To my beautiful, caring, compassionate, God Loving sister who has helped me through so many rough days…I wish you a splendid birthday. God blessed me when he allowed me to be your lil’ sis. Love you so much and I hope you have enjoyed your day so far!

The past couple days have been good. Today and yesterday wasn’t that eventful, we stayed here on the ship and rehearsed some of our new stuff. Nothing too exciting about that I guess….except for the fact that we are getting some new music. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed doing the music we chose for the trip, but it is nice to be able to get some more stuff in the rotation.

So the day before yesterday (Tuesday) was very interesting. We headed out in the morning because we had a performance scheduled for Santandar Escuela; which is a local school here in Tumaco, Colombia. We set out at around 1000 headed for the shore. The 35 minute boat ride seemed to rush by pretty quickly as I listened to some tunes on my iPod. We get to the BLZ and thought that we were heading straight for the med site to get our stuff but then we turned a different way and went to wait for someone…I don’t know who…to give us the word to go to the school. Several times, our Captain told our escort that we needed to go to the med site first to get our stuff…but the guy was not listening. So then he gets out of the van and starts talking on his little ‘walkie’ to someone about us heading straight to the school…AGAIN! Man, I never saw the Captain move so quickly. She jumped out of that seat so fast, you would have thought it was on fire! So needless to say, we made our way to the med site pretty quickly to retrieve our gear. After a quick MRE lunch at the site, we headed out to the school. When we arrived, the sky opened up with a small drizzle….so we decided to hold off for a little while to see if it would stop. In the meantime, the 1700 or so children present at the school were excited and so happy to see us….and we later found out that they thought Juanes was coming with us:( I felt bad to have to tell them that Juanes was not with us…he’d gone home. They seemed a bit bummed, but were still excited to see us. So excited that many of them were climbing on the rooftop of the school, hanging from the rim-less basketball goal and climbing up the sides of the wall to get to the window that was carved out of metal material. It was complete mayhem. As the rain continued, our truck left to seek out a large tent for us to set up under. We also set up a small tent, large enough for the brass guys to fit underneath so that they could get started as we set up the tent and our gear. As they were playing, the truck returned and about 800 shrieking children came running toward the truck. They thought Juanes was in our raggedy box truck!! Oh my gosh, it was crazy! So the driver and his team were trying to get the tent out and all of these kids were crowding them. It was so dangerous and I surely thought that one kid was going to get an eye poked out. Thank GOD that didn’t happen. Well as the guys were playing and the truck folks were getting the tent out, the sky completely opened up into a DOWNPOUR! Underneath the previously set-up tent, the BQ got soaked! We ran out to help them get the stuff…and we got pretty soaked. Needless to say, we couldn’t play…it was way too dangerous. Tomorrow though, we are going back to play for them. I’m praying that the weather stays as nice as it was today. There were a few clouds in the sky, but other than those…it was very clear.

Things are moving right along for us and it’s hard to believe that we are two countries away from the completion of the trip. It has been a lot of hard work so far, but I have never been one to shy away from using a bit of elbow grease to get the job done. I am looking forward to the rest of the trip…and then getting back to share with everyone what a wonderful, soul-building experience this has been for me.

Thanks for stopping by….
Keisha