Beware the Mustaches of March!

So march. alot of significant things happened in march. We made decisions about what we are doing next year, Congresso!!!(which gets its own blog post, i grew my first mustache which was totally awesome, LOTS of team birthdays(Lucas, Luke, David). So yeah, it was another eventful month.

So for the first few days we were in Curacao. But shortly after we returned it was time to make our final decisions about what we would be doing next year( like returning[or not] to STINT, applying for full time staff, etc..). I felt the Lord was calling me to go back to the States and continue my education.It was honestly a tough decision. It took up alot of my thoughts, time and prayers. This place has found a very special place. As much as i get frustrated with the on and off water and electricity, you just get used to those kinds of things. Things like that which were once a "big deal" become a part of life, at the most an inconvenience maybe when you cant shower or do dishes when you might want to. But there are alot of things here that make up for the periodic loss of water or other utilities. Actually, when we first got back form Curacao I probably hit my most frustrating point. The day after we came back we did not have water, electricity or gas, which was a bit frustrating not to have all three at once, but like i said, you just get used to it.
But anyway. So yeah, the people here are for sure worth not having water once in awhile. The students and my team are some amazing people who i appreciate and love. That will the hardest part to leave this summer, but luckily i still have a few more months to squeeze as much as i can out of them.

Other than that the rest of March was preparing for Congreso(Vida Estudiantils national conference for Venezuela). I did not have a ton of work to do for the conference before hand other than getting our students there, which at times felt like the most frustrating part. To put it nicely, its hard to get the majority of people here to commit to things, especially a month or weeks in advance. Needless to say when you are trying to plan for a conference where you are expecting nearly 300 people, it can be a tad stressful. But it all worked out in the end(more to come later on Congreso itself).

As i mentioned earlier, there were several birthdays on our team and we had a great time celebrating them! We had a little dance party for Lucas, went out to ice cream for Luke's birthday and just had a fun night as a team for David's which we also ate ice cream at. Getting the ice cream was an interesting experience.
So before we head over to the girls for dinner, Oscar and I went to a small store to pick up some choclate ice cream to suprise David with(it's his favorite). At the store we went to, the chest where the ice cream is held is right in the entrance to the store and is locked and you need a worker to come open it for you. Not a problem. We get there, grab the attention of one of the workers and ask him to open it. While he is there with us we spot a box of chocolate ice cream. We then debated for a moment on whether we should get a another container of ice cream because the one was a little small for 7 people. In the 1 minute that we are talking about it, some lady, who for sure didn't need the ice cream, she was hefty (sorry if that's mean, but she made me mad...and it's the truth...i was also a nutrition major, sorry.) comes over and points at the box that the worker is currently holding. Instead of giving her another one, he hands her that one. Not a problem, right? no. of course that was the last chocolate one there. ridiculous. needless to say i wanted to go find that lady and take back that ice cream for a number of reasons. The foremost being that it was David's favorite.
Thankfully we just took our business next door and happen to find the last chocolate container they had in stock. Crisis averted.