Josiah's First Week in Honduras

Our new helper is here! Josiah is the 18 year old son of friends of ours, and he'll be staying for the year, to work in the ministry and help in whatever other ways he can.

Josiah arrived on Palm Sunday, the beginning of the biggest holiday week of the year. This timing meant that his first week has been different than our usual days. Allen has actually taken several days off from his work at the bridge this week, so Josiah has been helping around the home place instead of at the construction site. He's been great about jumping in with whatever work is needed. Here's a list of some of the activities he's been a part of so far (usually working alongside some of my kids):

- Giving our fluffy lapdog a hot-weather hair clipping

- Boxing up all of the Bibles and study materials we had out here at the property, as we're doing all of our book sales from Russell's house now

- Re-organizing some of my books, to make better use of the newly emptied bookshelves that formerly held the books we sell

- Administering flea and tick repellant on all nine dogs. This included having Josiah pick up several of the dogs to weigh them

- Hanging up (and later taking down) laundry at the clothesline multiple times

- Overseeing Ben's school work. If someone doesn't watch Ben do his math, he starts to daydream and forgets to continue working the problems

- Tearing down and re-configuring the pig shelter on Tuesday (a major job), and then moving the shelter to a new location today

- Occasionally feeding and/or watering the pigs

- Helping load the car with the boxes of books, and with boxes of Kids Against Hunger food, as we shuffled stuff between here and Gracias

This may not sound like a significant amount of work, but that's only over the course of 2 1/2 days. On Monday, Bethany and Ben took Josiah for a walk down our property, and showed him around a bit. We also let him have some time to unpack and settle into his room.

We're excited to have Josiah here with us. The only regret (and this from Ben) is that he couldn't bring along his little brother, since he and Ben are good buds. But it helps that Josiah has an occasionally annoying little brother of his own - you can tell that it has helped him build up patience as he deals with the occasionally annoying little brother in our family.