Aloha family and friends!
I made it safe and sound to the Dominican Republic! There has never been a dull moment either. We were supposed to leave Miami at 11am Sunday but got delayed a little while. We finally made it to the DR around 4pm local time which is 1 hr ahead of eastern time zone. We then took a 4 hour bus ride to our “home.” At that time I had no clue where we were going and what “home” was going to look like. We finally arrived in San Juan and are living in a big empty house. We sleep on our mats and sleeping bags and are living out of our backpacks. When we finally arrived at home our first night we ate dinner and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up and decided to try to dig in my pack for an outfit for the day. Mind you, the weather here is 80+ degrees and extremely humid. None of us smell or feel the best lol. I open my pack only to find millions of ants inside and around my pack. They are attacking my snacks that I had sitting on top. I brought a ziplock of cookies from a graduation lei that my friend made me. Ugh, I was horrified and didn’t know what to do. So I drug my pack through the house and out the back porch and completely dumped it and got rid of all my snacks and hosed it out and sprayed it down. Those lil suckers were after my cookies! I KNEW I shoulda gave my cookie lei to Jay the day I left Hilo!! Lol aw well! It’s all been a learning experience for sure. Note to self: it is now time to sacrifice “snacks” in my life =)
We will be in “training camp” here in the DR until Saturday. I just found out today that on Saturday [I think] my team will be going with another team on the squad to Azua, Dominican Republic and we will be partnering with a church planting ministry. At this point I have no idea what that looks like or what we will be doing. We will find out more details later on in the week.
We have been doing a lot of exploring in our small town of San Juan. This evening I was playing with the local kids in our neighborhood. This one girl came up to me and was instantly attracted to me. She started talking to me in Spanish and I was actually able to carry on a small conversation with her! Woohoo!! Hooray for those 4 yrs of Spanish class that I took in high school and my 1st years of college way back when like 5-7yrs ago. I did retain some info! It was such a joy to be able to communicate with the kids and have fun and play with them. It has been a challenge with the language barrier, but we cannot take it for granted b/c right now we are fortunate that some of us know Spanish. Pretty soon we are going to be emerged in cultures where we are going to have COMPLETE language barriers. Now that my friends, is going to be interesting!
I love it here so far. It still hasn’t fully hit me that I am here..and here for ELEVEN months. Ive been exhausted and overwhelmed in good ways of course the past few days. Im still processing.
I will update more when I can. Internet access here is kinda limited. I was actually supposed to blog yesterday but I was the last one on my team to write a blog and time was running out so when I went to save my blog and send it out to all of you, the computer shut down and my time at the internet café was up. I wanted to cry b/c I just wanted to let all of you know that I am here safe and sound. But then I prayed and then had a peace about it. I realize I cannot update every single day and there are going to be times that I will not update for weeks and you [mom..and family/friends] are going to just have to pray and trust the Lord that I am safe and sound when you don’t hear from me.
I Love you all!
