D.R. Team Returns After a Terrific Work Trip             Our 40-member team was VERY busy and productive.  Thank you for praying for our safety and good health – we were a healthy, energetic, well-tuned group (both in working and in singing together) and truly felt the Lord’s presence.  His people in Las Colinas blessed us with their hard work, loving attitude, good food, smiling faces, “energetic and spirited” worship services 7 days a week, and grateful hearts to the Lord for His goodness towards them… poor in material goods, but rich in their love for Him. What did we accomplish? Ah, I hope you will come to the service February 10 at 10:00 15 A.M. We’ll show you pictures of the brightly-colored school building which took us 9 days to clean and then paint, the tile floors laid in the school, the church bathrooms which our guys dug in the hot sun through solid coral for the footers and frenetically poured and finished the concrete roof late the last day. We’ll show you the lovely pews and children’s desks we built, sanded, and stained or painted; the fantastic LARGE metal “food cart” which two team members built and welded together (temp was 104”F in the sun one day). You’ll see great team work as we formed “bucket brigades” to lift buckets of stone and sand and bags of cement to the school roof for the men to mix and pour concrete so the water could drain properly. (We were grateful when the hose was left on overnight pouring water on the completed roof – in the morning, we saw that instead of draining off away from the school, the water ran directly INTO the school room.  Our men fixed that and many other water problems created by people who don’t have running water in their homes .. no faucets, no toilets or showers, no washing machines, and almost no comprehension of where the water comes from and where it goes after it comes…) You won’t see how joyful we were when our plumbing guys got OUR toilets and showers working correctly, but you’ll see the entire team forming lines to unload a truck of 70,000 heavy cement tiles for the school floors! Our wonderful teaching team worked from 8-5 every day with a 2 hr. break for lunch; children and teachers were delighted to be learning songs, phrases, Scripture verses, and mannerly behavior in English.  We were so glad to have had a Spanish teacher on our team. The medical team held 8 clinics on remote bateys, making a difference in the health of many, but seeing good changes in the health care because of our American Baptist missionary nurse’s organizational skills. After seeing over 150 patients in a small, noisy, hot room and bouncing along on a school bus for an hour over rutted dirt roads, the doctors and nurses returned to don working clothes and help paint, clean, carry tile or fill in wherever needed. We ate outside with the bugs under the passion fruit vines for 2 days so the cement team could pour smooth concrete over the rock-strewn dirt floor in the eating area (I hesitate to call in “dining area” lest you think of it as our nice church fellowship hall…..).  We visited the church we’d helped build in the city of La Romana in1985 and the hospital compound whose walls we worked on in 1987 and roof we helped to pour in 1995. We felt privileged to have been a part of this great work.  We’ll show you pictures of both buildings and the colorfully painted walls inside. Yes, we did get to the beach on a glorious, warm Sunday afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed that respite in the blue Caribbean. Who Benefited from this Missions Work Trip?             WE were blessed by these humble, loving people and thank YOU for your part in giving us this opportunity to serve them.  We were God’s instruments to bring encouragement and hope to the hopeless, worth to the “worthless”, love to those whose lives are certainly not lovely in man’s sight. But we return with our lives changed, more energized to serve the God we love.             Thank you for your prayers and support.