Dear Friends and Fam,
Greetings from the Northern Territory of Darwin, Australia! G’day mate!
My team and I left Kuala Krai last Thursday night. We had one last worship service with our contact and the church family before we headed out on the 1020PM night bus. Once the bus arrived, we loaded up and said goodbye to Pastor Yesu and his lovely wife, Theresa. Once we got situated on the bus, my team and I all fell asleep. We had about a six hour bus ride in front of us. We were all super excited to get to Kuala Lumpur to see some of our squad family! We arrived at the bus station in KL about 530AM, and then took a cab to KL Sentral, a bus station, that was about a two minute walk from where some of our squadmates spent their first month. It was so great to reunite with some more family! The rest of our squadmates started arriving later on that day, and spilled into Saturday. I got to spend Friday and Saturday in Kuala Lumpur with my squad, catching up and sharing about how God moved during month one.
Last Sunday (Sept. 30) my squad and I traveled to Singapore by bus. We left early that morning and made the six hour trip by noon. We spent the afternoon killing time before we needed to get to the airport for our flight. We flew out around 10PM and arrived in Darwin, Australia last Monday (Oct. 1) at about 5AM.
Once we arrived in Darwin and went through customs, we were met by our contact, Isabelle. We said goodbye to the rest of our squad and headed to our contacts home. David and Isabelle live about 10 minutes from the airport which is fantastic. Our setup this month is comfortable. The boys are camping outside, in hammocks and such, while the girls are living inside in an apartment setup below our contacts home. My team (Team Braveheart) is paired with another team this month (Team 6.33). We are so excited to be working alongside some of our squadmates, as we compliment each other very well. So, this month instead of living with 6 others, I am living with 13. 🙂 So far we have handled living in such close community very well. We are taking turns cooking meals for each other this month, and just trying to have high consideration towards each other.
Our ministry this month is simply building relationships with the Aboriginal people in a community called Bagot. If y’all know me at all, you know I like to have a set schedule. Well, God knew how to break me this month..and it’s definitely by not having a schedule with these people. 🙂 Every morning we are responsible to go into the community from about 10 to 1 to pick up trash, and sit down with people so that they can start trusting us. We want to make sure that they know we will be here for a month, and if they know that, then hopefully they might open up a little bit more. Our contacts have been working with the Aborigines for 11 years. They have started a church inside the community, so we are trying to help plug that as well. We have a church service at a nursing home on Sunday mornings, followed by a worship service in Bagot Sunday evenings. Wednesday nights we have a bible study at the Bagot church as well. Friday afternoons/evenings we have a waterpark outreach, where we bring the children from Bagot to a waterpark and then BBQ for them afterwards. Other than those planned events, we will just go into the community in the mornings and evenings and simply talk to people. I love how intentional about relationships our contacts are. Because it’s not about the religion, it’s about the relationships.
I’m going to try and keep y’all as up-to-date as possible about my time with the Aborigines. Please pray for their hearts to be softened.
Much love,
Caitlin
PS- SPOILER ALERT: Month 3 we will be (Lord-willing) in Vietnam, but before we start our month of ministry we will meet together as a squad (all 56 of us) in Ho Chi Minh City for a squad debrief. During this time our squad coaches and coordinator will join us on the field for a few days to help refuel and pour into us as we have just completed 2 months on the field. Please pray for safe travels for our coaches and coordinator as they join us! 🙂 We’re excited, but still living in the here and now!
xoxo
