We finally made it to our destination!
After our 5 days in Brisbane with the most amazing family ever, we left to fly
out to the northern outback of Australia. Our 11 am flight ended up being
cancelled, so we had a 3-hour detour to Sydney and ended up making it into
Darwin around 11pm. After 2 nights in 2 different towns and a 5-6 hour ride in
a sweaty bus, we made it to our destination! It is HOT here- around 96 degrees.
We have definitely done our fair share of sweating and we have only been here
several days- ha! Our contact here is an aboriginal pastor who is a wonderful
man of God. His children are precious and we are so excited to get to know his
family even better.
We are staying in a house for
government workers who do inspections in this community. We definitely did some
cleaning last night when we first got here, but have come to call it our home
for the next 3 weeks. It is currently the wet season here, so when it rains we
have to be ready to evacuate our building because it will flood! This is going
to make for an interesting experience while we’re here for sure! We can’t swim
in any of the lakes or rivers because of crocodiles. Speaking of critters,
there are toads, grasshoppers, flies, lizards, and spiders everywhere! All the
creatures are bigger here than at home- the ant hills here are several feet
high! That being said, we are really working on keeping our doors shut and
wearing LOTS of bug spray!
An interesting fact about this
community is that time really does not matter.
No one wears watches and people don’t have clocks in their homes. Their clock
is the sun. For example, we were going to leave to go into town today at 10am
to get our food for the month. It is currently 1 pm and we are still waiting.
This has been quite an adjustment to get used to because as Americans we are so
used to the “busy, instant gratification” lifestyle. It has been hard to learn
that waiting is okay and I have a feeling that we are going to be doing a lot
of it throughout the next 10 months. A culture joke they have here is NT time,
which stands for Northern Territory time, meaning not today, not tomorrow, not
Tuesday, not Thursday! ha I have come to embrace the phrase, “Live in the moment!”– because that is all we can do these days!
This seems like it is going to be a
pretty challenging month. We are not
here to try and change how these people live or to pass judgment on their way
of doing life. We are here to bring hope and encouragement. It was a little
overwhelming driving here yesterday and getting everything set up last night.
I’m not going to lie; it was somewhat of a culture shock. However, I know that
God has called my team here, that He has called us to bring joy to the people
here, that He is going to bring encouragement to them through us, and that He is
going to renew our strength daily to do this. Please pray that these people
will see constant joy and love overflowing from our lives and that it will
become contagious in theirs.
The nearest town for me to get
internet is about 1-2 hours away, so my internet access will be limited this
month. We are buying all of our groceries today to last us the entire month, so
I don’t even know if we will be going into town again. Our next stop is the
Philippines! We don’t have a date to fly out yet, so I’ll keep you posted when
I find out! Love & miss you all!
PS- We didn’t get picked up until 2:45
to go into town- God is definitely going to be teaching me patience J
