Day 123.

Let me apologize for not posting in a while. Alanna's dad and brother came, which means two things:

1) I received a package from my parents, sent down with Alanna's fam.
2) I had to finish the package I wanted to send back with Alanna's fam to my parents.

The latter was much easier than the first, which required no creative hours or mess.

Apart from that, I now return from teaching at 5:30 instead of 2:30 like all of last month. My math class is doing alright. I have two students who nearly aced the final exam I gave them before Christmas (one is just genuinely bright while the other one actually studies), but my other girls all failed. Pretty miserably. Yesterday though, we had planned an auction of sorts, using all the points they had earned through participation, homework completion, and test scores as a form of fake currency to buy random plastic crap I purchased at the office supply store owned by a nice Chinese family near my house. Connie Congleton, my second grade teacher, did the same thing when I was seven and I remember my class absolutely loving it. My class of seventeen year olds did too.

The interesting thing was how whenever two girls would get in a bidding frenzy, the winner would give the prize to the loser. There was also lots of "Just give so-and-so all my points". We'll have another auction after the tests, in April, and I'm excited to see if this attitude is going to prevail or if it was just part of the Christmas spirit.

Speaking of which, Christmas is rapidly approaching and I can't wait. Yesterday was our giant "Feliz Navidad Lunch" with all the girls that are part of the Refuge ministries (either as students during the week, or part of the craft crew on Saturday, or a player on the soccer team). We ended up serving lunch to 85 girls, and a lot of them were at other Christmas Parties at school. It was an awesome visual of how many young women are impacted by Christ for the City every week.

As part of the program, Alanna performed two songs with her choir of five girls; everyone cheered gloriously at the end for them. The soccer team did a lip sync with choreography to some Spanish Christian rap song that was a huge hit. As soon as it was over, everyone just screamed "Again! Again!". So what did they do? They performed the exact same thing. Again.

My host mom just cranked out a batch of 100 tamales yesterday and I had the privilege of eating the first one. I remember hating them when I was here as a twelve-year-old (the tamales here are wrapped in banana leaves, not corn husks like in Mexico. This gives them a bit of a different flavor), but like every time I try a new food, I realize my taste buds have changed.

I now have a small pile of presents to open on Christmas morning and have been playing Harry Connick Jr. and the Muppets Christmas nonstop (more things my parents sent down).

However, this delicious serving of Christmas cheer didn't come without its share of bitter cold (okay, really there has been no cold. It's been 80 every day. That was just a terrible metaphor): the long awaited webcam my parents sent to me turned out to not be compatible with my mac, so no opening presents with them on Christmas morning. That really hit hard and a rather homesick/downtrodden me fell asleep watching Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer in ten-minute chunks on youtube last night.

And then I woke up. The sun kept shining, my host mom kept smiling, and there was another day ahead of me. My host sister, brother, and sister-in-law invited me to go to the beach with them tomorrow, Susie and Sarita (two very veteran missionaries here) asked me to join them on a two day trip to the country side after Christmas, and a message was waiting for me in my facebook inbox from a girl in Michigan who seems full of potential roommate material.

Basically, I can stay in bed today and sulk, but life is going to keep throwing blessings at me. So I think I'm gonna get up, go for a run, call my Peruvian friends, and enjoy the days that are precious to me...which is every day.

--Hannah