Summer to winter.

This photo shows what the parks are like in Bucaramanga in the summer months. This was taken last December. Who would have ever thought the grass would grow back in the winter time, but the next photo tells the story for the month of August.

The color winter green.

I can now understand what the color winter green indicates. This is a park in Bucaramanga where we like to walk around in the early morning hours when we are in Bucaramanga. The month of August is winter time and noitice how green the grass is.

JAS convention.

We attended a JAS or (Young Single Adults) convention in San Gil. Everyone wanted to have their pictures taken with us. The gals as well as the guys. We felt pretty special. The two girls on the left are twins and have become very good friends of ours.

An old colonial bridge.

We can only imagine the Spaniards crossing this bridge many hundreds of years ago. We are glad it is still standing.

This is really street food.

This horse is eating on the job in Bogota. The horses and carts are always entertaining. They are used to move people's home supplies , carry the equipment for the gardners, collect garbage and anything else you can think of.

Fifteen hundred million years old.

This fossil was very interesting. We were told it was fifteen hundred million years old. This head is about six feet long. The whole fossil was about forty feet long. When it was found by some farmers, the farmers took one of the legs and the tail bones before the government stopped them. This is right where it was found about fifty years ago. They have built a museum around it. It is about ten minutes outside of Villa de Leyva. It had a head like a crocodile, but it always lived in water.

An abrubt ending.

We were so sorry to have Sister Berrios mission end on a sad note. Her father was killed in an accident just a few days before she was to go home. We were very grateful for all that she did on her mission. We wish her well.

Keeping everyone awake.

These missionaries taught us a new game called Ninja. They loved it. The object is to be the last person to have someone touch your hand. It can involve a large group.

Playing Ninja.

This was such a fun game. It was good to play right after lunch when everyone was getting tired. It was good to wake them up. Where you hand stops, you have to hold it there until someone tries to hit it.

Learning from each other.

Missionaries are always learning from each other. Some of our missionaries are new in the mission and others are getting ready to return home.

After four days of training.

Here we have the zone leaders, district leaders, and the trainers for over half of the mission. We repeated the training to the leaders in the other part of the mission.

Always a white shirt and tie.

The missionaries never have to decide what to wear, it is always a white shirt and a tie.

It is hard to count and do push ups.

There are many ways to teach a lesson, and we needed them to keep everyone interested for four days of training.

People not lessons.

We learned the importance of teaching people not lessons.

Good listeners.

Here we have another teaching moment. We all learned from this lesson.

The yummy lunch.

The missionaries were very hungry every day, and they knew it would be good. This does not show how big this portion was. She gave it to me, but it was later divided into food for three. No wonder it is hard to lose weight.