Si le vemos, lo sabremos

After traveling through the night, we went to La Plaza de Cervantes (prounced la pla-tha they ther-ban-teyss with a spanish accent) to meet our families. They were supposed to be there at 2:00pm, but many arrived after. Maddie, my roommate, and I waited and waited. Families came to pick up students, but we were left there until probably about 2:20 or so...probably one of the longest 20-30 minutes of my life. It was like we were waiting to be picked for a sports team in elementary school, but much, much worse. It was more like we were orphans and we were waiting for someone to come adopt us.

However, it gave us sufficient time to notice that the host families matched their students perfectly. So we got to the point where we would see another anxious Spaniard come to collect us Americans, and we could tell if they were there for us. Si le veremos, lo sabremos. If we see them, we will know, we said. And we did. Up walked Faustino López, and we knew he came for us.

He has quite the apostolic feel; he doesn't talk very much, but he is very nice. He is very helpful around the house, especially since his wife, our madrita, has breast cancer. She's been going through chemo and I can tell she's very weak often. I can't believe she still volunteered to have students in her house again (they've done it recently before). Their house feels very similar to mine, I feel very at home. We come home at the end of the day exhausted and all I want to do is stay home. It feels good.

Our activities as of late have been hanging out with Julio, their 23 year-old son who is in a wheelchair. He has cerebral palsy, but not to the point where he can't eat, speak, or change channels on the TV. He speaks slowly enough that Maddie and I can understand him perfectly, which is awesome. Guillermo is their other son, who is 25. He is studying architecture in a University in Madrid--he travels 2 hours every day to get there, and 2 hours to get back. This is his 7th year of college--school is different here. But he served with one of my friends from drumline, Craig Conder, in Riverside California. Craig was his district leader, so it was interesting to make that connection. It's a very small world when you're Mormon.