This summer has been such a whirlwind, but it has been amazing and God has been doing such cool stuff in the lives of the students here in Valencia. There truly is never a dull moment! Our schedule is filled with students from the morning to late at night and we love every minute of it. Even our house is not really just ours anymore; there are always students stopping by and staying, but we love it that way! The doors are always open! Well here is a little taste of what is happening in our in the ministry down here
The 5 NEXO students arrived May 31st and we pretty much got started with ministry right away. They came to class with me the last week of school and promoted the English clubs at the Universities. We also told everyone at school about the welcome party that we were having for the gringos and 80 plus students showed up to welcome them that Friday night! After a looong night of talking and dancing, we took a team bonding trip to Cata (the Lighthouse beach) to get to know each other and to plan for the summer clubs. That was a nice way to get the summer going! =)
The conversation clubs have been going great! We are teaching at two of the main universities in Valencia, and we have about 30-40
students in each class. Each week has a different theme of discussion. So far our themes have been: University life, holidays, sports, entertainment, pop culture, and music. We present the topic on a power point and then we break up into groups and have discussion questions. We always include at least one question that engages the students in some sort of spiritual discussion, and it has been amazing to see the doors that God has opened to share our faith in the classrooms.
Almost every weekend we have some event planned that corresponds with our week theme. After the entertainment week we had a movie night on Friday night at our house and we watched the Chronicles o
f Narnia. After the movie we broke up into groups and had a movie review and discussion. There is so much amazing symbolism in the movie so we asked them questions about faith, sin, sacrifice, and forgiveness. Then we explained to them the allegory of Christ that C.S. Lewis created in the story. There were about 50 students who came to that event and all of them heard the Gospel message. The following Monday we went to see Prince Caspian in the theatre (it just came out over here!) and there were about 40 students who came to see the event with us and then came back to our house afterward 
to hang out and talk.
After our sports week we had a Sports Day in one of the large public parks. We had about 35 students come and we split up into 4 teams and did relay competitions and goofy field day type games. After we finished with the relays one of our Nexo students shared his testimony and gave a “Game Day chapel” for the group. 
We then invited all of them to come to Bible study on Sundays if they were interested in learning more. After chapel we played soccer, ultimate and kickball until the park closed.
We also have taken some weekend trips with the students from our classes that have been great for building relationships and sharing our faith! We went to a little German town called Colonial Tovar and about 20 students came with us. The bus trip was about 2 hours long and God opened the 
door for a couple of us to have some deep spiritual conversations while riding up there together! This was a trip that we had planned to just be us gringos, but it turned out being a fun opportunity to spend more time with our students building relationships outside of the classroom.
Another cool thing that is going on this summer is Spanish Club! The students in our English club classes decided the second week of club that they wanted to give us “gringos” a Spani
sh club. There is a group of about 7 students who we meet with every Wednesday in the park and they teach us Spanish and plan activities for us to do to work on our Spanish. After the club we usually go out to eat together and talk.
Just about every night we are doing something with students! We either have something planned or some of them just drop by the house and hang out.
There seems to be one main theme for this summer and for the ministry here in Valencia ….FOOD!!! Every event we are either going out to get food, we end up going to the house to eat food, learning to cook new food, trying out new Venezuelan food, etc! We had one student come over and teach us how to make the Venezuelan main dish called Pabellon which was really fun because you aren’t Venezuelan until you can make Pabell
on and Deb and I are really trying hard to earn to earn the Venezuelan title.
We also had a friend of ours come over to our house and fix us the best Parilla (barbeque) that I have ever had. Another student invited us all over
to her house to try a popular Venezuelan dish called Mondongo. Mondongo is a soup made out of cow stomach lining. I was also fortunate enough to get a cow hoof in my bowl! You suck on the bone to get more flavor! I think we would all be ok if we never ate Mondongo again, but the experience was priceless. We also have started a tradition that after every Bible study on Sunday we either fix something at the house for the students or we go to Calle de Hambre “Hungry Street” and hang out. This has really been a neat way to develop community within our Bible study group.
This is Debbie now, Morgan has said it all really well... and she's right we are living la vida loca... its always crazy here.. but its great! Th
ings are always changing too, it keeps us on our toes. I am excited about one major change.. I will start teaching in the university with Morgan next year as 
well as teach for the guy I've been teaching with. I'm excited about the opportunities this will open for our time here as well as the experience I will get. We'll see if i'm cut out for this teaching stuff. I'm teaching an American Civilization class, so I basically talk about what has happened in the states over the last century. Anyway, that's about all we have for you. I know you loyal blog readers have been dying for an update. I've tried to include a lot of pictures to make up for the lack of posts =) Enjoy another slide show with even more pictures!
