Hello fellow Americanos,

Sorry we haven't touched base in a while. Amy has been sick most of the week but she plans on giving you an update soon.

We had a pretty "adventurous" day today in Trujillo! First, Amy got a call from the school that Hall had just passed out. After coming to, he vomited and had a nice bout of diarrhea to go with it. Needless to say, they were ready for the gringito (slang here for a young, male, Americano) to be picked up as soon as possible. He seems fine now and just hopefully ate something bad.

To add more excitement, I picked up the local paper to read at lunch- which I sometimes do to work on my Spanish. I slipped into a local streetside dive and was dining on a fine meal of goat, egg-gravy covered potatoes, beans, and cantaloupe juice (yes, you're lucky you're on the other side of the equator from me right now) which cost a grand total of $2.

Well, it didn't take long reading to get the point. The entire front page and two following pages were dedicated to the spread of the swine flu in Trujillo. Two people have just died of it and about 100 more have the swine flu here in town. As a precautionary measure, the government has ordered the closing of the schools (with the full support of our kids!) for the next two weeks. So far, the school where I teach remains open and probably will unless the situation gets a good bit worse. It's still a relatively mild strain of flu.

Anyway, all this just reinforces one thing my hard head seems to be continually reminded of on this trip- what I'll call the physicality of the "spiritual" world. It just continues to amaze me how much the physical/health side of things affects the other. Of course, this is no novel concept. We see it so many times with Jesus- who became flesh, dwelt among us, made bread and wine, died, etc. Both the physical and spiritual were very important to him and maybe not as disconnected as they sometimes are with me.

No, we haven't gone through any intense suffering by any means. But, the ongoing physical "roadblocks" have been issues for us. As usual, I think there is a "silver lining" in the challenges. They basically force us to say, "We're just here. If anything good is going to happen, it sure won't be because of us. " Of course this is always true. The physical setbacks just help us see it.

As always, thank you very much for your thoughts and prayers.

Your Gringo,

Jeffersonian