on their way. The day before the students arrived, we all went grocery shopping. The check out clerks at the supermarket all stopped and stared as we kept loading toilet paper, chips, bread, lunch meat, sodas, etc onto the conveyor belts. The poor woman checking us out should have won an award. They all wanted to know where the party would be and how they could get an invitation!Can I even begin to count the number of times we did the Cha-cha Slide this summer? At the Feria de la Familia (we did 6 of them in a month) we danced for hours. We had crafts and a jumping castle for the little ones, but how does one involve "too cool for school" teenagers? Easy, bust out the Cha-cha slide, Electric slide, Cotton-eyed Joe, YMCA, and the Macarena and you've got a party started! Who says Baptists don't dance?

And now I am so sorry to say that I have NO pictures of Team Gainesville. I guess by the time they got here I had taken a picture of everything and just gave up. So sorry if any of you are checking this. I promise we loved you just as much and appreciated all that you did. Bormujos' first ever VBS...we could not have done that without you!