Home stays

The team´s first night in El Estor, team members stayed in homes of the families of  presbytery leaders. Experiences varied ' three veteran team members stayed with families they new well, sooe others stayed with people they had just met.  Some slept in beds in homes with bathrooms, others slept on hard floors with no shower or perhaps even outhouse in sight.  Some stayed up until 11 or midnight with their host families, others crashed at 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m.  Some felt almost embarrassed by their host families´ hospitalityñ others felt a lack of enthusiasm on the part of their host families.  The jury is still out on whether the home-stay experience will continue in the future.  One possibility for next time is a hybrid in which team members are given a choice about whether they want to do the home stay (with some doing it and other staying in a hotel throughout)  Another possibility would be to do it later in the stay, when people everyone had started to get to know each other and to get acclimated.  Team members also had mixed feelings about displacing individual family members, all the more so in families whose homes were already very crowded.

-Perry