The Many Faces of Terra Nova

The Café has been open for about two and a half months and I cannot believe the number of faces that have passed through in such a short amount of time. Ruben , a Spanish friend of ours has been amazing to our team as he has given us both help as a waiter an in giving us pointers in how to serve people better as waiters. He is a college student and is starting his own graphic design business. This coming fall he will be leaving Santiago to study art in a design school in A Coruña. He has a promising future in design and has already been designing web pages and literature for various businesses. To see his latest web development click here. We opened the café with the help of our four winter interns Carver, Chad, Christina and Erin. They did a lot of the grunt work to help us get the doors open in about a week. They have since returned to the west coast in the USA to their normal lives, but we really enjoyed having them here with us and know that they made opening a way easier transition than it could have been. A few days before the interns left us Beth came to volunteer in the café for a month. Beth is from Wales and had very little to no Spanish when she arrived, but a great desire to serve people. She would be the one in the back slaving away over milkshakes and sandwiches while the rest of us were taking coffee orders out front. One day we asked her to redo the chalkboard sign out front and discovered that she was quite an artist. So, her last to weeks with us she totally changed the inside of the café by beautifying the chalk writing on the menu above the bar and by turning one wall into a collage of “Terra Nova”. ( I will try to post some photos soon) Shortly after Beth took off we were joined by seven summer team students (six from Texas and one from Oregon). They have been helping us in every aspect of the work here in Santiago and learning what it means to live Life as Ministry. Some of them have been keeping track of their experiences during their time in Santiago and if you would like to see what they have to say click here or here. Well, I have recently added some exhibits to the Gallery of our website and invite you to peruse them here. The current exhibit is by Estrela Rua who is an artist from Galicia. Her artwork depicts various scenes of Galician country-side. The photos only grasp a portion of the beauty of her work. To see them better you’ll have to come visit us in Santiago and stop in for a coffee. We can't wait to see you!