We celebrated our first birthday here at the new house this past Sunday. It was great. Most of these guys have never really had a birthday party before. They do try to celebrate birthdays at the home, but there really are too many guys to do it very well. They just pick one day and celebrate all the birthdays from that month. So usually you share your birthday celebration with a dozen other guys. Lots of times no one else even notices when it’s the actual day of their birthday (sometimes even the guys themselves forget).

Celebrating birthdays is something I want to do here. It’s a good opportunity to encourage the guys and have some fun. So on Sunday we made pizza and opened presents…and I bought an amazing chocolate cake. As another side note, cakes here are…well, not always what I think they should be. They look amazing for sure…and they’re not terrible or anything. Bolivians just don’t like sweet deserts very much. But there’s a German restaurant here that bakes cakes and deserts…it’s a happy place let me tell you. So I bought a cake there that was so rich we could hardly choke it down. =) It was awesome!

There was a funny “lost in translation” moment though. I’m not sure of the tradition here, but I put 20 candles on the cake for the kid to blow out. I was trying to explain the whole, “how many candles are left after you blow are how many girlfriends you have” thing. Except that this guy has a girlfriend, so I said that he needed to make sure he had one candle left. So he proceeded to carefully blow out each candle until there was only one left. Not exactly what I was going for, but whatever.

Please pray for the guys and me this week. Although there have been some good moments, overall it feels a bit rough. Especially today. I’m having ongoing problems with one of the guys. When things go his way, he’s one of the easiest guys to get along with. But the moment he thinks he’s right and you’re not, he just does what he wants and then lies about it to try and cover. I’ve busted him a couple of times and it seems that today might be another one. I’m just waiting to get a bit more info. It could be that it’s time for him to leave. I want to give the guys as many opportunities as I can, but there comes a point when that’s no longer possible. I have a responsibility to the other guys too. If everyone gets to do whatever they want without trying to change or grow… Well, we’ll have some problems for sure. At any rate, I could use your prayers. I definitely need wisdom here.

But I want to end off on something encouraging. One of the fellows has been bringing his girlfriend to church with him. They have a newborn baby and I’m pretty sure they’ll end up getting married at some point. So I’d sure like to see her make a commitment to Christ…for both their sakes. My church has been great with them. It’s one of the reasons I love that place. Many churches here would have had a problem with them, or at the least wouldn’t have necessarily been very accepting. My church family has just accepted them and loved them. People want to see the baby and Veronica has been invited to more coffees and functions than she possible could attend. She seems to be enjoying being with us, but please pray for her. She comes from a Catholic background, which sometimes makes it difficult for people here to understand their need for a personal relationship with Christ.

As a funny side note…a few weeks ago I talked about what it was like to suddenly be “Dad” to eight teenage guys. One of my friends asked me that, if these guys are my “sons” and two of them have kids of their own…what does that make me? Grandpa?

Hmm…let’s just nip that kind of talk in the bud right now shall we….