Engineers with a Mission Party

Thursday evening The M and I had a dozen or so Engineers with a Mission students over to the house for our traditional lasagna dinner. I put out disposable cups and wrote the names of some of the poorest and richest countries on them. So for example, someone drank from Burundi with its $600 GDP per capita, while someone else drank from Qatar, with over $100,000. Cups were assigned at random to emphasize the fact that one can't control the country in which you are born: rich or poor. I thought myself clever for this, which is not hard.

Kim, Joe, and Sarah are some of the newest members of the PIT Crew. (PIT stands for Project Implementation and Testing) We have some of the highest caliber students in our organization!

After a few years of being president of the Baylor chapter of EM, Jonathan will be graduating this May. He has been on three trips with me overseas: Kenya once and Honduras twice. He and I have found ourselves in many interesting situations together. Without going into a lot of details, these situations range in topic from undersized toilet facilities, to Cuban cigars, to sleep-deprived fits of laughter!

We gave Jonathan a Honduran bean pot as a thank you gift for all his hard work. I'm going to miss him after graduation; I count him as a good friend and we have a special connection. He and Katie are getting married in October and we are invited to the Kansas wedding!

David, Eduardo, and Brian (clockwise) are all going on trips this month. David to Rwanda, and the others to Honduras with me. I put this photo in as evidence that engineers can, indeed, laugh.

We ate together and socialized and played Wii golf and generally had a good time. The M and I really like being around the students because they are mature enough to carry on intelligent conversations with good social skills, and yet they are young enough to be energetic, optimistic, and just plain fun.

Perhaps I made the coffee a little too strong...