I’m in Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia!! It’s about 8000 people here in town during the wet season (now), but it’s touristy in the dry season. So there is an awesome coffee shop (Coffee Club) with free wifi…yippee! Outside of town, it’s the rugged outback. We are working with Aboriginal people in the surrounding communities and it’s a totally different culture than Western culture. It’s intriguing and exciting! 
We arrived after a detour through Sydney, then a drive down about 300 km from Darwin. We got to Darwin Monday night late, about midnight and they took us to this facility called the Christian Outreach Center. It is a multipurpose facility where a lot of Christian organizations seem to hub out of. The facility has a hostel for Aboringinal people needing medical care. For example, I met a woman who has been at the facility for 5 years taking dialysis 3 times a week. The government pays for their stay at the facility. We are currently staying at the Morrow Farm which is owned by local Christian leaders, the Morrows. They use the facility for people coming through and also for retreats. There are a lot of bugs…bugs on the toilet seat, bugs in the coffee mugs, bugs all around. I think it’s just generally buggy around here and the place hasn’t had any visitors in a while. Anyway, it’s home for 3 weeks and the good news is we are inside away from the snakes and the crocs!
The family of spiders that reside under our kitchen counter and the pile of bugs we swept up after fumigating our bathroom–no, there’s no dirt in there….all bugs.
We’ve seen kangaroos, wallabies, and some ducks here so far. There is a camping/motel lodge close by and we chatted with a man who works there. He told us we can swim in the pool and that there are 14 fresh water crocs in the billiabong. After finding out that the billabong is the water hole, we walked around it, but didn’t see any. We will look again..maybe in the troopy. What’s the troopy, you ask? Well, we are driving around here in an aweseome “troopy” aka an old Toyota Land Cruiser. It’s pretty sweet and I get to drive it because I know how to drive a standard…yay!
It’s pretty hot here, too. I mean, I know I said it was hot in Brisbane, but I was mistaken…it’s really hot here. Sweating 16 hours out of the day is normal. We use the “air con” window unit at night and it’s lovely cold. I’m not generally one to complain about the heat, but it’s just such a strange feeling to be sitting in church, having conversations with people or whatever you are doing and streams (literally) of sweat to be flowing down the back, chest, and stomach. Oh what a feeling. I think I finally feel like I’m on the World Race!
Part 2…coming soon–What are we doing here, anyway??
