What would you do for a Klondike bar?

Hello again! You may have noticed that I have not had the time to write a blog entry in the past few days. This is because the busyness factor went through the roof here for the week. First, Heidi and I had to go hunting for a roll of plastic, much like the kind you lay on the floor when you are painting. A task such as this is quite simple in North America, but it took up a good portion of a day to accomplish here in Egypt. First we had to search through random shops, trying to find one that sells plastic sheets. It took quite a while before we found even one shop that carried it. The first shop we found that had it wanted 2.50 Egyptian Pounds per meter. Seeing that we needed 75 meters of this stuff, it would've ended up to be over our budget, so we had to keep looking. Eventually we found ourselves on "the other side of the tracks" (which is much more Egyptian and much less Western) where we came upon a household items store that just happened to have a roll of it sitting inside. After lots of explaining, arguing, and waiting, we walked out of there with a garbage bag filled with plastic. Wonderful!

For the next two days, Heidi and I worked on constructing a cube shaped greenhouse-type structure out of PVC tubing and plastic. This was a very frustrating project for us because: A) We had to build it on the roof of an apartment building with no elevator B) It is boiling hot up there (yeah, I'm sunburnt now) C) It is windy up there, the plastic catches the wind, and pulls the whole structure either up into the air, or smashing down to the ground. D) There were only two of us building it. After two days of toiling in the heat, attempting to build this, I laughed at how simple the pyramids were to build. They're made out of heavy blocks that do not blow in the wind! How simple! How elementary. Anyways, the reason we built this structure was so that we could have two have two people at a time enter the "cage" and have a massive food fight with each other. It was pretty crazy, and maybe a little bit wasteful, but it was the kickoff for our highschool ministry year, so we had to go big! Tomorrow we kick off the middle school ministry, but it won't be as ridiculously big and stressful.

Somewhere in these past couple days, I also packed all my things and moved in with my host family. They were a very nice family from Holland. I haven't had much time to stay at home and spend time with them, but they have been very kind and welcoming towards me. Today I did lots of cleanup from last night's event, did a little Arabic learning, and now I'm about to head to church. I'm helping out the pastor with the sermon. I have to stand on the stage and do some stuff. Not really sure on the specifics yet. Should be interesting. I will try and return later to share some of my deep thoughts with you, and what I've learned in the past couple days.