The Pen and The Sword: Toucans in the DR

Each of us was assigned to a group in the DR. Our groups rotated responsibilities at the school and the Makarios house, with the exception of the Chain Gang, who worked on projects at the school each day. My group, the Toucans, went to school each morning, and we went to villages two of the afternoons, back to school one of the afternoons, and the last afternoon, we served at the Makarios House, on a VBS-style outreach to the neighborhood kids, a project Margaret dubbed, "Mak.com." Here are some pics of our doings for the week...

Each day we circled up in the drive-way and prayed together before each group headed out.

The Toucans!

Toucans being silly.

I think I was a little heavier than those girls expected.

Monday and Wednesday, our group had "recess duty" at school. At first we tried playing organized games with the kids. Here we're trying to explain one of our games called "Cross the Ocean." The kids never really caught on, so we ended up just playing and giving lots of caballito rides.

When we were tired from running, we would play a game called "Bumper Gringos"and we'd all just smash into each other in the yard. At least we had a chance to catch our breath.

Thursday was Grace's birthday. Dominicans have a tradition of dumping water on you on your birthday. Grace was caught totally off guard last year, but this year, we figured she'd be expecting something. So Justin devised a master plan of having each group pose for "last day out" pictures before we headed to school. Here, Paige, Courtney and I posed first to make it seem like everything was totally normal.

While Bailey, Grace and Andy got posed, Court, Paige and I ran up to the roof where Andy, Jack, Pro and Bella were waiting with a big bowl of water.

Perfect execution.

Grace is such a good sport. Even after getting soaked, she still had a smile on her face. And so did Bailey and Andi, who got pretty wet too.

One of my favorite things the Toucans got to do was take part in Thursday's chapel. Cakito, the school's chaplain, assigned each of us emotions, and we wrote them on a sign. Courtney was looking pretty loco on the day of the chapel.

Justin was the only boy in our group, so he played Jesus. He was great at it.

As we entered the cafeteria, we had to act out the emotion on our sign. I was "agresivo", which means angry. I stomped in and shouted, "No me gusta los ninos!"- "I don't like children!"

My angry face.

After each of us entered with our different emotions (craziness, weakness, sadness, anger, deceit, sickness, tiredness, and fighting), Jesus came in and began to change us.


After everyone's heart was transformed, we sang a song in Spanish with the kids.

Cakito wanted to say a special birthday prayer for Grace. She was skeptical, because she'd already gotten doused with water earlier, but she's such a good sport that she went along.