Wednesday

Today we had a very early start with breakfast at 6:30am. Saul was coming to pick the women up at 7am to take us to the bakery, Panaderia La Moderna. Santiago and his brother run this bakery and let us come in there to bake our cookies for Kairos. We made a toll-house base recipe and divided it up into five parts and added cocoa to half the batch to make chocolate cookies with either peanut butter or white chocolate chips. The others were regular chocolate chip cookies and butterscotch chip cookies. The bakery let us use their flour, eggs, sugar and butter and we had the rest of the ingredients. We had to guess at some of the amounts because of metric conversions. We dumped all the ingredients into a very large commercial mixer and it mixed it all for us! We then split the dough up and rolled cookies 30 per cookie sheet. We were able to cook all 870 cookies at one time in a very large commercial oven that used rolling racks. It was so awesome!!! We spent a total of 3 hours preparation and baking time for all those cookies. Saul was running late to pick us up, so we all pitched in to help bag bread items for the bakery. We have never seen so many small breadsticks in our lives! THOUSANDS!!!! We managed to get them all done for them by the time Saul picked us up at 12:30. We headed back to the mission house to drop off the cookies and start helping the team out! The men left about 1:30 to head to San Sebastian. While the women were at the bakery, the men took chairs and supplies to the prison and got it all set up.

The ladies ended up skipping lunch and started to help cut tomatoes and assemble sandwiches for snacks for the prisoners and the Kairos team that were going to be picked up at 4:30 At the mission house, we had no electricity. It had already been out a couple of days. Beth, Carla and Sue cut up carrots, potatoes and another type of vegetable for the dinner that night for the entire team while we still had daylight. Others worked on setting up the prayer room, making salvation bracelets, the prayer chain and working on other types of agape. Luckily the mission house had a gas stove and a large gas grill to start cooking the supper. It was taking longer than usual so the ladies were going to end up eating with the rest of the team when they got back. We had a couple of hours of time to spend getting to know each other and talk. It was starting to get dark so we lit a bunch of candles, drank coffee, hot chocolate and ate some homemade bread while waiting on dinner to be ready. The men began arriving to the mission house around 7:15-7:30. They had a quick team meeting to talk about tomorrow then we ate our dinner. After dinner, everyone went to bed or back to the hotel to get lots of rest for a long day tomorrow.