I was ready to spend the whole month sleeping in a tent, freezing cold and walking around talking to people in Albania. Apparently that is not the plan God had for us this month. We arrived in Albania on Thursday, April 4th at 8:00pm. Our contact George was waiting at the airport for us with a bus. We had to wait a few hours before we could leave the airport because one of our squad mates hadn't made it through customs, we finally had to leave him with one of our squad leaders. When we arrived at our ministry location George told us that the weather has been unusual for this time of year. Instead of being warm and dry it had been very cold and raining everday. He told us how he had talked to AIM(Adventures in Missions) and convinced them to let us stay inside a dorm, where we could sleep in beds. God obviously knew what he was doing because it would have been very hard to sleep in a tent and get enough rest to work as hard as we are. If you have ever lived on a farm or worked at one then you might be able to relate to the work we have done this past week. We were broken into small groups and given various jobs to do; haul rocks and pile them(about two cubic yards stacked, after we removed all the trash), move a few cords of wood and stack it, clean the bushes off the fence, then paint the fence, haul broken concrete to a neighbors house, sheppard sheep in a field, work with pigs, muck all the animal stalls, and fix all the broken tools on the property. I didn't expect to be doing all this physical work but we are doing two bible studies every day. It is nice to get a break from evangelizing every day and getting poured into by our contact and each other. I am learning a lot from reading Proverbs and Matthew every day, hopefully I will be able to use this wisdom to further our ministry for the next 7 months. Our contact George is a very blunt British man, but he has so much wisdom to share and is an amazing man of God. God has taught me so much in the past four months, and I know that I will never be the same person I was before the race. Thank you so much for your support, please keep praying for me.
