¡Bienvenido a El Salvador!

    I have officially been in El Salvador for three days!! It is unreal and amazing. There is so much to learn (mucho espanol), to see, to experience, and people to meet! Good thing I will be here for 6 weeks to do many of these things! These past three days have been about becoming acquainted with El Salvador and with people from the ministry that we will be working with for the majority of our stay.     We arrived on Thursday morning at 7:45am and I could already feel the heat through the airport walls...thankfully the weather has been pretty cool (for El Sal) ever since...we will see if it stays that way. Right now as I am writing this post, it is raining intensely and there is consistent thunder and lightning which to me is fun and exciting!!
    The next thing I noticed was how green and beautiful the landscape is here!! The country has seven volcanoes and I think two of them are active. Our hotel is actually very close to one of the volcanoes (Not sure of name) and I think we will be able to hike it at some point in the trip which is SO awesome!! If you don't know already, El Sal is known for their coffee (MMM!!!) and surf. Most Americans that come to El Sal are here for surfing. Some more info...it is now a Socialist country but it used to be a Democracy. This is a recent change to the country and does not settle well with the wealthy but helps the poor a little more. If I had to choose a city San Sal is similar to LA...CRAZY CRAZY drivers, very dense, a lot of shopping, many buildings on top of each other, many universities...the only big difference is that you can get almost anywhere in the city in about 10 to 15 minutes. There is also about 2 million people.
    One of the first cultural things I learned was that Salvadorians are very warm and welcoming people even to strangers. We were told when we got off the plane that a normal thing in Salvadorian culture is to kiss people on the right cheek when greeting and meeting! Such a different lifestyle than Americans for sure! It takes a little to get used to but it just shows that Salvadorians desire loving relationships with everyone and want people to feel welcomed!
     On Friday, we were able to visit Evangelica Universidad which is one of the campuses we will be visiting regularly. We had the opportunity to go around campus and pray for the students along with our new amigos y amigas from the ministry team at the University. After our prayer walk, we got a chance to meet some of the students and practice our espanol and get to know some of them in hope that we will see them again on campus during our stay. Seeing the same students on campus, we were told, is very likely since they are small universities. One of my roommates (Amy) and I went together to talk to a group of four girls and soon found out they spoke no english! Amy thankfully speaks spanish pretty well and I can understand spanish fairly well just not so well at speaking. The girls were so young compared to college students here...some were 16 and none older than 19. Even though our spanish wasn't the best, we still were able to understand each other pretty well and they were continuously laughing at our spanish (in a nice way) which made the conversation fun.
    We have had a lot of good team bonding and it is amazing how well our team has been getting along so far...God has really unified our team so quickly and it will be awesome to see how close we all will be by the end of the trip. Our first day here, we did a team devotion time and went through John 17 which is about being unified with God, believers, and nonbelievers and so that everyone will be one with God...we can see that God is already answering prayers. Speaking of prayers.... God provided full support for our team!!! Thank you again for your support in this project!
     Saturdays (today) are adventure days for the team and today we went to a Judo competition!! Definitely something random but really awesome because San Salvador happened to be hosting the world cup of Judo and USA is staying in our hotel so we went and cheered them on!! I never even heard of Judo until now! For those of you who don't know what it is...Judo is a modern martial arts, it also kind of looked very similar to wrestling. We saw both girls and boys participate for USA and they rocked!! After Judo, we went and saw Harry Potter 7.2!!! That was definitely exciting!
    Tomorrow, we are going to church with Cecy and Manuel (directors of Vida Estudantil-the Campus Crusade of El Sal) who are very much the grandparents of the gang. We are going to their church which is a very traditional Salvadorian Christian church. Kristen and Joe (our Project Directors) told us we will be going to different churches throughout our time to switch things up!
    I am looking forward to this coming week, since it will be our first full week and we will hopefully get into a groove of what we will be doing each week!! This week the majority of our time looks like we will be on Evangelica Universidad. We also will be doing service projects in the near future with an orphanage and a Senior Living Home. I am so excitied for what's to come and to share all that is going with you!!! I feel like I still haven't told you enough since I feel like SO MUCH has happened and I am sure will happen but I will do my best to explain it as concise as possible! It also seems that I will probably be updating posts about once or twice a week because of time! Thank you so much for reading and if you have any questions please do not hesitate!!!
    A verse that I want to share with you all is a verse I felt comforting when I first arrived and was a bit nervous...Colossians 1:9-20
   since it is a long verse (and you may look it up for your selves) I will give you just a small part of the verse: we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God...
I love you all and pray you are doing well,
Meg