I want to say thank you all for your support including 7 straight days being sponsored. In the busyness of everything here I have fallen behind in writing what happened on these days.
December 26th, 27th & 29th-31st were all sponsored by my grandpa and grandma Jilly. December 28th was sponsored by the Kurtz family.
January 1st was sponsored by Christine Hatch.
As I have fallen behind on these I’m going to run through the highlights of each of these days as to not make this blog a book haha.
December 26th started off with doing my daily devotional (as I did every day this week) in the morning and having a team worship time. This whole week was going to be more of an ATL (ask the lord) week. A lot of our ministry was on pause for the time between Christmas and New Years. The goal was during worship to figure out what God wanted us to do that day. Some people went to do a prayer walk, others went to town to encourage christians that we had met. I personally, along with a few others, focused on getting personal work done so that I would be better set to work the future days. It was on this day that I wrote my last blog and took care of some treasury work.
December 27th I woke up with a little sickness that had been going around the team which was just a sore throat, headache and just feeling out of it. The day started off with a team bible study on Ephesians 4. I rested most of the day playing cards and laying down. We were also able to call one of our friends from Serbia to catch up with Him later that night which was really awesome.
December 28th wasn’t any better health wise. We did have a really cool worship session in the morning that turned from what was going to be 30 minutes into a 2 hour session. Once that was over I took a nap most of the afternoon to try to get better. I woke up not feeling much better and spent most of the rest of the day resting. At the end of the night we split up into the guys and girls on the team with out squad leaders to talk about how things were going and how we could better ourselves.
December 29th I woke up feeling a lot better from the one sickness only to have gotten a new sickness. Sorry if this is too much information but here we have a “poop scale” inspired by one of our training camp leaders Shad. If you would like to skip the details skip to the “*******”
The scale is from 1-7. A #1 is basically constipated , like it hurt coming out, and a #7 was like your poop came out like you just turned on the faucet. Anyway I had 8 #7’s on this day .
*******
Besides that it was a nice day. We picked up trash at the hostel we were staying at. Afterwards we played discgolf with regular ultimate discs around the hostel and played card. Friday’s are also paydays this month for the team. Each week I give out a weekly allowance to spend on food for each person. Unfortunately, though Butterfly was a great place to stay, cooking our own food wasn’t really possible and eating their food was not in budget. So each Friday as treasurer I would give everyone the equivalent of $4 a day for food for the week.
The 30th was an adventure day that more so turned into a rest day. it can be summarized by 3 things.
1st: I had 8 more #7’s throughout the day. 2nd: I spent the morning trying to get a monkey to take bread from my hand. Watch the video below to see how it went!
3rd: I led team time were I made our own personal quiz night. Back at West Chester we would go to quiz night every Tuesday. Though we were consistently awful we had fun being all together. I decided to bring that to my team by making a 3 round quiz. The first round was I had everyone give me a short childhood story and everyone had to guess who’s story was whose. The second round I played everyone’s guilty pleasure song and everyone had to guess again who’s was who. The final round was everyone gave me an interesting fact about themselves. Whoever had he most points at the end won.
New Years Eve and New Years was a great because I got to catch up with so many people.
New Year’s Eve was a rest day and started off with getting to talk to Danny who has been my friend since my 1st day freshman year at West Chester. After that we had a Bible study with one of the locals on Matthew 7. I always enjoy these times because we get to gain a greater understanding of how much the locals know about God and we also get to strengthen our relationship with Him at the same time. Later that day my squad leader Drew, Zach and I made a rock tower on top of one of the bigger rocks in the lake. It was exhausting but restful at the same time. Even though it took so much work, if you know me, you know being in nature and building things rejuvenates my spirit and excites me. That’s exactly what this 3 hour project did. After this I played a few games of Bawo and then got to video call into my church’s New Year’s Eve service back home which was so awesome. Being able to be a part of service back home was a real privilege even if it was really weird seeing myself on the big screen haha. My whole team was pretty exhausted and the day ended with only myself and Zach still awake and watching the office when the clock hit midnight.
New Years was a great day of community both here and back home. The day started off by being able to video call home at 7am local time , midnight back home, to get to see the Wrench Drop in Mechanicsburg (we drop a wrench in our town center because what else would a town named “Mechanicsburg” drop on New Years?). I also then got to call and talk to a couple other friends as they were hanging out to bring in the new year. Later that’d day One of the other teams on my squad who were located only an hour away had traveled to where we were staying and hung out for the day. We all spent some time in the water, playing games and just catching up on how ministry was going that month. After they left some of us went into town for dinner and when I got back I was able to talk to family one last time for the holidays as my dads side of the family was having a birthday party for my papa Jack as we do every New Years.
Today January 7th. As I write this our time in Malawi has come to a close. We left on the 5th at noon and have been traveling from Malawi through Mozambique to Zimbabwe. We got to where we were staying for the first night in Zimbabwe finally around 1am this morning. We stayed there overnight and now we are currently heading to hour final destination in Bulawayo , Zimbabwe where my team will be working with and organization called Scripture Union for the month.
Stay tuned for more updates!
