Ok, so maybe I would like to be home...

A little update...one of our leaders spent the day at the airport getting us rescheduled and our team members are flying out of here over the next several days. I am scheduled to leave Santa Cruz on Tues morn, which mean I will hopefully be home by Tues night if I can get on a connection to St. Paul. Mom is working on that for me from the other end right now. We can no longer stay at our guest house, so they are moving us to the MCC headquarters which is more downtown. It sounds like we will have decent facilities down there, they just aren't able to feed us, so it may present a bit of a challenge to try finding food down here that is safe for us to eat. I know I said I would rather just stay down here, but at this point, I'm ready to be home. We're not working anymore, so it is harder to find productive ways to interact with the culture, and we are kind of getting put on lock down, so we can't even roam the streets anymore. Some of us went downtown this afternoon. We walked through the plaza and went to this ice cream place a few blocks away. After we had been there five or ten minutes, they turned on a TV in the corner and there was live news coverage from the plaza where thousands of people were gathering to protest. We looked outside and everyone was marching down the streets, so we went back to the plaza to check it out. It was pretty peaceful as far as we could tell, but all the stores were still closing as if they were getting ready for a riot. They were shooting off these firecracker things and shouting, so it was louder than all get out, but nobody really fighting. Willie, one of our MMI people from down here, said he was hearing people saying it might start to get bad, so we left. We had some trouble getting out of downtown because so many of the streets were blockaded, but we finally found a route out where we passed hundreds of police in riot gear loading busses and trucks, headed downtown. It was pretty interesting to see it all. So...we will be moving down there tomorrow....hahaha. I make that sound worse than it is. We should not be in any real danger at the place we are staying, we just won't be able to go out much, which makes me think I might as well be home. Oh well. Please continue to pray for our safety, our patience (some of the team is getting REALLY testy!), and for the conflicts to be resolved without many more problems. The protesters shut of all power and water to the city yesterday for about 5 hours which was kind of inconvienent. But as long as stuff like that doesn't keep happening, we should be just fine. Ok, that is all for now. Sorry this is just one big chunk of an email. I typed it insanely fast and didn't take the time to figure out where the paragraph breaks should be. Time for dinner.

Love you all!
Eva Joy :)