Farewells, Haircuts and Chicken?

Tomorrow, we will be bidding farewell to another member of our family, Alex Papulis. Alex has now been an intern at the orphanage for the past year. In the past year he has accomplished a tremendous amount. In only the last three months he transferred from being a Project Mexico intern to more of an Orphanage intern. The difference being that he began focusing more on the boys, and their education, instead of the construction part of our ministry. In only a few months, he has taught the boys a number of valuable computer skills. The improvements in the boys typing, math, reading and spelling had been impressive. His work has definitely made a huge impact.

Over the last two month’s he’s mentored me and that’s been a great blessing. I’ve definitely been eased into my jobs instead of being thrown immediately into the race. This past week he has been training me with different programs on our computers here. At the same time he gave me a crash course class on programming… in Spanish. Double Whammy! While my slow mind has had a hard time trying to catch up, he’s been very patient. I feel much better about stepping into his place and eventually taking over with the boy’s computer education.

All this to say that we will all miss him, and we are all indebted to his work while at Project Mexico/St. Innocent’s Orphanage.

To celebrate Alex’s time here, I was able to go out with a few others today for lunch at a restaurant that’s specialty was Chicken. Wow, it definitely lived up to its reputation. After a fantastic meal, there was one piece sitting in the middle of the table. We all looked at each other, all full, but not wanting the final piece to go to waste. In the end we pushed the piece Alex’s direction, and he finished the tasty morsel off, with no problem.

Afterwards, Fr. Michael and I went out for haircuts. We had gone last night, but were beat there by a bus full of boys… from St. Innocent’s no less. We decided to come back today instead of waiting the couple hours it would take to have all the boys get their haircuts. Again, I have to rave about the haircut, I felt like I should have been paying $25+ for the haircut instead of $5. With the haircuts, we’ll all be looking sharp for our Christmas picture coming up this Sunday. No worries, I’ll be posting those pictures when I get them. :-)

Under His Mercy,

Joel