How do you summarize an entire year full of boarding school activity, rice and beans, spanish everything, 59 students, teenage hormones, tears, laughter, rice and beans, surrendering everything, giving 100 % even when you feel like your running on half full, pride, rice and beans, teaching, humilliation, learning, rice and beans, unlearning, amazon basin rain forest weather, washing, bathing, and playing in the creek together, rice and beans, Educational director job and paperwork almost as much as rice and beans, planning and dreaming together for more efficiency, praying for wisdom and guidance and the hands, heads and hearts we needed to get through the school year, rice and beans, beautiful butterflies, especially the big blue ones, 2 weddings, a mission trip with a group of the students, SISTER TIME together!, rice and beans, the challenges and blessings of working with 18 volunteer staff and their families, carpentry shop, construction, sewing, agriculture work and classes, harvesting rice toghether, planting rice together, making the rice chaco (field) together, eating rice together, choir practices and performances, a new truck and tractor, and a make over on the old ogre truck, (it is a beauty and runs much better!) and a beautiful handful of young people who took the stand to follow Jesus, Praise the Lord! There is so much that went on during the year that it would take a year to tell the blessings and struggles and joys and pains that have been lived.

     In closing, ( yes really!) I am praising God for the work he has done and is doing in His people all over the world, and am excited to see the wrapping up of the end of time. I am thankful that He is willing to use even me in His big work. I am hoping and praying that all who read this short (ahem) letter will claim His promise for our lives as I have that God knows the plans he has for us, for good and not for evil to give us a future and a hope, that My God will supply all our needs according to his great riches, that the angel of the Lord will encamp about those that fear him, and that he will keep them in perfect peace whos mind is stayed on Him.  May we all see the hand of God working in our lives in this new year no matter what it may bring for us, and may we surrender everything in our lives to Him so that our lives may have true worth and meaning. May God richly bless you all in the year to come!

 Sincerimente, Sara:)

 Directora de Educacion de Unidad Educativo Tecnico Industrial de Richard Gates