New respect

Hey everyone this is day 6 of 100. Sorry if I'm bugging you guys but I hope yall are enjoying reading some of my quirkiness. So thanks to everyone who comments, follows and reads this madness of mine.
So last night I got a call from Mark and Ali Kaiser who are missionaries in Brazil. They are on sabbatical in the U.S. and they came in last night to see the Culture Show at ACU. We ended up going to Wild Wings and hanging out afterwards at a friends house. They are some of my favorite people in the world, I haven't seen them in over a year and I was uber pumped to see them last night. We ended up staying up really late which, as is well known, is not a good idea when you have to wake up early the next morning but everyone still seems to do it anyway.

Bueno the reason I had to wake up so early this morning is because I am working with a family of Cuban political refugees helping them learn English and how to survive in the U.S. They are incredible people and I love working with them, its the highlight of my week most of the time. Lately we have been working on learning to drive because while they have only been here for about 5 months they are working two jobs each and have already bought a car. They have never driven anything in their lives though so this can be a stressful situation at times. Now I want you guys to imagine with me for a second.
Picture a very paternal Cuban man sitting in the drivers seat of a small SUV with a white guy in the passenger seat making frantic hand motions and moving his mouth so fast that you need a hummingbird camera to see it. If you see this site on the road the best advice I have for you is to remain calm, and slowly turn in a different direction and watch from a distance with cell phone in hand in case of the necessity of an ambulance ... at least for a few more weeks.
I now have a new found respect for my Father, all parents, and anyone who has ever taught a drivers ed. class. Now when I was a kid learning how to drive I never could understand why my Dad always seemed so tense when I was driving. I thought if he would just relax then everything would go a whole lot smoother. It all makes so much more sense now that I'm whizzing inches from mailboxes, stopping in the middle of street, and making left turns from the right lane. My fathers predicament of a few years back seems o so familiar now. However with me I have the addition of trying to get this all done in espanol. Now don't get me wrong. I think Spanish is a beautiful language and I have spent the last two years trying to get to a point where I can communicate and I feel that for only being two years old I do ok. But in the heat of the moment when bad things seem to be closing in my language seems to slip from coherent sentences to fast overly repeated limited syllable words. Like "mira! mira! mira!" and sometimes devolving even further to guttural sounds like "ugg a a urr" with a grimace and a clenched jaw. However, we are moving forward and soon mi familia cubana will be able to get around Abilene independently.
So as I am having to teach I am finding a new respect for teachers, but more for the students that I'm teaching.
Just some thoughts for the day.
Yall be careful y ojala que estes con una sonrisa.