June 2007

Whitney and Amylia play on a club basketball team sponsored by a charity called Friends of the Americas. Every year the charity sponsors a trip to Hermisillo, Mexico. The boys and girls teams go there to help in orphanges and help in the community. At the end of the day they play in a basketball tournament against other teams from Mexico. Todd volunteered to coach the girls varsity team. Todd, Whitney, Amylia and I were able to go this year. This was the second year that Whitney and I have gone. Parker was able to go last year as well. It is such an amazing experience and it is hard not to want to take 25 kids from the orphanges home with us. Todd and Whitney's team won the tournament, which made it even more fun. It was 122 degrees some of the days which made it a little hard to play basketball but they still did it and had fun. We stayed up until 12 or 1 a.m. every night and had to get up between 6 and 6:30 a.m. Because of the heat and all of the different service things that we did, we were pretty much exhausted all of the time. I was incharge of keeping track of 10 teenage girls every night. That was not an easy job, especially because there were around 20 teenage boys. I hope that we will be able to continue to do this over the next few years. I am on the board of Friends of the Americas and have found it very rewarding. It has been great to be able to help our kids realize that there are people in the world who aren't as fortunate and it is important to help. I want them to realize the amazing feelings you can have when you are helping others.